How ludicrous can he get?

I refer to Steve Kates, Trump cultist, who seems to honestly believe that as soon as the Presidency changed, every economic indicator was obviously due to incredible awesome powers of Trump.   And that everything under Obama was crushingly bleak:

The parlous state that Obama left the American economy in will require an astonishing amount of luck combined with a great deal of very well constructed policy to move past. You do know that in the entire eight years Obama was president, the US economy on not a singe occasion achieved a growth rate as high as 3%. Trump has now achieved it twice, with more to come. Obama even inherited the recovery phase following the GFC which is almost invariably an economy’s period of strongest growth since part of what happens is the recovery of ground lost during the recession. Instead, there were eight years of low growth and stagnant employment. There is not an economic story to tell to his credit, even with interest rates at near zero and public spending at an all-time high, which in standard economic theory are a good thing. Of course, both are harmful to an economy’s prospects but don’t expect your friend to know it or believe it if you tell him.

But why take my word for it. Here is Conrad Black pointing out that Trump is already the most successful U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. And as you can see from the beginning of this excerpt, he is not PDT’s greatest admirer, but even so:

Conrad Black!  Kates is outsourcing his economic analysis to the ex con who been writing odes of  praise for Trump for, what, years? 

monty:  how can you resist not telling Kates he's an embarrassment to his profession?

A New Zealand themed post

*  SBS on Demand has the popular New Zealand movie Boy, made by writer/director/actor Taika Waititi, available for viewing at the moment.  I had not seen it before.   There's a lot to like about:  it looks great for a small budget film; the child actors are excellent and quite charming; and it has a real sense of place.  On the downside, the story doesn't have much propelling it forward, and a clearer change in Waititi's character by the end might have been welcome.  But overall there's something about some of its imagery, scenes and music that made it rattle around in my dreams, and in my mind throughout today, after watching it last night.   That's always a sign of a good movie - when it clings to your brain, even if you don't quite understand why.

* Taika Waititi is, presumably, very happy with how many people have seen and liked Thor: Ragnarok.   it's been out for all of 16 days and will probably have taken over $700 million internationally.   I wonder if he gets a percentage of the take? Incidentally, I was surprised to see in Boy that there is a section where his character talks about the Incredible Hulk, which seems quite prescient.

I am happy to read that he is wanting to make a spinoff to What We Do In the Shadows, concentrating on the werewolves (not swearwolves.)   A clip of the vampire/werewolf confrontation, which amuses me more than it probably should, is here:



*  Well, that's a bit sad:  I see on IMDB that James Rolleston, the lead actor in Boy, made a couple of other movies, but was in a serious car accident in 2016 which involved some pretty major brain injury.   New Zealand media says that he has had to undergo a lot of rehabilitation, which sounds like is ongoing.  He was only recently sentenced for a dangerous driving charge from the indicent.Sounds unclear as to whether he will make a full recovery.

*  On a more serious note, Ed Yong writes at The Atlantic about how New Zealand conservationists who want to try to eradicate all rats and other introduced mammals are very keen on a kind of scary CRISPR technique called gene drives to spread extinction causing genes (for infertility, for example) throughout the rat population.  

I don't know:  getting rid of stoats I can understand; rats I feel sorry for, even if they like bird eggs.   I just can't see that it is worthwhile using gene modification techniques that could risk accidentally eradicating rats worldwide.  That would make for some major ecological changes, surely.   

A fake, I'd say...

On the public's understanding of Brexit

The SMH has a report about how badly Brexit is going, with experts complaining that the public, which apparently in polls still narrowly supports it, just don't understand what's involved:

Menon says the public wrongly equate a "no-deal Brexit" with the status quo. "They think 'no deal' is going to buy a car and you don't like the car so you come back with the car you have. They don't think it means they blow you up inside the old car."

Now this is disgusting

I've been meaning to post about this for some weeks, after I saw a bit of NRA TV on some site or other, with a talking head woman going on about this topic, as Time explains:

The overriding message is that the NRA identity is under attack. There’s a tone of simmering indignation and a sense of persecution that curdles into hostility toward government, media and other cultural institutions. “Their hateful defiance of [Trump’s] legitimacy is an insult to each of us,” Loesch says in one video. “But the ultimate insult is that they think we’re so stupid that we’ll let them get away with it.”

Yes, the NRA is encouraging people to arm themselves because Trump is "under attack" - it seemed as clear as day to me that it was a call for people to arm themselves for a coming civil war, except they are careful enough not to use the words "coming civil war".    And yet the danger of this pandering to armed paranoia is largely ignored by the media and politicians.

The liberals in America ought to be calling this out as dangerous and disgusting.

Getting a bit hysterical now

I've never followed the career of Al Franken closely:  I think as a comedian I probably would not have liked him - just a hunch, really.

But it seems to me that the reaction of liberal outlets Slate, Vox, Axios (many stories on it making it seem the biggest sex scandal that has ever hit Washington), and a columnist at Wapo,  is a bit hysterical.

In short - it isn't 100% clear that his fingers are actually touching her breasts , in fact, given the risk of her waking up if touched, I would say it's more likely they weren't.   It's a poor taste photo "joke":  it's not clearly sexual assault.

As for the kiss - her key complaint is that, in a public venue (backstage, where presumably there was little  risk it could advance to any further form of sexual advance without anyone seeing it), he pestered her into a kiss rehearsal and then used tongue.

Look, forced tongue would obviously be gross and unsettling; but it's also true that there are degrees of tongue and who knows whether it was fully engaged as she claims.  

She says she pushed him away and was upset and told him never to do it again.  Good.

Of course such behaviour (let's assume a clearly engaged deep tongue) is not "acceptable";  at the same time, it's getting a bit out of hand when commentators immediately call for resignation when a woman claims too much tongue in her mouth 10 years ago in a rehearsal.  This is not the same as the office staff suddenly been put upon by the boss.  As she explains:

Franken had written some skits for the show and brought props and costumes to go along with them. Like many USO shows before and since, the skits were full of sexual innuendo geared toward a young, male audience.

As a TV host and sports broadcaster, as well as a model familiar to the audience from the covers of FHM, Maxim and Playboy, I was only expecting to emcee and introduce the acts, but Franken said he had written a part for me that he thought would be funny, and I agreed to play along.

Get a grip, people. 

Look, what will happen if Franken is a general sleeze who has forced himself onto women repeatedly is that there will be other women coming forward, and that's when it will get to "call for immediate resignation" territory.    And I appreciate that Franken has brought this upon himself by being the liberal hero on allegations made against Republican figures.

But still, I say the reaction to this incident alone is going over the top.

The peculiar story of modern Japanese housing

I've occasionally talked about this to Australian friends (how the attitude to domestic housing in Japan is very different from that in Australia, and perhaps most other countries), and it's good to see that my understanding was correct, as all explained at length in this very detailed article at The Guardian:

Most of those houses built in the 60s are no longer standing, having long since been replaced by newer models, finished with fake brick ceramic siding in beiges, pinks and browns. In the end, most of these prefabricated houses – and indeed most houses in Japan – have a lifespan of only about 30 years.

Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.

The article notes that there is a bit of a movement towards renovation rather than demolition now, but it's still nothing like the renovation industry in other countries.

The good thing about this peculiar aspect to housing is that, for the Western buyer who isn't so fussed about the age of a house, and provided they don't need to live in one of the large cities, you can buy houses very, very cheaply in much of the country.  That's assuming you want to use in it yourself, I suppose, as you don't really buy them as an investment.

Cow wars

More on the situation with "cow vigilante" groups in India at Reuters:

A Reuters special report this month investigated the vigilantes, who snatch cows from Muslims whom they are convinced intend to slaughter the animals. It is an accusation that inflames passions in a Hindu majority nation, where many consider the animal sacred and killing cows is outlawed in most states. 

The reporting process revealed some fresh details about a rising tide of religious nationalism in India, beyond the country’s booming stock market and rising direct foreign investment. Interviews with just two of the Hindu-led groups found they’d seized some 190,000 cows, at times working with police, since Modi took office. 

Relations between right wing Hindus and Muslims is not great, it seems:

As reporter Zeba Siddiqui interviewed a local head of a right-wing Hindu group, the man paused and asked: “You’re Muslim, right?” Siddiqui said she was. 

The man began to rant: “It is in their religious books that you should kill non-believers, and that you should kill and eat animals. What kind of holy book says that? The Gita (a Hindu holy scripture) doesn’t. I don’t have a problem with the religion, but the people who follow it.” 

Siddiqui asked whether the man was saying he disliked all Muslims. He did not answer the question.

Stuck in the 1970's

This analysis by Yglesias at Vox about the problem with the Republican tax plan debate sounds basically credible to me:

The tax reform debate is stuck in the 1970s

Tax reform is lining up like this: Republicans want big, business-friendly tax cuts to spur savings and investments while Democrats complain it’ll blow a hole in the deficit. These terms of debate made sense 30 to 40 years ago. Back then, the economy was stuck in a particular kind of rut. With inflation high and profits low, companies weren’t investing and creating new jobs even as a torrent of new workers was flooding the labor force. Very high interest rates lurked in the background. 

Both Republicans and Democrats agreed this nexus of issues was a problem, so they had a debate over what to do. There were ideological disagreements about the prescription but consensus on the diagnosis. In his first term, Ronald Reagan implemented the conservative prescription. In his second term, the much-lauded bipartisan 1986 tax reform bill represented a reasonable high-minded compromise of the two poles of the debate. 

But today is different. Corporate profits are high, not low. Inflation is low, not high. The workforce is growing slowly, not quickly. Borrowing is cheap, not expensive. 

Everything about the situation has changed— except the tax policy debate. And the result is that Congress’ No. 1 priority has almost nothing to do with the biggest problems facing the country.

So there was some sort of survey result yesterday?

 Some quick observations:

*  participation rate was higher than I expected.

* that means it was pretty accurate, and it did match polling quite closely.     Newspoll in September had this result:

The proportion of voters who support same-sex marriage now stands at 57 per cent, compared to 63 per cent in August and 62 per cent in September last year.
The no vote has lifted to 34 per cent, from 30 per cent in August and 32 per cent a year ago.
About nine per cent are uncommitted.

So, the Australian government spent $100 million to work out that Newspoll is pretty accurate.   Congratulations...

*  I wonder how the 20% who didn't vote would have gone if voting had been part of compulsory election voting.   Very hard to say - this article at The Conversation talks about that.

*  Further on that theme:  it's funny how non compulsory voting enables a different slant on things, isn't it?  The "best" that the conservatives/cynics on this issue (like me!) can argue is that of the total eligible voting population, it was actually only about a 49% yes vote and a 30% no vote.    Yet a 60/40 split in those who did vote enables people to call it an "over-whelming" yes vote.   (You see the same in government elections overseas, of course.)   Admittedly, you would have to say that compulsory voting would have sent the yes vote well over the 50%, but still, let's not get too carried away with the "overwhelming" adjective.   For me, for something like this, I would hold back "over-whelming" for something like a 65 plus vote.  

*  I think everyone is surprised by the strength of the No vote across a swathe of Western Sydney electorates.  What a divided city.   Fortunately, we live in a country where riots over social issues rarely happen.   So a bunch of Labor politicians are at some risk of annoying their electorates by voting Yes.   I suppose they can always say "look, doesn't make any practical difference if you were to say that all members should vote according to their electorate result, as if we did that, it would still mean only 17 No votes in the House.   Just live with it."  

*  Kind of amusing anyway how many, many National Party electorates went for "Yes", though.   Queensland was different in that regard, with two huge outback electorates going "No".    It does just confirm that Queenslanders can be very "different" in voting  patterns; but in most respects, not in a good way.  (I'm talking the ridiculous prospect of One Nation getting some power in Queensland parliament again in the next election.  High temperature just does something to the voting brain, I am sure.)

Fundamentalist dating theory

Slate notes that there is one corner of American faith for which Roy Moore wanting to date teenage girls was not an unusual idea:

But there’s a group of Moore’s allies for whom the basic idea of an unmarried older man “courting” a teenage girl is not anathema at all—fundamentalist home-schoolers. Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, who endorsed Moore in the contested Republican primary and has spoken at his rallies, told an audience in 2009 that girls should marry when they’re “about 15 or 16.” Moore has appeared several times on a radio show hosted by Kevin Swanson, an ultra-conservative Colorado pastor who defended Robertson's notion that girls should be marrying at 15 because it helps them avoid sexual sin.

Moore has an even deeper relationship with Doug Phillips, a disgraced leader in the “Biblical patriarchy” movement. Phillips was president of Vision Forum, a Texas-based organization devoted to the “restoration of the Christian household.” In Phillips’ world, men ought to be self-sufficient by the time they marry, but women live under their father’s authority until they marry. Ideally, in fact, a woman would live under her father’s literal roof until her wedding day. Phillips promoted the concept of “stay-at-home daughters,” in which girls live at home until they marry, often forgoing formal education and focusing on homemaking skills. Independence is essentially a flaw in a Christian wife, who, Phillips taught, should be willing to call her husband “Lord.”

Gee.  

Of general interest

*   From an interview at NPR, here's the charming explanation of the Duffer Brothers (the creators and sometime director/writers of Stranger Things) of how they co-write:

Matt: A lot of our work is actually done on Google Docs, and so we don't speak to each other. It's a really weird thing where we're both on headphones, not talking, and just typing on the same document at the same time.

We're in the same room, same office. We have separate desks. We're not, like, literally right next to each other, because we'd probably punch each other every once in a while, so it's good there's a little bit of physical distance.

We'll get into Google Doc wars, where I type a line of dialogue or an idea for the scene — he'll delete it. I'll go write it back in — he'll delete it again. And then the headphones come off and then we actually have to have a conversation about it. So it's a little ridiculous.

* The BBC has an item about a small Siberian (I think) town which apparently has the record  for the highest temperature range (-68 degrees C in winter to 37 degrees in summer), but my impression is it spends a lot more time frozen than hot.  Here's how they live:

Blocks of ice are cut from the river and delivered to villagers for water.
Each house has its own stock of water stored outside in stacks of ice blocks.
The blocks are then melted inside the house.
Running water, which moves at very high temperatures to prevent the pipes from freezing, is not drinkable.
Temperatures are so low that some details of daily life take another dimension here:

• batteries last only a few minutes
• pen ink freezes before writing
• it becomes dangerous to wear metal glasses

The locals also let their cars run all day, afraid they might not restart until spring.
Armed with thick fur and a layer of fat grown during the autumn, the horses and the dogs of the village spend the winter outside in these freezing temperatures.
The yakut horse is small and resistant, little domesticated and raised mainly for meat.
It holds a great place in the life, economy and spirituality of the Siberians.

There are lots of photos, and the town looks about as bleak as you might expect.   

*  The Guardian talks about the financial failure of Blade Runner 2049, and lots of readers comment about whether they enjoyed it or not.   Some did, but I think the majority has issues with it, as did I.

*  There seems to be some suspicion that Justice League is not going to be very well reviewed.  I thought it looked pretty awful on the trailer.

*  A pill that tells your distant doctor via your mobile phone that it's been taken?  And it's an anti-psychotic?   Um, doesn't the very concept seem likely to encourage paranoia in those who already fear they are being secretly monitored?

Koch history

I just was doing a Google of the Koch Brothers, and turned up this bit of history.  (Perhaps I had read about it before, but forgotten):

The Kochs may be following in the footsteps of their father Fred Koch.  As New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer has detailed, Koch Sr. made the family fortune by working for Stalin helping to build 15 Soviet oil refineries. The experience made him virulently anti-communist and anti-“big government” in general, but these beliefs did not seem to stand in the way of making money.

Fred Koch would later go on to help Hitler’s Third Reich build an important oil refinery that had to be taken out by the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.

Going to the New Yorker article from 2010, I see that Fred Koch went from helping one of the worst Communists in history to being a anti communist to a nutty degree at home:

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

What a family dynasty, hey Jason?   His sons have more moderate views than their father - all they want to ensure they is that they can make money before their oil burning puts Florida, New York, Bangladesh, etc under 10 m of water....  



*A reference to their recent investment in a Chinese company, which is what the article is mainly about.

The culture wars have become very, very weird

I refer to two things:

*  Milo Yiannopoulos and his Australian tour, which I see is presented by Penthouse (Australia and NZ).   (Why?)   This is a screenshot of his sales site:

Who on earth would pay $90 plus, let alone $295, to meet this twit?    And the meet and greet starts at 11.45 pm.  ? 

I like the way the venue is secret 'til a week out, meaning that the "sold out" shows may be the 30 seat conference room in the back of the CBD Ibis Hotel, for all we know.

And yet, because he talks about how terrible "SJW's" and feminists are, he has the support of crossover conservatives/alt.righters, and Andrew Bolt, regardless of his apologia for older gay men who "mentor" young teen gay guys, as he plainly did in the now infamous interview that took an unusually long time to be publicised.  (Not that he's apologising for that any more, as far as I can tell.)

* Roy Moore in the US.   It seems hard to credit that there could be more evangelical support for him, after the first round of allegations about his unusual habit, as a 30 something year old, of dating/sexually assaulting teenage girls.   Maybe, after the latest claim, from a woman who says she is a Trump voter, they will actually start to wonder?    Or is it more that, the ways things are currently perversely working, a sex video of him with a 16 year old could only help strengthen evangelical support?    (After all, the Lord's mother might have only been that age, I can hear them say.) 

Talk about a religious group shooting their moral credibility in the foot over the last couple of years.

Axios says Rand Paul is the only Senator still endorsing him (!).   Maybe he has concussion or something affecting his judgement, or is it just a example of why libertarians can't get much of a foothold in the US government when their figureheads are lacking common sense?

The funniest thing was the report a day or two ago that Breitbart (read "Bannon") sent out two reporters to Alabama to try to discredit the claims, when in fact since then the reports have become worse and worse.

Fail, Bannon.   A complete fail.

Yet more disarray

Another Senator gone (Lambie). 

I think an election clean out of the entire Parliament is feeling more warranted every day...

Today's Freudian trivia

From a very short book review in Nature:

Sigmund Freud's first paper involved the dissection of eels in an attempt to locate their testes. To his frustration, Freud failed to find any.

I encourage all readers to attempt to slip that into workplace or household conversation today.

Update:  because I'm curious, I had to look up more about Freud's hunt for (eel's) testicles.  Here it is:

As they say with young people, Freud may not have known enough to know how futile this task would be when employed by a nondescript Austrian zoological research station. It was his first job, he was nineteen-years-old, and it was 1876. He dissected approximately 400 eels, over a period of four weeks, and he worked in an environment that the New York Times described as “Amid stench and slime for long hours”. His ambitious goal was to write a breakthrough research paper on the animal’s mating habits that had confounded science for centuries. One has to imagine that a more seasoned scientist may have considered the task futile much earlier in the process, but an ambitious, young nineteen-year-old, looking to make a name for himself, was willing to spend long hours slicing and dicing these eels, hoping to achieve an answer that could not be disproved.

Unfortunate for young Freud, and perhaps fortunate for the future of Psychology, we now know that eels don’t have testicles, until they need them. The products of Freud’s studies must not have needed them at the time he studied them, for Freud ended up writing that his total supply of eels were “of the fairer sex”. Freud did write that research paper over time, but it detailed his failure to locate the testicles. Some have said that he correctly predicted where the testicles should be, and that he argued that the eels he received were not mature eels. The result was that he did not find the testicles, and he moved onto other areas as a result. The question that anyone reading the psychological theories Freud would write later in life, has to ask, in conjunction with this knowledge, is how profound was this failure on the rest of his research into human sexual development? 

 The blog writer goes on with a lot of questions about whether Freud's obsession with human psycho-sexual development was a case of unconscious over compensation for being unable to locate eel's testicles.   It's an interesting thought...

A lyric misheard for a very long time

Something else happened on the weekend - after hearing someone singing it live, I realised that I had misheard the chorus and title of a rather popular pop song as "Valerie" instead of "Out of Reach".  The song's only been out since 1999, give me a break.   I thought it sounded an odd way of singing "Valerie" but I genuinely had no inkling that it was actually 3 words, not one.   

I see that at least one other man in his 50's had been hearing it the same way.   Maybe it's a Dad thing.

The great inconsistency

It occurred to me over the weekend:   don't zombie cultist Trump worshippers, like Steve Kates, find that their simultaneous beliefs that:

a.   Trump is right and doing God's work in wanting a better relationship with Russia (well, Putin) because Russia/Putin and the US could do good work together;  AND

b.   that Hilary Clinton and the FBI and Obama did the worst possible thing in the world and should be locked up because they let the Russians get control some (overinflated) amount of US uranium

are not exactly consistent, at least with respect to the view of Russia inherent in those positions?

I hope that's a real tweet..

I suppose that, as the world ends, at least we'll be laughing grimly about how it happened...

Update:  so sue me, I hadn't been following this fake twitter thing closely.  Still pretty funny.

Just vote Liberal Democrats and shut up

Another day, another Tim Blair whine about the ABC operating on government money.

Look, there is at least one Party with pretensions to power that wants the ABC privatised as soon as possible - the Liberal Democrats.   Given that the fact that ABC funding support is seemingly the most important, gut wrenching issue in the daily life of Tim Blair, why doesn't he just continually support the Leyonhjelm outfit for this reason alone (if not others - Blair really wouldn't seem to have any issue with that party's policies, I reckon), and blog about something else.