When Dick doesn't work

I've been watching The Man in the High Castle, the alternative history series on Prime based on Phillip K Dick's novel of the same name and which (I think) got pretty favourable reviews when it first started.

I've seen 4 (maybe 5?) episodes now, and while I initially enjoyed the novelty of the scenario, I am prepared to abandon it. 

Looking at an imagined Nazi New York and Japanese California (and the desolate bit of the country in the middle) is cool for a while, but the plotting has slowed down and I'm not finding much of a reason to keep following the story.

The main problem is that it's too much of a bleak monotone, and none of the main characters seem particularly charming, or interesting, really.   I did once start reading the novel and couldn't get into it, either:  maybe I was just distracted with other stuff at the time, since I have read and enjoyed quite a bit of Dick's other work, and the novel won many awards, so you would think I would like it.

But, sorry - not finding it engaging enough.

Might be a bit of a pattern here...

About that teenager who shot up the garlic festival in California:

Legan posted two photos on Instagram not long before the attack.

One photo depicted Smokey the Bear in front of a "fire danger" sign, with a caption that said to read the 19th century book "Might is Right," a work that claims race determines behavior and is popular among white nationalists and far-right extremist groups.

About one of the teenage fugitives from the Canadian killings:

For Schmegelsky a dark but depressingly familiar picture began to form—a young man with a tense home life who found solace in online activities and had connections to the far-right. The two have been connected a YouTube account featuring a Nazi insignia, online game accounts using the banner of the Azov battalion (a Ukrainian far-right militia) and had photographs of a Nazi armband and a Hitler Youth knife. Schmegelsky's father, while adamant his son was not a neo-Nazi, did admit to having to drag him out of an army surplus store eight months ago after his son got too excited over the Nazi memorabilia. VICE also viewed photos of Schmegelsky with a gun barrel in his mouth.

An article at Business Insider in January:


All of the extremist killings in the US in 2018 had links to right-wing extremism, according to new report 

And over at Quillette:    but look what happened to Andy Ngo, the poor guy got punched, and some Lefties said he had been provocative.  The Left is appallingly violent!

Update:  also, count me as pretty amused about the long, boring, pointless Quillette piece "Why isn’t Jordan Peterson on This List of the World’s Top Fifty Intellectuals".  Not even worth a link, that one.

The ridiculous Ninja show

So is this three seasons now that the Australian version of Ninja Warrior has had a final in which no one got through the final course in order to have a go at the final climb?  

I saw some of the first season; none of the second; and bits of the third including last night's final, in which Channel 9 had been putting out hints that someone finally completed the whole thing to "win".

Instead, we got contestants who all found the "swinging doors" impossible - not even able to move past the first one in a row of 4 or 5.   This seems to me, and surely many viewers, pretty ridiculous.  As someone on Twitter said, the show might have more credibility if they showed that the obstacle was actually do-able, as they (apparently) have people who test the different segments of the course.

But these swinging doors looked ridiculous - a smooth metal edge giving no grip to two hands, let alone the one hand that would have to remain while trying to grab on to the other.

Do the international versions have this issue as well? - going several seasons before anyone can even try the final?

Planet of the Rats

Japan is going to do some human stem cell in animal experiments that sound a little confusing:

A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people....

Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal’s organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The reason why some people worry about these experiments:

Some bioethicists are concerned about the possibility that human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition.

Oh.

Woman with stupid idea has daughter with dubious ideas

NPR reports on the woman who allegedly invented or popularised the very stupid idea of gender reveal parties now saying that she regrets it.  In part, due to have a very "woke" daughter:

"Plot twist! The baby from the original gender reveal party is a girl who wears suits," Karvunidis says. "She says 'she' and 'her' and all of that, but you know she really goes outside gender norms."

The post went viral. Karvunidis says her views on sex and gender have changed, especially when she's talking to her daughter.

"She's telling me 'Mom, there are many genders. Mom, there's many different sexualities and all different types,' and I take her lead on that," Karvunidis says.

She says she does have some regrets and understands these parties aren't beneficial to everyone.

The daughter is about 10 or 11, given that Karvunidis' gender reveal party for her was in 2008.

Singapore and fake news

I just read a good article about Singapore trying to deal with the problem of fake news via legislation and its usual "soft authoritarian" style whereby politicians can order the correction or removal of fake news.

I have great sympathy to the goal, if not the exact means of execution.  

The throbbing sphere of education

So, it's university open day season in Brisbane, and given that I have a daughter approaching the end of high school, we once again went out to a university to listen to a couple of talks and view the facilities.

Yesterday, it was QUT, but we went to the Kelvin Grove campus, which does education and creative industries.  The education building is pretty new, and as with most new university buildings these days, is pretty flash.  Of some particular amusement, though, is the huge feature of a glowing central sphere in the centre of the building, the exact point of which was not made clear.  Some of the changes it undergoes in the projected pattern look vaguely like neurons firing; at other times the convolutions look a bit too much like intestines.  (I assume the former association is intentional; the latter, not so much.)   Here it is in action:



There was mention that people doing something on the interactive screen on the wall would influence what the Sphere of Educational Destiny, or whatever it's called, shows.

Anyway, it's certainly eye catching, and seems ready made to be used in a science fiction film; but I do wonder if it has much point.

As for the open day itself:  as usual, it was full of optimism about the courses; how students can do some of it overseas; and how easily they will find getting a job.   (The teachers course in particular put up a figure of 97% employment for graduates soon after completing the course - I guess they didn't say that all of the jobs were as teachers, but I assume that would be case.)  

They told us that there is a shortage of teachers not only in Australia, but world wide, and that Australian teachers are well regarded internationally.   Apparently, if you stick it living out in a remote community, you can make principal barely a couple of years from graduation.

All very positive vibes, as they usually are at these open days, and modern universities are such nice built environments, I really enjoy the open days.  More than my children do...

Someone needs to invent cooking meat smell

To atone for the eating of a few mouthfuls of raw dead animal a week ago, this last Saturday I was inspired to try cooking with one of the new-ish products that is purely vegetarian but trying to look like meat/mince.  

This one is soy protein based - which is a meat substitute source of protein that has fallen out of favour, it seems.  Remember the days when Textured Vegetable Protein was about the only fake meat in town?   I didn't mind it, really, especially the chunky version for things like chilli.

So, I tried chilli con carne with this product.

I don't know if it was really necessary, but I tried frying it off with onion, and that was the main problem.  I thought it had a most peculiar smell while frying.  Not really food like at all.   My son came into the kitchen and said "I can tell that's not meat you're cooking", and he had good reason to so comment.

I tasted some of it after it was "cooked" (the mince alone, I mean) and it was a pretty underwhelming flavour.  I think the Beyond Burger had inherently more flavour, and a somewhat meat one at that.

The end result chilli was quite OK - this product certain holds a mince meat-like texture quite well, and sufficient chilli and spices means that it is not as if the bland taste of the "meat" is all that noticeable.   I doubt it would taste great as a burger, though.

And they really need to do something about that odd cooking smell.

Some welcome pushback on the Mueller "optics"

I'm happy to see that there has been some pushback against all media's assessment of Mueller's congressional appearance as a disaster.   There's been quite a bit on Twitter by journalists and writers I follow, such as:

And now there is an article at The Atlantic along similar lines: Robert Mueller and the Tyranny of ‘Optics’:

“DAZED AND CONFUSED” was the Drudge Report’s blaring headline. But the Twitter verdict of NBC’s sober-sided Chuck Todd was almost as severe: “On substance, Democrats got what they wanted,” Todd wrote. “But on optics, this was a disaster.”

Optics—the kryptonite of the modern media age, the glimmering, crystalline material that can subsume substance at every treacherous turn. Or as the former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett rejoined to Todd on Twitter: “When you say ‘on optics, this was a disaster’ it is you saying so that helps make it true. The disaster of the optics is the elevation of optics and the claim by pundits that it was a disaster.”

 

I am not alone

Well, the odd things you sometimes find via Twitter.

Turns out that Hannah Gadsby does get negative reviews, even from high minded reviewers who seem to have approached her work wanting to like it, after all.   This one, about her latest show, is in the New Yorker, and it's pretty strong:

Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.

Then there is this review of the ridiculously over-praised Nanette, which is ever fiercer:

Nanette is awful, and it’s time we gave ourselves permission to think and say that out loud. Its few patches of genuine comedy eventually lead to giant yawning holes of intellectual chicanery masquerading as Deep and Profound Thought. Nanette assures viewers, especially straight ones, that queers and women can and must be understood and assimilated by first understanding us as uniquely and literally broken and bashed in. It isn’t comedy that is broken in Nanette, but queer life and feminism. Worse, the breaking of queerness comes about via Gadsby offering straight people in particular the assurance that this is a globally universal experience. Gadsby offers Nanette as a mirror to herself, and her self becomes a stand in for queers and women everywhere. If she had simply discussed her own story, Nanette would simply be an account of one woman’s trauma, but Gadsby takes it much, much further. She frames her story in a very particular, prescriptive, and retrograde vision of sexuality (“homosexuality is not a choice”) and in a denunciation of art that looks like a massive feminist takedown of male artists but is in fact embedded in a vision of the self that allows no place for the fragmented and fragmentary nature of experience and life itself.

Of course, the view of this queer reviewer that "homosexuality is not a choice" is a retrograde vision of sexuality may be controversial, but I'll still go with any review that points out the comedy empress has no clothes.   (So to speak.  No body size joke intended.  Well, not much.)

A problem noted

To say I am no fan of Tarantino is an understatement - and I suspect his legacy is already starting to degrade - so I won't be seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.   But I will still read reviews of it, especially if I can find support for my disdain for him and his oeuvre.  Hence, I was interested to read this in the Slate review:

A revelation about Pitt’s character’s past midway through the movie might change how you respond to the culminating orgy of violence, which, as is often the case in Tarantino films, seems at once like a critique of the vision of masculinity that’s imposed on us by TV and the movies and like a celebration of it. (In fact, a character in the movie—to reveal which one would be to say too much—at one point advances a theory about our culture’s dependence on mediatized mayhem.)

Well, if you ask me, such ambiguity is a problem, not a feature.  You don't critique something by celebrating it.   Back to the rest of the review, confirming that it's not just me that wonders how shallow his motivations seem to be:

In choosing to set a movie on Cielo Drive in the summer of 1969, Tarantino took on a historical event that not only changed how Americans thought about fame, violence, and the counterculture but also ended five innocent lives (seven if you count Tate’s next-door neighbors the LaBiancas, who died in a separate Manson-incited incident the following night). It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements—the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees—were just so cool.

Modern America, noted

OXFORD, Miss. — Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The South remains a worry.

Here's the story.

Hot in Paris

Météo-France said the mercury at its Paris-Montsouris station in the French capital surpassed the previous high of 40.4C, set in July 1947, soon after 1pm and continued to climb, reaching 42.6C soon after 4pm.

“And it could climb even higher,” the service said, noting that 43C in the shade “is the average maximum temperature in Baghdad, Iraq in July”. David Salas y Mélia, a climatologist, said the heatwave was one “of quite exceptional intensity”.

That's hot, anywhere; but especially in a city that has not been well fitted out with airconditioning.  (And adding lots of airconditioning can make a city hotter too.)

When are the decrepit dopes of Catallaxy going to admit they are wrong, JC?  Needs to start at the top - with Sinclair Davidson's apology to society.  

Indian woes

France 24, of all places, has an article about the continuing problem of sex selecting abortion in India.  It's startling how entrenched it is, despite successive governments trying to stop it:

Over the past three months, not a single girl was born in 132 villages in the northern Indian state of Uttrakhand, according to local authorities. An investigation was launched over the weekend after official data revealed that of the 216 children born in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, not one was female, according to Asian News International (ANI). In 16 of the 132 villages, now marked as a “red zone”, no female births were recorded over the past six months.

Quantifying India’s skewered gender ratio is a depressing business and it keeps getting worse. The 2011 Census found the world’s largest democracy had 919 female children for every 1,000 male children, down from 927 in 2001. 

The country’s preference for boys results in fewer female births due to sex selective abortions as well as excessive female deaths due to neglect or maltreatment. Together, they account for what statisticians call women “missing” from national populations. In 2017-2018, the Indian economic survey found 63 million Indian women were “missing” and an additional 21 million were “unwanted", resulting in lower nutritional and education levels. 

They've tried to ban dowries, but everyone ignores it, it seems:

While wedding costs in India are customarily borne by the bride’s family, rising consumerism has sparked increasingly lavish, long-drawn-out ceremonies. Media coverage of extravagant ceremonies hosted by a growing section of “super-rich” adds aspirational pressure on bridal families struggling to cope with wedding costs. 

The economics of traditional Indian marriages then are brutally simple: the family of the bride enriches the family of the groom. In low income and caste groups this means the family of the groom can impoverish the bride’s family. And that, experts say, accounts for India’s entrenched preference for sons and declining value of women.

“The dowry that must be paid to marry off a daughter encourages parents to prefer sons, because in this case, they do not pay for the weddings and instead receive dowries and gifts,” explained Bénédicte Manier, a journalist and author of “Made in India”. “These dowry-related transactions are worth billions of rupees each year in India, it’s an economy by itself, growing with a new middle class. Not surprisingly, this social category, which has high dowry rates, also has the highest birth sex selection rates.”

I also would not have guessed that the arranged marriage rate was still so high:

Arranged marriages account for an estimated 90 percent of Indian marriages, almost all of them within societally prescribed caste and community groups. The lack of choice is largely unquestioned and enthusiastically promoted in popular culture such as films and TV series.

The sex ratio leads to some horrible situations for adult women too:

A skewered sex ratio, far from increasing the value of a woman’s life, puts her at graver risk, say experts. Manier explains that it sparks a “strong disruption of the marriage market” resulting in “many men struggling to find women of their age”. This, she warns, results in high celibacy rates in some areas. “In the long term, some 30 million men will remain without a wife. This situation also leads to trafficking of young women from poor families. Some are even bought by several men who "share" or sell them several times in a row.”

In some of the worst affected northern Indian states, the practice of buying and selling wives is so prevalent that vulnerable women are resigned to the fact that they will be sold on to a next husband after delivering a son.

What a society...

Another in the series: very late movie reviews

I've always meant to catch the 1994 New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, and finally did last night.

First:  did Auckland really have bits as ugly as that in 1994?   Did Maori gangs really look exactly like escapees from the Mad Max movies?  Do they still look like that?   What about that trashy bar, and the amount of beer typically being drunk?   (Actually, I read in an article afterwards that it was not a Maori pub at all in real life.  Huh.)

Anyway, apart from it looking much uglier than I expected, and the acting sometimes in my opinion feeling a bit more theatrical than cinematic, I could see why the film had impact.   Unexpectedly, almost, I found myself quite upset by the pivotal death and the funeral scenes.

I was surprised that it did not get more criticism, or at least questioning, from other countries about its race politics at the time, though.  I see that the author of the book was a right wing figure, and although the movie changed the book's perspective a lot (focusing on the mother - and its hard to see how you could do it otherwise), the deeply bleak picture it painted of urban Maori behaviour was still controversial in New Zealand.  But not, it seems, in other nations' reactions.

I suspect it would face a strong attack on PC lines everywhere if being released today.

Update:  Vice asked recently why a prominent NZ bike gang, the Mongrel Mob, uses Nazi symbols.  Seems it wasn't started by Maori, but is now dominated by them.  But on the upside, membership is ageing and not being replaced by younger.   This article shows artsy photos of the gang members, whose heavy face tattooing is, shall we say, a tad on the extreme side. 

A fast food confession

This may well be considered controversial.

I prefer KFC mashed potato and gravy over their chips.

That is all.

Climate change and compound events

A new paper at Nature:

Floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts often result from a combination of interacting physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of processes (climate drivers and hazards) leading to a significant impact is referred to as a ‘compound event’. Traditional risk assessment methods typically only consider one driver and/or hazard at a time, potentially leading to underestimation of risk, as the processes that cause extreme events often interact and are spatially and/or temporally dependent. Here we show how a better understanding of compound events may improve projections of potential high-impact events, and can provide a bridge between climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers, who need to work closely together to understand these complex events.

Another case of murder by social media

What an appalling story, again illustrating the harm of social media:

Eight people have been killed in vigilante lynchings in Bangladesh sparked by rumours on social media of children being kidnapped and sacrificed as offerings for the construction of a bridge, police have confirmed.

The victims, which include two women, were targeted by angry mobs over the rumours, spread mostly on Facebook, that said human heads were required for the massive $3 billion project ($4.3 billion), police chief Javed Patwary said.

"We have analysed every single case of these eight killings," Mr Patwary told reporters in Dhaka.

More than 30 other people have been attacked in connection with the rumours.

Mr Patwary said police stations across the country had been ordered to crack down on rumours, and at least 25 YouTube channels, 60 Facebook pages and 10 websites have been shut down.

AFP has identified several posts still on Facebook that share the rumour, however.

Mob lynchings are common in Bangladesh, but the latest incidents are particularly brutal.

Do these countries where rumours that lead to lynchings spread like wildfire on social media try to educate the public that they cannot believe everything they read?

How hard is it for Facebook to have a local office that gets notice of a dangerous rumour and shuts down the account immediately?  Is part of the problem that you can't easily search Facebook content?  Does Facebook itself have the ability to immediately search posts across all accounts? 

Many questions I have.

Sammy Davis Jnr considered

There's a not so old documentary about Sammy Davis Jnr that has been on TV before, but I only saw it last night.  (Most of it, anyway.)

It fits in with something that has become a bit of theme here - as you get older, history feels closer than it used to.   As a child, something that happened 50 years before your birth feels like ancient history; but once you get into your 50's, you start thinking "hey, the 1960's doesn't feel so long ago", because you can remember bits of it directly, and lots of older people don't feel mentally much older than their perceived peak at (say) 30-ish.  Hence, anything that happened within any one lifetime doesn't now seem, in the big picture, all that long ago; and the timing of radical changes to our understanding of humanity (evolution, the "deep time" of the age of the Earth, the vast scale of the universe, etc) which are all still within roughly 150 years ago from today need to be considered in the perspective.    The intellectual and social reverberations of those discoveries have not had all that long to work themselves through.


Hence, watching the story of the rabid controversy in America that Davis Jnr's relationships with white women caused in the late 50's, but well into the 60's as well, is really eye opening.    Or things like the way blacks, at least in the 50's, had to drive way out of town to find somewhere to stay if working at Las Vegas.  (It wasn't entirely clear when that started to change.)  And the story of a motel operator being asked to drain the pool by a white person who saw Davis Jnr swimming in it, and they did (!).

This was all going on when I was a child, which isn't long ago.  It all puts nostalgia for the 1950's and 60's into perspective, and just because legislative action against discrimination happened,  no one should be surprised that lingering effects should take a long time to work themselves out.

It's all in the editing (and the understanding)

It's pretty funny to read how Right wing political punditry think the Mueller testimony was a disaster for Democrats (and it's true that quite a few on the anti-Trump side gave bad reviews to his performance as well), yet when you see on TV the key parts done as a 60 second highlight reel re-iterating the scandal that was the Russian interference, the welcome use by Trump of stolen emails, the lies of those around the campaign to cover it up, and Trump's trying to shut down the investigation, it doesn't look dire at all.  

Of course, others have made this point too:

As has been clear all along, this historic scandal is a case of Republicans gaslighting themselves about what went on and preferring fantasy Deep State conspiracy over reality.    All fed by their fawning to a President whose intense narcissism means that he cannot admit reality because he thinks it erodes the legitimacy of his narrow win.  (And in truth, it does.)

Republicans already look like fools - I can't imagine how bad they are going to look with the clear perspective of history.