I saw the 2015 Jonny Depp film Black Mass last week, on Netflix, and was surprised how good it was.
I see that it was better rated on Rotten Tomatoes than I thought (73%), but it didn't make much money at the box office. (Just under a $100 million world wide).
It's true: it is very much Martin Scorsese territory, and I think some people may have thought it was too much a repeat of Goodfellas and the rest of his oeuvre. But I thought of it more as Scorsese material but done with a better and more satisfying story arc. It is nicely directed, and Depp and all of the actors are very good.
The other film it's unavoidably close to is Scorsese's The Departed, which I thought was really awful and couldn't stick with, and even my son didn't seem to care for it. It is a much, much better movie than that.
Adam Creighton has been busy being upset about her banning:
Each of these characters have been mentioned favourably recently at Catallaxy.
Update: speaking of Catallaxy, I see that Steve Kates is now sharing Gateway Pundit fantasies of Fauci (and others) being on trial for...well, you can see.
It's one of the great mysteries of life that Sinclair Davidson seems to think he's performing a service to the world by keeping a forum running where his mates regularly show themselves off as, well, ridiculous idiots. His former RMIT buddy Steve Kates is currently endorsing COVID as being a vast conspiracy to bring down Trump and hence Western civilisation. But we've seen that before.
Today's entry, rather, for going "straight to the pool room" comes from Man Who Loves Women (Just as Long as They are Exactly Like my Catholic Mum circa 1955), with this:
It's better than having a trade or other war. The West needs to infiltrate Chinese social media and continue spreading this idea:
Young
people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly
little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying
flat".
The
new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to
society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long
shifts.
China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.
The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.
"Lying
flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the
discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become
the measure of all things."
The
comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese
microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.
The
idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more
attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised
by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a
spiritual movement.
...in that the future was not the cynical Two Minute Hate, forced on a populace by authoritarian government, but a whole 180 Minute Hate every evening brought by an ageing billionaire for profit and influence:
I mean, the Right in America (and any Australian sympathisers to it) have become just too stupid to engage with, and their obsession with attacking individual public figures like Fauci is just absurd.
As with climate change, they think they can pluck any statement made by a perceived enemy out of context and think that it proves their point. They think they're the smart ones, when they are just nasty and dumb and tribal to the point of preferring self harm to listening to expertise.
I recently watched two videos of interest regarding quantum computing.
As you might expect, Google is going into it in a big way, and while the comedy in this does not really work, it's still interesting:
And Bee Hossenfelder had an informative video on the various approaches to creating quantum computing. I didn't realise there were so many:
Update: I have been meaning to say, since I first posted a photo of these early quantum computer set ups, that I like the lacy, intricate design of the Google quantum computer, which is all about the need for extreme cooling. Which has made me wonder - how do you cool something down to below the temperature of space? This article gives some indication, although I still don't understand exactly how it works:
“Quantum chips have to operate at very low temperatures in order to
maintain the quantum information,” Clarke said. To do this, Intel uses
cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems from specialist Blufors.
The
refrigerator features several stages, getting colder as you go down -
all the way "down to temperatures just a fraction of a degree above
absolute zero - that is really cold. In fact, it's 250 times colder than
deep space,” Clarke said. “We use a mixture of helium isotopes as our
refrigerant to get down to these very cold temperatures, in the tens of
millikelvin.”
While the refrigeration system can bring temperatures down to
extremes, it can't remove heat very quickly - so if you have a chip in
there that's creating a lot of heat, you're going to have a problem.
"You're
probably familiar with the power dissipation of an FPGA," Clarke said.
"This would overwhelm the refrigeration cooling capacity. At the lowest
level of a fridge, you typically have about a milliwatt of cooling
power. At the four Kelvin stage [higher up in the fridge], you have a
few watts."
Future fridge designs are expected to improve things,
but it's unlikely to massively increase the temperature envelope. "That
imposes limitations on the power dissipation of your control chips."
It is distinctly odd, the way the Trump blog has been abruptly discontinued. The Guardian explains.
Is there a connection with the widely discussed report that Trump is telling people he will be "re-instated" in August? Did he write a blog post all about that, and people around him have thought it was going to hurt him if posted?
This article at the Financial Review, and not behind a paywall, describes the issues in the case and argues the settlement definitely was a capitulation by Porter.
I would also comment that the world of defamation lawyers seems particularly incestuous, even taking into account that the world of barristers and judges is routinely kinda incestuous.
I think that everyone now is curious about the additional redacted evidence that Porter wanted to keep out of the trial. Particularly from the guy who said he had a relevant conversation with Porter about his time with the deceased.
A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out
about UFOs is accusing his former agency of waging a disinformation
campaign against him, a report says.
Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program,
lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general
claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other
offenses at the agency, according to Politico.
and Jazz Shaw, the right wing blogger at Hot Air who is a firm believer in UFOs has a story about emails apparently deleted in the Pentagon, which he thinks is a Big Deal. I wonder if it'll turn out to be more incompetence than anything else.
According to some China critical Youtube channel I subscribe to, the Shenzhen SEG Plaza is still shaking from time to time, and remains closed and under investigation.
In 1996, the company went public and rolled some of the proceeds into SEG Plaza. Last week, Chinese media unearthed a report
on the building’s construction authored by a (then) graduate student.
She noted that “Shenzhen speed” wasn’t speedy enough for SEG Plaza: The
tower was raised at a rate of one floor every 2.7 days. She also
found that the building’s construction began before the design and
review process was even complete, and that updated plans were delivered
throughout the project, meaning that completed sections would often have
to be reworked.
SEG Plaza wasn’t the only project to cut such
corners. For years, Shenzhen’s contractors made cement with sea sand.
It’s far cheaper than river sand, and for good reason: It corrodes the
structural steel that holds up buildings. In 2013, the city identified
31 companies that had used sea sand in construction and suspended eight
of them for a year — but it never identified any at-risk buildings.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, building collapses are a regular, recurringtragedy in China.
The writer says the plaza has long been home to shody electronics sales:
A few years after opening, for example, SEG Plaza became a global hub
for trading cheap, used electronic components — rather than the new ones
that the company had hoped to drive. Chinese traders in, say, New York
might buy 5,000 used desktops from a Wall Street bank and ship them to
south China. Within a couple of months, their semiconductors would be on
sale in an SEG stall.
It wasn’t the kind of business that
Shenzhen wanted to advertise to the world (when dignitaries were in
town, the government would actually shut the plaza down). Its mere
existence hinted at the city’s relatively flexible attitude to
intellectual property. But over the years, the neighborhood
surrounding SEG Plaza filled with malls also marketing used components
to up-and-coming manufacturers who weren’t exactly scrupulous about
patents and trademarks.
In recent years, it became obvious that SEG Plaza’s best days were
behind it. Chinese consumers who once sought out the largely disposable
electronics built from SEG’s inventories were moving up to better
devices. When I first visited the tower in the mid-2000s, the dim
10-story mall at its base was a crowded and relentless warren of stalls,
all packed with chips and computers for sale. In the last half-decade,
the stalls have become increasingly populated with beauty products,
electronic cigarettes and crypto-mining rigs. Shenzhen’s freewheeling
days as an unaccountable manufacturer of low-cost goods are over.
What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these
are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t
know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely
couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that
these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.
At
least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December
2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the
Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans
have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a
co-operation accord with them.
“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he
told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments
here."
Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he
said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to
due to fears of “mass hysteria”.
Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to
represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s
Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the
Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances
that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he
doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and
aliens".
I said ages ago that if some government agency had proof of alien presence on Earth that they thought should be kept secret, there is no way they would have told Trump, as he would blurted it out at his next rally and tried to take narcissistic credit for being the person to tell the world.
Update: Eshed has made other claims:
Eshed makes implausible claims that include stories of how aliens
prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear
incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[24][25]
* Christian Porter: still a political problem for PM Smirko. Labor is right to be calling for the independent inquiry which was the obvious thing that Smirko should have set up as soon as this started. I suspect Smirko, who has shockingly bad judgement in this sort of thing, is going to try to tough it out as something not needing further consideration. (And Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning did a bad devil's advocate style interview with Labor's Mark Dreyfus which set up the arguments you can see Smirko trying on. He was probably taking notes.)
* That Friend's reunion interview, which I have no interest in, has at least had the benefit of causing quite a lot of people on Twitter coming out as saying they never thought the show was very good, and many hated it. I am not alone. (I didn't hate it, but it was only intermittently amusing; certainly not worth watching at all in later seasons. A show vastly overrated is the correct assessment.)
* Brisbane has had an unusually cold run of nights and mornings for this time of year. Days are still OK, by and large.
Only a week ago, I posted a Tom Scott video about the invention of the microwave oven, and it was soon followed by our home one breaking down.
It's quite old, so time for a new one.
What we now have is one which has no rotating platform. I didn't even know these were made for domestic use, although I think I may have seen one in a shop once.
It's a little disconcerting, not getting that visual signal of operation. But it seems to be working fine. The salesman said they heat more evenly, but I haven't used it enough yet to tell.
And by the way, why do microwave manufacturers persist in putting in recipes in the user manual? No one tries to cook an actual meal in them, ever, do they? Sure, steam the veggies and heat the rice, defrost the meat - but actually cook the meat in a main meal? No....
It seems America has become so familiar with mass shootings - particularly workplace ones by disgruntled employees - that they just don't register in the news cycle much anymore:
A transit system employee in San Jose opened fire Wednesday morning at a
light-rail facility, killing at least eight people before shooting
himself, officials said.
This seems to have barely caused a ripple on Twitter, for example.
Unless it's got kids involved - or shoppers, I suppose, because mall shootings have a special ordinary folk suddenly gotta run and hide drama about them, I suppose - mass shootings have become news "meh".
When Chris Mason’s daughter was a toddler, he watched, intrigued, as
she touched surfaces on the New York City subway. Then, one day, she
licked a pole. “There was a clear microbial exchange,” says Mason, a
geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “I desperately wanted to know what
had happened.”
So he started swabbing the subway, sampling the microbial world that
coexists with people in our transit systems. After his 2015 study
revealed a wealth of previously unknown species
in New York City, other researchers contacted him to contribute. Now,
Mason and dozens of collaborators have released their study of subways,
buses, elevated trains, and trams in 60 cities worldwide, from Baltimore
to Bogotá, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. They identified thousands
of new viruses and bacteria, and found that each city has a unique
microbial “fingerprint.”...
The researchers also found a set of 31 species present in 97% of the
samples; these formed what they called a “core” urban microbiome. A
further 1145 species were present in more than 70% of samples. Samples
taken from surfaces that people touch—like railings—were more likely to
have bacteria associated with human skin, compared with surfaces like
windows. Other common species in the mix were bacteria often found in
soil, water, air, and dust.
But the researchers also found species that were less widespread.
Those gave each city a unique microbiome—and helped the researchers
predict, with 88% accuracy, which city random samples came from, they report today in Cell.
I'm not sure that Ross Douthat does all that great a job of explaining it clearly enough without the jargon, but I think his basic point is (probably) sound enough:
The impulse to establish legitimacy and
order informs a lot of action on the left these days. The idea that the
left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily
defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy,
with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching
today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the
goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral
categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het
world.
To this end, the categories of
identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older
strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their
own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom
and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who
gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.
Meanwhile,
conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find
themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a
“systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern
power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist
and postmodernist enemies.
This is a
temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having
conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the
ironies — however rich and telling they may be.
Yes, the French philosopher was
undoubtedly a certain kind of genius; yes, as Shullenberger writes, “his
critiques of institutions expose the limits of our dominant modes of
politics,” including the mode that’s ascendant on the left. But the
older conservative critique of relativism’s corrosive spirit is still
largely correct. Which is why, even when it lands telling blows against
progressive power, much of what seems postmodern about the Trump-era
right also seems wicked, deceitful, even devilish.
In
the end, one can reject the new progressivism, oppose the church of
intersectionality — and still have a healthy fear of what might happen
if you use the devil’s tools to pull it down.
I have commented before on how the Trumpian Right are those who have most clearly provided a home - unconsciously, perhaps? - to postmodernism's "truth is a social construct" by their acceptance of his lying and bullshitting.
I have not let through any Graeme Bird comments for quite a while now, but he can't take a hint and is still making appearances in moderation, calling me a Jewish c.. etc. Do you really wonder, Graeme, why no one lets you comment for long on blogs?
But with my renewed interest in UFOs, and the particular evidence of the strangely acting "tic tac" thing over the ocean in 2004 that has impressed me so much (again, not the videos, but the pilots' accounts of what they saw), I am here to announce that I will let any comment that Graeme might like to make (on this post only) about what he thinks is going on.
Of course, any reference to Jews, or swearing, will mean the comment does not appear at all.
And by the way, I found myself in pretty much complete agreement with the commentary in this guy's video about the matter, which came out 8 months ago, but I only saw it recently:
Update: that'd be right. Just when you give him permission to comment on one matter, he doesn't. Not yet, anyway.
