Just a reminder

This is what "there is no evidence of global warming" [Steve Kates - who likes to keep an open mind on whether Soros and the Bushes are currently being interrogated at Gitmo] looks like:

Funny because it's true

I thought Allahpundit at Hot Air made a witty comment when discussing the "Trump ordered Mueller sacked" story:

Trump reportedly planned to justify the firing on grounds that Mueller had three separate conflicts of interest, one of which was, uhhhhhh, a dispute over golf fees when he used to play at Trump’s course in Virginia. I like to imagine McGahn literally curling up into the fetal position on his office floor when he heard Trump float that idea.

(McGahn being the White House counsel who dissuaded Trump by threatening to resign if Trump insisted on this happening.)

I also see that my occasional Catallaxian visitor JC thought it was "fake news".   Good call, JC, given that Fox News confirmed the story during Hannity's show.

And I see that it turns out that Trump didn't want to go to Davos to call everyone in the room poopy heads, as at least half the world thought might be his motivation.  From Vox:

His criticism of free trade was cast not in the crude terms he’s used in the past — “we can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” — but as a sort of tinkering at the edges designed to make free trade work for everyone. “We support free trade,” he said, “but it needs to be fair and it needs to be reciprocal because in the end, unfair trade undermines us all.”

Trump even signaled openness to rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an East Asian trade agreement that he withdrew the US from in one of his first acts as president. “We would consider negotiating with [TPP countries], either individually or perhaps as a group, if it is in the interests of all,” he said. ...

This morning was a clear victory for the conventional members of the Trump administration — National Economic Council Chair Gary Cohn, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — who have long been pushing Trump in this direction. With Steve Bannon out of the administration and marginalized, the highest-level policy advisers in the Trump administration generally do not share the president’s instinctive hostility toward the global order — and today, it showed.

Will this stick? That’s impossible to say with a president this mercurial.

Talk about your puppet president, so highly dependent on the matter of which advisers are currently in his good books, which is highly dependent on never hurting his fragile ego via criticism.

In fact, in another Vox article, Matthew Yglesias expands on this empty vessel of a President observation by reference to an interview he gave at Davos:

President Donald Trump’s first non-Fox television interview in a long time, conducted with CNBC’s Joe Kernen from Davos, Switzerland, is in many respects weirdly devoid of substance. And much of the substance that’s there consists of misstatements of fact. 

But lurking in that is an important insight: Trump is holding the office of president, but he’s not doing the job of president. He seems to have no real idea what’s going on, even with his own signature policy moves. 

Some of his misstatements have the color of propaganda, but often he seems to be caught up in other people’s propaganda or even to have misunderstood his own talking points. He’s disengaged from the details of big questions like NAFTA — “I may terminate NAFTA, I may not,” he says profoundly. He can’t even describe his own negotiating positions in the immigration standoff accurately.

A surprising biological discovery (if true)

Phys.org notes  research that indicates that mitochondria within cells actually operate at about 10 degrees hotter than average human body temperature:

Our body temperature is held at a fairly steady 37.5°C, and the assumption has always been that most of our physiological processes take place at this temperature. The heat needed to maintain this temperature in the face of a colder environment is generated by tiny subcellular structures called mitochondria. But a new study publishing January 25 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by INSERM and CNRS researchers at Hôpital Robert Debré in Paris led by Dr Pierre Rustin (and their international collaborators from Finland, South Korea, Lebanon and Germany) presents surprising evidence that mitochondria can run more than 10°C hotter than the body's bulk temperature, and indeed are optimized to do so. Because of the extraordinary nature of these claims, PLOS Biology has commissioned a cautionary accompanying article by Professor Nick Lane from University College, London, an expert on evolutionary bioenergetics.

I wonder if this would have some important implications to anti-ageing research, too.

Not entirely to be trusted

I like Axios a lot (you can read a detailed Buzzfeed report about how it operates here) and its two key contributors are Mike Allen and (Australian) Jonathan Swan.  Swan's reports are routinely accurate, and he is obviously well connected to the White House, but he keeps making snide comments on Twitter against other reporters and media that indicate a distinct bias against the "liberal media" which makes me not entirely trust him.  Latest example:

Now, as it happens, I don't often find the short satire of Shouts and Murmurs all that funny either, but I consider it pretty harmless.   Swan's reaction to it is strangely over the top, and given that it routinely targets Trump, Republicans and the Right, is suggestive of a bias.  (Because it's undeniable that the American Right has never more thoroughly deserved satire that it does now.)

Economist making sense Vs economist entertaining nonsense

Seems to me that Simon Wren Lewis's recent post The fatal inconsistency with neoliberalism makes a lot of sense, and is easy to read, too.

Meanwhile, at Nonsense Central (Catallaxy), I am amused to see that Sinclair challenged Trump cultist, conspiracist and fellow "Keynes ruined economics" economist Steve Kates to be clearer as to what "this" is when he complains about the media failing to report on the Greatest American Political Scandal Ever, and in reply Kates posted conspiracy nonsense that some commenter had put up that includes this:

Gitmo, in fact, is currently accommodating a number of people (more than 30 at last count), many of whom you have already heard about over the years. Anyone heard from Soros lately? Anyone noticed a diminution in Getup trolls on certain news blog sites. Anyone noticing Lady Rothchild is getting a little testy on Twitter. Anyone heard from the Bushes lately? And what about Las Vegas? Does the bad Saudi ‘uncle’ really own the top floors of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Join the dots. 

And at the end, Kates rubs his chin with a non-committal bit of later wriggle room "We shall see".

Even for most of the regulars in threads there, this is too much, and they're muttering about tinfoil for Kates.

The irony is, as I have said many times, the only single unifying belief amongst all who participate in threads at that blog is a solid belief that climate change is a non existent problem, either because it doesn't exist at all (I reckon 95% hold that view) or for the more sophisticated (LOL), it might exist but not in any form that is any problem.    What they don't realise is that this is fundamentally a conspiracy belief, making their raised eyebrows at what Kates is willing to entertain a supreme example of pot calling kettle black. 

I am also amused to see that it now is clear to all normal people that a Republican/Fox News conspiracy frenzy over the last couple of days regarding a FBI tweet about a "secret society" out to bring down Trump was a pure conspiracy beat up over a joke in a tweet which was referencing Trump's own claims of secret conspiracies in the FBI.  

That's how the Right wing, which has never been stupider, nonsense/conspiracy generating machine works.   They mutter darkly about conspiracies against them, someone makes a joke about it in a tweet, and Republican Senators (for God's sake) cite the joke as evidence for the conspiracy.

What a circle of jerks.

How's Tom going?

I have again switched over a few times to try watching Tom Ballard on Tonightly to see if he, or the show's writing,  has improved.   He hasn't.  It hasn't.  It is awful.

It would honestly be a mercy to Ballard to can the show ASAP.  He needs to be doing, I don't know, musical theatre or something - anything - other than terrible delivery of terribly written topical political humour.  

Surely it can't be rating highly?  Oh look, this review of the show, by someone who actually likes it, indicates that it is tanking so badly that even Ballard is making jokes about it:

In fact he wished he had the ratings for The Ghan instead of the 70,000 or so he is attracting. Understandable.

“I don’t know why I’m talking to this, nobody’s watching,” he joked at one point.

And even that reviewer complains about this:

If I have any early criticism, it is the prolific F-bombs dropped throughout the show. Not because I am offended by them, but because they distract. Yes I get that it’s cool to swear on ABC because you can, but language is better used for dramatic effect. If the audience is just waiting for the next one to drop, there is a risk we miss what’s being said in between. 

Kill the show, ABC.   I'll keep complaining until you do.

Re-visiting the 1980's

I've seen 3 movies from the 1980's via Netflix or SBS on Demand recently, each for the first time in many, many years.  In fact, the first two I don't think I have re-viewed since seeing them at the cinema.   I had forgotten how good they were:

*  The Fly:   gee, Jeff Goldblum was great in that role, wasn't he?  I remember I found the movie left me feeling it was too dark when I first saw it; but that was due to it being close to my father's terminal lung cancer, and the theme of a body deteriorating in front of its owner felt too close to the bone.   Now, with a bit of distance, and the modern desensitisation to gore (I didn't like the end shot - ha, a pun - when I first saw it), I can see how good the screenplay was without feeling depressed at the end.   Geena Davis struggled a bit with acting distraught, though, it must be said.

*  Little Shop of Horrors:  I had completely forgotten how funny Steve Martin was in the film, and the cameo by Bill Murray too.   A very amusing film, although it did make me wonder whether the black voice and slang of Audrey II might be questioned on PC grounds today?

*  Ferris Bueller's Day Off:  There was something perfect about Matthew Broderick's performance in the way it made you both like him and want to smack his smug face at the same time.  Particularly in the last scenes, when he is in bed talking to his gullible parents.  I had also forgotten Charlie Sheen's brief "bad boy" role in the film, which in retrospect is funny, given that it seems to have set the path for his actual life. Sure, the subplot of rich boy whose father doesn't love him was overdone, but it doesn't detract from the best elements of the film, such as the street parade sequence, which remains as infectious and impressive as it was when I first saw it. Incidentally, I checked the Metacritic rating for the film, and saw that Julie Salamon from the Wall Street Journal gave it a rating that the site scores as "0".  The only quote from the review is this:   

One of the least appealing movies I've seen in a while.... When a member of the audience belched loudly, that got the biggest laugh of the day.

 I saw it in a cinema, and with an audience strongly skewed to the 20 - 35 age range*, and there is no way it was not a popular hit  at the time with young-ish adults, not just teens.  I wish I could read the whole review to see how wrongheaded it must be.


* there is a reason I can safely say that, that I might explain another day...

Colour correction

One of the things I've noticed after having cataract surgery in one eye is the colour difference between the "old" eye and the new lens one.   The un-operated eye (which I was told does have some early cataract development, but is no where near the stage that it needs an operation) shows the world in what looks like a warmer light, whereas in the newly lensed eye things look whiter, perhaps bluer.  The difference reminds me very much of that between a "warm" toned LED or CF house light, and a "cooler" one, with its crisper, bluer light.

The ophthalmologist said yes, a cataract is like a yellowing of the lens, not just a clouding.

So people with slowly progressing cataracts start seeing the world in warmer, yellow-er tones, and don't realise it.   (Well, I didn't.)  I see that this has been discussed in the context of famous artists who developed cataracts, too.

Spotted at Aeon

That Aeon website has a pretty fascinating collection of essays up at the moment.

First, for the high minded:   a very good one about the "occult roots" of the idea of a fourth dimension and how it was mooted for a long time as a quasi-scientific explanation for the existence of a spirit world which we just can't perceive.

This is topic I've long been interested in, but this essay does a particularly good job of explaining how the idea was greeted by scientists, including Einstein.  Its explanation of how time became treated as a real fourth dimension, and Minkowki's work which Einstein reluctantly adopted, is not overly detailed, but enlightening.

Secondly:  for the more low minded, an explanation of medieval ideas of the importance of sex for health, with the most interesting aspect being the widespread idea that celibacy was pretty much as bad for you as having too much sex.

On the other hand, medieval medical authority held that too little sex presented a medical problem: celibacy was potentially detrimental to health, particularly for young men. Long-term celibacy meant the retention of excess semen, which would affect the heart, which in turn could damage other parts of the body. The celibate might experience symptoms including headaches, anxiety, weight loss and, in the most serious cases, death. Although celibacy was highly valued as a spiritual virtue in medieval society, in medical terms the celibate was as much at risk as the debauchee.

King Louis VIII of France, for example, insisted on remaining faithful to his wife while fighting in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29. Conventional opinion attributed his death to the resulting celibacy, making him the most famous victim of death by celibacy. According to the 12th-century Norman poet Ambroise, abstinence claimed many victims:

By famine and by malady
More than 3,000 were struck down
At the Siege of Acre and in the town
But in pilgrims’ hearing I declare
A hundred thousand men die there
Because from women they abstained.
’Twas for God’s love that they restrained
Themselves. They had not perished thus
Had they not been abstemious.

For most crusaders, sexual abstinence was (at most) a temporary inconvenience, to be endured only until they returned home and were reunited with their wives. But for medieval Europe’s many priests, celibacy was a lifelong state, and this could leave them facing a difficult choice. Thomas Becket’s doctor urged him to give up celibacy for the sake of his health, telling him that the celibate life was incompatible with his age and complexion, but the saint disregarded the physician’s advice. Becket lived for many years after this (and ultimately died a martyr at the hands of an assassin), but other bishops were less fortunate. An unnamed 12th-century archdeacon of Louvain, having struggled to remain celibate for a long time, was promoted against his will to the bishopric of the same city. For a month, he abstained from all sexual activity, but soon his genitals swelled up and he became seriously ill. His family and friends urged him to secretly ‘take a woman to himself’, but he was determined to resist temptation. Within days, he was dead.

The writer goes on to note that women were also considered at dire risk from prolonged celibacy, but oddly, through the quirk of their understanding of what was going on in bodies, it seems that some medical authorities were keener to endorse what sounds like masturbation as a cure for celibate women, rather than for celibate men. (!)

Anyway, all pretty fascinating.

Why IPA and Australia Day?

I see that many on Twitter have noted that the IPA funded poll on whether people want Australia Day moved from January 26 to be a clear case of "respondent training" to get the desired result.   Very hard to dispute that when you see the questions:

I was more interested in the question of why this is a matter the Institute of Paid Advocacy would be interested in at all.

I strongly suspect the answer can be found here:

The happy economics of craft beer

I don't know exactly what's going on in Australia, but I hope the figures show a similar happy story to that in America.

A new craft beer place has opened within a kilometre or so of my suburban house, but I haven't been to it yet.  

No, nothing vaguely authoritarian about that at all

Axios notes:

In an Oval Office meeting shortly after former FBI Director James Comey was fired, President Trump asked then-Acting Director Andrew McCabe who he voted for in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reports. McCabe reportedly said he did not vote and later said he found the conversation "disturbing," one U.S. official told the Post.

China and government control

Quite a surprising story in The Conversation about a Chinese "Social Credit System".  It starts:

While many are planning trips to their home towns to attend family reunions, millions more Chinese citizens have been blacklisted by authorities, labelled as “not qualified” to book flights or high-speed train tickets.

This citizen ranking and blacklisting mechanism is a pilot scheme of China’s Social Credit System. With a mission to “raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness of Chinese society”, the Chinese government is planning to launch the system nationwide by 2020 to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.4 billion citizens.

And continues:

It is a question Chinese authorities have been exploring for more than 10 years. When the plan of constructing a Social Credit System was first proposed in 2007, the primary goal was to restore market order by leveraging the financial creditworthiness of businesses and individuals.
Gradually the scope of the project has infiltrated other aspects of daily life.

Actions that can now harm one’s personal credit record include not showing up to a restaurant without having cancelled the reservation, cheating in online games, leaving false product reviews, and jaywalking.

On the other hand, do the right thing, and get rewarded:

Most pilot cities have used a points system, whereby everyone starts off with a baseline of 100 points. Citizens can earn bonus points up to the value of 200 by performing “good deeds”, such as engaging in charity work or separating and recycling rubbish. In Suzhou city, for example, one can earn six points for donating blood.

Being a “good citizen” is well rewarded. In some regions, citizens with high social credit scores can enjoy free gym facilities, cheaper public transport, and shorter wait times in hospitals. Those with low scores, on the other hand, may face restrictions to their travel and public service access.

OK, this is very dangerous idea; but on the other hand, I find the idea of punishing certain people - for example, 90% of threadsters at Catallaxy - for bad behaviour on the internet quite appealing.   

A nice Spielberg interview

At The Guardian.   I like the opening part, about M Night Shyamalan claiming (just after the success of The Sixth Sense) that he had worked out the secret of Spielberg's success, but wouldn't tell the interviewer what it was.   Hah.

Misunderstanding St Paul

I don't know a lot about theologian David Bentley Hart, but he seems to have been creating a bit of a stir lately with his own translation of the New Testament (which most reviewers seem to find interesting, if not always convincing -see discussion here and here), and with recent essays, such as this one from only a couple of weeks ago, discussing what (he argues) is the modern lack of understanding of St Paul's core world view.

The key paragraphs:

Questions of law and righteousness, however, are secondary concerns. The essence of Paul’s theology is something far stranger, and unfolds on a far vaster scale. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.

In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ (hypetaxen) all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

Interesting...

Sort of glad I missed online dating

I stumbled across this link today, and suspect it's been pretty popular, given how high it was when I Googled about Elaine from Seinfeld.

It's by a 40 something woman who details some of her worst online dating meet ups.   (She says she's never had a good date, despite trying several different sites.)   The details of how strange men can be is pretty hair-raising.  Here's a slightly edited version:

For instance, I exchanged several long emails with the Furniture Restorer. We seemed to have a lot in common, but within five minutes of meeting face to face, he uttered an anti-Semitic comment. It hadn’t occurred to me to say: “I’m glad you like kayaking, mushroom pizza and the Band, but do you happen to hate Jews?”

My date with the Logistics Manager wasn’t memorable for what happened during the 25-minute coffee interlude, which had stretches of awkward silence, but for what happened afterwards. I shook his hand and catapulted out of there, pointedly not saying, “It was lovely meeting you.” An hour after our deadly dull date, he sent me a text with a vulgar sexual suggestion.

Ummm . . . No thanks.

As I’ve tried the different dating sites, I’ve revised my dating profile, hoping that this version will catch the eye of Mr. Right. I tried a lighthearted tone, with a bit of humour and ended up meeting the Contractor at 11 a.m. one summer Sunday. He told me he had been to a party at a friend’s the night before and had stayed over. Fair enough. But he was still quite drunk when we met. He took a king can of beer out of his knapsack and chugged it there on the street.

Next, I tried a more serious, academic tone and that led to lunch with the Computer Programmer. There was a little basket on the table, filled with those little plastic creamers. This dude peeled the creamers open one by one and drank them....

But those dates don’t even come close to what I call the “Elaine Date.” If you watched Seinfeld, you may remember an episode where Elaine tells Jerry that her date “took it out.” Yup. That happened.

The Runner Up for awful/bizarre dates was when I went for lunch with the X-Ray Technician. He revealed himself to be a furry . . . I don’t even know how to explain that, other than to say he was covered in more plush than a truckload of teddy bears. He wore a spotted giraffe hoodie, with pointed ears and a mane, and matching socks. And he wore a tail. Yes, a furry tail. ...

I had one profile that was rather long-winded and very detailed about my values, my political leanings and about what I was looking for. It attracted a lawyer with a foot fetish who said he would buy me as many shoes as I wanted, provided I let him suck my toes. And then there was the Comedian who forewarned me that no sex by the third date was a deal breaker. ...

My final date was with the Advertising Guy. We did the usual coffee thing, which by that time already seemed like more effort than it was worth. During our hour-long cappuccinos, Ad Guy emptied the contents of his Dockers pockets and gave me a detailed commentary on everything he carried: screwdriver, tissues, pocket knife, measuring tape, Purell, Band-Aids, wrench set, hammer, magnifying glass, eyeglass repair kit, two HMV gift cards, a poem to his mother, fire starter, antiseptic wipes, allergy pills, pen, notepad, Starbucks gift cards, family photos, TTC tokens, elastics . . . As he displayed each item, he’d say something like: “This comes in handy,” or “You never know when you might need these.” At the end of the “inventory,” he read me the poem he had written for his mother. While I appreciate family bonds, reciting maternal verse was not the way to win me over.

I guess the big question is - how many unpleasant/strange women are out there in the online dating world?  I saw on Reddit today an example that was being widely mocked: 

A poke in the eye

Not entirely sure that I should have watched this YouTube of a procedure I'll be having tomorrow,  but it at least shows how eyeballs can take quite a lot of poking around in them.

Update:  that was interesting.   All seems OK,  so far.

About The Post

It seems a fair guess that Spielberg decided to make The Post because you can imagine every single element being utterly disdained by Trump:

*  key character:   a woman forced by circumstance to make her own way in a male dominated corporate world, and succeeds;

*  said woman makes an important right (not Right) decision in the public's interest, contrary to what the powerful men in the White House want;

*  lying politicians undone by a whisteblower and dedicated reporters willing to take risks;

*  a talk heavy story - hardly any guns or fights at all.

The perfect anti-Trump movie!  It's hilarious to think  that the White House asked for a screening (not sure if it was given);  I suspect Trump would have just said "no thanks" if told it was on, or walked out after 10 minutes claiming boredom.

I thought it was very good - not earth shatteringly remarkable, but a well directed, largely well acted, and (from what I can gather) only mildly fictionalised recreation of an important moment of US history of particular resonance to politics today.    There are one or two pretty static bits of background exposition near the start, but the story picks up speed and ends up quite engaging and satisfying. 

Even though it shares the same inevitability of Bridge of Spies, in that it is a true story and we pretty much know the ending, I thought it was significantly better than that movie, which I really felt had no surprises or complexity of any kind.   I remain a bit puzzled as to why so many reviewers praised it so highly.

One other point of comparison with Bridge:   this may seem minor, but there was something about the look of the rooms and streets in that film that seemed to me to look too much like a fake recreation of the era.   (Not sure that any other viewer in the world was thinking about art direction as I was, but there you go.)   On the other hand, The Post somehow looked to my eye to be much more convincingly of its day.   There, I've made some art director happy.  Unless it was the same person for both movies, of course.

Spielberg's use of hand held camera in some sequences is, as usual, fluid and not unsettling as it is with some other directors.   He just knows how to add subtle interest to scenes via camera movement and framing.   I think, to be objective, that there were a couple of "overtalking" scenes between characters that did not ring true (I think Spielberg used to do this in some of his earlier movies), but this is a very minor quibble about a movie in which, in large part, my Spielberg admiration was amply satisfied.

Late comments on the Last Jedi

Yes, I know you've all been waiting for my opinion on this.  No?  I don't care, you're getting it anyway.

I thought it was just OK.  Let's do this in dot form, and I guess you might not want to read it if you still haven't seen it:

*   For a movie for which I had taken much effort to avoid reading spoilers, I found there was a disappointing lack of important ones.   And did everyone like me suspect that Leia was going to be killed off (perhaps via a late re-write), given the unfortunate demise of Carrie Fisher?   Speaking of her, I have to note this, if I haven't before in this blog:  her voice/accent in both Force Awakens and this one did bother me.  In the original movies, I thought she strived for something a bit mid-Atlantic (it helps to sound a bit British if you are playing royalty, after all.)  But in the revivals, she has sounded like she had spent the intervening years is some smoky New York bar roughening up her throat.   I didn't care for the effect.

*   It's a more than a bit embarrassing to admit, but I do get some of the alt.right-ish backlash against the number of women in the movie.  What's been going on in the Resistance?   Did they start sacrificing men to some volcano or something?   Were the members of the Rebellion who didn't bother turning up at the end all guys who got sick of the positive discrimination policies under Leia?   "Ha!  I got overlooked for promotion 6 times for ethnic girls who kept flunking their X Wing course before they lowered the standards, and you think I'm coming running when you need me?"

Really, I quite liked the multi-cultural-ing of Force Awakens, and  Rogue One, and didn't mind that they had female leads, but with the increase in the number of women in (what seems)  every single scene in Last Jedi,  I thought the politically correct motivations are starting to look just too obvious.   That, along with the key theme that "men are too impulsive and gun happy to understand strategy and are going to get us all killed", and even the morally ambiguous position of Luke Skywalker through most of the film, all indicate a serious case of over-compensation for the lack of female roles in the first three movies.  (By which I mean, movies 4 to 6.)    In fact, not that I care at all about the prequels, but I would guess the amount of female presence in the Star Wars series if graphed would look something like this:

(Sorry I misspelt Abrams)

*   I'm not convinced that Rian Johnson is all that good a director, particularly of light sabre fight scenes.  I thought the whole confrontation with Snook's henchmen was very underwhelming, with a set that looked too simple and fight choreography that had too many silly, unnecessary spins and twirls.   I think JJ Abrams did a substantially better job in Force Awakens.

[Gee, this is coming out way more negative than I anticipated.]

*  What did I like?   Some of the jokes were pretty good, and I don't mind the general theme of Luke having a crisis of confidence, given that the Jedi just keep on seeming to stuff things up with some of their decisions.  Mark Hamill was pretty good in the role.    I guess I don't even mind the theme that you don't want to let old style, fundamentalist religion bog you down to seeing what's right and good.    But that also leads to the main problem with the film:

*  The on-going problem with the series is that it can't seem to decide on the nature of the Force, or give a coherent account of it in terms of evil.  Yes, it has a theodicy problem.

It is almost certainly not worth over-analysing a nebulous term written by a young director with a vague idea of inserting a mystical element into his fantasy universe, but when you read articles like this one (a semi defence of the awful idea of the Force as mediated by Midi Chlorians) you can see that writers and viewers of the movies have been trying to make sense of it, but failing.

This article in The Atlantic discusses the substantial change in the nature of the Force in this latest movie.  I suppose that, in principle, I don't mind the democratising idea that anyone can be a Jedi (or use the Force), but it does just seem to come out of nowhere, doesn't it?    I mean, if the series had done something like have a Buddha or Christ figure who, at some sort of universal level, had come to bring the Force to all, that would make sense?  But the sort of burbling on by Luke, Rey and even Yoda (although I was pleased to see him, and in puppet form), just didn't do near enough to clear up the change.  Or the nature of the Force.

Another in depth discussion of the movie by David Roberts explains that he felt the movie kept indicating it wanted to make a clean break from a good/evil dichotomy, but eventually pulls back from it.   I'm not sure I agree - I think the movie just leaves the nature of the Force vis a vis good and evil more confused than ever.

I don't know whether this will ever be capable of proper resolution.  I fear it would take some character to sit down and give a 20 minute lecture to clear up the matter, and it's not going to happen.

*  But anyway, it's not completely forgettable, like the prequels.  It's probably fair to say I enjoyed it at the time of viewing more than this analysis would indicate, but some movies do suffer a bit when you think about them too much.



  

Some Trump Youtube mockery

I found this Colbert clip, talking about the details of a Trump affair that it seems everyone during the campaign had forgotten about, to be particularly hilarious:



Which reminds me of this bit of art that was on twitter recently:

While I was on Youtube, the Trump mocking parody songs of Roy Zimmerman, who seems to have around for a long time, but I hadn't heard of him before.

He's a pretty good singer, and even if you think at first that the look or lyric is not so clever, each song usually gets to one or two lines that are very funny indeed.  For example, you have to get to the chorus in this one:



Or this, where one line in the middle is very LOL: