Expats for China

The BBC has a story up about something interesting I have mentioned before - how China's pro-government (to put it mildly) media network CGTN features pro-China ex pats a lot.  

Question with an obvious answer

 

Nice, low key humour spotted

 

Poor Japan

It's sort of been Japan week here, and to top it off, we now have what was long suspected might happen - an Olympics without spectators.

To make it a good television spectacle in any event, maybe they should be covering all stadium seating with plastic so they can green screen in a full audience?   Do you even need to do that with modern video techniques?  

I guess in 100 years time, the audience could just be robots.  

The new superpower tech war

As usual, the ABC's Foreign Correspondent has done a terrific job at looking at China's decision (prompted by Western bans) to accelerate its own tech infrastructure:

While the US has long had the edge in tech, China is catching up fast, investing heavily in AI, robotics, 5G and 6G, microchips and surveillance technology.

US President Joe Biden is planning a $330 billion package to rev up the US's investment in R&D, having noted its strategic competition with China is nothing less than a battle to "win the 21st century".

I have to say that I am being pretty impressed with China's rapid advances in space technology - although as I have noted before, they don't seem to have been able to replicate it in the aviation industry, generally speaking.   Still not 100% sure why that is...

It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in future.   I find the idea of a government controlling a digital currency by setting an expiry date on its use to be the most fascinating control proposal - and I doubt anyone has a good idea how it would play out in real life economics.

Yet more Japan content

So sue me, I happen to be watching a lot of Japanese content on Youtube at the moment.   

This one is a couple of years old, and is from one of several channels The Guardian has (I didn't know until Google suggested it), and it's a pretty fascinating explanation of how you can get cheaper rent there if you are the first person to live in an apartment or house after someone has died in it.   I hadn't heard of that before, although I did know that housing is treated as more "disposable" in that country than in most of the West. 

 

Who knows - maybe it's easier for Westerners to rent one of these apartments too:   I have seen several  Youtubers explaining that Japanese landlords and letting agents really are not welcoming of foreign renters.   They consider them a high risk of skipping the country with rent arrears, and unreliable tenants generally speaking.   (Japan is a fantastic place, but there are some residual, slightly problematic, cultural issues like that.)

 And speaking of abandoned Japanese residences, Chris Broad and his friends visited a Japanese island which has a population dwindle to (I think he said) 150, but it has scores of apartment blocks from when 10,000 people lived there, now being slowly taken over by plants in a very post-apocalyptic look.  Because people do actually still live there, anyone can go visit on the ferry.   It's apparently near the more famous "battleship island", but you can't go to that one alone.  Fascinating:

Trouble for Pikachu

I stumbled across this on Al Jazeera, and am rather surprised it hasn't gone viral.  Or maybe it has?  Poor old Pikachu in Chile gets roughed up:

 

Stories from Japan

I've been extraordinarily busy at work again, so I've been posting less frequently.  But let me record some stories, all about Japan, as it happens:

*   Sperm cells must be a lot tougher than I would have guessed. This is surely a very surprising story:

A Japanese team of researchers has succeeded in the reproduction of mice using freeze-dried sperm preserved in space for nearly six years, developing what could be a “Noah’s Ark” type of technology to save plants and animals from extinction in the future.

The study published last month in the Science Advances journal said a total of 168 mice were born in 2019 and 2020 after the sperm was brought back from the International Space Station despite exposure to space radiation.

The preservation period of five years and 10 months is the world’s “longest duration that samples have been preserved in the ISS in biological research,” the study said.

The experiment was conducted by a team including researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the University of Yamanashi.

The freeze-drying technique, developed by Teruhiko Wakayama, a professor at the University of Yamanashi, allowed the sperm to be preserved at room temperature for more than one year. It also meant there was no need to install a freezer on the rocket launched to the ISS.

The technique is also expected to be adopted in modern reproductive medicine and livestock breeding.

I guess it makes the panspermia idea of how life spread through the universe a bit more plausible, too;  even though, yes I know, panspermia did not refer to actual sperm.  Turns out maybe it could have?

 *  I feel very sorry for the country and what's happened to the Olympics.  Like, no one cares, do they?   They are now talking about a lot of events having no spectators.

I think they could just turn the opening ceremony into a World Order reunion concert, and I would be just as happy.

 *  Every year, I note how Japan has record rains and disasters resulting from it.  Climate change.  And sure enough, the urban landslide on the news this weekend does seem to have involved record rain, according to NHK:

The active seasonal rain front has brought record rain to Shizuoka Prefecture and the southern part of the Kanto region, which includes Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures.

Weather officials are warning of the heightening risk of mudslides in Atami and elsewhere in Shizuoka, where ground is saturated after the downpour. Landslide alerts are in place in parts of the prefecture.

Atami City, where fatal mudslides occurred on Saturday, received 321 millimeters of rain in the 48 hours through Saturday evening. That is more than the average rainfall for the entire month of July.

*  One of the Japan based Youtubers I sometimes watch put up a video of her visiting the top tourist spots in Kyoto recently, and wow:  it is spectacularly devoid of tourists at the moment:

I also have been meaning for some time to note a couple of interesting Youtube videos, by another Western video creator who lives there, explaining a lot about Shinto. Here they are: 

 

The (formerly) British guy who is the expert in the videos has his own blog on Shinto here.  Seems a little "dry" to me, but some interesting stuff.

 

On the upside, that wall was probably made from Australian iron ore...

Update:   Hey, the exact same joke was made on Mad as Hell last night.  I demand royalties!

A show in decline

I recently finished watching the Netflix cartoon show Disenchantment in its 3rd season, and I have to say, the quality of the writing and humour has dwindled away terribly.  

This was quite an enjoyable show for the first two seasons, although some episodes have always been better than others.  But the overall storyline of this season - it's just meandering and terrible.   

I see that I am not alone:

‘Disenchantment’ season three review: Matt Groening’s swords-and-swigging sitcom loses the plot

Disenchantment gets bogged down in plot and loses sight of jokes in “Part 3”

Disappointing.

What if they said "UFOs are real" and everyone just shrugged

That is, after all, pretty what has happened with the brief Pentagon UFO report.

Jazz Shaw, the right wing columnist who has been (for want of a better term) pro-UFO (and is just one of the Right wing figures who has been talking up this issue for the last couple of years) takes the "glass half full" view:

None of this should be taken to mean that the report was a dud. There were important admissions made by the ODNI on Friday. One of the first was that the vast majority of “UAP” incidents they studied “probably do represent physical objects.” They draw this conclusion from the fact that most were picked up using multiple avenues of sensory data, in addition to testimony from pilots and technicians who watch the skies for a living. So it’s not just swamp gas, “ball lightning,” or birds. And if you’ve seen one, you may not be crazy. (Or if you are, it’s not because of this.)

The next thing the ODNI conceded was that the vast majority of interesting cases they have been studying are truly “unidentified.” Out of 144 incident reports, they were able to conclusively attribute precisely one of them to a mundane event, specifically the downing of a deflating weather balloon. They don’t know what the rest of them are, and they’ve really been hunting for an explanation. Prior to the release of the report, the Pentagon had already stated that what people have been witnessing is not an example of secret United States government technology. (How much faith one places in their claims at this point is entirely up to the reader.) In the report, they went one step further, saying that they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

While some dedicated, skeptical journalists might latch onto the phrase “currently lack,” interpreting that to mean that the UFOs could still turn out to be Chinese or Russian, this reading seems dubious. As the report also notes, most of the reported sightings took place in controlled airspace, in the midst of our naval battle groups and even over military facilities in the middle of mainland North America. If there were the slightest indication that those things came from Russia or China and were showing up over our testing range in Nevada (it’s happened), there wouldn’t be a “concern over possible national security concerns.” We would already have the real-world, military equivalent of Will Smith up there in an F/A-18E Super Hornet shooting them down.

And on the Left - which includes most scientists eager to pooh-pooh the "aliens are watching us" theory - we have David Corn writing an interesting column in which he explains that even though he saw (with others) something that pretty convincingly fits a "true UFO" description as a 12 year old boy, he just can't buy into "aliens are visiting us" any more.    

David Corn's background (as it is with some others I have seen downplaying the Pentagon report) is that, as a child, he was seriously gullible on all UFO stuff - believing Erich Von Daniken's ancient astronaut guff, for example.  (I soon learned the truth about that, even though, like most other kids seeing it the first time, I initially found it a bit spookily credible.)

He's a good example of something I have long felt:  if someone has swung wildly from one side to another in the matter of politics, religion or (as it turns out) belief in UFO's, there's actually good reason to doubt their judgement.    It's not really a matter of saying that people shouldn't ever believe anything  firmly;  but all belief should be tempered by some scepticism of your own certainty.   Those who have swung wildly from one set of beliefs to the opposite - they don't fill me with confidence that they have an appropriate way of assessing their own thinking.   

So, what do I think of the report?    Of course, it is hard to know how to judge some of the cases when the material for them is still classified. And, as I have repeatedly said - I don't find the 3 videos alone all that convincing;  although I am also open to the suggestion that some of the debunking of them is more speculative than concrete.  (I understand that there are some pilots who have disputed some of the Michael West debunking, for example.)

I remain satisfied that the "tic tac" incident is one that is truly mysterious  and "real", and (to my mind) unlikely to explained by earthly technology.  It's been too long since it happened for the technology not to be revealed.  But sure, the "alien drone" theory is a stretch.  

That said, lately I get the feeling that, oddly, there may be collectively much more evidence for "alien drone" than we realise; it's just that when people face a weird incident, if it is only of short duration, they soon put it out of mind and don't press for anyone else to investigate, either.

David Corn's story, for example.   (I have also been impressed by stories I have read over the years of guys who woke up while camping to find their tent or cabin flooded with light from above, but with complete and unearthly silence - which of course means it was not likely to be a chopper or pranksters.  The light stays on for a length of time - making a meteor flash unlikely - and then blinks out in an instant.)   But these sort of incidents are not collected by anyone central.  There is no real  life Mulder.   The stories just turn up years later in magazines or on line when people want to tell of a mysterious life event that they never understood. 

So yeah, it's funny, but probably the government never needed to cover up what it knew in terms of sensor evidence for UFOs, or sightings by military people - it could just rely on people seeing something weird, shrugging, and getting on with life.

It's a theory, anyway.

So, so stupid

Food observations

*   Couscous is an underappreciated food.   I need to learn more about where it came from, how it's made, etc.

*   For a couple of years, I have been curious about the Coles branded pre-cooked lamb shanks in red wine sauce:

I finally tried them recently, and was pretty pleased.   35 minutes to re-heat in the oven, and the sauce was pretty nice.  A large amount of meat on each shank.   They cost $15 for 2 shanks, but cooking them yourself takes forever to get them very tender, and they're not very cheap raw either.  I will buy the pre-cooked ones again - at least if there is only two of us eating dinner.

*  I continue to be annoyed that veganism has seemingly totally replaced vegetarianism in popular culture.  Youtube is continually recommending vegan stuff to me (well, I do subscribe to a few channels, so it is my fault), but when I searched for "vegetarian recipes" on the weekend, the results barely showed two videos before reverting to vegan recipes again.     I want vegetarians to try to re-claim some of the popular imagination again.

But too much wokeness is the real problem in America

Sarcasm, of course:

Good thread

A test

 Is this working? 

That's odd.  Blogger isn't working properly in Firefox.   Did I change some setting?  Didn't think so...

Stop watching trashy reality TV

So Love Island has a particular reputation in England for ruining the emotional lives of participants.

I think the only reality TV format I have ever watched at length is My Kitchen Rules, and that was years ago now before the formula because too obvious and trashy.  I don't think I have ever watched any that involves romantic relationships developing - I have a natural aversion to watching people having such a private aspect of their emotional life broadcast to the world.  Even the more well intentioned ones, like the recent "Love on the Spectrum" - I saw some of it, but I have the same basic objection. 

Really, the format would die if people would not watch it.   But how to encourage people not to watch it?   Make better romantic fictional stories?   

A Big One coming

The ABC does these on line stories with graphics really well.   This one is about the high likelihood that there will soon be another big earthquake - this one centred on the West coast.

I think half of Auckland going under a new volcano would be more spectacular - and that is quite possible too.

Lying flat discussed

The best single column I've read about the Chinese government getting all panicky about the "lying flat" movement is this one by Matthew Brooker at Bloomberg.  Some parts:

It’s ironic (though perhaps inevitable) that, having adopted the methods of a market economy to achieve its goal of creating a moderately prosperous society, China now finds itself beset with an identifiably capitalist affliction. Opting out and doing nothing requires a base level of affluence that would be impractical in a country still trying to drag itself out of poverty. Yet beyond a certain point, material goals cease to satisfy human needs — a syndrome that is familiar in many developed countries.

Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine, driven by an inexorable logic of expansion. The profits of production are invested in more production, which requires ever-expanding markets to consume what is made. This gives rise to the advertising and marketing industries, whose job it is to convince consumers that fulfillment lies in more and better things. All this makes capitalism a prodigious generator of goods and services. It also tends to generate feelings of alienation and anxiety.

That’s because the answer to human happiness doesn’t lie in sating material desires (something that Buddhists have known for thousands of years).....

A Stalinist political system is a perpetual motion machine of another kind, fueled by paranoia. The motherland is surrounded by enemies, and the people must constantly redouble their efforts and unite behind their savior-leader to beat back the existential threats it faces. Having abandoned (or at least postponed) the Communist ideals of equality and solidarity, Xi has turned to nationalism and perceptions of a hostile world to reinforce belief in the necessity of the party’s leadership. “Universal values” such as democracy and human rights are a foreign plot designed to weaken and destabilize China; discussion of such pernicious influences has been banished.

What is intriguing about the “lying flat” wave is that it shows how similar the Chinese experience is when faced with the same conditions as other countries. Political control has its limits. For all Xi’s attempts to foster a sense of Chinese exceptionalism and reinforce Communist orthodoxy, society may develop in unexpected ways. It’s also a reminder that China has other traditions besides the rigid Legalist philosophy that characterizes Xi’s grip on power. Lying flat contains more than a hint of Daoism, which emphasizes harmony with nature. The Daoist poet Li Bai seems to have spent most of his time drinking wine and enjoying the company of friends; he reputedly drowned while leaning drunkenly out of his boat to see the moon's reflection in the river. The Communist press wouldn’t have approved.

 

 

 

About that excessive movie about excess

With reluctance, as I considered there was an excellent chance I would not like it, I watched Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday (on Netflix).   

And (surprise!), I didn't care for it.

That was pretty much going to be a certainty when Matthew McConaughey turned up unexpectedly in the first 10 minutes.   Actually, while this segment was pretty funny for its bizarre aspects, he still lived up to being my personal talisman for warning that the movie will be, at the very least, badly flawed.

My main problems with the movie?:

a.    it's excessively about crass excess - in such a way that it hurt the sense of realism.  I would say it  very often seemed more cartoonish than realistic.  Even apart from the scenes of carnal excess, which (as I expected) were extreme and many, I thought the whole trading floor atmosphere seemed over the top and fake.  Too many people in too small a place; too much noise; too much adoring love for their boss when they thought he was going.   The day after watching the movie, I did see on Youtube some video showing the real lead character (Jordan Belfort), both when the movie came out, and back in the 1990's.   These reinforced my impression that the artistic licence taken in showing this world went too far.  I appreciate that some people would have wanted to see the movie to see how outrageous the life of the rich and crass could be - but to me, it looked too unrealistic too often.

b.  It is way too long - both in so many individual scenes, and overall.   I read David Edelstein's review after watching it, and fully agree with this part:

In interviews, Scorsese’s brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker has said it was hard to cut the film down from four hours. Four hours?! As I watched, I kept thinking that every scene could be snipped at the halfway point, before yet another hot-dog monologue or leering shot of Belfort’s second wife, the startlingly pretty but soulless ­Naomi, the “Duchess of Bay Ridge,” played by Margot Robbie. I figured Leo must have been sitting in the editing room saying, “No, no, don’t cut here — my favorite line is coming up — 30 more seconds — okay, a minute — wait, let it run! It’s my Oscars scene!” But no, this was Scorsese’s design. Overkill is the ruling aesthetic.

c.  While I don't say it had to be more of a morality play, as it does fit into Scorsese's love of stories about corrupt men who think they have it made and then things start falling apart, there is one key scene which is problematic:  the one where the FBI agent (the best played character in the film, if you ask me, and I did think his scene on the yacht - invented for the movie - was well written and acted) is on the subway after seeing Belfort face justice at last.  As Edelstein writes:

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible. But you’re supposed to envy them anyway, because the alternative is working at McDonald’s and riding the subway alongside wage slaves. What are a few years in a minimum-security prison — practically a country club — when you can have the best of everything?

I think Edelstein is going too far in saying Scorsese wants the audience to envy the characters on screen, but it is hard to interpret the subway scene as anything other than invitation to share a moment of doubt that maybe it's sad that more people don't get to live life to a drug addled, VD infected, lobster eating, full.   As I say, problematic.

d.  A dated gratuitousness to the display of female nudity.   I hesitate to raise this, because I can see an argument that it suits the movies and pop culture of the era in which it was set.   But I just couldn't avoid thinking about it after the scene near the end where the Swiss banker waits for his young lover under his bed sheets, but when she makes her appearance, it's like a deliberate pause for a bit of full frontal nudity before getting under the sheets, which then start flying about in a Benny Hill style caricature of sex.   That just struck me as the way it would have been done in a 1980's flick, but not these days.   Sure, earlier there was Leonardo's butt side on during a (again) pointlessly protracted sex scene, and there was a comedy flash of a (presumably) prosthetic penis; but in retrospect, I think it is fair to say that the whole movie looked dated in the way the flesh displayed was primarily female.   (Although - now that I think of it - was trying to get more gender balance in skin on display the reason for the odd scene in which the college band came into the workplace floor but with the guys wearing no shirts?   That just looked weird in its own way to me - I can't see the uber macho male brokers being impressed, and there were few females working there anyway.)  

So there you go.  My thoughts, in too much detail, probably.