Seems an unhelpful thing to claim at a time of Chinese sabre rattling over Taiwan...

 

Looking old and fat

Trump is really looking physically unimpressive in his recent golfing appearances:

 

Asians and heights

Google made me ponder recently, after making me watch videos from the Youtube channel FlyEast, like this one:

 

that it seems the Chinese have an irresistible urge to build on top of tiny, tiny precipitous heights. I can imagine them looking at the Three Sisters at Katoomba and thinking "why isn't there at temple on top of at least one of them, and stairway access?"   

Not only that, it would seem that a lot of the population is missing the "fear of heights" gene.  I find it hard to imagine the same tourist enthusiasm here for scrambling up near vertical stairs to get to small peaks with little standing space.   Even with bridges, look at the tourists happy on this one, which I would go on too, I suppose, but not entirely without nerves:

  

Youtube is full of examples of precipitous buildings in China, and of course, horrendously scary mountain roads in China adjacent places.   I know there are examples in Europe of buildings on scary heights too, but I still don't think that Westerners have quite the same enthusiasm for building things in such difficult and dangerous locations.  

So why do they want to build structures up on tiny, tiny peaks anyway?   Because of proximity to heaven or gods, I suppose, but I would like to know for sure.

Update:   OMG, look at this video, which is incredibly beautiful, and has only had 23,000 views:

You can view the same temple complex in summer here.

 

Pleasant lunar temperatures

Interesting:

Parts of the moon have stable temperatures fit for humans, researchers find 

The moon has pits and caves where temperatures stay at roughly 63 degrees Fahrenheit, making human habitation a possibility, according to new research from planetary scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Although much of the moon's surface fluctuates from temperatures as high as 260 degrees during the day to as low as 280 degrees below zero at night, researchers say these stable spots could transform the future of lunar exploration and long-term habitation. 

The shadowed areas of these pits could also offer protection from harmful elements, such as solar radiation, cosmic rays and micrometeorites.

For perspective, a day or night on the moon is equivalent to a little over two weeks on Earth — making long-term research and habitation difficult with such extremely hot and cold temperatures.

 

 

I am, and so is Sinclair Davidson

 

Welcome news for colons

As someone who has had to "prep" for colonoscopies maybe 4 or 5 times, and recently got invited to have another:

At last, an easier way to prepare for a colonoscopy

Not just me

 Of course, it is a "honeymoon" period, but still it's pleasing.

Albanese is just coming across as very competent and down to earth,  without the ego of Rudd or some other past Labor figures.   Indeed, all of the new cabinet is doing very well, especially in comparison with the Morrison government.

Just the silliest thing

I complained a week ago about the Netflix series Midnight Mass, but I decided to hate watch it to the end.

I'm not quite there yet (last episode to go), and I did start fast forwarding over scenes where I could just tell there was going to be another tedious monologue, but I have to say I am completely puzzled as to how anyone gave this ridiculous mess a good review.  It's like Stephen King on a complete nonsensical bender (and that's saying something, given that I have read about how more extreme in "suspension of disbelief" elements his novels generally have been compared to their movie versions.)

To me it makes no dramatic sense at all -  and I will say why after this:

SPOILER ALERT 

The whole premise of the story is that a old priest suffering dementia (or perhaps just "Jerusalem syndrome") who is made young and capable of regeneration after being bitten by a vampire he happened to stumble upon in a cave in the Israeli desert (as you do), and his very conservative/zealoty woman parish helper, manage to interpret your classic demonic looking vampire as in fact an angel of the Lord,  and the end times are here, or...something?  And hey, let's ship said demon vampire "angel" back home in a crate, where we'll slip some regenerating blood into the parish's communion wine, so that the character who from the start looked and sounded like a young woman pretending to be old one can actually stop putting on that "old woman" voice, and other regenerative miracles will happen.   Mind you, the regenerated priest (eventually) can't go out in the sun or he fries, and he has an incredible urge to drink blood, but somehow this can still be interpreted as a Good Thing from God and let's keep sharing it with the parishioners.  And nutty conservative woman flunky is happy to go along with it all.  In fact, she's played as the main villain, but I for one never understood why she was so on board so quickly with the priest's plan.

I mean, it's just really ridiculous - especially when said vampire reveals himself to the community at the climatic mass and at least half (actually, nearly all, I think) of the congregation goes all Jonestown and decides to drink the poison being passed around by bad woman, because, hey they know they'll come back to life because a friggin' demon vampire has just appeared and spread his giant bat wings, and of course they would trust him and the excitable priest - who they just realised is the old priest with 50 years off the clock.   (How no one ever said "hey, you know your voice sounds exactly like our old priest" I don't know.)   I didn't even really get exactly why poisoning everyone seemed a good idea - she is shown as having a predilection to poisoning things earlier in the show, but even so.   Her references to Revelation hardly seemed a convincing explanation to me, given a distinct lack of references to vampires in that book. (Not that anything in the show convinced me.)  

Yeah, yeah, they just watched someone drink it and apparently die and come back - but who knows for how long?   "Give me that poison, I wanna die painfully for 5 minutes too."

Obviously, the writer/director is going for a "religion - even in apparently nice sincere Catholics - can turn  into a death cult under the wrong influence" vibe, but the way this happens in this show just makes no sense at all.   I mean, couldn't you at least have the vampire physically look normal and not like a freaking demon from the start?   Stumble upon his true appearance by accident?   Have him speak with charm?   He could be the charming assistant priest, instead of flying around the island looking for random victims sometimes, and other times running around in old priest get up.   Couldn't the effect of being bitten be a bit less obviously vampiric, so that the downside doesn't so patently wipe out the apparent upside?

I mean, the one core story element - the regenerating vampire blood being slipped into the communion wine - is a nice creepy idea - but there is zero plausibility as to how a non talking demon vampire convinces anyone that he's there from God.  

Anyway, I'll watch the last episode, which I hope is really bad!

Update:   watched the last episode, and it continued to be full of bloated monologues, plot points that didn't make much sense, and bursts of ridiculously high quality choral signing from the island's new vampires.   

The priest gets to be regretful, and to explain that he was just trying to give everyone eternal life and avoid death (which, you know, isn't all that common a goal amongst Catholic priests - but I suppose it might have some psychological plausibility if it wasn't via a vampire demon thing you found in the desert drinking your blood.)   

I went over to Reddit to read comments about it.  Again, to my puzzlement, many people liked it, or at least found it creepy, but there are amusing aspects - such as a key plot point that everyone thought we were meant to infer, but one of the writers turned up and said "no, you're wrong, and stop blaming the director for misleading you."   

Some people commented on something I noticed - hardly anyone on the island seemed particularly likeable.   Mike Flanagan, the director/writer, seems to specialise in mopey characters, prone to using 500 words when 50 would do.    

I think Netflix should stop giving him money. 

What a great political ad

 Very effective:

Standing under a nuclear detonation not necessarily such a bad thing

Well, this is comforting to know, if ever an Independence Day style dogfight between us and aliens ever starts happening over our heads.   I hadn't heard this story from the era of nuclear atmospheric tests:

Fascinating!

A sudden burst of mostly good news

Trump is sounding desperate, even for a man famous for saying anything, irrespective of truth or sense:

Former President Donald Trump told ESPN that “nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11” as he defended his decision to host the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series at his Bedminster course.

Trump defended his decision as he faces outrage from the families of 9/11 victims. He told ESPN the tournament’s Saudi sponsors “have been friends of mine for a long time.” He boosted the series as an “alternative” to the PGA, saying “nobody would’ve ever known there was gonna be a gold rush like this.”

On the other hand, Biden has a big win:

Joe Biden has hailed a congressional deal that represents the biggest single climate investment in US history – and hands him a badly needed political victory.

In a stunning reversal, Senate Democrats on Wednesday announced an expansive $739bn package that had eluded them for months addressing healthcare and the climate crisis, raising taxes on high earners and corporations and reducing federal debt.

And it sounds like he dealt competently with China.  (And by the way, can anyone imagine what Trump would have said in a 2 hour phone call with Xi?) 

The Chinese president has warned Joe Biden against “playing with fire” over Taiwan in a highly anticipated phone call that lasted more than two hours on Thursday, as tensions remain high over the House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s potential trip to the island next month.

“Those who play with fire will be perished by it. It is hoped that the US will be clear-eyed about this,” Xi Jinping, according to a Chinese statement. He also urged the US to implement the three joint communiques that serve as the foundation for relations between the two countries “both in word and in deed”. Xi vowed “resolutely” to safeguard China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity and said this is “the firm will of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people”....

In response to Xi’s comment on Taiwan, Biden reiterated Washington’s policy and said it had not changed and that “the United States strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan strait”, according to the US statement, which was much shorter than the Chinese one.

Sure, there is the matter of whether the US is in a recession or not, but I don't know - it seems hard to find it too recession-y while ever anyone who wants a job can get one, doesn't it?

The other interesting recent thing - polling indicating that the Democrats are looking better placed for the mid terms than anyone expected.  (No doubt, the GOP's excited rush to ensure a ban on every single woman or child from ever getting an abortion is likely the key factor in this.)

Four national polls from the past week have shown Democrats favored by more voters to control Congress compared to Republicans, as many analysts and GOP leaders continue to express confidence that the liberal party will lose control of at least the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterm election.

 And Republicans, for some reason, appear to want to look like complete jerks at the moment:

Why did the GOP reject a bill to help veterans exposed to toxins?

Does Jon Stewart care to comment?

Remember how Jon Stewart went on Colbert's show and did an extended "bit" on how it was obvious that Covid would have come from the lab in Wuhan where they research it?

There are more scientists than ever who beg to differ, it seems:

Scientists say there is "compelling evidence" that Wuhan's Huanan seafood and wildlife market was at the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak. 

Two peer-reviewed studies published on Tuesday re-examine information from the initial outbreak in the Chinese city.

And I think we also have Trump still crapping on about making China pay.

Incidentally, Trump's done I reckon.   He only wants to run again both for vanity (90% motivation for everything he does) and the hope that it scares off prosecution as looking too divisive and politically motivated. 

How to view the body

I watched this Youtube last night (from a channel full of stories of odd or surprising aspects of Japanese history) about how it was quite the thing for a while for Buddhist monks to contemplate artwork of deceased and decaying women as a remedy for feeling sexual attraction towards them (while alive, I hasten to add!) 

 

I presume this tactic did not originate in Japan:  I recall a scene in the movie Samsara, set in Tibet I think, where a monk tried to bring back a fellow monk from abandoning the religious life for a woman by showing him a book which (if I recall correctly) allowed erotic drawings of intercourse to devolve in subsequent pages into corpses having sex.  (!)

Here's some of what Wikipedia says on the topic of Buddhism and the body:

Revulsion

Though perhaps less concerned with issues of purity and pollution than the Brahmanist tradition, certain views of the body recorded in Buddhist scriptures do depict the body as unwholesome and potentially an object of disgust.^[1] This is the “unwantedness” of a body in the tradition of Buddhism identified by some scholars.^[5] Reflecting on the loathsomeness of the body is considered to be a particularly powerful method for countering attachment to sensual pleasures, such as sexuality or pride in appearance.^[1] Stories recorded in scriptures and in the biographies of Buddhist teachers particularly focus on the contemplation of the foulness of the female body as a remedy for sexual desire in a male religious practitioner.^[1]

Value

In contrast to views of the body as disgusting or a source of unworthy desire, the Buddhist tradition does speak of the value of the body in the context of the preciousness of human birth, and the value of a healthy body as an aid to pursuing the Buddhist path.^[1] While contemplating the repulsiveness of the body is considered to be a powerful remedy for sensual attachment, this is a therapeutic perspective that is not necessarily intended to be carried over into other areas of life.^[1] In particular, the suitability of the human body for the pursuit of religious practice is praised in traditional sources, comparing favorably with the capacities of birth among the gods or the various chthonic realms.^[1]

 It's quite the balancing act, then.  Just as it still is in India today.  From a story on BBC News today:

"I can be naked in front of a thousand people… It's just that they get uncomfortable," Bollywood star Ranveer Singh told the Paper magazine recently.

That is exactly what happened when Singh recently posed nude for a photo spread in the same magazine. Social media exploded with both appreciation and indignation - but mostly the latter. Memes and jokes making fun of the pictures abounded; and many accused the actor of denigrating men. If this was not enough, a police complaint was lodged against him for "hurting the sentiments of women".

Singh is not your traditional male star. He's endlessly energetic, flamboyant and embraces a frothy fashion style - velvet pants, sequin turtlenecks, jewellery - that Vogue magazine calls a "positive nod to the non-binary fluidity that fashion today is embracing".

In other words, says Paper, Singh has "challenged practically every stereotype of masculinity in a still-traditionalist Indian society".

"He has an ideal kind of male body. But he dresses on the border of androgyny. He is not rigid and openly talks about sex. He doesn't fit in the notion of masculinity in India. That is causing a lot of anxiety, and also making a lot of men uncomfortable," says Rahul Sen, who's doing his doctoral dissertation on literature and sexuality at Tufts University.

The article goes on to note the odd Indian mix of attitudes to the body, where being nude in public as a way of a holy man showing a spiritual disconnect from material things is fine, but for sexual appreciation, is disturbing (despite the temples covered in depictions of sex):

The differing reactions to Singh are illustrative of what some call India's "wild moral confusion", where people harbour a strange mix of conservative and liberal attitudes. The most graphic examples of erotic temple art can be found in many small-town shrines. One of the world's oldest textbooks of erotic love, Kama Sutra, is from India. Model and dancer Protima Bedi streaked on a Mumbai beach in 1974 for a film magazine cover. Nudity is not uncommon: thousands of ash-smeared Hindu holy men belonging to a cult turn up naked at religious festivals like the Kumbh Mela.  

This made me think how it's also a little odd that Judaism has a reputation for being an 'earthy' religion, where the body and food for it are not to be disdained at all: 

In the Jewish tradition there is no absolute division between material and spiritual, body and soul. According to the Hebrew Bible, the human body expresses divine reality and is a key to divine knowledge. As the Bible states, “From my flesh, I will perceive God.” (Job 19):

Before his expulsion from Eden, Adam’s body shone like the sun and was capable of living forever. Only as a result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge did God “place His hand on man and shrink him”. This changed to skin the body of light which en-clothed him, making it subject to death. One of the goals of Jewish spirituality is to reverse this process: to perfect the body and make it shine.

Judaism’s ultimate goal is not to transcend the physical, but to make for God a dwelling place in the lower worlds. This brings the divine into the physical world. Judaism’s ideal is the soul fully inhabiting the body, not the soul liberated from the body.

And yet, it has also always viewed nudity as shameful:

Oddly, I would say that modern secular Japan, and Scandinavia, with their casual acceptance (indeed celebration) of communal bathing in a non sexual context - seem to hit a happy medium towards attitudes to bodies - not to be seen as awful and corrupting, but something normal, if sometimes still a little embarrassing.   I don't think the Japanese can be accused of the over-promotion of female or male bodies either - I don't think they equate big muscles as a masculine ideal still, nor do I think that their female pop stars ever emphasise their sexual features in dress like some Western ones do.  

Anyway, it's not that I have any particular new insight into this topic - I just remain pleasantly puzzled as to how religious and cultural attitudes towards bodies is such a complicated thing.

More for us, I guess, but I still feel sorry for our wineries

It's rare that I would deem a tweet from The Australian worthy of this quality blog, but here we go:

That's...some turnaround.  I guess I don't feel the same sympathy for something like a mining giant that suddenly loses a market; but agriculture (and wine production in particular) feels like such a human scale enterprise that it seems more personal to hear them hit by unexpected geopolitics.

Judaism and personhood

Slate still occasionally throws up interesting articles, between the salacious allegedly true sex/relationship advice bits.

This one, for example:  What We Can All Learn From How Jewish Law Defines Personhood in A.I., Animals, and Aliens.

Cool!

Here are some key paragraphs:

For many rabbis, humans are valuable whether or not they are unique; not only could other beings share some of our “essential” human characteristics, but a few actually do. Rather than protectively shrinking from this expanded notion of humanity, rabbis have historically been very open to the idea of nonhuman sentience and have tended to see parallels between humans and nonhumans as an excuse to treat nonhumans better.

Evidence for this position isn’t hard to find. Take demons, for example. In rabbinic literature demons are not inherently evil; they are mortal beings with agency, sometimes imagined as the unintended offspring of human beings, and their existence doesn’t pose existential threats to human value. The rabbis also record the existence of an animal called “the man of the field,” which so resembled human beings (one modern rabbi speculated that it was an orangutan) that its corpse is afforded some of the dignity of human dead, and medieval German rabbis talked about vampires and werewolves—sometimes even reading them into the Bible—without any concern about what their existence might entail.

As for beings that aren’t imaginary, Jewish thinkers—like many modern animal rights groups—have tended to value them on a gradient, with animals above plants and plants above inanimate objects. The reason for this, in some strains of thoughts, is that all of these creations are ensouled; the human soul has extra pieces, but it shares much with other beings. In both the Bible and the Talmud, people are regularly criticized for treating animals badly, with the critique occasionally coming from the animals themselves....

The most powerful example of all is the golem. The medieval golem isn’t a proto-robot, and it isn’t a parable about uncontrolled power. Instead, it’s something far more radical: It is a person, one who is brought into existence for the sole purpose of demonstrating that humans, like God, are powerful enough to create life. That humans and golems are essentially the same is the whole point; humans, for the rabbis, are also an artificial intelligence; the first being to be called a golem is Adam. Instead of diminishing human value, the possibility of making golems asks that people appreciate their true power and act accordingly.

Discussions about aliens, golems, and animals occupy very different parts of Jewish thought.
What brings them together is the belief that human value is axiomatic, and that it is precisely because of the unassailability of our value that our instinct should be toward expanding the idea of what is human when we recognize it in others. This idea has a very important corollary: because human value is the basis for valuing these near-humans, the latter can never supersede the former in importance. In other words, this model both allows us to be generous with the idea of humanity while resolving concerns that our own status will become diminished in the process.

 

Russian naval history noted

I possibly may have heard something about this disastrous Russian naval expedition before, but this video account of it is pretty amusing, and it seems appropriate to hear the story of historic Russian incompetence in light of its recent, less than stellar, naval performance:

Odd marketing

The oddest thing I reckon about this "Manly gay pride jersey" story is that to me, the rainbow stripes don't even obviously suggest the gay pride flag:

 

The horizontal banding reminds me more of the Centrum vitamin branding, which has been in a use a long, long time:

Ok, well, the colour order is different, but the stripes on the jersey play with the colour order anyway - with for some reason the bottom strips being different to the top strips.  But was that a deliberate ploy of the marketers, to make it look not conclusively like the gay flag?    A sort of "plausible deniability" for players who aren't so keen on being associated with gay pride? 

Maybe I have spent too much time looking at vitamins at Chemist Warehouse recently, but Centrum would still have come to mind if the media hadn't told me first. 

Certainly believes in cementing his reputation...

...as the laziest and worst Prime Minister in recent history:

   

Putting psychedelic therapy in its place

Hey, I like it when Australian public broadcasting takes up an issue and unexpectedly doesn't take (what might be called) the squishy Left line on the topic.  It happened a couple of months ago when SBS did an Insight episode on trans women in sport, which (surprise!) featured a preponderance of people who argued that it was indeed unfair for former men to become women's sport champions by becoming women.   

And last night it happened when Four Corners looked at psychedelic therapy, and actually focused on some pretty strange people who are at the forefront of promoting it in Australia.  (Some Canada therapists came out of it looking bad, too.) 

In fact, one would have to suspect that the people who appeared were more or less ambushed - thinking that surely the ABC will take the sympathetic line that this is a type of therapy that only stick-in-the-mud conservatives are arguing against, only to find they about to come out of their participation looking somewhat nutty and not entirely trustworthy.

In fact, why did the guy who takes people out on 8 hour bushwalks after taking (I think) peyote agree to appear at all, including showing him distributing an illegal drug?  I mean, the worst aspect of his dubious exercise was that he admitted that he (at least sometimes) takes the drug at the start of the bushwalk too - so much for having someone sober to lead them out of the wilderness if an emergency happens.  

Anyway, least I be criticised for my conservativism on the issue, I wouldn't want to stop all research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics.  It's just that I think it needs to be extremely cautious, and not taken over by people with a missionary zeal,  as the use of these drugs has been around long enough to take a reasonable guess that they are going to be of limited use and benefit, and very unlikely to be some kind of mental health universal panacea. 

A complicated movie

I watched No Sudden Move on Netflix on the weekend - the recent movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon (Men in Black, amongst many other likeable credits.)

It's well directed, well acted, looks really good, and things are always happening;  the only problem is, it does take too long to understand what the movie is really all about.  I mean, on one level, I did admire the complexity of the screenplay - it  keeps half a dozen balls in the air all the time, and is written very realistically, so that it's like how overhearing conversations in real life often presents a puzzle as to what is being discussed.  But it's a fine line to walk, and at certain points, it does verge towards "this is requiring too much concentration. And can some character just explain to another what's going on?"

In general atmosphere, it reminded me both of Mad Men (which I haven't watched, but by reputation, its full of adultery, smoking and drinking, as is this movie) and some of the Fargo TV series (general gangster world vibe).

It's enjoyable enough, but....

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

As this article explains, it is a completely fictional story that is spun around one true life corporate scandal.   That's a little disappointing, because while it never claims directly to be "based on a true story" or even "inspired by real life events", the explanation at the end of the film gives the impression that there probably is some truth to the key crime that takes up, like, the first half of the movie.   It feels like it should be at least an elaboration of some true life event, but it turns out it isn't.

Oh well - I guess if I had known that at the start, it would have saved the disappointment.