The silly Senator

Where's Jason lately?   Because I'd like to know his reaction to this:

Senator Leyonhjelm to bring Milo Yiannopoulos to Parliament House

I've always said Leyonhjelm had no good judgement.  This is just further evidence.

A good spice

If you go this page, you'll see an article about cinnamon possibly being useful in burning up fat.  But look to the left - there's a bunch of other articles of hopeful cinnamon health effects, too: from Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, and liver health too!

And, of course, tumeric seems to be having its day in the fad sun, with vendors of a tumeric tea type drink to be found around shopping centres lately.

Seems that some spices are "hot" at the moment, in the matter of health.

More Yglesias

I'm finding Matthew Yglesias's explanations on economics to be rather like Greg Jericho's in Australia:  neither are economists (I think) but both have a convincing way of explaining economics issues.

Hence, Yglesias's article on the likely effect of the Republican's desired tax cuts sounds about right to me.

Pandamania

I strongly recommend that the gentle reader make haste to view a series of cute and kooky looking photos of pandas, many also featuring Chinese carers dressed as said animal, in this charming feature in The Atlantic.   An example:

I know that Star Trek IV featured aliens coming to Earth to find out what had happened to their favourite animals, the humpback whales, but I think it more likely that it would be this charming, but  inept, creature that looks like it was dropped off here for safekeeping 10,000 years ago...

A funny Travel Man

Yay:  SBS Viceland (I think) is showing another series of Travel Man, and they are up on SBS on Demand.

While Richard Ayoade is never unwatchable, some episodes are funnier than others, depending to an extent on the person he's travelling with.

The episode we watched last night, in Valencia (a gorgeous looking place to visit, incidentally), with a female comedian who I am not familiar with, struck me as particularly funny.   The paella cooking lessons were a highlight for my amusement:

Yes, pretty amusing (and sort of encouraging)

Spotted on Twitter:

Premier pro-Trump website in Australia is run by Sinclair Davidson

I see that the increasingly potty Rafe Champion, who used to respected enough to have blogging rights at Club Troppo, has been utterly convinced by a book by Newt Gingrich (who more sensible people blame for starting the rapid, poisonous decline in the dynamics of American politics) that Trump is just a great, salt-of-the-earth, man-of-the-people sorta guy, with remarkable political talent.

So Sinclair Davidson, libertarian and Trump skeptic himself, now hosts two of our nations most gullible and slavishly pro-Trump commentators on Catallaxy.   Sure, he has one (maybe two?) anonymous contributors who put the boot into Trump occasionally, but the blog commenters run about 90% in favour of Trump, I reckon.

I don't know how Davidson reconciles himself to the fact that running a supposedly libertarian/centre right blog has been taken over by the most wingnutty/conservative voices in the country.

The only - and I mean only - unifying thing about anyone who regularly participates at that blog is that they all know climate change is a crock.

Aliens any day now

I'm not sure how accurate this estimate could be, given that this is the first interstellar asteroid/alien star destroyer detected swanning through the solar system, but The Guardian reports:

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.Surprisingly, they calculate that another 10,000 could be closer to the sun than the eighth planet, Neptune, which lies 30 times further from the sun than the Earth. Yet these are currently undetected.

Each of these interstellar interlopers would be just passing through. They are travelling too fast to be captured by the gravity of the sun. Yet it still takes them about a decade to cross our solar system and disappear back into interstellar space.

If this estimate is correct, then roughly 1,000 enter and another 1,000 leave every year – which means that roughly three arrive and three leave every day.

Presumably, this means that, despite decades of attempts to detect asteroids around the solar system, we could find that on any day of the week one that comes from interstellar space does a braking burn and our alien overlords will have arrived.  

The asteroid that looked suspiciously like a spaceship

I posted as soon as I read about that interstellar asteroid that zoomed in and out of the solar system last month because I thought that it may well be a spaceship instead.

Lo and behold, the observations made in a rush as it left the solar system indicate this:

Karen Meech explains the significance: "This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape. We also found that it has a dark red colour, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it."

These properties suggest that `Oumuamua is dense, possibly rocky or with high metal content, lacks significant amounts of water or ice, and that its surface is now dark and reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over millions of years. It is estimated to be at least 400 metres long.

and the artists impression is this:

which seems to me, if you add more red, to be a fair approximation to this:

That's one of the versions of Red Dwarf, for those who don't know.

As usual, someone else on the 'net has probably already made the comparison - because it does seem kind of obvious to nerds.

Tim Wilson - migration skeptic?

Judith Sloan has been whinging about migration for a while now (a couple of years?)   She thinks there's too many and that they don't really bring economic benefits that others claim.   She has a column in The Australian today making her arguments, in which she seems to concede they may have a small net economic benefit.  

Seems her gripes are exaggerated to me.  Where does she live, Melbourne?   Migrant neighbours bothering her, I wonder?

And then, to my surprise, Tim Wilson comes out in support of her views today:

What is it with these small government, IPA types getting into quasi One Nation migration whinging?

It's very peculiar.

That doesn't seem very sporting of God

Some researchers have studied flu infection rates in Middle Eastern countries with the timing of the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, and Hanukkah in Israel, and the results look very clear:

You'd think they would have done this sort of study before, but apparently Saudi Arabia doesn't like to play ball by providing its figures.  So this is for 6 neighbouring countries, plus Israel.

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.