Good news noted

The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was found liable on Monday for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, over Jones’s claim the massacre was a hoax.... 

Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for relatives of eight victims who sued Jones in Connecticut, said: “What’s clear from Judge Bellis’s ruling is that Alex Jones and the Jones defendants have engaged in a long, continuous course of misconduct in this case designed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting evidence about Mr Jones’ business and about his motives for publishing lies about them and their families.”

A Texas judge recently issued similar rulings against Jones in three defamation lawsuits, finding Jones liable for damages after defaulting him and his companies for not turning over documents.

Good.

And a hobo with a podcast is being done for contempt:  

Steve Bannon has surrendered to US federal authorities to face contempt charges after defying a subpoena from a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

There's not much good news around these days, so you have to take what crumbs there are and celebrate them.

Squid ink

I'm three episodes into Squid Games, and having my doubts about continuing.

I don't know - I've just always found a serious credibility gap with dystopian-ish stories in which large numbers of people are involved in despicable behaviour.  That may sound like an odd thing to say in light of the evidence of the 20th century - or even the absolute nuttiness of wingnut America at the moment.   But at least people in those real life examples thought (or think) they have reason on their side.  It seems hard to see how you fit any kind of moral reasoning into the behaviour of both players and masked staff in this show.  

And masks - put a mask on an evil (or good) character and I start to find its credibility wanes.   I don't think it matters who - Batman, the murderer in the last season of Babylon Berlin, the bad guy in V for Vendetta (which I have never watched, mind you):  mask wearing stops me taking the story very seriously.  Why?   Maybe it's because it never happens in real life? 

Some possible exceptions people might want to bring up:  Darth Vader?  Well, it always sounded like a ventilator, and helmets in space are OK, so I'm not sure it counts.   Zorro?  He wasn't really that serious a character in the first place.  Same with Spiderman - the movies are never really meant to be that serious, especially in the Tom Holland incarnation.  I can forgive a lot if a movie is light in tone, or largely comedic [Deadpool]; but that hardly describes SG.

To be honest, I am a little uncertain about the acting in this show, too.  Sometimes it seems a bit over the top.  The acting in Kingdom, by far the best Korean Netflix series I have seen, was better and didn't seem pushed too far, despite the zombie content.

I  might go another episode (or more), but I am more inclined to just read about how it goes from here.

   

This is nuts

 

Who's more prominent in Australia - conservative, conspiracy mongering, Catholics; or conservative, conspiracy mongering Protestants?  

I preferred Big Trouble in Little China

I wonder how that John Carpenter movie would hold up on re-viewing?

Anyhow, I'm talking about having watched the surprisingly well-reviewed (92% on Rottentomatoes, and 71% on Metacritic) Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.    (It's now streaming for free on Disney, after only being on the cinema starting maybe 6 weeks ago?)

I'm glad I didn't make my first trip to the cinema for nearly 2 years to see it, as I was seriously underwhelmed.

It's not exactly bad - it's just that it's not very good.  I don't think the script, which was meant to be heavy with family drama, was particularly good.  And the action continually suffered from the Marvel issue of not always being able to do heavily CGI action in such a way to make it feel it carries any sense of danger, or at least, pleasing movement.  (It's funny, but it's hard to work out sometimes why for me some obviously CGI action works well enough, and other times it doesn't.)

As with Black Panther, the climatic battle I found an uninteresting, badly edited visual mess,  and going all in with Chinese mythology and dragons seems a bit of stretch for me, even in a movie series where the multiverse is a thing.   

I ended up wondering why I like Dr Strange a lot, but didn't care for this.  Maybe I'm more into Asian mysticism than Asian mythology, and the Dr S movie was very eye-catching with its innovative looking visual effects.   (I still like seeing the sparky portal - it's charming.)   

I hope I have a better reaction to the James Bond film - I hope to see that by this time next week.

  

 

Danger and humour

They still Might be Giants

Gosh:  it's been years since they appeared in one of their music videos (unfortunately - it's nice to see them acting peculiarly on video again!)   But here they are, with an immediately likeable song:

It's hard to explain how significant this band is to people who have never heard of them - I mean, clearly, they are well known amongst the creative types in Hollywood, given the number of things they have been asked to do in TV and the elsewhere. But it is so pleasantly intriguing: it's almost like the John's and their fan base both like them being a modest success forever, rather than hitting an early peak and flaming out.  In fact, they pretty much explained this is a correct take on them in a recent interview with PBS: 

Cannibal chickens (and more) considered

In an article about whether free range chickens are as cheery as we might imagine them to be, there's this:

Feather pecking is when chickens peck and pull out other hens' feathers.

This can lead to cannibalism, where chickens eat the wounded flesh of the injured hen.

These three factors kill a lot of free-range hens. One Australian study found cannibalism was a major cause of death in free-range hens, second-only to being eaten by predators.

Dr Hartcher, who researched feather pecking for her PhD, says death by cannibalism is an "awful way to go".

"We understand more about it than we did a few decades ago but we still don't fully understand how to control the problem," she says.

I would have guessed that keeping too many chickens in too small a space may be a reason behind it, and  I see from another website that is one trigger, but there are many others:

These stressors include crowding, bright light intensity, high room temperature, poor ventilation, high humidity, low salt, trace nutrient deficiency, insufficient feeding or drinking space, nervous and excitable birds (hereditary), external parasites, access to sick or injured birds, stress from moving, boredom and idleness, housing birds of different appearance together and birds prolapsing during egg-laying.

 How do you cure "boredom and idleness" in a chicken, I wonder.   I would have thought letting them scratch around free range on grass would go a long way to curing that, but maybe it's more the lack of good quality chicken cinema and poetry readings?   

They're an odd animal. 

Update:  OK, let's just have a whole gross out afternoon, by reading this list of 10 cute animals you didn't know were cannibalistic.   I did know of hamsters, and had heard of pigs too.  But rabbits and red squirrels?   It's a particularly cute bunny they have chosen to picture, too.   Most of the examples are of babies being the victim of mothers, though, and I guess we tend to feel that crazy hormonal stuff maybe gives those individual Mums some sort of excuse.  Males (or females) who go killing other mother's offspring, though - harder to like them!   

As for primates and cannibalism - chimps seem to be the nastiest of all. 

I'm almost starting to wonder why we don't have cases of modern humans feeling evolutionarily compelled to do something similar.  

Calling out lies

I am finding it refreshing, this new found confidence in Labor, and much of the media, to call Scott Morrison a liar:

 

The armed Right wing in the USA

I find the argument in this article pretty convincing:

Prepare for the Shock Troops

What happens when gun culture merges with a nationalist personality cult?

A key extract from the end:

There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”

After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.

The lights are still flashing red.

 

 

Scientists taking it personally

In Science magazine, there's an article about disagreement amongst physicists about whether one particular experiment really did show interactions with dark matter.   The problem is, it hasn't been replicated elsewhere, and it seems that the "no it didn't" group think they may have worked out what the first group did wrong.

You can read all about that at the article, but I wanted to note the very personal way the leader of the "yes it did" camp takes criticism:

Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”

Interesting, but looks kinda crazy

Obviously, a fair bit of money has been put into this already, but the precision with which it has to work is surely a worry.  (I mean, you can imagine the internal damage if the timing of the release if off by the tiniest, tiniest, bit.)

On reasons for voting for Trump

I thought this thread contained much truth:

 

True American patriot

 

Some lunar oxygen calculations

An article at The Conversation explains how there's a lot of oxygen on the moon - unfortunately, all in the soil and needing a lot of heat to extract.  But still, the maths are interesting:

If we ignore oxygen tied up in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material — and just consider regolith which is easily accessible on the surface — we can come up with some estimates.

Each cubic metre of lunar regolith contains 1.4 tonnes of minerals on average, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630kg oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just over).

Only 800g of oxygen a day?  I would have guessed it was more than that, probably influenced by things like the thought of the weight of a full scuba tank!  Of course, there are going to be other gases involved too.  The ISS has a 79% nitrogen atmosphere. 

Anyway, more rough estimates from the article:

Now let’s assume the average depth of regolith on the Moon is about ten metres, and that we can extract all of the oxygen from this. That means the top ten metres of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years.

This would also depend on how effectively we managed to extract and use the oxygen. Regardless, this figure is pretty amazing!

Indeed.

 

   

Precipitation issues in China

First:  quite a lot of snow:

 

 Another video of buildings not coping with it:

  

 

 And an article in The Guardian about recent heavy rains:

 ‘It’s alarming’: intense rainfall and extreme weather become the norm in northern China

For the next time you're in a dangerous crowd

From NPR:

8 tips to follow if you're trapped in a crushing crowd

 

A European problem

I didn't know this:

The European Union brags that its climate ambitions are more aggressive than anywhere else in the world. There’s just one problem: If the world behaved like Europe, it would be burning an awful lot of wood.

Europe gets 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass fuels, a process that uses wood scraps, organic waste and other crops to generate heat and electricity in specially designed power plants. U.N. rules allow the European Union to write off the emissions as carbon-neutral, so long as sustainable guidelines are met, even though burning the fuel can release more warming gases into the atmosphere than coal.

The European Union’s reliance on wood-burning energy to meet its climate goals — which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent by 2030 — is a measure of the difficulty of making the transition to clean energy even on a continent where politicians have shown political will and enjoy significant public support for their green agenda. For now, much of Europe’s emissions reductions are being achieved by burning biomass instead of coal — and then not counting the resulting greenhouse gases, which critics say they should.

 ....

Excluding emissions from biomass can make a big difference. According to their official numbers, the European Union and Britain together reduced energy-related emissions by 26 percent between 1990 and 2019. Adding emissions from biomass makes the reduction 15 percent over the same period, according to an analysis last month from Chatham House, a British policy think tank. Britain — which left the European Union in 2020 — is a major consumer of biomass pellets, so the post-Brexit E.U. figures for biomass are likely to be somewhat smaller.

About dangerous crowds

Here's a good article at the ABC about the history and science of crowd surges, like the deadly one at the Travis Scott concert.

I think it clear that the most disconcerting thing about this one was the fans who were trying to get the concert stopped when it was clear a disaster was unfolding.

Trans reality

I didn't intend to, but I ended up watching about half an hour of the show on ABC "Girl Like You" last night.   It was a documentary, made over many years, watching a young trans guy and his girlfriend dealing with his transition.

I didn't get his full background, and I have to say, as documentary it was very heavy handed.- lots and lots of music made to flag the emotions on display.   And as with all "fly on the wall" documentary, I do wonder what influence the presence of the documentary makers have.  

I also wondered why it was being pretty heavily promoted, but only being show in a pretty late time slot.   

I suspect the answer is that because the story wasn't as positive about the whole trans experience as might be expected from the very queer friendly ABC.   The story seems to be that his girlfriend thought their relationship could survive him transitioning, and it turned out it couldn't.  She broke it off, abruptly, but it was clear that she had felt the whole experience of supporting her former boyfriend very draining.  

As for the transition - it looked like he had not had the operation, just a lot of chemical treatment.  And they made the point that one of the drugs taken to achieve comes with lots of potential mental health side effects - which isn't ideal for a group already prone to depression, etc.

As often happens, I again wondered about the body dysmorphia aspect of trans, which seems such a large part of it.   We can all agree that body dysmorphia that leads to anexoria is bad and an issue that needs a mental cure;  but when it comes to dysmorphia that is based on gender bits, it's considered wildly improper to approach it in the same way.    I looked up links on cognitive behaviour therapy and trans, for example, and as far as I can tell, the only idea about using it is to help trans be happy trans - not to question whether their thoughts about how wrong their body is may be misguided.  Yet isn't it used that way to encourage people with healthy bodies to stop thinking there is something wrong with it that will only be cured by being dangerously thin?

I suppose people will say that trans ideation is not only about body dysmorphia - or isn't always.   But gee, it's a messy area full of unstated assumptions and ideas that seem to be rarely thought about by those sympathetic to their situation.

I guess it was somewhat refreshing to see a doco that didn't portray the whole issue as if all trans situations would have a happy ending if only everyone would "validate" the person going through it.  (He seemed to have lots of support, including from his Mum when he moved back in after the girlfriend left.) 

A Carter comparison

My main recollection of how I felt about the Carter presidency at the time is that I thought his popularity suffered because his administration gave the impression of the nation suffering a kind of paralysis in the face of several problems not really within anyone's control.   And was there ever a worse Presidential PR look than the one of him running himself into collapse (and being attacked by a rabbit!)

I keep getting the feeling now that the Biden drop in popularity has similar features - OK, so the Congressional paralysis is something he perhaps could have done something about faster, but the other things which Americans are saying concern them  (supply chain, the possible return of modest inflation, COVID, border rushes) seem to me to be much harder to pin on Joe.  

But that doesn't seem to matter much - Americans like a sense of "moving forward", I reckon, even if the direction is dubious and going to be later regretted.  (Like rushing into Middle Eastern wars under Bush.)

You perhaps get similar sentiment in other countries, but the hatred of not moving forward seems something felt particularly keenly in the American public, I suspect.