Waiting for Kubo

I had noticed recently an unusual amount of advertising for the soon to be released Laika feature Kubo and the Two Strings.   Given that it is a stop motion animation being released outside of school holidays, I thought that this perhaps indicated a high degree of studio confidence in the film, even though I didn't find the trailers all that impressive.

And, yeah, seems my guess was right:  early reviews from America are very, very strong, and I am now keen to see it. [Update: the Rottentomato score is even higher, and the one "rotten" review is from someone unknown at the Guardian, and it reads more as clickbait than a serious review.]

Once again, I will be forced to bribe at least my daughter to see it with me. My son is more easily persuaded to try new movies based on my sales pitch.

Anyway, as I love seeing behind the scenes at Laika, here's a short video showing some of the work on this film:

Trump, Roberts, etc

If you ask me, Brian Cox and the rest of the panel was too soft on Malcolm Roberts last night.  While his conspiracy thoughts about NASA got an airing, we didn't hear about Agenda 21 and the European banking families.  Still, I can't blame Cox, who is a mere visitor to our shores, for not reading up a bit more on nutty Mal.  There are better things to do with your time.

As for Trump - the little bit of his speech I have heard about seemed a bit "meh" - and no explanation as to how "extreme vetting" is supposed to stop the internet radicalisation of Muslim kids who were born in the US.   Did he suggest working more closely with Putin?  I thought that was the general drift.

This'll be interesting...

Trump to lay out plan for combating radical Islamic terrorism - CNNPolitics.com

Although, truth be told, the way Trump is complaining about media bias I think the theory that he will soon "fire himself" (while trying to divert the blame to "the system") is looking more credible than ever.

What a surprise: the blog for angry white males approves of a mock complaint by an angry white male

See here.

Of course, the correct way of seeing Leyonhjelm's complaint is that it's just another example of a Senator with too much time on his hands, playing games.  

What's his "nanny State" and wind power enquiries achieved, by the way?

Monday stuff

*  Well, that's weird.   Trumpkin tragic Steve Kates from the clown rodeo at Catallaxy yesterday noted an article about the unclear size of the proton-muon combination, and how important this may turn out to be for physics, just after I had read the same day an updated article on arXiv suggesting that the discrepancy can be explained by extra dimensions, and suggesting further experiments that might help confirm it.  I assume that this type of experiment does not require high energy and particle acceleration, so it would be ironic if a "table top" experiment turned out to be key to proving the existence new physics when the LHC has not.

*  So Tony Abbott now thinks he probably shouldn't have played games with human lives by allowing the Gillard government to legislate for trying the "Malaysia solution"?   This poses a bit of a quandary - should he be at least grudgingly admired for coming around to this view, or should we feel greater vindication about his appalling hypocrisy and willingness to advance his career at any cost?    I'm leaning strongly to the latter - Abbott is like a bad advertisement for the type of Catholic who takes full advantage of its "get out of jail free" system - you can sin pretty much as much as you like provided you have enough time on your death bed to regret it and receive absolution.   Nope, sorry Tony - it was clearly a mere political game you were playing at the time, and you don't deserve sympathy.

*  The Olympics - I have my own guilty confession to make -  I'm sort of finding Rio's reputation as the most dangerous and bumbling Olympics ever held to be refreshing.   I mean, every Games there is panic about facilities not being ready on time, tickets not being sold, and whether visitors will face dangers from terrorism or whatever.  But this time, it's all coming true (well, thankfully, with visitors only being robbed and avoiding bullets, but not being killed - I wouldn't be making this comment if that had happened.)   It makes a change from the Games all going smoothly after all.   Perhaps it will work as incentive to give the games back to poor old Greece permanently, which would seem to be about the only way that country might make a long term economic recovery.  

And I would have thought most Australians would be happy enough with the performance of the swim team - I can't stand commentary about "choking" from armchair critics.

So, yeah, I am sort of perversely enjoying these games - and Rio still looks like a very pretty city.

Password problems

I am getting overwhelmed with passwords, and in particular, with the interaction between Yahoo, Google and YouTube.  I think there's less problem if you're not trying to keep a level of net anonymity, but if you are....

The end of the line for super colliders?

Physicists need to make the case for high-energy experiments : Nature News & Comment

Bee paints a pessimistic picture, too.

And here's an article (a pretty clear one, too, given the topic) about it at The Atlantic.

Message to monty (everyone else can ignore)

Can you please tell CL to stop his "I support Trump...but not really" act?  He does the same with Gateway Pundit - calls Hoft a dimwit who is only right 1 out of 20 times, yet still continually and gullibly re-posts every Clinton conspiracy theory that Hoft posts, and only occasionally covers his endorsement with "well, if this is true..."   His self created land of obfuscation is bothering me...

And - you might also note there that Snopes has looked at the wildly implausible RWDB meme that Clinton needs a doctor actually ready to inject her at any moment by her side.   You're dealing with folk not playing with a full deck, you know?

"Work with me here, Donald"..."No"

I find this hilarious - the pro-Trump Hewitt trying to help Trump de-doofus himself, and Trump refusing the invitation:

Update:  at Hot Air, of all places, they have a serious take on the stupidity of this:

This is a recurring problem for Trump, seen most recently in what he said about “Second Amendment people”: He doesn’t seem capable of imagining how the things he says will be understood beyond his own fan base. Tom Joscelyn noted this morning that “Obama founded ISIS” is also an idea pushed by Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei. He has a different meaning of “founded” than Trump does: He wants Shiites, who loathe ISIS, to believe that the organization was deliberately created and equipped by the U.S. to persecute them. That’s not what Trump means by it, but because he insists on using a word that implies intent in describing Obama’s role, Iran can use the clip of Trump in its English-language propaganda. Trump either doesn’t grasp that or doesn’t care enough to be more precise with his criticism.

Update 2:  and then comes the argument, from Slate, that Trump knows what he's doing.  Personally, I think that's giving Trump too much credit.  I think it's more likely that he wings it in front of supporters, because he likes the roar of the crowd and is actually insecure, and then comes the retro-justification:

Hewitt then countered one last time by suggesting that he personally would use “different language” to communicate the same criticism. Trump’s response was remarkable for its awareness. “But they wouldn’t talk about your language,” he told Hewitt, “and they do talk about my language, right?”

That remark is telling, and it illustrates something that should be obvious by now but is often lost in the noise of each new controversy that comes every time Trump says something outlandish and/or obviously untrue. This was not some ad-libbed comment that went awry, a bad joke that did not land, or the candidate going “off message,” as Beltway pundits call it. In fact, he’s completely on message, and this has been the message for years, dating back to Obama’s first term, during which Trump used the birther movement to lay the foundation for his current presidential run. More than anything, Trump has built his campaign on (white) America’s fears of the other, and what better way for him to harness those than by othering the sitting president of the United States, be it by questioning his citizenship, his faith, or his loyalty.  It doesn’t matter to Trump whether his wild-eyed accusations are true; it doesn’t matter to him whether they’re offensive. All that matters to him is casting an illusion his supporters want to believe in.

Ridiculous technology

While I take great pleasure in marvelling at what technological capacity there is in cheap mobile phones these days (my current phone was under $100 last Christmas), I would love to have the new Samsung Note 7, which, I see, comes with a pre-order offer of a micro SD card of 256 G capacity (at a price of $1348 at Harvey Norman.)

Carrying around 256G of storage in your smart phone (even more if you count part of the in built 64G)?  And on such a tiny card?

This is just ridiculously awesome, and young folk who are growing up with this need to understand how incredible it is.  (Hence I spend time doing this with my own kids, and encourage all adults over 40 to do the same.)

I suspect this phone is going to do well for Samsung, given the way some markets (such as India) go for the big "phablet" devices if they can only afford one computing device.  Reviews seem positive.

And, back to my under $100 Samsung phone - I have recently tried a new launcher - Smart Launcher - and I like it a lot.

Trump's still running?

The Trump campaign has been a disaster for the Trump brand - The Washington Post

Some spectacularly bad PR for Trump yesterday/today, hey?  Even being generous to the idiot that he didn't mean gun nuts could shoot her, I reckon the least you could plausibly interpret it as would be speculating about armed intimidation of a Clinton presidency over her choice of presidents (of the "open carry" type of demonstration that makes the country look like a hick third world nation.)

The article linked deals with something I had been wondering about - wouldn't all of this woeful publicity be hurting anything branded "Trump"?  I mean, if you were a Democrat who previously might have holidayed at a Trump resort, and just joked with your friends about the apparent support for an eccentric TV character that this entailed, wouldn't you now take it more seriously and definitely avoid having anything to do with his name?

Census 2016

I find it hard to understand the privacy freakout by certain folk with respect to the 2016 census.  I strongly suspect it is age related - I reckon you have to be over 45 to worry about it at all, even though I well and truly belong to that category, and don't.  I'm guessing that 95% of people under 30, most of whom have so little regard for privacy that they post about their strings of partners (temporary or longer)  on Facebook, and have probably at least once sent or received pics of their naked bits through the aether,  have no concerns at all.  

Bernard Keane has been particularly overwrought about this - and didn't he write a novel about surveillance  which featured many sex scenes?  He has some other odd obsessions, including donkeys and greyhounds.  (None of which, I trust, are involved in the novel.)   I wish he would just stick to politics.

Anyway, no I couldn't complete it on line tonight either, and I'm sure I'll get sick of hearing about this government tech failure over the next week.  

I don't know why they just didn't call it "Census Week" to make it clearer people could do it on line over (say) 7 to 14 days.  Seems an obvious way to avoid the rush of "census night", no?

Laffered out of a job

Conservative Lawmakers Ousted in Kansas Primary Election - WSJ

Even the Wall Street Journal notes the failure of the Laffer inspired Kansas experiment in large tax cuts.

Good to see some politicians paying for it.

Warming lakes not so good for them

Decline of fishing in Lake Tanganyika 'due to warming' - BBC News

Steel story

The (largely false) globalization narrative - The Washington Post

I was surprised by this explanation of what happened to the American steel manufacturing industry.

Lol indeed

I was just on Youtube looking at the video of the old Safety Dance song (for no particular reason other than it's catchy - I've embedded it before.)  Thought I would look at the recent comments, and found this:

This song attracts the funniest comments...

Olympics

For what it's worth:  I quite liked the Rio opening ceremony.   It was, apparently, a much cheaper production than recent Olympic openings, but was actually better for it - it reminded me of the scale of the Sydney opening, which was also great but with less mechanical contraptions than seem to have turned up at later openings.   It again showed how much can be done with the clever projectors they use at all these events now.  (I particularly liked how the early airplane I had never heard of before seemed to be designed backwards.)

And yes, it was appropriately sexy in a Brazilian way.

Politics

*  Wasn't Insiders interesting yesterday, with new Senator Malcolm Roberts sealing the deal as having outpaced Leyonhjelm as the biggest nutjob in the Senate, by far.   Apparently, only 5 years ago he let some "very strong researcher" from Queensland convince him that the "sovereign citizen" movement was the way to go to try to argue against a carbon tax.  (I hadn't even heard of this bunch of nutters until Malcolm came along.)   He seems to have changed on this in more ways than one - originally trying to claim he had no knowledge of the movement, now saying it was "a mistake".

The guys looks nutty; he definitely sounds nutty; and he committed his nuttiness to paper - I think based on his "empirical evidence" insistence, I can declare the evidence is in:  he was and is a nut; and a slippery dishonest (even by normal political standards) one at that.

*  Also on Insiders, Gerard Henderson* was claiming that One Nation was a long term problem for the Coalition, as having 4 Senators and staff meant they could consolidate their credibility before the next election.

Yeah, sure, Gerard.   The track record of parties based around one personality is obviously dire - especially when they are run by self interested populists like Palmer or Hanson.  (Hanson does well out of elections whether she wins or not.).    At least people like Xenophon or Don Chipp - smart guys running for a neglected centre of politics - might establish parties that run some distance, but even then the Democrats show they won't be around forever.

Gerard's gone downhill as a political commentator; time to retire, I suggest.

*   Is Trump still the GOP candidate?    The longer this campaign runs, the more it shows that the power of positive thinking may take a BS artist who starts with a family fortune quite a long way, but it does absolutlelynothing to encourage insight.

The thing is, the more he derides Hillary's mental state, the more the electorate will see it as projection.  But he obviously doesn't see that risk.

Update:  *  even after just having watched the nut filled interview performance of Roberts.  But Henderson has always given undue credence to climate change denialism - he gave Salby a venue at which to claim he had discovered the end of AGW.   Where's Salby now?   Completely discredited, where ever he is.

Sleeping dog

Quantum papers

Yay, two papers of interest have turned up on arXiv in the quantum section.

First, one talking about the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, which I've mentioned here before, and been wondering whether it's going anywhere.  I haven't done much other than scan the paper (it's a heavy read, and I'll be skipping the maths), but it's worth looking at more carefully, I think.

Secondly, here's one talking about the enduring puzzle of the double slit experiment with the enticing title Can a Single Photon Modify Two Remote Realities Simultaneously?   Here's the abstract:

The concept of wave-particle duality, which is a key element of quantum theory, has been remarkably found to manifest itself in several experimental realizations as in the famous double-slit experiment. In this speci?c case, a single particle seems to travel through two separated slits simultaneously. Nevertheless, it is never possible to measure it in both slits, which naturally appears as a manifestation of the collapse postulate. In this respect, one could as well ask if it is possible to "perceive" the presence of the particle at the two slits simultaneously, once its collapse could be avoided. In this article, we use the recently proposed entanglement mediation protocol to provide a positive answer to this question. It is shown that a photon which behaves like a wave, i.e., which seems to be present in two distant locations at the same time, can modify two existing physical realities in these locations. Calculations of the \weak trace" left by such photon also enforce the validity of the present argumentation.

Death by (lack of) fashion

Neanderthals' failure to make parkas may have sealed their demise: A quartet of researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada has found evidence that suggests that the reason early humans were able to survive the ice age while the Neanderthal perished is because humans figured out how to make parka-like clothing to keep warm and Neanderthals did not....

The researchers also note that other evidence of humans crafting warm
clothes has been found as well, such as bone needles for sewing and
other tools that could be used to scrape pelts. Also, a set of figurines
wearing parka-like coats and dating back approximately 24,000 years was
found in Siberia. No such evidence of Neanderthals wearing crafted clothes has ever been found.


As to why the Neanderthals would not have crafted clothes to survive
the cold, the researchers suggest they may have lacked the intelligence
or simply because their cultural traditions were standing in the way.

 I can imagine some Neanderthal bloke pointing at some newly kitted out non-Neanderthal guy and saying "ha!  look at the girly man in his new 'parka.'  Clothes are for wusses."

Derangement noted

From the Economist,  a report on a campaign stop on 1 August:

The presidential race: Donald Trump’s disastrous fortnight | The Economist:

The speech that followed was even more rambling than usual, and peppered with personal gripes; the boasts were fewer, his haranguing of the media (“some of the most dishonest people”) went on for longer.

At times, Mr Trump sounded deranged. Some of the negotiators he says he will commission to improve America’s trade terms “are horrible, horrible human beings”, he said. “Some of them don’t sleep at night, some of them turn and toss and sweat, they’re turning and tossing and sweating and it’s disgusting, and these are the people we want to negotiate for us, right?” Whose experience, actually, was he describing? With three months to the election, it is early days, and the contest looks close; yet Mr Trump’s campaign is a mess. In Mechanicsburg it was tempting to think he really had seen the writing on the wall.

Out-nutted

Well, what a pain that Senator Blofeld Leyonhjelm got re-elected.  I see his total vote in New South Wales was 3%, but his position on the ballot paper was pretty good again, and I also thought the big fault under the new system is the tiny size of the party logos at the top of their columns.    I strongly suspect that this factor, and the parties use of  the word "liberal," again benefited him, and I expect if he was way to the right of Liberal column, you could shave off at least a third of his votes. 

But as a big a nut he is on guns and other matters, he will certainly be out-nutted in the Senate by the Queensland no.2 Senator for Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts.   An ageing engineer (a professional which produces some of the most obnoxious examples of Dunning-Kruger), he's the climate change denier whose mutterings about international banking family conspiracies made even Andrew Bolt distance himself from his group.   I see from the link that he's also (naturally) an Agenda 21 conspiracist completely opposed to any support of renewables (even though, as Abbott found out, quite a lot of people who might be dumb enough to vote for Hanson actually quite like their solar panels on the roof).   I bet he's a goldbug, too.  And, I wouldn't be surprised if he loves his guns as much as Leyonhjelm.

So, it's going to be interesting, and worrying, to watch what crap he will come out during Senate speeches.
  

Unsettled weather

Just saying, but the weather in Brisbane in the last couple of weeks has been all over the shop, in a way that I think's quite unusual for this time of year.  We've had a late winter burst of quite cold mornings after some very clear nights, but then it seems out of the blue will come cloud, wind and rain.  Last night it was from an east coast low, which I don't think are very common at all in early August.  Now its sunny and warm again, although maximums are still relatively modest. (Whoops - spoke too soon, it's gone cloudy and breezy again.)

I have been noticing in other recent years that Augusts have not been very cold at night at all - I pay attention to these things because of insisting on sitting and staying at the Ekka for fireworks.  But this year - unless this messy weather all clears up - I am thinking it is going to feel colder there at night, like it used to sometimes be when I went as a child.

Is it all part of global warming causing a more turbulent and changeable mixing of the atmosphere?

Support warranted

Guardian Australia has made a difference – with your help, it can do more | Media | The Guardian

I see that The Guardian Australia is asking for subscribers (or donors, if you will) and suggesting $10 a month or $100 a year.

I think this would be well deserved support for a great paper and website.  (I already subscribe to the SMH too.)  

Get our your credit cards.

The drop out option

Would Donald Trump really consider dropping out?

A good consideration here of what would happen if Trump dropped out, and why he probably won't.   (Although I still suspect he might if enough Republicans continue to repudiate him.)

Update:  and here's Vox on what the party can do to try to get him out of the race.  (They can't force him.)

My suggestion for the next James Bond

He's dark haired; darker skinned (for a bit of character variety); good with gadgets; knows his way around Europe; and the ladies love him.   [OK, so 4 out of 5 is not bad.] :)

Anyway, he would make an excellent Q, at the very least.

An amusing comment about Friedman

Noahpinion: How are Milton Friedman's ideas holding up? Part 1: For some reason, Friedman is treated a bit like a secular saint in policy discussions. If you criticize "Idea X", fine. We can have an argument. But if you criticize "Milton Friedman's Idea X", then WHO ARE YOU, LOWLY WORM, to criticize the great FRIEDMAN?? If you say government is a lot more useful and important than Reagan and Thatcher and Art Laffer and Friedrich Hayek and Ed Prescott and Greg Mankiw think, well, fine, that's your opinion. But if you say government is a lot more useful and important than Milton Friedman thought, then you're wrong wrong wrong and don't you know that Friedman proved government was bad in the 70s?? Etc.

OK, I might be exaggerating as an excuse to use lots of capital letters and italics, but Friedman is such a towering intellectual that criticizing him does feel a bit like tipping a sacred cow. Fortunately I'm from Texas, where cow-tipping is a way of life.

Interesting technology for the drinker

Flexible wearable electronic skin patch offers new way to monitor alcohol levels -- ScienceDaily

Any suggestions?

Ridiculing Trump has become a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel for everyone, so I'm getting a bit bored with that.   Seems to me the only thing providing any real tension in the Presidential election is what's in emails that Julian Assange is determined to try to take down Clinton with, and when they'll be released.  I can't dismiss the possibility that there might be real problems for her in this - but Assange is going to be winning no friends on the Left by playing games with the timing of release, and he has no friends already on the Right.   He's stuffed either way, then.  

I wonder, though, whether Trump might do something really unprecedented - such as pulling the pin himself on his run if enough Republican figures say they can't endorse him.  His musing about a possible rigged election seems potentially on the path to something like that, and he obviously is worried about how he'll cope with one on one debates with Clinton.   Let's see...

I haven't even been posting much science lately - I think most scientists must be enjoying the NH summer holidays, because I don't think that much of interest has been in the media recently. 

Oh - here's something:   Brian Cox's new series from the BBC started last night - Forces of Nature - and as with his previous similar shows, it's beautiful to look at, and I find it rather endearing watching a man who seems continually blissed out about science and nature.  Could be a bit better edited - there seemed to be a little bit of unnecessary repetition in last night's episode - but overall, it's highly recommended.


Apart from that, I feel like calling for suggestions as to what I might find interesting on the 'net at the moment...

When any publicity is not good publicity

Some would say this is hardly surprising, given the source, but I am still amused to see this group of headlines re Trump on the Washington Post website today:

A very odd thing to say

Gee, for a man who has a long association with the IPA, with its transgender staffer Mikayla Novak and its past high profile gay spokes-ego Tim Wilson, Sinclair Davidson sure likes to buy into moral panic about high school students and sexuality.  And he has done so today in a truly spectacularly oddball way. 

This is the post in question, about a scholarship body that has started asking teenage applicants if they identify a gay/transgender etc, apparently with the intention of specifically offering money to some in that category.  SD notes, however, that the applicants will often be below the age of consent, which leads to his ending his post with this:

"...perhaps this is a matter for the police and not reporters from The Australian."

Now look, I have long, long argued in this blog that sexuality of school students is something best dealt with at school as a matter of emphasising privacy and respect for all (and therefore don't particularly care for teenagers in high school who go out of their way to be "out"), and I would agree that gay identity politics influencing sex education may have gone so far as to advertently or inadvertently put inappropriate pressure on students to categorise themselves in ways they should not need to.   So do I think it makes much sense in principle to be offering scholarships based on sexuality?  Of course not.

But do I think that they're aren't some teenagers who have a pretty good understanding of their sexuality as not being heterosexual?  Of course not.

Everyone who has read anything by, or talked to, gay adults knows that a great many do feel sure fairly soon into puberty that their sexuality is at least different, and (even before the modern Western openness to discussing homosexuality) recognized it as homosexuality, or at least bisexuality.  And in most cases, this is prior to any actual sexual experience at all.  

Therefore, it is obvious that asking a 15 or 16 year old if he or she identifies as gay, etc, (and leaving it open for them to decline to answer) carries no necessary implication about whether they are or have ever been sexually active, or will be before it becomes "legal" by virtue of their age.   So in what implausible way does SD think asking this question on a piece of paper could induce an underage teenager to have gay sex?  A scholarship possibility means they'll just go and try out the gay stuff to make sure they can honestly answer the question?    Yeah, sure.   Is it meant to be just be like how detailed sex education encourages straight students to have sex early (when in fact, if anything, it probably has the opposite effect)?   

Even when asked to clarify in comments what he could possibly mean about police looking into this, the Professor does not retract at all, and seems to make his concern sound even more like extreme conservative, moral panic, ridiculousness.   People who work in a body offering scholarships to a gay identifying 15 or 16 year old are "grooming"??  The police should look into this instead of pursuing George Pell??   In fact,  we all know the police would be rolling their eyes and writing "just plain nuts" in their notebooks. 

It's remarkable how SD can take a matter on which moderate conservatives might agree (do we really need scholarships based on sexuality?) and take the argument to such an unjustified extreme that makes it immediately dismiss-able not just by Lefties, but by any sensible social conservative too.  

Trump-ism of the day

Trump says he hopes Ivanka would quit if she got harassed: Kirsten Powers

Apparently, from a telephone interview with Trump:

What if someone had treated Ivanka in the way Ailes allegedly behaved?

His reply was startling, even by Trumpian standards. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said.

But most women don’t have the financial resources of Ivanka. They can’t afford to quit their job without another in hand, something that is impossible to do when you are under contract and forbidden to speak to competitors. Most importantly, why should a woman be expected to upend her career just because she ended up in the crosshairs of some harasser?

Hand cleaning considered

Health Check: should we be using alcohol-based hand sanitisers?

Here's something I didn't know about alcohol based hand cleaners:

In a hospital setting, health-care workers use medicated soap and water
wash or alcohol-based hand rub to remove germs and kill pathogens.
Alcohol-based hand rub has the added bonus of providing an additional 20
minutes of residual action on the surface of the health workers’ hands
to keep pathogens from multiplying to a level that can cause infection
in vulnerable patients.

Milling about in the dark

Tokyo’s surreal and shadowy world of Pokemon Go after dark - The Washington Post

The photos aren't that special really; but yes, I can just imagine how incredibly popular this game will be there.

The Apollo astronaut I saw

Mike Collins Talks About Mars, and How to Handle Apollo Hoaxers | Daily Planet | Air & Space Magazine

I have mentioned here before, but I saw Michael Collins in the late 1970's in the bookshop of the Air & Space Museum, when he ran the place. (I thought it was the 1980's, but I was also there in either '78 or '79, and he was the director up to 1978, apparently.)

He's 85 now, and recently gave an interview (linked above) which has a few funny parts, including this:

Is there anything particular that provokes memories of the Apollo days?

Well, the moon kind of surprises me sometimes. I’ll be out at night and I’ll see a nice moon, and say, “Hey, that looks good.” Then I’ll say, “Oh shit, I went up there one time!” Kind of  surprises me. It’s like there are two Moons, you know—the one that’s usually around, and then that one.

Trump and the Russians, continued

Trump: Don’t worry, Putin won’t go into Ukraine � Hot Air

When even Hot Air keeps noting how Trump is making a complete mess with his media appearances, you know he's in trouble...

Heh

Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context

It's a few days old now, from The Onion, but it's pretty funny.

Some skepticism called for

Computers will require more energy than the world generates by 2040 - ScienceAlert

Oh, and by the way:

YES, BAN THAT MILITARY GRADE FLASHLIGHT - IF THAT WILL STOP IT APPEARING AS AN ADVERTISEMENT EVERYWHERE I GO ON THE NET.

Evolving interpretations of ancient sexuality

TLS Greek homosexuality

This (sort of) review of a re-published important book about Greek homosexuality takes a broader look at how its ideas were received, and it's pretty interesting.   The author of the book - KJ Dover - also sounds like quite a strange character.

Getting mileage from your toilet

An interesting story has appeared at the LA Times about Japanese (and American) progress with hydrogen powered fuel cell cars.  (The Japanese are using sewerage to make the gas.) 

It sounds like there is more work going on with this technology than I realised.

Trump's wrath with Khan (sorry...)

No doubt someone else has already made that pun somewhere, but never mind.

Everyone except the stupidest, and those who comment at Catallaxy (what a Venn diagram that would make) can see that Trump badly hurt himself with his inane comment on the Muslim parent's appearance at the DNC.   I thought this Vox commentary really got to the heart of it:

The second thing, as Salam says at the end of his argument, is that Trump is easily baited. He couldn’t swallow his hurt and anger over the Khan’s speech, he had to lash out, to fight back, to smear them in response. This doesn’t make sense if you understand the goal of an election as getting elected, but it does make sense if you understand the goal of an election as playing out an endless series of dominance games.

This is a point TPM’s Josh Marshall has repeatedly made about Trump. A need for dominance, Marshall writes, "is the key to understanding virtually everything Trump does. Whatever is actually happening he tries to refashion it into a dominance ritual or at least will not engage before performing one. You saw that in those numerous examples where he said he would participate in a debate but only after the other party wrote a major check to charity. It's primal."

The Khans’ speech hurt Trump. He watched it. He read the coverage of it. He felt slighted, inferior, humiliated. And so he needed to rebalance the scales. He needed to regain his dominance. He seems confused that anyone faults him for this — isn’t it obvious that they attacked him, and so he should get to attack them back?

This is the logic of a schoolyard bully, which Trump is. But it’s a dangerous mindset for a president.

Putting Trump in the Oval Office would open a huge vulnerability in our national security. It’s much easier to bait Trump than it is to attack the United States. Our enemies’ aim is often to provoke us into overreacting and overcommitting abroad because they can’t hope to seriously hurt us here. With Trump in control of the armed forces, the path to manipulating us into that kind of overreaction would be clear.

By the way, monty, if you're reading.  Could you pass on a message over at an open thread that this piece made me realise why CL has such sympathy towards Trump - he's psychologically the same in this key respect.

Update:  sorry monty, had you done the "wrath of Khan" reference already?  

Meanwhile, in Siberia...

There's been an anthrax outbreak, with a possible global warming connection:

Russian army biological protection troops called in amid warnings 'utmost care' needed to stop deadly infection spreading.

The concern among experts is that global warming thawed a diseased animal carcass at least 75 years old, buried in the melting permafrost, so unleashing the disease.

A total of 40 people, the majority of them children, from nomadic herder families in northern Siberia are under observation in hospital amid fears they may have contracted the anthrax. Doctors stress that so far there are NO confirmed cases.

Up to 1,200 reindeer were killed either by anthrax or a heatwave in the Arctic district where the infection spread.

Specialists from the Chemical, Radioactive and Biological Protection Corps were rushed to regional capital Salekhard on a military Il-76 aircraft.

They were deployed by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu to carry laboratory tests on the ground, detect and eliminate the focal point of the infection, and to dispose safely of dead animals.

The move confirmed the seriousness with which the authorities view the anthrax outbreak, the first in this region since 1941. 

Nearly spring

I usually post some photos from the garden at this time of year; and the type of flower hasn't changed much recently.  But some - like this daisy - even if you've seen similar before, I just like the strong contrast with the black behind it:

And this bee may not be perfectly lined up against a contrasting background, but you try taking photos of bees and see how often they stay still for a shot:

And there's always a scruffy dog to try to get to stay still, too:

And finally for now: nothing too spectacular, but nice enough:

He really likes his soy sauce

Make sure you get to the last paragraph: 

'Kioke': The secret ingredient of soy sauce | The Japan Times: Shodoshima, the largest island in the Seto Inland Sea, is not only covered in thousands of olive trees, it also holds half of Japan’s remaining wooden soy sauce barrels. Though the island has produced olive oil for about 115 years, soy sauce has been made here for centuries — and has weathered many changes.

After World War II, soy sauce makers across Japan were encouraged to modernize their 1,000-year-old tradition by fermenting in stainless steel tanks rather than kioke (wooden barrels). But Shodoshima’s residents — like many islanders — don’t always do what they’re told by mainlanders. They decided not to use stainless steel, and today there are still 20 soy sauce makers on Shodoshima who ferment the old-fashioned way. Yamaroku Shoyu is one of them.

“In the hot and muggy summer, the shōyu moromi (soy sauce mash) becomes active, making gurgling sounds as the fermentation accelerates,” says Yasuo Yamamoto, the fifth generation head of Yamaroku. “When I walk the planks between the wooden soy sauce barrels, the moromi in each barrel becomes noticeably more active, as if it is talking to me, telling me it is happy to be in my presence. We have a mutual love for each other.”

The submarine cyber hacking we don't hear much about

America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’ systems - The Washington Post

This is pretty fascinating:

"There is a — an offensive capability that we are, that we prizevery highly," said Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, the U.S. Navy's program executive officer for submarines. "And this is where I really can't talk about much, but suffice to say we have submarines out there on the front lines that are very involved, at the highest technical level, doing exactly the kind of things that you would want them to do."

The so-called "silent service" has a long history of using information technology to gain an edge on America's rivals. In the 1970s, the U.S. government instructed its submarines to tap undersea communications cables off the Russian coast, recording the messages being relayed back and forth between Soviet forces. (The National Security Agency has continued that tradition, monitoring underwater fiber cables as part of its globe-spanning intelligence-gathering apparatus. In some cases, the government has struck closed-door deals with the cable operators ensuring that U.S. spies can gain secure access to the information traveling over those pipes.)

These days, some U.S. subs come equipped with sophisticated antennas that can be used to intercept and manipulate other people's communications traffic, particularly on weak or unencrypted networks.

"We've gone where our targets have gone" — that is to say, online, said Stewart Baker, the National Security Agency's former general counsel, in an interview. "Only the most security-conscious now are completely cut off from the Internet." Cyberattacks are also much easier to carry out than to defend against,  he said. 

One of America's premier hacker subs, the USS Annapolis, is hooked into a much wider U.S. spying net that was disclosed as part of the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, according to Adam
Weinstein and William Arkin, writing last year for Gawker's intelligence and national security blog, Phase Zero. A leaked slide showed that in a typical week, the Navy performs hundreds of so-called "computer network exploitations," many of which are likely the result of submarine-based hacking.

"Annapolis and its sisters are the infiltrators of the new new of cyber warfare," wrote Arkin and Weinstein, "getting close to whatever enemy — inside their defensive zones — to jam and emit and spoof and hack. They do this through mast-mounted antennas and collection systems atop the conning tower, some of them one-of-a-kind devices made for hard to reach or specific targets, all of them black boxes of future war."

Rousseau and Trump?

I was enjoying this essay in the New Yorker which argues that the origins of the anti-elitism of Trump supporters can be found in Rousseau (although I would have appreciated an explanation as to how - apart from stupidity - they can pin their hopes on a member of the pretty elite club known as "American billionaires"), when this paragraph came out of the blue:

Rousseau’s denunciations of intellectuals may have acquired an extra edge from the fact that Voltaire exposed him, in an anonymous pamphlet, as a hypocritical proponent of family values: someone who consigned all five of his children to a foundling hospital. Rousseau’s life manifested many such gaps between theory and practice, to put it mildly. A connoisseur of fine sentiments, he was prone to hide in dark alleyways and expose himself to women. More commonly, he was given to compulsive masturbation while sternly advising against it in his writings.

This makes me want to re-read Paul Johnson's chapter about him in Intellectuals - where I am sure I would have read about his kids before, but don't know if it covered his, shall we say, sexual issues.  

Book sales hard to believe

Speaking as I was about Pauline Andrew Bolt, once again I raise the mystery of why there has been such an effort by him, and the IPA, to promote and sell his book, especially when it was simply a collection of his already published columns from a newspaper and magazine.  Why would you even expect that to sell well?  All the words have been read by his fervent followers before:  it's not as if there was any effort put into creating something with original content.

And some sites have been mocking its initial small sales, and say that it has been pushed onto newsagents  who didn't actually order it.

Today Hanson Bolt  is claiming that there are only "a few" left out of its initial print of 15,000 - and that it is being reprinted. 

This seems a very surprising result for a political book (and surely it would count as that) with no fresh content.  Sales of over 10,000 for any political book in Australia seem fairly rare - according to this list, there were three that sold over 10,000 last year, and one of those was only 12,000.

Given the previous articles about how slowly it initially sold, I strongly suspect something funny is going on here.  Has the IPA (with staffer Bolt Jnr) snapped up a large number to send out for free if memberships are renewed?  Did Gina Rinehart have a particularly large gap on her library shelves that she decided to fill up just to make it look like reads a lot?   That's two possible theories that immediately spring to mind.

I await some commentary to appear on these implausible sounding sales figure to appear in the media soon.    

About political panel shows

Jack the Insider: Why I quit TV

Here's an amusingly written piece by Jack the Insider about what it's like to appear on TV political panel shows.

The only thing is - while I do think that in principle that it's a good thing that different party politicians sometimes remain on friendly terms despite opposing policies, I'm in a way disappointed that panellists on these shows routinely do likewise.  The difference being that politicians are sometimes running positions that they feel they have to and may personally regret.   TV commentators, though, argue for stupid, immoral or otherwise odious positions completely voluntarily.   So they have less excuse, and overlooking their positions for the sake of a drink later seems a bit of a cop out. 

Or am I saying that just because lately I'd like to throttle Andrew Bolt?  OK, maybe just throw a sauvignon blanc at him.  

Australian Trumpkin nutjob watch

You can guess which blog has this comment about  Trump:

Yes, it’s uncanny – he’s right so often. Yet many here can’t see a real leader when they see one. Most comments on Trump matters here are about him being “the lesser of two evils” or “Klin Ton is worse”.
President Trump is a game changer, a paradigm shift, away from the degenerate Marxism that has infected the West.
Get real Cats&Kittehs – Trump is the only choice. If only we had someone in his image in this gay political backwater.

Don't export trouble

So, the government has been wondering whether to nominate Rudd as a candidate for UN Secretary General.

As a person who long picked Rudd as a dud before the rest of the nation caught up with the idea, I really cannot see why the government should hesitate in not nominating him.   Honestly, a politician dumped from the top job by his own party for having a disastrous  management style should have no reasonable expectation that his nation would nominate him for such a high profile job where management is a key issue.  That he got a second run at the top job was out of sheer party desperation as to how to resolve internal conflict, and not  due to any significant re-assessment of his talents.

Besides this, his actual performance when meeting world leaders when he was PM was embarrassing.

And furthermore, on recent media appearances, he has looked to me to be very pale and very puffy faced - and while I think Right wingers are often ridiculous and immature in honing in on odd personal appearance in a single photo, I genuinely got the impression that Rudd does not look very healthy (and we know he has had significant health problems in the past.)  In all honesty, despite any temporary hurt to his ego, Turnbull would probably be doing him a long term favour by not nominating him...

Update:  so Rudd doesn't get nominated, although it looks like Malcolm may have led him to believe he would be.

Big deal, Kevin:  do you know how much the public will care about this - not one iota.  So you may have wasted a year or two in flying around the world trying to schmooze the right people.   Meh - you had a hobby, and now it's ended.  Go do something full time for a charity, or learn to paint in watercolours, or anything:  we really don't care.  You're not short of a quid - but here's a suggestion:  find a hobby that doesn't depend on people liking you.

I also endorse Jason Soon's tweet on this:

Rudd's response to not being supported is a perfect example of why he should not be supported.  

A good summary of what's happened with the conventions

Democrats have stolen the GOP's best rhetoric — and Republicans have noticed - Vox

It seems everyone, except Trumpkin nutters, can see that the Democrat convention got its mojo back (so to speak) on this third day of extremely well received speeches.

Hey Trumpkins: If the country is a disaster, why is Obama quite popular?

Obama Approval: Can it Help Clinton? - ABC News: President Obama will address the Democratic convention tonight from an unusually strong position; for the last two months straight he’s held the highest job approval rating in ABC News/Washington Post polls since early in his presidency. Fifty-six percent approve of his job performance, up from a career-low 40 percent just in advance of the 2014 midterm elections.

Obama’s in a particularly enviable position in comparison with George W. Bush at this time in his presidency: His approval rating was a dismal 28 percent in July 2008, a year in which Bush was perceived as a drag on John McCain’s unsuccessful effort to succeed him.

Scott Adams and his precious bodily fluids

In "what is nutty not-so-crypto Trump lover Scott Adams saying about US politics now" news:  he's worried that the DNC is having a bad effect on his hormones:

I watched singer Alicia Keys perform her song Superwoman at the convention and experienced a sinking feeling. I’m fairly certain my testosterone levels dropped as I watched, and that’s not even a little bit of an exaggeration. Science says men’s testosterone levels rise when they experience victory, and drop when they experience the opposite. I watched Keys tell the world that women are the answer to our problems. True or not, men were probably not feeling successful and victorious during her act.

Let me say this again, so you know I’m not kidding. Based on what I know about the human body, and the way our thoughts regulate our hormones, the Democratic National Convention is probably lowering testosterone levels all over the country. Literally, not figuratively. And since testosterone is a feel-good chemical for men, I think the Democratic convention is making men feel less happy. They might not know why they feel less happy, but they will start to associate the low feeling with whatever they are looking at when it happens, i.e. Clinton.

On the 2D playing field – where policies and facts matter – the Democratic National Convention is doing great. And when it comes to exciting women, it might be the best ever. But on an emotional level – where hormones rule – men have left the building…that they built.

 Is he still married?  Being recently dumped by his wife would explain a lot...

Update:  I just happened to catch much of Obama's pretty sensational convention speech - although some American writers are saying Biden was even better.  Can poor old Scott feel his hormones rising again, I wonder? 

Happy Stagflation Anniversary (and what it's an example of)

OK, so I am a day early:  but tomorrow will be the 5 year anniversary of the Sinclair Davidson stagflation warning.   I am reminded too that my lengthy post about this in 2013 attracted a comment from a Catallaxy reader (they're the only ones who address me this way) as follows:

You can wait Stevie, perhaps stagflation will happen, or not. Certainly there is a recession around the corner.

Maybe this won't affect you, but there will be about 1.5 million people who will be effected.

Not sure how long I have to wait to declare that prediction wrong too - how far away is "a corner" in economic terms?  

Anyway, how's inflation going?   It is very low. Now true, this might not be the best sign economically - but it is not "stagflation".   (I presume that the economic doldrums that do not incorporate high inflation would still be claimed by Sinclair to be "the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy" - because that's the beauty of being ideologically committed to a view against government spending - everything's the fault of Keynesian economic policy!) 

Catallaxy also no longer features any posts by the Prof about the "pause" in the global temperature record - presumably because the long term temperature/modelling record now looks like this:

In fact,  his series of posts about "the pause"; his stagflation warning (which seems to have been inspired by a very short term bump in CPI);  his (more recent) attempts to decry tobacco plain packaging as a failure by analysing some post introduction short term data about tobacco consumption; and his blog's (though not his own) posts about the dire state of renewable energy because of a very high but very brief spike in South Australian electricity prices - all show up a clear pattern.   Namely, a continual rush to make claims out of obviously limited short term data.   But look at the longer term and the claims either have collapsed entirely, or look extremely wobbly.

Do the threadsters of Catallaxy appreciate this pattern?  Of course not.   Ideology and short term evidence trump long term results every day.  (Oh yeah, and speaking of Trump - most of them are on board with him being better than Hilary.   What a bunch of jokers.)

Is he still the GOP candidate?

Trump’s news conference was chock-full of outrages and lies - The Washington Post

Must be near full blown panic amongst establishment Republicans about how they can't stop Trump giving disastrous press conferences like that one. 

Bad Zika news

Florida investigates four mysterious Zika infections - BBC News

Reasonable advice from a playwright I don't care for

David Williamson's advice to playwrights - write like a TV writer | Daily Review: Film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more.

I don't know that I have ever seen anything by David Williamson that I've really liked.  Yet, oddly enough, his comments in the talk at the link about the issues he sees confronting Australian theatre seem all pretty sensible to me.

The vague appeal to me of trying to write a play is that there are not that many words involved, compared to writing a novel, or movie script.  The difficulty of my doing so is that I freeze up with the thought that I don't really know how people talk when I'm not there.  (Actually, that stops novel writing stone cold, too.)   Does that make sense?

More on stupid Julian

At WAPO, an article about Assange's deliberately timed attack on Clinton includes this part:

In the interview, Mr. Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he pronounced “great.” He also suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds, but also saw her as a personal foe.

At one point, Mr. Peston said: “Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?”

Mr. Assange replied that what Mr. Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Mrs. Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.

The first was to do with "freedom of the press" (because she wants Assange indicted):   yes I can just imagine Donald Trump being much more conciliatory towards those who partake in security leaks.

The second was to do with her being a "liberal war hawk":  in this respect, Assange would prefer to have someone who is "completely unpredictable", and who contradictorily promotes himself as a new strongman who will "smash" ISIS (in contrast to the "weak" Obama), while at the same time suggesting that the US should stay out of the Middle East (and, by the way, hints that some NATO countries may not get protection they were expecting, either.)

Assange is a twit. 

In Trump We Trust 2

Trump Time Capsule #57: Russia, and Taxes - The Atlantic

James Fallows argues that the media has been way, way too soft on the matter of Trump refusing to release his tax returns, especially in light of suspicion that Russians were involved in the Wikileaks hack.  (Assuming it was a hack, I suppose - I had first assumed it was probably a leak by Sander's sympathisers.  But no, it does seem to have been an outside hack into the system.)

In Trump We Trust

Those Freedom Kids Who Performed at a Donald Trump Rally Are About to Sue Him | Mother Jones

Product placement

Amidst the general news of death and mayhem in the world, let's pause to appreciate something relatively simple.

[I have a strong sensation of acting like one of those TV ads that purport to give information about a product when it's actually just an ad (what is that series in Australia with the terrible intro music? - can't remember) but here goes.]

My family and I are very impressed with the Zoosh range of salad dressings, and in particular, their aioli:

We're also enjoying the South East Asian salad dressing at the moment

Trust me, they're distinctively good.

Owners of Zoosh company - please send me money!

Not great news

Global rate of new HIV infections hasn't fallen in a decade : Nature News & Comment

Mind control

Why did Iran destroy 100,000 satellite dishes? - CSMonitor.com

Some surprising information here about the Iranian government's determination to control television content.

Transplant gamble

‘I Can Do Absolutely Nothing.’ The First American With a Double Hand Transplant Wants Them Removed | TIME

Whether a hand transplant will give you a usable hand seems a very big gamble:

The surgeon who led the transplant in 2009, Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, is currently at Johns Hopkins where he’s preparing to perform penis transplants for American veterans. Lee says the need for removal is uncommon and has occurred in six out of 100 similar transplants in the U.S. and Europe.

“Mr. Kepner’s transplanted hands do not function as well as those of other hand transplant recipients,” said Lee in an email to TIME. “Our team has performed bilateral hand/arm
transplants in four patients to date, including Mr. Kepner. The other three patients have had significant functional return in their hands and have been able to resume completely independent living, including driving, working, and going to school.”

“Complex surgery such as hand transplant do not produce uniform results in everyone,” Lee adds, “but we have been encouraged by the functional return in the great majority
of our recipients whose lives have been transformed by the procedure.”

I suspect medical science is better off pursuing robot hands.  

Putting a face to the voice

'Ghost' Soprano Marni Nixon, Who Voiced Blockbuster Musicals, Dies At 86 : The Two-Way : NPR

I've probably seen her face before, but I don't recall it.

Well, actually, I definitely had, just that I didn't know it:

After My Fair Lady was released in 1964, Nixon appeared onscreen in only one movie — The Sound of Music — as Sister Sophia, one of the nuns who sing "How Do You Solve a
Problem like Maria?" The film's star — Julie Andrews — didn't need any help in the singing department.

Yet more "Don't Panic" from yours truly

Trump versus Clinton polls: why the next 2 weeks of them will be basically meaningless - Vox

Interesting, though, that Julian Assange is on a revenge mission over Clinton.

Does he really expect that he, America, and the world, would do better under Trump?   Prone to fantasy, that boy.

Trump update

I am rather surprised that some on the Left are running around like headless chickens worrying that Trump's acceptance speech was evil but effective.   I'm not the first to notice, but the giant, angry, head of Trump put me more in mind of this, rather than anything else:

and the dark tone is surely recognized by a very large slab of Americans as an exaggeration, and a cynical one at that.

The Democrat email leaks don't even have me particularly worried - internal party politics can be very dirty, so why should anyone be surprised?  And Clinton has chosen a respected Democrat politician who speaks Spanish, and is Catholic but respects Roe v Wade - ticking quite a few boxes there for voter turnout.  (Speaking of Catholics - surely there are few Catholic bishops in the States comfortable with the idea of a Trump Presidency?)

I remain entirely confident that Trump will not become President.

Shell shock via rabbit

Rabbit Death at Manassas - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A mostly amusing story involving a rabbit, which despite the title, does not die.

How toys evolve

The History of Dollhouses - The Atlantic:

In the beginning, dollhouses had only two purposes: display and pedagogy. First built in the 17th century in northern Europe, primarily in Germany, Holland, and England, dollhouses were designed for adults. They were closely associated with wealth and served as markers of social class and status. As Faith Eaton explains in The Ultimate Dolls House Book, the German word dockenhaus meant not dollhouse but “miniature house.” And a miniature house was not a house to play with. In Holland, these exhibits of wealth were called “cabinet houses.” The front of the house opens like a china cabinet on hinges that can be closed and locked. Inside cabinet houses, people could both show off and conceal their collections of expensive miniature objects.

Beginning in the 17th century, “Nuremberg kitchens” might contain a hearth, cooking pots, a straw broom. These all-metal houses were designed without ornament, for purely utilitarian purposes. Used as teaching tools for girls, Nuremberg kitchens allowed mothers to show daughters how to set up and control a house. All about learning rules, a Nuremberg kitchen was the opposite of a dollhouse as a dream world of fantasy. It was a place where girls learned to manage not only the objects of the house but also its servants, where girls would learn to become the lady of the house.

By 18th-century England, the “Baby House” emerged. The Baby House was an exact copy of the owner’s home, a replica designed to showcase the owner’s wealth—a small, “baby” version of a real-life house. Unlike the Dutch Cabinet House, which might have miniature furniture but tended to be full of expensive or rare objects, the Baby House was full of
furniture in tiny versions of the owner’s rooms.

Changing definitions of childhood in the beginning of the 19th century shifted ideas about play. But it took the industrial revolution and the increase in mass-produced objects to make dollhouses and miniatures begin to be construed as toys. And it took until after World War II, when the U.S. stopped importing goods from Europe, for dollhouses to become mass-produced and affordable. Miniatures began to take on a second, different life.

More on Bolt

He's muttering about (I presume) defamation against Fairfax for Elizabeth Farrelly's recent column comparing him to Enoch Powell, and he's recently complained about The Australian's Paul Kelly and Chip Le Grand's concern about him, over the same issue.

Today he's defending Pauline Hanson against Chris Mitchell (!).

Gee, at some point, maybe Bolt will realise the problem is his complete alignment with the dog whistle (is that the right term when it's actually direct shouting and fearmongering?) politics of Hanson?

And further:   what is this complete entanglement with the IPA for the hyping of his book (containing just old columns)  all about?   I presume his son still works there, and I presume Roskam and Sinclair Davidson still consider him a "mate", but is that enough to tie the IPA so closely into promoting someone who has gone so Hanson right wing on immigration?  Isn't Davidson embarrassed by his blog entries?  Why does he say nothing?   Why is Bolt himself seemingly so desperate to promote the book?  

I find this all rather weird.

High temperatures noted

Heat and rainfall making headlines around the world | Official blog of the Met Office news team: 

Across parts of Iraq, western Iran, Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, extremely high temperatures have been recorded over recent days. On Thursday Basrah Airport, Iraq reached 53.4C, while Mitribah in northern Kuwait recorded 54.0C. Both of these temperatures, subject to confirmation, are new national records and the 54.0C recorded at Mitribah is among the highest temperatures ever recorded in Asia.

The highest ever temperature recorded globally was 56.7C at Death Valley, California, USA on 10 July 1913.

The high temperatures will continue today (Friday) with 53.6C recorded at 1200 GMT at Basrah Airport, Iraq, but the weekend should see a break from the heat as northwesterly winds bring cooler air to the region.

While it was worthwhile the article noting the all time global high, the significant difference is that no one has built cities, towns and airports in Death Valley, have they?

The Bolt descent continues

Maybe Bolt considers himself in the running to head Fox News?  He'd fit right in with his increasingly shrill and dumb posts which seem to now be in competition with the style of nutty and stupid exaggeration by the execrable Gateway Pundit. 

Look at this post about Obama - for a video that is supposed to be "bizarre" and "chilling" (all because Obama briefly cracks a smile when he realises he shouldn't personalise it too much)  - how come it's the Press in the audience that actually laugh at the fleeting incident?

Message to Bolt:  the media does not generally laugh at "chilling" comments made by a President. 

Also: he seems unable to contemplate the possibility that a report that the Munich teen killer was shouting "Allahu Akbar" was wrong.   The claim seems to be based on one witness? 

What a weirdo

Scott Adams continues his self branding as a Trumpkin who claims he isn't at his blog.  Or is he just doing it for publicity?  Who cares?

Recommended viewing

I very much enjoyed the BBC doco last night on the futuristic looking Halley Research station in Antarctica on SBS.

It can be watched on SBS on Demand for the next couple of weeks.

The (possible) wonders of aspirin

Could an aspirin a day keep depression away?

The Thiel speech

I suppose one would not expect Gawker to give a glowing review of Peter Thiel's speech yesterday, but yes, they were underwhelmed.  (Something I noticed was that the Convention floor barely seemed to be paying attention for the first 2 or 3 minutes of a 6 minute speech.  He also is pretty terrible at teleprompter delivery.)

The Gawker article notes that Thiel makes for a peculiar libertarian, in that he longs for the days of some ultra big government projects such as Apollo.  But I see today that  he has said before that he's not ideological on the matter of size of government.  I suppose that should make me think he's at least an independent thinker, but actually it makes me think more that he's just a purely opportunistic, self interested one - he's a fan of space exploration generally, but because he has that odd idea that space colonies will, of course, establish a techno based libertarian utopia.  It probably comes from taking Heinlein too seriously, and I think it was a theme in Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy too?  (I only read the first book, though - I don't think he's that entertaining as a writer.)

Anyway, I just can't take Thiel seriously in light of his 2009 essay at Cato Unbound, where he dissed democracy, and regretted women got the vote because they're generally too pragmatic to be libertarian. (Well, you tell me what he meant if you think I'm being unfair.)  And in his postscript to that article, he wrote this, the first three sentences of which makes a joke of his support of a candidate who (with the one exception of not caring much about LGBT issues) is as intensely and deliberately divisive as possible:

I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.

He's also a fence sitter on climate change, although because nuclear power is all Gee Whiz technology, he still advocates for its massive expansion anyway.

I see that The Atlantic has a good article explaining his nonsensical positions, especially his Trump support.  Perhaps I should have just linked to that...

Update:   Vox criticised Thiel's speech and position, too, and included this paragraph:

It’s not just that Trump has a long string of business failures, from Atlantic City casinos to Trump steaks. Thiel himself described Trump as "symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City" just two years ago — he’s under no illusions that Trump is a great businessman.

Sounds about right

The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump. - Vox

Paul Krugman noted this article, but points out that he called it much earlier on the Republicans, and cites the start of their intellectual downfall as being with the adoption of supply side economics.  

She writes well

I’m With The Banned — Welcome to the Scream Room — Medium

I don't know of Laurie Penny, and as a "queer feminist" I am I certain I would disagree with many of her views.

But this description of her meeting with Milo and assorted Republican hangers-on at the convention is very wittily written, and I strongly suspect explains him correctly.

Dream analysis not required

I certainly hope that dreams don't actually often mean that much, because last night I seemed to have a long one which involved getting a small tattoo from Pauline Hanson (!)   (It was actually to convert a large birthmark on my side - which does not exist in real life, btw - into a volcano.  But I did stop her after a short time, deciding it was a bad idea after all, and she wasn't very competent at it.  And please be assured, there was no erotic aspect - at all.)

And you thought an old white guy arguing with an empty chair was an embarrassing look for the Republicans...

Of course, there were many delusional Right wingers who thought Clint Eastwood's performance was a brilliant bit of biting Obama takedown, instead of the peculiar embarrassment that it was.  I wonder how many of that group think that this election's Republican convention is a success?   Surely even that group (with the catchy motto "United by Hate we Stand") has some within it that can see that this convention looks like a never ending disaster?

For goodness sake, even Charles Krauthammer thought the Christie led chants of "burn the witch" "lock her up" was a bad look.

As for Cruz:  one might almost say his position was principled, except no one seems sure whether it involved him lying about what he would say; and besides, it seems he genuinely is despised by about  95% of people who have had to work with him, which would suggest that his call that people should vote according to conscience means they would be right not to vote for him either.

Rich libertarian weirdo/eccentric* Thiel hasn't spoken yet, but I heard it speculated on the radio that he was going to call for the Party to get on board with gay rights?   I'm curious to see how that goes over...

Anyway, the Party is in the worst intellectual and moral position it has ever been, I reckon.  (Have a look at these bits of misogyny noted at Slate, as well as their story about the trainwreck that Trump is on foreign policy).  The Party blowing itself up like this might be a good thing, eventually...

*  aren't they all? - rich libertarians - or even just "libertarians", I mean

Okunoshima - my part in its downfall (not really)

Just after I finish my posts about Okunoshima, I see that someone has done a study of some kind arguing that the rabbits are being loved to death.  Population explosion!  No vegetation left!  Bloating them with cabbage!

“There are now about 1,000 rabbits on this two-mile island,” DeMello said. “They’ve destroyed the ecosystem.” As a result of the lack of vegetation and the inappropriate food that tourists provide for the animals, the rabbits suffer from a variety of health problems and now have a life expectancy of just two years, DeMello and her fellow researchers found.
The findings were presented on Wednesday at the World Lagomorph Conference in Turlock, California.

Well, I didn't know the word "lagomorph" before - so that's something useful.

Look, not that I can claim expertise on rabbit health, but my recent day and night on the island just makes me skeptical of these claims:

On Rabbit Island, DeMello and her fellow researchers found that the rabbits are fighting over even the least nutritious food provided by tourists. “Of the 728 rabbits that we counted on the island, 28 percent had visible injuries or illnesses,” she reported. The percentage grew to 50 percent in the areas of the island closest to humans. “The more humans interfered, the sicker and more injured the rabbits appeared to be,” she said.

In fact, I had been prepared to see a fair few rabbits with obvious illnesses - some other blogging visitors sometimes commented on seeing sick looking ones - but as I noted here, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the generally healthy appearance of the great majority of the furry inhabitants.  Compared to what we occasionally see jumping across the road in Australia, the Okunoshima ones seemed particularly fine examples of rabbit-hood.

As for "destroying the ecosystem" - another pleasant surprise was to see that the island looks so well vegetated despite supporting hundreds of rabbits.  Perhaps it's because in Australia wild rabbits have such a environment destroying reputation that I would not have been too surprised if the island featured baron sections chock full of holes, with mangy, starving rabbits lolling about desperate for a feed.   Well, OK, sometimes they are very keen on a feed, but while there are a rabbit divots on the lawn in front of the hotel, it's not the scene of rabbit devastation an Australian might expect, at all.

And did I kill any by feeding them cabbage?:

The tourists, she said, often come bearing cabbage, one of the cheapest vegetables in Japan and a big part of the Japanese diet. Cabbage is a bad food choice for rabbits, as it causes dangerous and potentially deadly bloat. It is also low in fiber, something rabbits require for what DeMello called their “very particular digestive system.”

Hmm.  It's odd, then that there seem to be a few million websites on Google - including from vets - saying that pet rabbits can be fed cabbage, some (but not all) mentioning that some rabbits might get bloat and be a bit cautious in introducing it.

There may well be an element of truth in this report - I wouldn't be surprised if increased tourists numbers has led to a slight population increase - but even then, I know that on a weekday in July, the island was hardly teaming with humans.  (Access being available only by a ferry, there will always be a natural limit on the number of people there each day.) 

Overall, this report just smacks too much of environmental doomsaying from a well intentioned, but exaggerating, animal welfare advocate.  A bit like the American pro-koala advocate years ago who I heard (or read) saying that Australians were hearing the wailing of treeless, dying koalas at night.

The situation for the rabbits and the island may not be ideal, but it doesn't look to me to be as bad as these people claim.

Update:  I see from this website that most wild rabbits actually live less than a year (!), although pet ones can last 8 to 10.   If the Okunoshima ones live for 2, they're doing better than average, although I would have guessed they would get closer to the pet rabbit age.   There's lots of interesting wild rabbit facts on that website, incidentally.

Good riddance

Milo Yiannopoulos: Twitter banning one man won’t undo his poisonous legacy | Technology | The Guardian

To be perfectly honest, I didn't even know who Yiannopoulos was until his recent appearance on Andrew Bolt's show.  But reading that he took the "gamers" side on Gamergate (about which I had read enough to have a view), worked for Breitbart, and seemed to primarily be about vacuous self promotion in the "culture war", I soon enough had his measure.  (Why is it that Right wing gay men - such as him, Jim Hoft and - I think no one doubts it - Matt Drudge - seem to be amongst the nastiest and dumbest Right wing culture warriors around?  I find that odd.)

The linked article is not bad in explaining his poison, although I think she's unduly pessimistic about the benefits of his Twitter banning.

Update:  the Vox explainer on the background to his banning is pretty good.  Of course, that Bolt would have him on his show just re-confirms my re-categorisation of him  - "Gone Completely Stupid and Offensive".