Lego movie worry

I thought the first Lego movie was enjoyable enough, without being as great as some people seemed to think.

But last night we watched the Lego Batman Movie, and things have taken a worrying turn for the worse.

Look, it's a funny concept: Lego Batman as a lonely jerk version of the modern brooding Batman, but I thought the execution was terrible. 

The main problem is that visually, the movie is just ridiculously "busy" and cluttered - virtually ever single shot ridiculously full of, well, things.   And as for the extremely rapid action and editing - I saw someone on Rottentomatoes say that it was like Fury Road for 5 year olds,  and that's a pretty good way of putting it.  Maybe the directors (different from the guys who did the first movie) thought they would appeal to the un-medicated ADHD audience, or something, but by half way through I was finding it tedious.   And despite one great idea in the second half (all of the various franchise villains in the Forbidden Zone), it does get less funny as it goes along.

I reckon the Lego team needs to sack whoever was involved in this project (which made $310 million internationally compared to $470 million for the first Lego movie) because I suspect this one mainly gave a headache to parents accompanying their kids to it, and they may well take some convincing to see the next one.

Whoops

Did a Glowing Sea Creature Help Push the U.S. Into the Vietnam War?

News from the war front

Your Saturday dose of paranoia from Catallaxy, where "struth" is one of the most overwrought inmates:

The insanity that we are seeing now will only become worse as those repeated left wing lies are gradually believed (from stolen generations to white privilege, to there being more than two sexes) and then they build on those.
It won’t end until there is a bloody revolution.
Right now, the defenders of the west (men , and mostly white) are being set up as the enemy.
Blah, blah de blah.
We all get this.
We get that they are using a captured institution to do this, the education system.
There is nothing for it except to fight.
The right must realise that this is going to get much worse, and end up with violence and death poured upon us.
You will be pulled from your houses kicking and screaming and will not be heard from again.
This shit doesn’t take a century to occur.
It will be you.
Especially cat commenters.

He's great company at dinner parties, I bet.

6,700 flights per day??

Science magazine has a short article this week on the geoengineering idea of spraying sulphur in the atmosphere to counter global warming.   But read this extract:

Gosh. Is that number of flights correct?

Floating power

This is an impressive photo, from a Time magazine story on China and renewables:

And how's this for the symbolism:

....the world’s largest floating solar farm on a lake formed on top of a collapsed and flooded coal mine just northwest of Anhui province’s Huainan city. A tapestry of 166,000 glistening panels bob and bask below an ochre sun, producing almost enough clean energy to power a large town, as fish break through the inky water all around.

Other photos in the story show that its construction is pretty low tech - the solar cells are on simple plastic floats.

I would have thought that this is a pretty good idea for water storage dams in Australia - I'm sure I've suggested this here years ago.  I don't think there is any substantial risk of polluting the water if some sink, is there?  Furthermore, in a hot area, the coverage might help reduce evaporation, I would have thought.

When am I going to see this on , say, the Wivenhoe dam near Brisbane?

Because sometimes, even stupid arguments have to be answered

It's one of the golden oldies by climate change denialists:  "The climate has always changed.   Nothing to see here - move on."

It has never made sense as an argument, and it can be taken as a reliable sign that any person promoting it has never tried to read about the issue seriously and it will be pointless arguing with them.  

But, just in case you know a denialist who is not beyond reason, and who you can forgive for not already realising how vapid the argument is,   Stefan at Real Climate has set out the detailed rebuttal.  

How women are murdered in America

Again from The Atlantic, some startling figures about women as murder victims in the US:

The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths. Of those, 55 percent were intimate partner violence-related, meaning they occurred at the hands of a former or current partner or the partner’s family or friends. In 93 percent of those cases, the culprit was a current or former romantic partner. The report also bucks the strangers-in-dark-alleys narrative common to televised crime dramas: Strangers perpetrated just 16 percent of all female homicides, fewer than acquaintances and just slightly more than parents.

About a third of the time, the couple had argued right before the homicide took place, and about 12 percent of the deaths were associated with jealousy. The majority of the victims were under the age of 40, and 15 percent were pregnant. About 54 percent were gun deaths.

Black women were most likely to die by homicide of any kind, at 4.4 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Native American women, Hispanics, and finally whites and Asians. Data from earlier reports suggest a far smaller percentage of men—around 5 to 7 percent—were killed by intimate partners.

I'm pretty sure the way women become murder victims is not dissimilar in Australia.

Economics and babies (or lack thereof)

Quite a convincing argument put forward at The Atlantic that all of the "employment flexibility" beloved of the parts of the Right, and which has caused major changes to the way men (in particular) work in Japan, is behind that country's dramatic drop in marriage and making babies.

Update:  I think it's often fair enough to be cynical  of the way Australian unionists and Labor politicians talk about the importance of strongly enforced workplace laws so that workers can have a work/life balance, as well as penalty rates fairly compensating workers for time away from family on weekends, etc.   They can over-egg the argument.

On the other hand, if you look at a country where companies can get away with extraordinary pressure on workers, and implement policies that maximise profit, you can see the harm that removing all sense of employment fairness entails.  

Police shootings in the US

It's common sense to just about all Australians who aren't libertarians that the large number of police shootings in the US is in substantial part due to police having to be always on edge there that they are dealing with an armed person, whether they be legally armed, or not.  But the international comparisons between US police shootings and that in other countries is even more surprising than I expected:

Police officers in the US shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people a year, according to the Washington Post’s database — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Australia, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.

For example, an analysis by the Guardian found that “US police kill more in days than other countries do in years.” Between 1992 and 2011, Australian police shot and killed 94 people. In 2015, US police shot and killed 97 people just in March. These differences are not explained by population, since the US is about 14 times as populous as Australia but, based on the Guardian’s count, has hundreds of times the fatal police shootings.

Low carb not so important as Taubeians claim

For all those who are dedicated believers in Gary Taubes's diet ideas, where carbs are basically evil and you just can't get enough fat and protein in your diet if you want to be healthy, this article at Vox talks about a very rigorous study that indicates that his theory about how low carb diets are supposed to work doesn't really hold up.

I think it's pretty simple:  breads and a lot of other carbs are pretty delicious and part of human diet for so long it's a bit silly to think they are evil.   Just don't eat too much of them.

Blasphemy in the Gulf (again)

At Gulf News:

A businessman, who threatened his former partner and sent him blasphemous and offensive SMSes over a financial dispute, has been fined Dh500,000.
The 39-year-old Lebanese businessman was involved in a business partnership with the Emirati man before they had a financial dispute in October.
After the two men failed to reach an amicable settlement, the Lebanese man sent several SMSes in which he cursed God and threatened the Emirati man.
The 39-year-old sent to the Emirati’s mobile three SMSes in which he offended the latter, threatened to harm him and cursed God as well.

The fine equates to about $172,000 Australia dollars, I think.

Taking offence on campus, revisited

The current problem on (mainly*) American campuses regarding offensiveness is given a going over again at the Atlantic: Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence,  and it puts up a very good argument.

The only misgiving I have about this issue is that I hate the way that the Wingnut Right takes a bad argument by the too-precious-for-reality Left as justification for complete incivility in debate, and for genuinely offensive claims to be made  - it's like the opposite of a virtuous circle. (Which I see Google says is a "vicious circle/cycle.")

* you could say that the recent silliness of the QUT case is an illustration of the same disease, but at least we rarely have riots here of the kind you see in the US over controversial speakers on campuses. 

Beachfront land as a long term investment

Nature reports that the reason for some sea level rise discrepancies in the satellite record has been identified, and indeed, the rate of sea level rise is accelerating:

“The rate of sea-level rise is increasing, and that increase is basically what we expected,” says Steven Nerem, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Colorado Boulder who is leading the reanalysis. He presented the as-yet-unpublished analysis on 13 July in New York City at a conference sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme and the International Oceanographic Commission, among others.

Nerem's team calculated that the rate of sea-level rise increased from around 1.8 millimetres per year in 1993 to roughly 3.9 millimetres per year today as a result of global warming. In addition to the satellite calibration error, his analysis also takes into account other factors that have influenced sea-level rise in the last several decades, such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 and the recent El Niño weather pattern....

 If sea-level rise continues to accelerate at the current rate, Nerem says, the world’s oceans could rise by about 75 centimetres over the next century. That is in line with projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013.

Obamacare as a qualified success

I think Ezra Klein makes a lot of sense here - the only way you can make sense of consistent polling finding that Americans are not approving of Republican plans to replace Obamacare is because it basically works well enough in enough States to make it popular.    (Which is not to say that it is not without its problems.)

Now to an unpleasant subject

Antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea (gosh, it's hard to remember how to spell that word) has been in the news a lot lately, including in the top story on The Age's website (about the number of worrying cases in Australia.)   

As it happens, I also heard the Health Report on Monday evening, which a story about a trial of the use of mouthwash to reduce transmission.   I had heard about that before, but the most surprising thing was this discussion about transmission:

And then there was a second observation that led us towards this mouthwash issue, and that was we saw that gonorrhoea was really common in young gay men but not very common in older gay men. So there must be something different that young gay men were doing, so that led us to a separate study to try and work out what that was, and it was kissing. So young gay men kiss a lot more individuals and don't have sex with them. And when they have sex with them they seem to kiss more than older gay men. And so we thought perhaps it's the throat. And that led us to think, well, if gonorrhoea is being transmitted from throat to throat, perhaps there's something we could do to attack that. And that led us to do some laboratory work on mouthwash.

Denton Callander: So wait a second, are you saying that kissing can transmit gonorrhoea?

Christopher Fairley: It's very hard to work out exactly what act transmits gonorrhoea because they all tend to happen at the same time, but yes that's exactly right. So we can grow gonorrhoea in almost all individuals who've got it in their throat in saliva. So yes, we think that the transmission of saliva through kissing might well transmit gonorrhoea.

Denton Callander: So you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, the throat seems to be a key anatomical site when it comes to gonorrhoea.

Christopher Fairley: Absolutely right. And this is flying in the face of what everyone else has always thought. They've always thought that you transmit gonorrhoea principally involving the penis, putting it into the throat or the vagina or into the anus and that's how it is transmitted, but we think probably that's not the case with sex between men, that it's saliva in the throat that is the key driver of infection.

Bugs really are out to get people, aren't they?   And it would appear that, until now, no one thought that this particular bug was probably being spread in this "safe sex" endorsed way. 

Although the trial is not yet finished, I reckon buying shares in mouthwash producing companies is probably a good idea at the moment.

Why people should worry while Trump is President

I'll copy this Axios post in full, because of the way it illustrates how a dysfunctional White House under a gormless President works:

The Trump administration re-certified yesterday that Iran is in compliance with its nuclear deal, preventing Congress from having to decide whether to levy additional sanctions or scrap the deal in its entirety.

• But it was only after a day-long drama featuring the president's advisers trying to get him to change his mind, I can independently confirm, as reported last night by Peter Baker at the New York Times and this morning by Eli Lake at Bloomberg View.
• The vast majority of the principals — led by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — were in favor of the U.S. staying in the deal. But Trump hates the deal, and the decision goes against Trump's gut instincts.
• Why it matters: It's not just the media that Trump keeps in suspense — he frequently keeps his top advisers guessing on consequential decisions until the last minute. Yesterday's decision shows he's willing to go against his gut instincts, but not without giving his team serious heartburn. Trump re-certified again, but his top advisers are far from confident he'll do it again the next time.

What a worry...

Update:  a lot more detail on why Trump more or less had to give in on this is in this article at Slate.
The campaign promises and claims are falling by the wayside at a pretty fast rate at the moment.  

Sure has that feel about it

The man who crosses Tim Blair's mind every 5 minutes is right:

It's hard to work out what is going on with the Liberals and Coalition at the moment.

For example, Barnaby Joyce has definitely swung in behind Turnbull, as has (I think) former Abbott hard man Morrison.   Yet Barnaby's previous form with Malcolm was precarious, to say the least, as indicated in this extract from an interview that appeared in Fairfax yesterday:

Joyce has also gone toe-to-toe with Malcolm Turnbull which also almost came close to ending with an urgent dentist appointment.

"[We] had a huge blue in the past over the carbon tax. And...Oh, god. Furious argument. Absolutely furious. Shouting, screaming, the whole lot," Joyce said.

"Other people kept a cap on it by getting me out of the room. Bundling me out like I used to do folks [as a bouncer] at the Wicklow. So after that, it was raw but now we respect each other. We work well together. He completely trusts my confidence and I trust his."

My impression is that Turnbull already didn't need to do the Abbott hairy chest imitation with Defence and security to defeat the conservative forces in his party.  But he has anyway.

All a bit strange.... 

Revolutionary rubber

A bit of historical clickbait here at the NYT:

How German Condoms Funded the Russian Revolution

(Actually, the condoms don't feature much in the complicated story of Lenin bouncing around Europe and trying to get himself and funds back into Russia.)

Water music

A short account here at NPR about King George I and his barge trip on the Thames for which Handel wrote his Water Music.  (It's the 300th anniversary of the outing, hence the article.)

It's a wonder it hasn't been recreated for some movie or other.  Or has it?

[Instead of showmanship in front of the military, why doesn't Malcolm Turnbull try a similar exercise on Lake Burley Griffin?   He's got the spare change to pay a composer, too.]

Mark Latham - on board with Trump

I see that Mark Latham is getting rave reviews from the Catallaxy commenters for a column today in which he repeats so many of their favourite themes that  he could replace all of that mob using half a dozen aliases and no one would notice any difference.

It's all there - the Leftist "march through the institutions", cultural Marxism, the glorious Trumpian fight back as an outsider and populist who takes his message directly to the people, the complete disdain for civility in debate (because "they started it").   He even praises Trump for dumping the Paris Accord, when he (Latham) used to be adamant that politicians were foolish to reject climate change.

Getting caught up in the culture wars (which, in reality, has become a grand conspiracy theory believed in on the wingnut side) corrupts good sense and judgement, and Marks's a prime example.

No mention of the chronic lying and repetition of falsehood by Trump;  no mention of his political rise on the back of birtherism and climate change as a Chinese conspiracy;  no concern about repeat stories about how hard it is for anyone to give detailed explanations to him on complex issues; nothing about his less than useful contribution to health care reform; his simplistic understanding of tax, trade and economic policy; his dogwhistling to racism;  etc, etc.

Trump is personally obnoxious to opponents (which essentially means, anyone who criticises him) and on his side in the culture wars, and that's good enough for Mark.

What a loser.