Genki desu

Because we cannot live on a diet of COVID19 news alone, let's consider this story of Japanese pop!

I'm not sure why, but Youtube was recently suggesting World Order music videos to me, and in a recent bit of late night curiosity, I watched quite a few. 

I was vaguely aware of them before: the Japanese "boy" band which shows a deep resolve to sticking to the formula of electro pop with robotic choreography done in public while wearing Japanese business suits.   I'll even put up (what I think is) their biggest hit, which is as intensely idiosyncratically modern Japanese as you can get:

Anyway, watching the videos made me curious about the leader of the group - especially as the song credits show that he writes them (sometimes in collaboration).  There was something a bit familiar with his odd set of characteristics:  a good looking, clean cut man heading a band, writing its thematically unusual songs and heavily into choreography as part of performance;  and I realised I was thinking of David Byrne.

Yeah, so I'm coming a couple of decades late to learn about him, but looking up the life story of this guy - Genki Sudo - was quite surprising.  While David Byrne is seen as a man of wide ranging interests and talents, he's got nothing on the career path of Genki.   He made his name as fighter in that mixed martial arts UFC competition, and was allowed to do over-the-top, theatrical (and somewhat amusing) entrance choreography.  I think it makes UFC look a lot less serious than I assumed it was, and a bit like WWF.  Here is an (apparently) famous example from 2006:

He went from that to form World Order, whose song titles indicate a strong interest in liberal internationalism, with a cynical attitude towards the American Right.  As its most recent example, have a look at this 2018 video, for the sarcastically upbeat anti-Trump song (turn on the captions to see the lyrics) "Let's Start WW3":

The video ends on Genki's long standing slogan "We Are All One" featuring all nation's flags.

And now - Sudo has now left the group to become a politician!   Here's his entry on the Japanese Diet website:

His political goals according to this website are:

As a politician, his three main goals is furthering food safety, helping global environment protection and “a foreign policy that involves peaceful and realistic negotiations (translated quote).”

Yep, he's definitely liberal.

Wikipedia says he has also been a successful wrestling coach, and has written 14 books! [David Byrnes has written quite a few books himself, and in another similarity, I see that they have both been married once and divorced.  Sudo has no kids, though, apparently.]

Quite the varied career, to put it mildly.  

Hope he does well as a politician, anyway.  I have no idea whether he is likeable in real life - there are not that many interviews with him around, that I can see.  But a pretty interesting character.

Oh - and the title for the post:  "genki" means healthy, lively or vigorous, and the Japanese greeting of "genki desu ka" (pretty much "how are you going"?) can be answered "genki" or "genki desu".  So I believe.  Genki Sudo does seem pretty "genki".  

So obviously,wildly, inappropriate

And yet, Fox News is trying to endorse it (mind you, this was prior to the above Trump performance, but still):

Quite frankly, if this virus doesn't manage to take out Rupert Murdoch as ironic revenge for his malignant effect on American politics, there ain't no justice.

This seems...a really bad idea

From the Jakarta Post:

Annually, some 20 million people from Greater Jakarta travel to their hometowns to celebrate Idul Fitri in a tradition called mudik (exodus). The tradition, public health experts say, could lead to massive COVID-19 contagion on Java, an island of 141 million people, where many regions have far worse healthcare systems than Jakarta....

 President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announced that he would not officially ban people from traveling for the Idul Fitri holidays, ignoring warnings from public health experts that the consequences of failing to prevent people from leaving Jakarta, the epicenter of the outbreak in the country, could be dire.  

“[The President] underlines that there is no official ban on people going on the mudik during the 2020 Idul Fitri holiday period. The travelers, however, must self-isolate for 14 days, will be given ‘people under observation’ [ODP] status, as per the World Health Organization health protocol, and will be monitored by the respective local administration,” presidential spokesman Fadjroel Rachman said in a statement on Thursday, shortly after a speech by the President on the matter.

State Secretary Pratikno, however, later clarified Fadjroel’s statement, saying that the President actually called on people to stay in the capital, though he did not categorically state that the President would ban the mudik.

More about the mudik tradition, due in May this year, which until now I knew nothing about.

Would suggest facemasks are worth wearing

As noted at Science:

You may be able to spread coronavirus just by breathing, new report finds 

The disagreement over whether apparently healthy people should be wearing masks when out and about is surprising.   Provided there are enough around (so that health care workers have plenty), it's hard to imagine it hurting. 

In other COVID-19 news:

What a surprise.

The sad thing is that I thought Austin had a reputation as a Democrat stronghold within Texas.   Seems even liberal students in the US did not exercise common sense.  Or did the fact that they went on a chartered jet mean that these were the Republican students in Austin?   Would be interesting to know...

Pell and the ABC

I thought I had missed one episode of the ABC's Revelation series, but I was mistaken.  Turns out I saw part of the first one, all of the second episode (which I posted about), and then last night I saw most of the final one, which centred on Ballarat and George Pell. 

I reckon if it weren't for the COVID-19 situation, it would have attracted more commentary questioning its timing, when Pell's High Court appeal is due next week, and the most widespread view seems to be that the court will overturn his conviction.

I thought the show was most interesting in it description of the highly insular nature of Catholic schooling and clerical life in the period of the 1950's to (say) about 1990.   Both Paul Collins's and David Marr's comments on that seemed insightful.  I was also interested to hear a woman (unfortunately for her, the sister of the prolific child sex offender Ridsdale) who knew Pell from a young age saying he was always arrogant and a bit of a bully.  I'm sure I have said here before that I used to suspect that it might be more a case that his odd manner of speaking made him sound more cold and arrogant than he might really be.   My generous assumption seems to have been wrong.

I also have no doubt that he was legitimately considered with suspicion by some adults for his fondness of swimming and playing with boys, even at a time when there was much less awareness of the possibility that male authority figures in child centred organisations might be fond of sexually touching kids. 

At the end of the day, it's hard to know what to make of some of the allegations against him.  As the show suggested, though, they did tend to fit a pattern:   one of a sexually frustrated young man who would touch where he shouldn't but was perhaps smart enough to never do anything with an absolutely clear sexual motive.    (That is, of course, ignoring for the sake of the argument the offences for which he was convicted.)

As David Marr indicated, though, the overall impression of Pell's life is one that feels sad and tragic - a conservative wanting to fight societal change and maintain the influence of traditional Catholic thought, but becoming increasingly ineffective at doing so even while he climbed the ladder of authority within his Church.

Good news for some

I feel sorry for the donkeys, though. 

In which I once again save everyone's time

Spotted at, well, you can guess where:

Come on, once again I can save everyone's time.

It will be 200 pages devoted to the urgent need for the Australian governments to:

a.  deregulate everything, as fast as possible;
b.  start using blockchain technologies, they're terrific;
c.  urgently reduce all government spending on things other than the temporary workforce support, with public broadcasting getting special mention;
d.  reduce taxes.

Done and dusted.

No 1

Update:  at the same press conference, this answer, which will (I suppose) let Trump later claim that he always thought the recovery would be slow:

Update 2:  yet more from this bizarre presser:

Has any journalist attending these yet asked the obvious question - "why are the journalists in this room seated far apart for social distancing, but at every press conference it's breached on your side of the podium?"

Just another quick COVID-19 comment

Planet America on the ABC is really good:  smart, sharp and knowledgeable programming of the  kind  that has pretty much disappeared from commercial television.

Unfortunately, though, I often overlook watching it on its first screening, and it's the sort of topical show which it seems not worth going back to view on line even after a few days, given the speed with which Trump generates new, usually appalling, news.

However, I watched last night's episode and it was well worthwhile.  They had an interview with a New York doctor who painted a very bleak picture of the city at the moment.  You should watch it.

And I have been meaning to comment on this for a good few days now:   New Yorkers, being at the epicentre of the North American COVID-19 crisis, must be absolutely hating listening to Trump downplay the problem, trying to claim that there is plentiful protective equipment, and giving himself top marks for how his government has responded.    They must despise the man.

Our numbers do seem pretty good

Far be it for me to want to give any succour to right wing figures who are screaming "Think of the economy!  We have over-reacted!",  but I do get the feeling that it's not unreasonable to be starting to think that Australia might have caught COVID-19 in time.  I've been looking at the Worldometer table, and note that:

a.    as everyone knows, the South East Asian rich countries did exceptionally well;

b.    you can ignore the poorer SE Asian countries which currently show tiny case numbers, but presumably they have tiny testing rates, and I think the WHO should rightly be warning everyone of  terrible death tolls that may come from those places over the next 6 months;

c.    but compared to other Western nations, including virtually all of Europe and the USA, Australian figures do seem remarkably good, especially on a per capita basis.   We're still under "1" for deaths per million of population, and our "total cases per million" at 195 is close to that of South Korea, and a fraction of the figures for the likes of Germany, France (around 1/4), the USA (about 1/3) and the UK (about 1/2).   In fact, looking at the UK, why is their death rate running at 35 per million, while ours is barely 1?    

The trick, of course, is going to be how to judge an appropriate rate of "return to something like normalcy" without risking the numbers getting out of control.

But, the figures do seem to give some optimism that early action may have worked well, and the government should not be shy of saying that.   I think that, for general economic confidence reasons,  it would good for the government to also start talking about the criteria it will be using to look at when they will start to relax the present semi-lockdown.  It's probably a pretty hard thing to communicate, as I expect the expert opinion on that will be divided.

Update:  here's a report on the same topic in The Guardian today.

Update:  I see from Bolt's blog (I can only see the header - no way I would part with a cent of money to a Murdoch publication) that he is saying something similar to what is in my last paragraph.   (Except he puts it in his bombastic way, that the PM must tell us how the lockdown will end; it can't go on for 6 months, that would be a disaster, etc)     The problem with Bolt's take on it all, though, is that he helping encourage the dangerous Right wing views that it was never a serious danger; it's enabled something like a Left wing dictatorship; and it's already low risk to go back to normal.  Just have a look at the headings of his other posts.  

Yes, too soon. Still amusing, though.

Back to COVID

It's hard to believe that it won't be a disaster in India.  Not to mention Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and any nation when large numbers of the poor live in slum like areas.  From Science:

Fewer than 600 cases had been confirmed at the time of Modi’s announcement, although that number is widely believed to be an undercount. But without control measures, 300 million to 500 million Indians could be infected by the end of July and 30 million to 50 million could have severe disease, according to one model. And the world’s second most populous country has large numbers of poor living in crowded, unsanitary conditions and a weak public health infrastructure, with just 0.7 hospital beds per 1000 persons, compared with Italy’s 3.4 and the United States’s 2.9; India also has fewer than 50,000 ventilators.

Self indulgent observations (because it's not about you-know-what)

*  I reckon viognier is a very underutilised wine grape variety.   You can barely find it in a lot of liquor outlets, but it has distinctive characteristics which I like.  

*  Speaking of wine grape varieties that don't get a fair go - I remember drinking Australian made verdelho back in the 1980's, and now I don't think I have seen it for many years.   It was fine.  Why did it go out of style?

*  More about wine in the 1980's: the Hunter Valley used to be hugely into making semillon.  I think they still do, but again, I doubt that it has the sales that it used to.  I thought it was OK, especially if older, but I was never the biggest fan.   Hunter Valley wineries also always made a chablis style of wine, and I used to always dislike it for being extremely dry and (to my mind) acidic.  It always used to give me indigestion, like no other wine.   I'm glad you don't see that one around anymore.

* On to food:  I really like the frozen Scottish kippers you can buy.  I get the feeling they don't sell many in Australia, and they do stink up the kitchen when you grill them, but a very pleasing, salty treat, if you ask me. 

* My son has taken to making mojitos for himself, but he prefers using dark rum over white.  I presume he is following a similar trajectory to me - the first spirit I remember buying was Southern Comfort, which I think I drank with soda; but I used to enjoy cheap brandy with (don't know how common this is) dry ginger ale.  Scotch and dry was fine too.    I still like scotch and dry, sometimes, from a pub.   I presume it's a common thing that young drinkers most often do not have a taste at first for bitterness, or overly dry characteristics, in their alcoholic drinks.  That usually develops later.  Or it did with me, over my 20's.  
     

Made me laugh

So I saw the tweet about an English  woman asking about the name of a neighbour's cat via signs in the window.  Read about it here.

Then saw this later tweet, which amused me a lot:

Here's the full sign:

A sensible use of blockchain

Revelation, indeed

I didn't see the second episode of the ABC's Revelation documentary series about child abuse in the Catholic Church, but I ended up watching the final episode last night.

It really was pretty shocking stuff:  in particular, the couple of current priests who struck, shall we say, far from the expected tone in their attitude.

For example, there was the sad interview with a 90 something year old mother whose 13 year old son hanged himself in his bedroom in the 1970's.    Three Brothers from his school, one of whom was his class teacher, came to the house and asked if he had left a note.  He hadn't.  Later, it transpires that his teacher was convicted of multiple sex offences against his students.  

But the priest who also attended the dead boy's house to anoint him is still alive, and was interviewed.  He expresses the view that it was more likely a prank that went wrong than a case of the boy being a victim of sexual abuse(!).   Why would he express such a view after what has gone on?   Completely and utterly "tone deaf", if nothing else. 

Father Brian Lucas came out of his interview as a pedantic jerk, too. 

It was pretty powerful stuff, really. 

There was also another interview, from jail, of a brother who had been moved from place to place once his abuse was discovered.   His comments further put paid to the conservative idea that it was homosexuality that was at the heart of the problem,  rather than sexual immaturity, social isolation and opportunistic access to boys.   I cannot believe that conservative Catholics cannot get this into their heads:  it would never have been a case that a priest or brother could easily explain away spending time with girls or young women in their accommodation, or taking them on trips.   But they could readily be assumed to be having a mentoring or friendly relationship with boys, and they used this to access sex.  

Idiocracy, indeed

Update:    And by the way, on a more serious note, why did this bit of thwarted Right wing terrorism get so little attention last week:

A man suspected of plotting to blow up a Missouri hospital and was killed in a shootout with FBI agents was apparently frustrated with local government action to stop the spread of coronavirus, the FBI said Wednesday.

Timothy Wilson, 36, died Tuesday in Belton, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City, after members of the FBI’s joint terrorism task force attempted to arrest him. The FBI says Wilson was the subject of a “months-long domestic terrorism investigation."

Meanwhile, in Australia, Sinclair Davidson is doing another bit of comic book inspired "take down the government" wankerism by re-heading Catallaxy as follows:

[Update:  see comments for apparent clarification.] 

I don't know why any politician gives him the time of day.

I had noticed this too...

What is it about Trump putting trust in long haired doctors?   It's very odd...

Update:  Slate has an article pointing out that this French doctor/researcher has a very, very dubious track record.   Also, is a climate change denier.    The "crank" element is high. 

Watching the goal posts shift

And this laughable Trump spin on how he's now being thanked for social isolation bringing families together!:

And over at Catallaxy, I continue to be amused at how keyboard warriors of the Right are bravely offering the sacrifice of anyone over 70 in the interests of keeping the economy ticking.   (Someone wittily tweeted last week that they wouldn't have guessed that it would be the conservative Right that would end up endorsing the social system of Logan's Run.)

And look at the pathetic goal post shifting that is going on.   CL posts with strong endorsement a Roger Kimball article (dated 28 March) which encapsulates the view that it's still an over-reaction, this economic shutdown.  Yet towards the end, he has to do some fessing up:

Over the past few weeks, I have been predicting a modest fatality rate from COVID-19. I began by predicting no more than a couple of hundred deaths and then upped my prediction to a 1,000-1,200. As of today, the number of deaths attributed to the virus is just over 2,000. So I was wrong about that. 

He then argues that maybe he wasn't really wrong - most of these deaths are old people who had other conditions.  [Groan]. 

But look at the basic goalpost shifting  -  his initial prediction was out by a factor of 10  - as of 28 March.    The number of deaths today? - close enough to 3,000.  [Update - over 3,000 now, according to the Worldometer count, which seems to update faster than WHO or other sites and is quoted by Kimball himself.]

At what point will these dimwits admit that their initial predictions were so embarrassingly wrong, people should ignore any and every thing they ever say about risk and science again?   At the "I was out by a factor of 100" stage? 1,000?   We will see.

Update:  Via The Onion, this story headline fits perfectly with a common view on the wingnut, Trump defending Right at Catallaxy and elsewhere:

Further downgrading warranted

I recently rubbished conservative Catholic Trump excuser Gray Connolly for his bad takes on many topics.

Today, I noticed that he recently went up to another level on the "pathetic" scale.  This is how it went:

Connolly went on to challenge Dale to put up the video, and he did.    There is no laughter to be heard, from journalists or otherwise.    

Connolly then, unbelievably, tweets this:

And then:

What an arrogant schmuck!

As someone says following:

And this:

Others point out that, even if you were to believe Trump was "joking" - that would be appalling in its own way.

Connolly is just a Trump excusing fool.  No doubt about it.