How's that Trump isolationism going?

The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump's young presidency.

Urban planning revisited

Simon Jenkins' take on the Grenfell first sounds a bit extreme...: 

How many times should we say it? Don’t build residential towers. Don’t make or let people live in them, least of all families. They are antisocial, high-maintenance, disempowering, unnecessary, mostly ugly, and they can never be truly safe. No tower is fireproof. No fire engine can reach up 20 storeys, period.

Towers are again raising their heads across the urban landscape, creatures of egotistical architects, greedy developers and priapic mayors. We gasp at their magnificence, their extravagance, their sheer height. Yet like Grenfell they are alien creatures in a British city. They do not converse with their context, they thumb their noses at it.

...but he has a point, at least when it comes to government funded housing for the relatively poor.

I've heard it said elsewhere recently, but high rise is not necessary for high density:

Hence the most “crowded” parts of London are not around towers but in eight-storey Victorian terraces. The boulevards of central Paris have treble London’s residential density without towers. Westminster council’s aborted Paddington Pole, at some 60 storeys, had fewer housing units than the high-density street housing suggested by its opponents. The tall blocks wanted by Boris Johnson for Clerkenwell’s Mount Pleasant estate are at a lower density than the low-rise town houses proposed by the consultants Create Streets.

And, I am also reminded of Kevin McCloud's 2010 documentary on lessons to be learnt about high density living from the Mumbai slums.   And also, how Japan manages to cram in extremely high density but with most residential blocks of relatively limited height. 

What bullet?, and up the Nile

That was some pretty amazing TV, as the ABC journalist in the Philippines gets a neat hole in the neck, and doesn't realise why until he has an x ray.  (Hey, there's a bullet in there.)  If you missed it, you should watch it.

I have also been meaning to recommend the (possibly repeated? - it's from 2010) Joanna Lumley's Nile series that been showing on ABC.   Surely no one could possibly dislike Lumley - or is it just a 50+ male thing that I believe the entire world must surely find her charming?   Anyway, her travel shows are always entertaining and enlightening, and this one where she is travelling right up to the source of the Nile shows her in some very isolated places (Sudan, parts of Ethiopia) way, way off the normal tourist track.  

Last night, where she was visiting a spring that is considered the source of the Blue Nile, and which is considered by the local Christians to be holy water with miraculous curative powers (even curing HIV, according to some type of priest!) was really remarkable.  An earlier episode featuring the old guy on a boat in the Nile who said devils lived around that particular part of the river, and could appear in any animal or human form, and had once set his boat alight, was also remarkable as an example of the grip that old religious/superstitious belief still has in that part of the world.

Good viewing.

Get the boss

Another story of Islamic inspired lawfare, this time in Dubai:

DUBAI: A senior bank manager was arrested last week after a Muslim colleague filed a complaint accusing him of insulting Islam.

E.D. from Goa, India, was taken into custody within hours of the incident at the Bur Dubai branch of a local bank on June 7. He was held at Al Raffa Police station before being released on bail.

The complainant T.A., 30, from Bangalore, India, said his boss E.D. made religious slurs against him and ridiculed Islam when he asked him for leave to go to Makkah for the Umrah piligrimage.

“This happened during our morning huddle. In front of several staff members, E.D. mocked me saying that if I was so keen to perform Umrah then instead of the Kaaba, I may as well take rounds (tawaaf) of his villa in Victory Heights,” T.A. said in an interview with XPRESS.

“I was shocked but I kept my cool and told my boss that he had no right to make such blasphemous comments against my religion but he remained unrepentant and went on to blame Muslims for terror attacks including the recent one in London. He also made jibes at my appearance, particularly my bloodshot eyes. He said they make me look as if I was drunk. I told him they were caused by lack of sleep during Ramadan but he refused to listen and said Ramadan was a month of giving but all that I gave him during Ramadan was pain. The same day I filed a police complaint.”

Violence and politics

The Trump supporting Right, be it in American or Australia is, virtually by definition, too blind and/or stupid to argue with.  

So, after the shooting in Virginia today,  they will bounce off the walls with ridiculous arguments about violence being committed only by the Left, and newspapers critical of Trump having "blood on their hands", while completely and utterly having no problem with Trump repeatedly vilifying Mexicans and other immigrants en mass for political purpose, and barely being able to find time to comment on subsequent racially motivated killings.  

They will not acknowledge the existence of Right wing violence and extremism in the US, and would not read an article such as this one, which appeared recently at PBS  putting some perspective on matters.   The point made:   Islamic extremist attacks have distracted the public (but not Homeland Security) from the very real and ongoing issue of Right wing extremist attacks:

Between 1990 and 2014, the ECDB has identified 38 homicide events motivated by Islamist extremism that killed 62 people. When you include 9/11, those numbers jump dramatically to 39 homicide events and 3,058 killed.

The database also identified 177 homicide events motivated by far-right extremism, with 245 killed. And when you include the Oklahoma City bombing, it rises to 178 homicide events and 413 killed.

Although our data for 2015 through 2017 are still being verified, we counted five homicide events perpetrated by Islamist extremists that resulted in the murders of 74 people. This includes the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, which killed 49 people. In the same time period, there were eight homicide events committed by far-right extremists that killed 27 people.

These data reveal that far-right extremists tend to be more active in committing homicides, yet Islamist extremists tend to be more deadly.

Our research has also identified violent Islamist extremist plots against 272 targets that were either foiled or failed between 2001 and 2014. We are in the process of compiling similar data on far-right plots. Although data collection is only about 50 percent complete, we have already identified 213 far-right targets from the same time period...

  Far-right extremists, who typically harbor anti-government sentiments, have a higher likelihood of escalating routine law enforcement contacts into fatal encounters. These homicides pose unique challenges to local law enforcement officers who are disproportionately targeted by the far right.

A good article.

I also thought Peter Beinart's article in The Atlantic The Blurry Line Between Violence Talk and Violent Action was moderate and balanced and appropriate.

Clean coal, Finkel, etc

To be honest, I've been busy and haven't heard enough about the Finkel review proposal regarding a clean energy target to know whether it's all good, or a bit fanciful.   (My suspicion is that the modelling is a bit fanciful.)   But it has the feeling of "a lot better than nothing" about it, nonetheless.

I am encouraged by the fact that it would seem that the Abbott objections are not getting all that much support from within the party room, and even Barnaby Joyce seems to be giving up the argument and just wants to get this divisive issue behind him.

Could it be that the Coalition is genuinely in a process of permanently sidelining the climate change fake skeptics, lukewarmers and conservative culture warriors for whom a matter of science has become, weirdly and corrosively, an emblematic issue?   I'm starting to get my hopes up...

In the meantime I remain completely skeptical about clean coal, and hope the Coalition does not fund it.

High rise fire

This tragic London apartment tower fire raises the question - what is it that burns so well in a tower block like that?   I reckon that the sight of a high rise almost entirely on fire internally is shocking because I would normally assume that it would mainly be only furnishing and curtains that can really burn well, so shouldn't any fire be readily contained to within one apartment, or at worst, one floor?  

But it obviously doesn't work like that...

I see that there is a Wikipedia entry up for the Grenfell Tower fire already, and it notes this:

In November 2016, a residents organisation, Grenfell Action Group, published online an article attacking KCTMO as an "evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" and accusing the Borough Council of ignoring health and safety laws. The Group suggested that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of [KCTMO]". The group had also published articles criticising fire safety and maintenance practices at Grenfell Tower.^[12][13]

This is going to be in the news for quite a long time, by the sounds.

Magnetic eels

Hey, Norway gets a mention, too:

Now, researchers at the University of Miami and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research have shown that the eels use Earth's magnetic field to determine which direction to swim. In a Norwegian fjord, they placed locally caught glass eels in a mesh container that was suspended from a surface float. A camera recorded the behaviour of the eels and the team found that they tended to swim in a southerly direction at ebb tides. The same glass eels were then placed in a specially designed tank in which they are shielded from external stimuli such as daylight. Magnetic fields were applied to the tank, which effectively rotated the magnetic north–south axis by 90°. During periods of ebb tides, the team found that the eels oriented themselves in a southerly direction as defined by the applied magnetic field. This led them to conclude that the glass eels navigate using Earth's magnetic field in a manner that is linked to the local cycle of tides. This, they believe, could help the eels to use the tides to reach freshwater in rivers. "It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the Earth's magnetic field," says Miami's Alessandro Cresci. "The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals," he adds. "It is also the first observation of glass eels keeping a compass as they swim in shelf waters, and that alone is an exciting discovery."

TV recommendations

*  the "invisible city" series showing on SBS on Sunday nights - where they go underneath various Italian ancient cities and map them in 3D detail with laser scanners - has been really interesting.   Last week's episode, about Rome itself, really surprised me as to the vast extent of ancient, empty quarries underneath it.   (As well the awesomeness of Roman engineering generally.)   You see some of the scanning results at this website, and I'm sure it would still be able to be viewed in the SBS on Demand.

*  Last night's Foreign Correspondent about the large Kerokbokan prison on Bali was pretty fascinating too.  A more or less self run (by the inmates) prison, it seems a remarkably happy and relaxed place, despite serious overcrowding.  (Apparently, the prisoners who never attempt breaking out despite the relatively low tech security arrangements.)   Perhaps it has a not so scary atmosphere because most of the prisoners are just unlucky drug users/couriers/dealers?    Or is it because there is pretty access to drugs within the prison - a point the show did not spend any time explaining?   (With the relaxed looking monthly family days, smuggling drugs in does not look like a problem at all.)

With shows like these, I always feel like chaining News Ltd columnists and whiny Catallaxy economists to a chair and make them watch such quality TV which is unmatched by commercial networks.   Do they want us to only watch fake reality TV contests and pathetic things like shows made about other people watching shows?  

How often do I get to put "lesbians" and "Nazis" in the one post title?

Researcher sheds light on life of lesbians in Nazi Germany

Long story short:  the Nazi's didn't get as worked up about lesbians as they did about gay men.

The systematic persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime has been well documented by historians. The regime's laws explicitly criminalized homosexual acts between men. About 50,000 men were convicted for being homosexuals and between 5,000 and 15,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where up to 60 percent of them died, according to scholars.

But how lesbians fared is less clear. Females were excluded from the law that made homosexual acts illegal. Aside from a few cases that have been uncovered by a handful of scholars in the United States and Germany, little documentation exists describing how the Nazis treated lesbians.

There were still some attempts at prosecutions, though, and the article notes 8 cases on the records where the women were not convicted.  One was particularly odd:

Liu née Holzmann, whose lesbian relationship was also documented in a recent German monograph, struck Huneke as particularly strange. Holzmann was a Jewish lesbian who lived in Nazi Berlin. In 1941, she married a Chinese waiter and received Chinese citizenship, which the police insisted shielded her from deportation to a concentration camp. Once Holzmann's husband became aware of her lesbian relationship, he filed for divorce and contacted the police.

Yet, as in the other three cases, the police opted not to intervene. "It is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship," Huneke wrote.

Magnetic brain rewiring for depression

They should make this available to the threadsters of Catallaxy:

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA is one of a handful of hospitals and clinics nationwide that offer a treatment that works in a fundamentally different way than drugs. The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation, beams targeted magnetic pulses deep inside patients' brains—an approach that has been likened to rewiring a computer.

TMS has been approved by the FDA for treating depression that doesn't respond to medications, and UCLA researchers say it has been underused. But new equipment being rolled out this summer promises to make the treatment available to more people.

"We are actually changing how the brain circuits are arranged, how they talk to each other," said Dr. Ian Cook, director of the UCLA Depression Research and Clinic Program. "The brain is an amazingly changeable organ. In fact, every time people learn something new, there are physical changes in the brain structure that can be detected."

To Norway, again

My interest in Norway is piqued again by an article in the NYT (with some photos too) about the Americans building a new radar on an isolated Norwegian island, and the Russians are not happy about it:

The joint American-Norwegian radar project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and consume substantial amounts of electricity, has infuriated Moscow, which sees it as part of a Pentagon drive to encircle and contain Mr. Putin’s resurgent Russia. The Russian ambassador in Oslo, Norway’s capital, recently warned Norway that it should “not be naïve” about Russia’s readiness to respond.

“Norway has to understand that after becoming an outpost of NATO, it will have to face head-on Russia and Russian military might,” the ambassador, Teimuraz Ramishvili, told Norway’s state broadcaster, NRK. “Therefore, there will be no peaceful Arctic anymore.”

The new radar system at Vardo will merely upgrade an earlier American-built radar system and continue its mission, Morten Haga Lunde, the chief of Norway’s military intelligence agency, said in a cryptic statement last year. That mission, he added, is to track space debris like defunct satellites and to “monitor our national area of interest in the North.”

But Russia’s generals and many Norwegians have dismissed the space-trash story. They say they believe that the new Globus 3 radar is part of the Pentagon’s efforts to develop a global missile-defense system, making it a prime target for attack in the event of a conflict.

Send in the cows

How do you start a dairy industry overnight in a wealthy desert nation with its transport links blockaded? You buy 4,000 cows from Australia and the U.S. and put them on airplanes.

That is what Qatari businessman Moutaz Al Khayyat told Bloomberg he is doing. The airlift will require as many as 60 flights on Qatar Airways, but Al Khayyat said, "This is the time to work for Qatar."

Here's the link.

Putin on the risk (to the tune of...never mind)

There's a pretty decent article on why Putin is probably feeling pretty cheery about how things are going for Russian influence at the Interpreter, and one odd bit in particular I wanted to extract:

Taking into account all of the above, it seems remarkable that some foreign commentators still find it difficult to see that Putin has been engaged in an all-out attempt to bring his Western enemies down, by whatever means. If 'enemy' seems excessive, let us recall that the standard KGB expression for the US during the Cold War was 'chief adversary', and that until quite recently the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Patrushev, was claiming publicly that US hostility to Russia was 'systemic' and 'immanent' – that is, no matter who was president, the US would continue to seek to 'dismember' Russia.

As Robert Horvath noted in an unpublished address to the Pacific Institute in February (cited here with permission), the most lurid specimen of this propaganda is the allegation that Madeleine Albright once said it would be impossible to construct a just world while Siberia's vast natural resources were controlled by Russia alone. That allegation was first aired in an interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta with a former KGB general about an occult secret project to read the minds of Western leaders. This project was the source of the Albright-Siberia claim.

So one bit of notorious Russian fake news has started from their secret mind reading projects? Huh.  How more "fake news" can you get?

And for a tale of Putin and strong suspicions of his knowledge of hits on Russians who have crossed the interests of Russia:  there's a rather interesting report on Buzzfeed about a death in Britain in 2012 which everyone, apart from the British, think is highly suspicious.  The British investigation does sound rather, shall we say, oddly lacking in curiosity.

I see that I still haven't managed to fit the word "risk" into the post in order to justify the attempted musical pun in the title.  Well, here's a Bloomberg article from early 2016:  Putin is a Compulsive Risk Taker. Hey, it's the best I can do.

Unwanted movie review

In my never ending search to find more than one A grade movie on the Stan streaming service, I watched the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Nightcrawler last weekend.  It got a 95% rating on Rottentomatoes, which just goes to show how unreliable it can be.   (Metacritic gave it a much more reasonable 76%, but I would put it much lower than that.)

It's a very peculiar movie, seemingly made mainly to show off Jake's earnest ability to make himself look physically quite awful and act as really oddball sociopath.   A mix of Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) and Nathan (from Nathan for You - the somewhat amusing but disorientating comedy series also on Stan - you should try it), the role is very menacing and cringingly funny, but it doesn't ever really dramatically build up to much. 

Thematically,  it did keep reminding me of Network,  not that I particularly enjoyed that movie either. 

Good acting in search of a good story, I would say.   4.5/10.   

Addictions of the religiously conservative

For a socially conservative religion, it sure sometimes seems that Muslims have quite the problem with drug addiction.   Although, to be a little bit fair when I don't really want to be, I suppose you could have said the same thing about Catholic Ireland's reputation for overindulging in alcohol.  Which leads me to this extract from a paper talking about the Irish and their reputation for heavy drinking:

Mind you, I should be targetting the Scots instead, perhaps - look at this per capita consumption of spirits table from the same paper:

Gosh.

Batman, too considered

I have to say, prompted by all the commentary appearing with the passing of Adam West (who seemingly was a nice enough, self-effacing fellow), that the amount of words devoted to analysis of his 1960's lightweight show is rather excessive.   The show was mildly amusing for children and adults, but was not all that culturally significant.  You can stop talking about it now...

A mentally unhealthy blog

The threads of Catallaxy, which have become a self selecting support group for the perpetually angry conservative, culture warrior Right, have long made me suspect that many who cyber-live there have, at least, actual personality defects, if not more serious mental health issues.

Yesterday, one of their regulars spoke seriously about feeling depressed and angry to such an extent that he recognises he has a problem, but does not know how to address it.  (He is a teacher, and doesn't trust antidepressants, based on how he has seen them affect children.)

Well, the responses did indeed surprise me, to the extent that so many "regulars" did volunteer that  they have had serious issues with depression - with several mentions of suicidal thoughts and bouts on antidepressants.  (Most of whom indicate they have recovered, of course, although some made it clear it was a continuing battle to some extent.   One of the more unpleasant regulars said he had more or less been born depressed - I can believe that, and would add in "angry" - and was fanatical about exercise as a way of battling it.)

Now I am not wanting to mock those who have bouts of depression, however caused, and of course there be would abundant numbers of people on the Left who have suffered from it as well.

But it does strike me that living your mental life in a perpetually angry Right wing echo chamber, and one which is undoubtedly in denial on several major culture war issues (climate change, and that the younger generation accepts changing marriage to include gay relationships, to give the two clearest examples), is actually not a mentally healthy place to be in the long run, if you are inclined towards depression.

The relief they may feel that "I'm not the only one who thinks like this" has to be off set by the fact that it encourages them to continue denying reality, and thus leading to frustration that, if so many can (apparently) agree with them in this corner of cyberspace, what is wrong with the rest of society?   The site reinforces their sense of anger, ultimately, but based in large part on a denial of reality.

Thus I say that Sinclair Davidson's blog is not only a corrosive one for civil political discussion, it's probably mentally unhelpful for its own community, in the long run.   

Update:  just to show I am not making up the startling outpouring of admissions of past depressive illnesses, here's what the recent depression sufferer has noted today:

All completely normal..not

Much well deserved mockery of Trump's "you must pledge your allegiance to me and proclaim how brilliantly I am performing" public cabinet meeting.

Seriously, no amount of culture war warrior-ing, or just shrugging shoulders and saying "we can work around him to get policy we want"  can excuse defending this fragile, narcissistic ego as normal or nothing to worry about in a leader with the power of POTUS.  

And as for Newt Gingrich, who is credited with starting the Republicans decent into "let's win at all costs, who cares about evidence based policy" stupidity,  his reversal within a month just shows how incredibly shallow and untrustworthy he is.  Just like his President.

Bring back the old Conversation

Can I say, I don't care for the way The Conversation is going under its new leadership, with headline articles like this:

Not merely costume: the power and seduction of the Queen’s hats