Yet more unwanted movie reviews

*   Rushmore:  even though I have been underwhelmed by Wes Anderson's last couple of movies, I thought I would see what his shtick was like when it was new, back in 1998.   The verdict:  yeah, it was pretty amusing and likeable.   The story's eccentric in a way that made me think parts of it were probably autobiographical, and I read afterwards that my hunch was right: 

Rushmore Academy was where Wes Anderson went to school. Well, not exactly – it was called St John's School, and it was only after he scoured private schools as far as the UK that he realised his alma mater was the perfect setting for his semi-autobiographical movie about a precocious turd who forms extracurricular clubs and falls head over heels for a hot school teacher. In a very Anderson-y way, he banked his private school experience for Rushmore. Like Rushmore's main skeeze Max Fisher, Anderson, too, was academically underachieving and had a throbbing crush on an older woman.

Certainly, no other movie before or since is likely to feature the word "handjob" quite so often.   Recommended.

*  The not fully viewed Tropic Thunder:   Last night I tried getting past the first 20 minutes of this awful thing, and just couldn't.   I cannot fathom the good reviews it largely received.   First, it seems weird that a 2008 movie would be bothered mocking the overly dramatic Vietnam war movies such as Platoon which were big 20 years previously.  Had the screenplay been rattling around unmade since 1990, because it felt awfully dated?   Movie-within-movie satires are a delicate thing - if you push the ridicule too hard (such as this movie does, in spades), it just doesn't work in any way.  (I'll allow it might work as a absurdist 3 minute piece in sketch comedy, but that's it.)   A bunch of actors who have been funny in other movies (and Tom Cruise, who critics seemed to think was hilarious in this) cannot save it as far as I'm concerned.   Gives me all the more reason to never trust vehicles Matthew McConaughey is in, and I'll add that when Ben Stiller makes and awful movie, they really, truly stink.  I think his hit rate of good movies is actually pretty low.

*  Vanilla Sky (2001, Tom Cruise version.)    Giving up on Cruise's over the top act in Tropic Thunder, I switched over to see him in this.   I' hadn't seen the Spanish original, which no doubt helps.  (I seem to recall that quite a few art house type critics, such as David Stratton, resented this film as being an unnecessary remake.)

I thought it was pretty great - well directed,  really good acting by all concerned, Penelope Cruz at what may have been her peak of youthful charm and beauty, and a story that finally made some relatively straight forward science fiction-y sense.  (Although it is one of those films open to other interpretations.)    

Two surprises which, if I had known, would have made me watch it earlier:   a brief cameo by Steven Spielberg (yay), and the incredibly magnetic Tilda Swinton turns up at the end too.    They are like the exact opposite of McConaughey - lucky charms indicating that a movie is probably well worth watching.   (The negative power of McConaughey is something even Spielberg struggles to overcome - Amistad was an  interesting story that nonetheless is one of Spielberg's least memorable movies.)  

I had what seemed a lengthy dream last night in which I had inherited the Courier Mail, and kept trying to work out who to consult to learn how to run a newspaper.  It was not an unpleasant dream, though, and clearly came to me a result of Vanilla Sky.

Recommended.

The propaganda problem described clearly, but no solution identified

You really should read Ezra Klein's terrific column at Vox:  Donald Trump, Fox News and the Logic of Alternative Facts.

It's a clear and convincing identification of how Right wing propaganda is working, with one key point being:

What Conway and others understand is that if you’re just trying to activate your tribe, you don’t have to win the argument, you just need to have an argument; you need to give your side something to say, something to believe. Something like the Nunes memo or the various out-of-context texts aren’t part of a search for truth — they’re an ammo drop, or, to go back to the way Ball put it, “a semi-plausible (if not entirely coherent) counternarrative.”

Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk radio host turned Trump critic, put it well. “The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It’s to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people.”.....

And so, although fact checking can show how the "counternarrative" is not true, those who already chose to believe it cannot be bothered following the fact checking process:

If you want to believe that the Nunes memo, the FBI texts, or the Warner texts show an anti-Trump witch hunt on the part of the FBI, and if you’re following politicians and media organizations that want you to believe that, it’s easy enough to believe it. The argument has internal logic, it sounds plausible, it fits what you’re hearing, it aligns with whom you trust, and you’re seeing what looks like documentary evidence. 

Yes, there are plenty of outlets trying to fact-check these claims, plenty of outlets working hard to align their reporting with reality, plenty of outlets trying to explain what’s actually happening. Explaining why it’s not true takes some time, it takes dates, and it takes an interest in the explanation and some interest in the people delivering it. This work never reaches most of the people convinced by the original stories, and it likely wouldn’t be credible to them even if it did. As David Roberts wrote in his important essay on tribal epistemology:

Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one.

Now, while there has been despair about how to counter this (people interested in getting governments to make sensible climate change policies have been debating how to deal with propaganda for a  good decade), there are a couple of points I don't hear said enough:

*   Political spin is one thing;   outrageously misleading and inflammatory claims made with no regard for truth is something else.   It's ethically wrong and in the case of Fox News as a money making machine, cynical to the point of evil.    (Who really believes that the drama queen acts of Hannity and that ridiculous Jeanine Pirro are entirely sincere?   If it is, they're so stupid they should be taken off the air anyway.)

My point is:  as far as I can tell, the network continues to host at least 2, maybe 3?, token moderate  journalists/hosts who don't go along with the lines put out by the overwhelmingly pro Trump propaganda machine that the network is.  

They shouldn't stay there!   No ethical person should participate in such a corrupt machine in the interests of thinking it needs them to give it a shred of credibility.    Their co-workers (and presumably, the bosses) are cynical propagandists with no interest in truth and objectivity - and as Klein explains, no counter explanation given by them is going to be accepted by the 95% of  viewers who are there for the propagandists anyway.

*   There needs to be more calling out of such deliberate deception as evil, not by other journalists, but by everyone with any moral standing and a public voice.   Stop pretending it's just politics and spin that's always been with us - it isn't.    It is sophisticated and cynical manipulation of people who have given up caring if they are being manipulated.   It is dangerous, and anathema to good decision making in a democratic system.   Call it out. 

The sound of heads pointlessly hitting brick walls, again

Sinclair Davidson sure knows how to run a stupid argument.

Today it's to suggest that the ABC must be failing its purpose (or not be good value for money) if people pay for cable television too.

Apparently, a really, really good national broadcaster can run enough programming that satisfies everyone at every minute of the day.  I don't know:  perhaps inflate their budget by 10, give them more bandwidth, and they could.* 

It's an extraordinarily dumb line to run, even by his stagflated standards.

And then the minions get to bleat again about how much they hate the ABC, because bias, climate change, etc.   Sad place, really.  


*  that was just a guess, but maybe not far off.  I see that the Nine Network annual report from 2014 says they had total revenue that year of about $1.5 billion.   The ABC in its entirety - TV,  radio, internet and other assorted stuff  - operates on just over a billion dollar budget.  

Every Clint Eastwood film in ten words

"...and then righteous testosterone did what had to be done."

[A post inspired by the rather bad reviews of his latest movie, for which I have to join in with every writer and say "not to detract from those guys did, which was really outstanding".   But Eastwood's thematic interests really are limited to the above to a cliche extent, aren't they?]

Back to Barnaby

It was an interesting discussion on Radio National Breakfast this morning about the matter of the public's right to know about Barnaby Joyce's affair.

Fran Kelly indicated that lots of listeners were very angry that it had been not been reported on by most media during his re-election campaign.

Of the panel of journalists, one went with "well we did try to investigate it and couldn't confirm it", one went with "really, it was a personal matter that we don't like to touch" and one went with (I'll paraphrase) "this is absurd, of course the public has a right to know if a Deputy PM facing re-election in a by-election that could bring down the government has done something that would be controversial in any workplace - got a staffer pregnant.  Journos just didn't want to upset the convenient compact they have with politicians."

I'm with option 3.

As for the "we did  try to investigate it" - some have linked to how the Inverell Times asked questions of Joyce's media office specifically about the status of his marriage and why he was being asked in public places about his mistress.  The paper was fobbed off.  Nice to know someone made at least a token attempt - but come on, as Caroline Overington (option 3 above) argued, as if journalists really interested in this couldn't get to the bottom of a rumour that so widespread. 

Also, the other female journo on today who said "we did try to investigate" claims that journalists had in some cases not just been fobbed off, but been lied to.

That should be news itself, if true, but is the story of lies to cover an affair also not being reported because of the mutually convenient pack between politicians and journos? 


Of course politicians on both sides are running with the "it's a private matter" line - they have a great incentive in the keeping the compact of not reporting on infidelity no matter the circumstances - given it almost certainly happens to a higher extent in both their professions than it does in the general public. 

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person thinking this is a clear case where the general principle of avoiding unnecessary interest in personal lives has been taken way too far in this case.   

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.