Just an opinion

I can't stand Senator Jim Molan - his whole manner grates, and he strikes me a prime example of how the Army office corps allows pompous, overly self assured twits to have a career.

Brave advertising

I'm sure many must be amused to see this advertisement appearing on Twitter recently:

So, some advertising exec, and the fund itself, thought it was clever to call it "Apollo" yet use the space shuttle as a graphic, despite it having nothing at all to do with the Apollo program, and being the only famous spaceship design to actually destroy itself not once, but twice.

I can't decide whether that is what can be called irony, or whether it's just honesty, given what the cryptos have been doing lately...

Nice research from QUT

QUT researchers have identified a drug that could potentially help our brains reboot and reverse the damaging impacts of heavy alcohol consumption on regeneration of brain cells.

Their studies in adult mice show that two weeks of daily treatment with the drug tandospirone reversed the effects of 15 weeks of binge-like alcohol consumption on neurogenesis – the ability of the brain to grow and replace neurons (brain cells). The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

• This is the first time tandospirone has be shown to reverse the deficit in brain neurogenesis induced by heavy alcohol consumption
• Tandospirone acts selectively on a serotonin receptor (5-HT1A)
• The researchers also showed in mice that the drug was effective in stopping anxiety-like behaviours associated with alcohol withdrawal, and this was accompanied by a significant decrease in binge-like alcohol intake

"This is a novel discovery that tandospirone can reverse the deficit in neurogenesis caused by alcohol," said study leader neuroscientist Professor Selena Bartlett from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation.

Link is here.

Liberated German kids

Well, while I knew that Japan raises kids to travel around the city alone and not be afraid, I didn't know that Germany had a view to child raising that emphasised independence too.   (I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - it has been brought to my attention that the Japanese have similar attitudes to the Germans on many things.)

Slate notes that there's a book out by an American women noting the stark differences between the two countries' attitudes to child raising:

In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent. 

Zaske argues that thanks in large part to the anti-authoritarian attitudes of the postwar generation (the so-called “68ers”), contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom—to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both. This freedom makes those kids better, happier, and ultimately less prone to turn into miserable sociopaths. “The biggest lesson I learned in Germany,” she writes, “is that my children are not really mine. They belong first and foremost to themselves. I already knew this intellectually, but when I saw parents in Germany put this value into practice, I saw how differently I was acting.” Yes, Zaske notes, we here in the ostensible land of the free could learn a thing or zwei from our friends in Merkel-world. It’s breathtaking to rethink so many American parenting assumptions in light of another culture’s way of doing things. But it’s devastating to consider just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever adopt any of these delightful German habits on a societal level.

The attitudes really are very, very different:

Although Zaske does end every chapter with well-meaning suggestions for how American parents and governments (ha) might deutsch-ify their approaches, the book’s many eye-popping (but fun-sounding) stories—solo foot commutes for second-graders; intentionally dangerous “adventure playgrounds”; school-sanctioned fire play; and my personal favorite, a children’s park that consists solely of an unattended marble slab and chisel—just remind me of all the reasons my American compatriots will double down on their own car-clown garbage lifestyles. I found myself frustrated into tears while reading Achtung Baby, because the adoption of any German customs stateside would require nothing less than a full armed revolution. 

For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t. In the contemporary United States, even in larger cities (with New York being the only notable exception), school is so synonymous with the interminable “drop-off line” that its vicissitudes are the subject of bestselling mom-book rants.

I think that Australia is too closely aligned with the American views, especially in the vast over-reaction to child being in a public space alone.  

Update:  There is an odd combination in Japan, and by the sounds of it, Germany, in relation to the matter of childhood social compliance combined with greater independence.   Japanese social cohesion is emphasised from a young age, in terms of learning societal politeness, group effort and cohesion (for example, the way all school kids are engaged in cleaning the school each day), and even the acceptance of family/public nudity in onsen.   (It's probably no co-incidence that countries that are relatively casual about social nudity - the Scandinavians, Germans, Japanese - tend towards strong welfare state/socialist tendencies.    Well, perhaps describing the Japanese post war system like that is a stretch - but you certainly don't have a highly stratified income and lifestyle difference between the wealthy and middle class.) 

But within that sort of society that expects strong social compliance and contribution in certain respects, they can allow greater independence in terms of how children grow up.

On the contrary, the US right wing tendency towards complete adult autonomy and freedom from government interference leads to a society with little social cohesion and a feeling that it is simply not safe to allow children to be independent on a day to day basis.

Qualms rapidly overcome

Gee, it was only a couple of years ago, when the HIV prophylactic drug Truvada was first becoming available, that there were articles talking about how some gay men were stigmatised by other gay men for using it.  It was a controversial question - will it give licence to men to go back to behaviour of the kind that led to the HIV breakout in the first place - lots of non safe, casual sexual encounters with low regard for consequences.

How quickly the qualms seem to be vanishing, with news that the government is almost certainly going to subsidise its use.

I can understand that their might be an economic benefit to using it - if the cost of prevention is cheaper than the cost of treatment.   I see from a post here in 2014 that it was estimated then that the cost of antiviral treatment was $18,000 per year per person.   I wonder if it still runs at that cost.   How did Africa get around that problem - I don't know the details of that story,

And I guess that guys (and the odd woman) using PReP may not be using it all of their life - if ever they decide that having sex with one, non infected person is the easiest way to not catch HIV. 

But - it still grates that, unlike your average drug, it is not treating an illness, but is more like a super expensive version of a condom for people who refuse to use other, pretty simple strategies (like condoms or other forms of safe sex until reaching high confidence of mutual monogamy with a partner with no disease - how radical) for having a healthy sex life.

One thing I bet will be an outcome - a continuing rise in other STDs due to the non use of condoms.

When will Kates question this?

When will Australia's most Trump adoring economist (Kates) ever get around to questioning the fact that Trump and his Republicans indisputably do not care about the budget deficit (now that they are in power):

Back in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the budget deficit “the nation’s most serious long-term problem.” That same year, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it a “serious threat” to the economy. They were full of it. 

Not just in the narrow sense that they both went on to enthusiastically endorse a $1.5 trillion tax cut late last year. Nor even in the somewhat broader sense that the real cost of that tax cut is much higher than $1.5 trillion when you consider the various accounting gimmicks and bad-faith phaseouts that were used to squeeze it under that figure. 

Even under the weird linguistic conventions of American conservative politics where deficits caused by tax cuts don’t count as real deficits, today’s budget deal — a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending “offset” by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely. They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.

The Barnaby silence

I see that Jacqueline Maley at Fairfax claims that her papers never ran with the story last year because:

The reasons were less conspiratorial than they were journalistic: we couldn’t stand it up.
The rumours were so widely circulated it seemed clear there was some truth to them. But until now, no one, within the press gallery or outside it, could firm them up to a publishable standard.

I find this hard to believe.  Did they ask Barnaby specifically what was going on?  Did they ask the ex staffer?  Did they speak to Tony Windsor?   Why did they think it not worth pursuing after the Murdoch tabloids published about?

No - it is much, much more credible that they thought (wrongly) that they were being principled by not pursuing his "private life", even when it was an affair with a staffer causing widespread and open rumours on the internet.

UPDATE:  despite my apparent support of the Murdoch press in running with the story to some degree last year, obviously I don't agree with their sleazy way of dealing with it yesterday by putting the photo of the pregnant staffer on the front page.   Surely Blair and Bolt should acknowledge that puts the emphasis on the wrong person.

So, as far as I'm concerned, none of the media has dealt with this appropriately.

Some error or other

Since yesterday, I'm getting some intermittent loading error with the blog, which is usually fixed by clearing history and reloading.   But that's a pain.   There is Google forum entry on the error code, but I don't have time to check it out properly yet...

As foreseen by Michael Nesmith

You have to give it to Elon Musk - the image of a Tesla in space is indisputably the historic pinnacle of corporate self promotion.  (It won't be beaten until a certain fast food chain paints a giant "M" on the moon.)

It did, though,  put me in mind of a song by Michael Nesmith from the 1980's, which had very similar imagery:

Science fiction writer who can't read science fiction

I've only read one (I think) book by Charlie Stross, but I was interested to read on his blog how he just can't get into recent science fiction by other authors.   

That's a lot of money

If I had been asked to guess, I would never have been near this figure for the cost of US involvement in Afghanistan.   Axios notes:

The assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, Randall Schriver, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that the U.S. will spend an estimated $45 billion on the war in Afghanistan this year, the Hill reports.

 I see that all of NASA gets by on just over $19 billion a year in its budget.

And there was another item up recently at Axios about how the Taliban and local farmers are getting back into opium poppies in a big way.  (I wonder - is there no biological agent they can deploy to eat into their flowers?   No particular beetle that loves poppy buds?)  

Even the Air Force Times had a detailed story throwing doubt on the effectiveness of the recent strategy of bombing heroin labs in the country.

What a hopeless country.   Trump and the rest of the world would be better off building a wall  around it, rather than down Mexico way.

Cryptocurrency targetted

I don't think that the future of cryptocurrency is looking at all bright.

Sorry, libertarian dreamers.   You'll have to pay for your apartment and dinner on a floating island with Peter Thiel (who maybe just lost about $10 million on cryptos) some other way. 

Small hands compensates with big missiles

This seems just childish, doesn't it?:

Pentagon and White House officials have started coordinating a parade to showcase America's military strength, per the Washington Post, after Trump said he wanted "a parade like the one in France." The Pentagon confirmed the report.

Why it matters: Per the Post, costs associated with such a parade "could run in the millions" after shipping "tanks and high-tech hardware to Washington." Trump said he was inspired by Paris' Bastille Day Parade last year, and told French President Emmanuel Macron that the U.S. is "going to have to try to top it."

A lot of trouble to go to for a better memory

A short report at Nature:

A well-timed zap to a brain region involved in learning can improve memory.

Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues studied memory in 25 people who had had electrodes implanted into their brains for medical reasons. The researchers recorded brain activity while the individuals studied a list of words that they later tried to remember. Using computer algorithms, the team identified patterns of brain activity for each person that predicted whether the individual would remember or forget a word.

Next, participants studied another set of words. Whenever the algorithm predicted that a word was not being encoded well, the researchers applied electrical currents to a brain region called the lateral temporal cortex, changing the brain’s activity patterns. Precisely timed electrical stimulation improved people’s chance of recalling a word by an average of 15%.

How the media should respond, Part 2

So, back to Barnaby Joyce.

I posted at length last October about the matter of the weirdness of what was going when only parts of the media thought it was OK to report on claims of sexual impropriety circulating on the internet (sourced from ex political Tony Windsor) during the Joyce election campaign.

I don't see any reason to change my views. As many, many people on Twitter are pointing out, there are a bunch of circumstances as to why it was actually pretty perverse the media to not report on the true Joyce situation last year:

1.   (I don't think this is really the highest reason, but many people think it is) - he was a prominent conservative arguing against same sex marriage on "traditional value" lines - making the matter of the break up of his own marriage vows in an unseemly fashion a matter of apparent hypocrisy;

2.   His affair was with a staffer - a situation well known for at least the potential for causing workplace trouble.   Furthermore, it had been in the media in mid 2017 that a prominent public servant was caught up in a relationship issue that apparently has caused problems:

Sources say Roman Quaedvlieg​ has taken leave for a matter relating to his personal behaviour, rather than his official duties.

According to reports, Mr Quaedvlieg is facing allegations of inappropriate behaviour relating to a personal relationship. 

According to the Daily Mail:

And it has now been claimed the 52-year-old was allegedly involved in a relationship with a fellow ABF employee in her early 20s, with her colleagues saying she received a promotion after their relationship began, the 

OK, you might argue, if other staffers of Barnaby didn't complain of favouritism, then it's not the same.   But really, I don't think that washes.

If a prominent public servant places himself in a such a position and gets media publicity as a result, why does the Deputy PM doing something so obviously unwise to workplace harmony get a "no publicity" pass from the media?

3.   Tony Windsor had tweeted that there was something going on - his claim (making sound like sexual harassment) was obviously defamatory if untrue, yet a large part of the media said "we're not going to ask Barnaby about this"?

4.   This was happening during an unusual election campaign.

5.   As I noted in my previous post, Joyce himself looked unusually glum and distracted about the dual citizenship issue - and in retrospect it would not be surprising if the turmoil over the affair was affecting Joyce's work performance. 

6.   The same Left leaning media that was critical of conservative dissing of Julia Gillard for her relationship status effectively gave protection to Barnaby from criticism from conservatives for his relationship status.   (Yes, go read Catallaxy - they are uniformly disgusted with him.)

7.  Joyce was the subject (apparently) of a sympathetic puff piece in The Australian in only March last year, which from later reporting would appear to be after the start of his affair.    If the media is going to aid his profile that way, in a way which in retrospect looks dishonestly manipulative, it should be prepared to at least report on the status of his marriage later.

To again be clear:  it all depends on the circumstances as to whether a politician's marriage break up or affair is newsworthy .   But in this case, it was in the public interest to disclose this, and I remain quite surprised that the "principled" media cannot acknowledge this.

How should the media to respond Part 1

The recent twitter thread by Vox writer David Roberts, in which he complains about the American media's role in amplifying lies by politicians (notably, of course, those issuing from Republicans in protection of a President so completely unfamiliar with telling the truth that his lawyers urge him not to voluntarily give evidence under oath), is very good summary.

Something cheerful

I need cheerful news.  I'm struggling to find it.

Let's see:  * I thought the Mission Impossible 6 trailer looked pretty good - although you realise that Cruise has set ridiculous tough standards for topping the last movie's stunt sequences when you see him dangling off a helicopter and think "meh, hanging onto the outside of the military transport looked scarier."    But don't worry, I'm in the cinema in the first week of release.

*  Chris Hemsworth was being interviewed on Sunrise this morning.  He does seem to be a ridiculously nice guy.   Of course, he's an actor and spends months away at a time - you would have to fear that one marriage for him will not be enough.   No, no, I'm trying to be cheerful, I forgot.

*  Yes, I have started to worry that I have spent years drinking my hot drinks while they are too hot:

Very hot tea can raise risk of oesophageal cancer, suggests studyCombined with excess alcohol consumption, scaldingly hot tea raises relative risk fivefold, says Chinese researchers

Wait - that's not cheerful at all.

The search for cheerful will continue...

Update:  again, not cheerful - how that Cloverfield 3 movie that I had hopes for (Chris O'Dowd as an astronaut notwithstanding) has appeared on Netflix and is getting uniformly bad reviews.  Dang.

Update 2:  this does make me happier - when a female who used to like Tarantino films finally realises something and downgrades her opinion:

When I watched, white knuckles gripping my laptop, the footage of Uma Thurman's car crash on the set of Kill Bill, it struck me that Quentin Tarantino has been revealing himself to us through his art all these years.

It was only a day or so before Thurman's revelations that I had been discussing the writer/director's work with a filmmaker friend and we both realised we'd cooled on his shtick considerably, for two main reasons: his obsession with the N-word, and his obsession with sexualised violence.

While chatting to my friend, I copped to enjoying Tarantino's latest film, The Hateful Eight, largely for the spectacle of its 70mm cinematography, but that I also agreed with New York Times critic A. O. Scott's description of the film as "an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny". On reflection, it really did seem like Tarantino had designed the chamber piece specifically to explore one woman's abuse at the hands of seven men.

Then, I remembered how Harvey Weinstein himself had waved off accusations of Hateful Eight's misogyny, calling it "fishing for stupidity". ...

....no matter how Tarantino might defend his blood-spattered back catalogue as pro-woman or true cinematic equality, violence in the QT pantheon so often seems to be, with a few exceptions, something done by men to women. ...

Now, I'm not about to accuse QT of dreaming of cracking a gun butt over a woman's head (The Hateful Eight), scalping her (Kill Bill), murdering her in his muscle car (Death Proof) or branding and whipping her (Django Unchained). Indeed, plenty of people have called Tarantino a feminist director specifically because of his plethora of female characters and willingness to treat them just as badly as their male counterparts.

But a theme, as it were, has emerged: Tarantino loves to put his female characters through hell. We know now, from Thurman's account of his on-set behaviour, that he also likes to do the same to at least one of his actresses in the name of authenticity in performance.

Fox News misinformation continues

Devin Nunes: Trump never met with Papadopoulos. Reality: here’s a photo.

As to how the American Right learned to embrace its paranoid/conspiracist/facts!-who-cares-about-facts? element, Slate has been running this article, adapted from Kurt Anderson's book Fnatasyland:  How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. I think it's pretty good at putting it all in perspective. 

Can't the stupid Right see there's a problem here?

You start to feel a loss for words at the idiocy and conspiratorial thinking that passes for Right wing commentary these days, but how on earth do they not see a problem with their views when even Republicans on the Intelligence committee disagree with Trump's sweeping statements about vindication?:

Calling on Trump not to interfere in Mueller’s investigation, four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Sunday the idea that the memo’s criticism of how the FBI handled certain surveillance applications undermines the special counsel’s work. Reps. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) represented the committee on the morning political talk shows.

A fast food complaint

I don't get why Guzman Y Gomez seems to be successful.   Seemed to me to be pretty low quality, sloppily made, not particularly good value for money, and not especially tasty (even if asking for the spicy choice.)    Yet it seems to be a growing chain.   Can someone explain why?

(By the way, I like to eat Mexican food made at home with the various kits.   Tastes better to me than what I can get at this takeaway.)