The socialist capitalism of Singapore

Found via a Peter Whiteford re-tweet:   an article explaining another way (the first, which I have noted before, is their health system) in which Singapore is hardly the shining example of a free market capitalist dream state that some American, "less government is always best", Right wing think tanks seem to think it is:

 In the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Singapore ranks as the second most “economically free” country in the world just behind Hong Kong. Since many use this index as a shorthand for “most capitalist” countries, a lot of prominent people end up saying some really weird things about Singapore. For instance, in his Liberty Con remarks, Bryan Caplan claimed Singapore was one of the closest countries to the capitalist ideal.

It is true of course that Singapore has a market economy. But it’s also true that, in Singapore, the state owns a huge amount of the means of production. In fact, depending on how you count it, the Singaporean government probably owns more capital than any other developed country in the world after Norway.

The Singaporean state owns 90 percent of the country’s land. Remarkably, this level of ownership was not present from the beginning. In 1949, the state owned just 31 percent of the country’s land. It got up to 90 percent land ownership through decades of forced sales, or what people in the US call eminent domain.

The Singaporean state does not merely own the land. They directly develop it, especially for residential purposes. Over 80 percent of Singapore’s population lives in housing constructed by the country’s public housing agency HDB. The Singaporean government claims that around 90 percent of people living in HDB units “own” their home. But the way it really works is that, when a new HDB unit is built, the government sells a transferable 99-year lease for it. The value of that lease slowly declines as it approaches the 99-year mark, after which point the lease expires and possession of the HDB unit reverts back to the state. Thus, Singapore is a land where almost everyone is a long-term public housing tenant.

There are more paragraphs at the link that provide more details, then this point:

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t generally associate state ownership of the means of production with capitalism. One way to see whether libertarians or conservatives actually think Singapore’s system is uber-capitalistic is to imagine how they would respond to someone who ran a campaign in the US aimed at bringing the country up to the Singaporean ideal.

What is it, exactly, that causes people like Caplan not to be able to acknowledge that the country has been very successful under a wildly different system from what they think is the best for the US and every other country under the sun?   

The culture war Right in search of a hero

This whole Jordan Peterson thing - it's one of those odd situations where I have the feeling that I should be more sympathetic to his philosophical approach to life, having shared some of his general Jungian interest in what mythology, religion and philosophy has been trying to get at over millennia, but I just can't muster the enthusiasm, and suspect there is less to him than meets the eye.

You can read here (out from behind The Australian's paywall) what fan girl Caroline Overington  says about his talk this week in Melbourne.   (Yes, a rare occasion where that blog's threads serve a useful purpose.)  There are certainly signs of crank eccentricity in there regarding diet, which I hadn't heard about before.  As for his long term bouts with depression - it raises some concern about his judgement, although if it is well managed, I know it shouldn't.

He certainly got lucky with that ridiculous BBC interviewer.   It seems to have doubled or tripled his fame overnight. A good profile of his sometimes rather murky or semi contradictory beliefs is in  this recent New Yorker review of his "rules for life" book, although it doesn't add that much to a previous profile of him I had read, which I can't find again at the moment.     

Perhaps I would feel less cynical about it were it not for the disproportionate enthusiasm disgruntled conservatives and Right wing culture warrior types have for him.   It seems to me that they are looking for a hero, and not finding one in the current somewhat charred reputation of the major Churches (which are either too dogmatic or too "social justice" for them, and caught in their own slow moving crisis of understanding the modern world), they have latched onto Peterson as a de facto leader.  I don't really want to use the meme in response, but I have to:  "Sad!"

Signs of decline

Seriously, these statements of Paul Keating about Trump and foreign policy make no sense whatsoever:

Mr Keating on Friday said he had not expected Mr Trump to have "such a pragmatic" foreign policy on China and Russia, and he urged the President to continue down the path he was on.

Um, can Keating tell us what path Trump is on?   Especially when Keating goes on to say:

Mr Keating argued the US should be a "balancing power" in Asia and learn to relinquish some control of the region.Mr Trump's strategy of using partnership diplomacy with China was a better approach than what Democrat Hillary Clinton would have adopted if elected, he added.

What the heck gives Keating the impression that this is the path that Trump is trying with China??

My old rule of thumb - it's unfortunate but true:  virtually everyone reaches an age by which their analytical judgement can start to safely be ignored.   Seems that 74 is about that for Paul.   (Bit younger than average, but it's in the ball park.)

Useless violence studies

I made mention in a recent post how people who defend high level, realistic looking violence in video games having no skepticism at all of psychological studies that claim "no connection with violent behaviour".

Here's a good example:  a website reporting on Trump meeting with video game industry people says:

A recent York University study backs up the ESA’s claim, finding no evidence of a link between violent video games and violent behavior.

When you go to the linked report on the study, this is what they did:

The dominant model of learning in games is built on the idea that exposing players to concepts, such as violence in a game, makes those concepts easier to use in 'real life'.

This is known as 'priming', and is thought to lead to changes in behaviour. Previous experiments on this effect, however, have so far provided mixed conclusions.

Researchers at the University of York expanded the number of participants in experiments, compared to studies that had gone before it, and compared different types of gaming realism to explore whether more conclusive evidence could be found.

In one study, participants played a game where they had to either be a car avoiding collisions with trucks or a mouse avoiding being caught by a cat. Following the game, the players were shown various images, such as a bus or a dog, and asked to label them as either a vehicle or an animal.

Dr David Zendle, from the University's Department of Computer Science, said: "If players are 'primed' through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorise the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded.

Um, yeah.  Tells me a lot about freaking realistic gun violence in video games.

OK, maybe another study did more:

In a separate, but connected study, the team investigated whether realism influenced the aggression of game players. Research in the past has suggested that the greater the realism of the game the more primed players are by violent concepts, leading to antisocial effects in the real world.

Dr Zendle said: "There are several experiments looking at graphic realism in video games, but they have returned mixed results. There are, however, other ways that violent games can be realistic, besides looking like the 'real world', such as the way characters behave for example.

"Our experiment looked at the use of 'ragdoll physics' in game design, which creates characters that move and react in the same way that they would in real life. Human characters are modelled on the movement of the human skeleton and how that skeleton would fall if it was injured."

The experiment compared player reactions to two combat games, one that used 'ragdoll physics' to create realistic character behaviour and one that did not, in an animated world that nevertheless looked real.

Following the game the players were asked to complete word puzzles called 'word fragment completion tasks', where researchers expected more violent word associations would be chosen for those who played the game that employed more realistic behaviours.

Oh come on.

Look, common sense tells us that this is going to be hard to study.  Not many people in the world are of a mind set, or have the weaponry available, to replicate in real life an ultra violent scenario in a video game.    (I suppose they could ask to do studies with criminals already in prison for violent crimes - has anyone actually done that?)

Common sense also tells me that these sort of studies as described above are highly unlikely to tell us anything about the worst possible influence with these games.  Because no, I am not worried that they turn a relatively normal person into a willing mass murderer.  But that's not what I'm interested in. 

So how about some skepticism about what these airy fairy studies about "priming" can actually tell us?

Here's what annoys me - video games can be made to be exciting without the highly realistic and bloody depiction of killing people (or for that matter, aliens or animals.)    To my mind, repeated depictions of sadistic and graphic violence is just obviously morally dubious - sadism should not be not something for which people should be encouraged to get a participatory thrill.   I don't need a freaking psychological study to tell me that - just as I don't need a psychological study to tell me that a porn video of some guy having sex with an underage girl (even if with her full consent) is wrong.  Or put it this way - it should not be made, regardless of whether you can prove that, on balance, it might mean less pre-teen sex by adults because they masturbated over the video, rather than encourage men to seek out underage sex.   (And I would say the same even if it was a question of a computer generated video of underage sex.)

If game makers were moral, and serious, they could still make exciting games that do not raise legitimate concerns over the deadening effect on some deadbeat's qualms about actually doing a mass shoot up, of the kind he has probably rehearsed on a video game scores of times.

But they don't.  Because they can show gross and graphic head explosions with bullets, they do it - looking for violent novelty all the time.

This is not a good thing.  It is, in fact, a bad thing.

The Entertainer, part 4 (or 5, whatever)

Look, I'm not going to bother copying any of this rather unhinged comment by my "favourite" nutcase in need of medication at Catallaxy, but if you enjoy theories of how the forces of global socialism are encouraging free porn on the internet and thereby low sperm counts by too much masturbation, all as part of the plan to kill off the righteous "Western male," knock yourself out...

Nunberg explained

Yes, the Stephen Colbert explanation of Sam Nunberg's wild (drunk? drug affected?) afternoon of media appearances was pretty funny:

They like tough men so much, they enjoy being bullied

The way the Trump tariff process has been announced sounds to me very much like behaviour that in schools or the workplace would be called bullying.

"Look, I like some of you, and I might exempt you from my new policy of delivering 25% of your lunch money to me everyday, as long as you to come to me and offer me something in return and/or tell me how great I am."

Yet what's the bet that the wingnutty world in Australia (hello, Kates and followers) will call it a brilliant bit of negotiation?   Almost guaranteed.   Because they like what they think is "alpha" tough guys so much they actually enjoy being bullied by them.

Update:  this article in the Washington Post earlier this week referred to Trump's tactics as bullying, and made the point that he's going completely the wrong way if the intention is to get at China.  As for Gorka's claims - yes, they are ridiculous.

But Trump's base is so dumb, they just have to hear a Trump lackey say "our opponents disagree with us because they are socialists" and they swallow it as true.   That's how basing all your ideas on a belief in a fundamental culture war works.  Any Republican - and there are many in this sordid bunch - who continually calls a different policy to theirs "socialism" is an idiot hurting America.

Update 2:  this was written prior to the actual announcement, but is still valid:

Trump’s tweets put the governments of Canada and Mexico in an awkward position. Before tariffs were an issue, all three countries could at least pretend they were trying to negotiate some sort of win-win compromise. Now, if our neighbors make consolations on NAFTA, it will look as if they are caving to Washington’s bullying tactics, which will almost certainly play poorly with voters back home. Maybe that’s Trump’s intention; perhaps he is trying to throw yet another wrench into the NAFTA-bargaining process in order to finally kill the pact. Or perhaps he’s thinking just the opposite; it’s possible he’s worried that the tariffs aren’t playing well enough with the public and hopes that tying them to an inevitable deal with Canada and Mexico will give him an excuse to drop the whole ill-conceived lark while still claiming victory. You can only guess with Trump. But by ostensibly resorting to blackmail, the president may be making it politically harder, not easier, to strike an accord. 

The president’s loose thumbs aren’t doing the administration any legal favors, either. Trump plans to impose the new tariffs under a law—Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—that gives him broad powers over trade specifically in order to protect national security. As part of that process, the Commerce Department has produced two elaborate reports arguing that the steel and aluminum industries need to be protected for the sake of American safety and well-being. But by telling Canada that it might be able to get rid of the tariffs by letting U.S. dairy farmers sell more milk in Toronto, Trump is making a mockery of that carefully wrought legal fiction. After all, if the health of the steel and aluminum industries were actually essential to U.S. security interests, the president probably wouldn’t be willing to barter them for butter sales.

A confession

When I first read the headlines yesterday about McDonalds in the US flipping its symbol upside down for International Women's Day, I thought "What?  To make it look like a pair of breasts?  Kinda controversial, no?"    Only today did I realise it was to make it into a "W" for women.

True, if embarrassing...

A culinary observation

Duck fried rice is particularly delicious.   The greater depth of flavour of duck meat makes it considerably tastier and satisfying than chicken fried rice.

You may return to your duties...

More history: railway surgeons

The article is a couple of years old, but Beachcomber recently linked to it.   I didn't know that the advent of the railways, and the injuries railway workers suffered, led to the speciality of the railway surgeon:

For rail workers and passengers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, train travel — while miraculous for the speed with which it carried people across vast distances — presented ghastly dangers. Brakemen commonly lost hands and fingers in the hazardous coupling of cars. Exploding boilers released high-pressure steam that scalded stokers. Passengers were maimed or crushed when trains jumped the tracks, or telescoped into tangles of wreckage. And in the hours they spent aboard, travelers and workers suffered heart attacks, strokes, seizures, all the health hazards of daily life, but far from their family doctor — or sometimes any doctor. One in every 28 railroad employees was injured on the job in 1900 — and 1 in 399 died.

These grim statistics helped spark the development of a new medical specialty during the Victorian Era: railway surgery. Physicians in this field focused on the injuries and maladies specific to workers and passengers. Eventually, railroad companies would open hospitals close to the tracks in remote locales otherwise without medical facilities. Professional organizations arose that furthered railway-related medical knowledge and investigated new avenues of preventive medicine. And within a century, railway surgery met its own untimely end — but its influence continues today....

... at their peak, about 35 railway hospitals had opened in the U.S. These included the Southern Pacific’s 450-bed hospital in San Francisco, the second medical facility in the country to operate an intensive care unit — a specialized approach to treatment much needed by maimed railroaders. Other rail systems contributed to existing hospitals on their routes, or set up mutual benefit associations for workers that covered the treatment of injuries. This was long before other industries considered providing health care services to employees.

So expansive were these railway medical systems that in 1896, just one railroad, the Missouri Pacific, treated more than 29,000 patients in its medical system and clinics, comparable to major metropolitan hospitals. “The direct descendants are employer-based insurance and employer-based health care,” says Stanton. “A lot of the larger corporations still do that. They have a medical center and a medical staff inside the factory that does the initial evaluation before getting patients out to the emergency room or hospital. What’s come out of railway surgery is our current employee-based occupational health system.”

Lawrence's problem

The allegations of sexual creepiness against Lawrence Krauss seem to be having some bite:

More Organizations Cut Ties With Physicist Lawrence Krauss

I have to say, I have never been enamoured of the manner of Krauss in his television appearances.  And to be perfectly honest, there is something about his face and head that has always struck me as remarkably unattractive or unappealing.   (Yes, he can't help that, but it does make it all the more remarkable if he thinks he's in with a chance with women.) 

I find his physical unattractiveness so obvious that I sometimes try to pin down what it is exactly about his features that is so off putting:  pretty much in the same, but opposite, way you sometimes read about scientists analysing what makes certain faces very appealing to other people.

Yeah, sorry Lawrence: God still loves you, anyway...

In other Netflix news

Oh - a new version (with a pretty decent budget, by the looks) of Lost In Space is coming in April.

Seems it will be worth checking out.

Depravity noted

As if you couldn't be more appalled at what the Holocaust entailed:

It was noon in early 1942 as Johann Grüner approached the ‘German House’ in the Polish town of Nowy Targ for lunch. As a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat in occupied Poland, he enjoyed the privileges of power and the opportunity for career advancement that came with duty in the East. The German House, a mix of cultural centre, restaurant and pub, was one of the privileges enjoyed by the occupiers. As he entered the building, he could hear a boisterous celebration within. At the front door, a clearly inebriated Gestapo official passed by, a beer coaster with the number 1,000 written in red pinned to his blouse. Addressing Grüner, the policeman drunkenly bragged: ‘Man, today I am celebrating my 1,000th execution!’

At first glance, the incident at the German House might appear to be a grotesque aberration involving a single depraved Nazi killer. However, such ‘celebrations’ were widespread in the occupied Eastern territories as members of the notorious Schutzstaffel (SS) and the German police routinely engaged in celebratory rituals after mass killings. In fact, among the perpetrators of genocide, heavy drinking was common at the killing sites, in pubs and on bases throughout Poland and the Soviet Union. In another horrific example, a group of policemen charged with the cremation of some 800 Jewish corpses used the occasion to tap a keg. In this case, one of the men, named Müller, had the ‘honour’ of setting fire to ‘his Jews’ as he and his colleagues sat around the fire drinking beer. In a similar case, a Jewish woman recalled the aftermath of a killing operation at Przemyśl in Poland: ‘I smelled the odour of burning bodies and saw a group of Gestapo men who sat by the fire, singing and drinking.’ For these Gestapo men, ‘victory celebrations’ proved to be the order of the day, and followed every killing action or ‘liberation from the Jews’.

The role of alcohol in the Nazi genocide of European Jews deserves greater attention. While numerous studies from the social sciences have demonstrated the link between drinking and acts of homicide and sexual violence, the connection between mass murder and alcohol is under-researched. Among the Nazi perpetrators, alcohol served several roles: it incentivised and rewarded murder, promoted disinhibition to facilitate killing, and acted as a coping mechanism.

 Read the whole essay, at Aeon, for other eyewitness accounts of drunken celebrations that were part and parcel of massacres.

No love lost

Further to the remarkably successful fiscal turnaround in California under remarkably Blue Governor Jerry Brown, which I posted about yesterday, it's fun to read of the outright war between him and the Trump administration on immigration:

SACRAMENTO — California and the Trump administration have locked horns from the very first hours of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. But a visit by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the California capital, Sacramento, on Wednesday produced an unfiltered shouting match that was remarkable even for the long-embattled antagonists, and seemed to be a culmination of fraying relations between the conservative administration and the country’s deepest blue state.

Mr. Sessions told a crowd of more than 200 law enforcement officials in a hotel ballroom that he would not stand for the insubordination of California lawmakers and what he called the dangerous obstruction of federal immigration laws.

A 10-minute walk away, in a briefing room of the State Capitol, Gov. Jerry Brown unleashed a tirade against Mr. Sessions and the Trump administration. He said that the administration was “full of liars” and that Mr. Sessions was “basically going to war against the state of California.”

It was highly unusual for an attorney general “to come out here and engage in a political stunt, make wild accusations, many of which are based on outright lies,” Mr. Brown added, “particularly a fellow coming from Alabama talking to us about secession and protecting human and civil rights.”

Speaking of Tehran...

....as I was a few posts back, it certainly makes me feel like deserves a supervolcano eruption when it starts doing stuff like this:

An Iranian woman who publicly removed her veil in protest against Iran’s compulsory headscarf law has been sentenced to two years in prison, the judiciary said on Wednesday.
Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, who announced the sentence, did not give the woman’s identity but said she intended to appeal against the verdict, the judiciary’s Mizan Online news agency reported.
Dolatabadi said the unidentified woman took off her headscarf in Tehran’s Enghelab Street to “encourage corruption through the removal of the hijab in public”.
The woman will be eligible for parole after three months, but Dolatabadi criticised what he said was a “light” sentence and said he would push for the full two-year penalty.

Speaking of comedy...

....I think Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell has been hitting some pretty high notes this season.

Tim - I saw somewhere on the net that you've cooled on him.   Hope you have been watching this current season, before I find it hard to imagine you don't find it amusing.

I think the thing that makes the show really work is the great team of support actors he has with him.  I reckon they're really talented.

Micallef himself is performing fine, too, but I have noticed he seems to have aged suddenly in the last year or so.   Hope he doesn't have any health problems...

Get your Moone on Netflix

Finding stuff to watch on Netflix is not always easy, but I was happy to find recently that the very pleasing Irish comedy Moone Boy (of which I had only ever seen the first season on Australian TV) is currently on Netflix - but only until 30 March!

So, I have 12 episodes (the total of Seasons 2 and 3) to watch in quick succession.

I'm not a binge watcher, though, and don't quite understand that practice.   This may sound odd, but I just have the feeling that watching many episodes of anything in one sitting feels like its not really honouring the effort put into making the show.   It just feels a bit wrong to consume so quickly something that took a long time to create.    Anyway, I like to protract enjoyment.   Why, when you find something you like, would you want to get all of the enjoyment done in a day, instead of stretching it over at least a few weeks?

Dinesh dumbs down further

If you enjoy seeing Dinesh D'Souza making an even greater fool of himself, you should read his tweet on tariffs and Milton Friedman, and the responses.

That's one way to end Middle East conflict...

I see in this article at Nature that vulcanologists don't think we're planning enough for the next massive volcanic eruption - one that would hit VEI-7 on the scale that I knew nothing much about until now.   [See the brief Wikipedia article - it involves blowing 100 cubic kilometres of stuff into the air.  VEI-8 gets really serious - 1,000 cubic km.!]

So, where do they think are possible sites for the next VEI-7?:

The researchers already have a long list of candidate volcanoes that might be capable of a VEI-7 blast. They include Taupo in New Zealand, site of the world’s last VEI-8 eruption — 26,500 years ago — and Iran’s Mount Damavand, which lies just 50 kilometres from Tehran.

Well, we Australians don't want Taupo blowing:  it's last eruption was a VEI-7 around 200AD, but fortunately Maori folk hadn't reached the islands at that time.  [Is there nothing in aboriginal folklore that has been theorised as being sourced from that event?   Let me Google it -  nope, nothing comes up in my first attempt.]

But Mount Damavand?   Just 50km from Tehran?  Let's see where that is on a map:

Look, it's a bit of a dramatic solution, but a big sprinkling of ash in a 1,000 radius would give the locals something else to think about for a good few years.

Who'd have thought?

Yes, this is remarkable.  The Wall Street Journal notes, with no criticism to speak of, that a Governor who I'm pretty sure wingnuts have longed derided as about as Left wing as Castro has brought California into a very healthy budget position without killing the economy.   How?  By taxing the rich:

Buoyed by tax increases passed under his administration and a strong economy, Mr. Brown said Wednesday that the state is projecting a $6.1 billion surplus for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

The governor proposed socking most of the money away in a rainy-day fund whose creation he pushed for in 2014. Nearly 70% of the state’s projected revenue of about $135 billion next fiscal year is derived from personal income taxes, according to the governor’s office.

As the tweet says:

Update:  I thought "should I be skeptical of the claim that the taxes really were on the rich?  Did the whole population suffer?   So, Googling the topic, I see it was pretty well targetted to the rich:

The measure creates three new personal income tax brackets for rich residents and adds a quarter-cent to the sales tax. The higher tax rates, which hit single filers making $250,000 and up and married taxpayers earning at least $500,000, last for seven years, and push the top tax rate to 12.3% for filers earning $500,000 and above, or $1 million per couple. It is effective starting with the 2012 tax year.
The sales tax hike, which brings that levy to 7.5%, starts Jan. 1 and lasts for four years.

The wealthiest 1% of Californians -- those with annual incomes of $533,000 or more -- will shoulder nearly 79% of the tax increase, according to the California Budget Project, a research group that endorsed the proposition. They will see their taxes rise by 1.1% of their income, while the bottom four-fifths of the state's residents will see an increase of between 0.1% and 0.2% of their incomes.

Conspiracy minded idiots

I see the wingnutty right continues with its pathetic "kill the messenger, who cares about the message" reality avoidance technique (just as they do with climate change), with the latest nut meme being that Downer was an untrustworthy Clinton agent because when he was foreign minister, the Australian government donated to the Clinton Foundation's anti-HIV initiative.

This is ridiculous - Downer passed on that Papadopoulos had told him that the Russians were shopping dirt on Clinton.  Normal people might think that normal Americans would have an interest in blatant but underhanded attempts to interfere in the election coming from Russia.   But no - for wingnuts it's all grand conspiracy thinking that no one should ever have acted on this because - you know - Clinton and anyone who ever had anything to do with her was in every and any way always corrupt and it's a case of conspiring against the Right.

Steve Kates (of course) passes on the meme today, and such influential wingnut bloggers like the high functioning but gormless idiot Ace of Spades thinks it's really big too.

Monty - again, I say to you - the wingnutty Right is just too stupid to argue with these days.   Just too stupid...

Bad news

If Bolton has any influence, everyone seems to think there'll be a much, much higher chance of American nukes flying off during a Trump presidency:

And I see that anti-tariff economics adviser Gary Cohn is said to be resigning.

Things getting much grimmer in the White House...

Update:   speaking of ranting men, you'd think Nassim Taleb might find time to occasionally make a critical comment on Trump's economics, but on his Twitter feed, he very, very rarely makes any comment on him at all.

A worthy Krugman

Been a while since I recommended a Krugman column, but this one "A Ranting Old Guy With Nukes" is pretty good.   (And Mother Jones notes an attempt to nitpick it by Kevin Williamson, which fails.)

Forgotten subway

In an article that explains that American governments are getting too carried away with the unproved technology of hyperloop, I found this bit:

There is reason to think high-speed vacuum-tube transportation can work, at least on paper. (A pneumatic subway briefly opened beneath Manhattan in 1870.) 

 Wikipedia has an entry about that short lived, short length, pneumatic subway, and it also notes that a similar novelty subway was built before that at the Crystal Palace in London.

The things you learn...

Prophetting in Africa

Seems I have missed the rise of "Prophet" Shepherd Bushiri in Africa:

On a regular Sunday, about 40,000 people will gather to hear the Prophet preach, and potentially pick up some of the specially designed merchandise on sale at stalls dotted around the large church complex - anything from "miracle oil", calendars and wrist bands, to branded towels, T-shirts and caps, all emblazoned with his face. 

Now I have to go look at the video which shows him walking on air.   [Done - and I don't think I will bother sharing it.  I see he has been a thing for a few years now, and been the subject of skepticism within Africa too.  Good.]

Blockchain skepticism in detail

When it comes to reading the stuff being put out by Berg, Davidson and Potts (key line - don't get too distracted by Bitcoin, the real revolution coming is glorious blockchain) I've never got over the feeling that it was pretty vacuous waffle that didn't make much sense.

Hence it gives me pleasure to read this great piece of blockchain skepticism by Roubini and Byrne in The Guardian today.   They make clear much of what I always thought was obvious, yet seems to never be addressed (or at least, in a way I can understand) in the RMIT conference machine material.

Strange choices

Have the Oscars become unimportant because the Academy has become more and more peculiar in its choices?   It would seem that the big winner (so far, I was just watching some of it during my lunch) is The Shape of Water, the "adult fairy tale" featuring a sexy love story between a woman and what looks like a slightly more human Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Being underwhelmed by the director's Pan's Labyrinth, and given the nature of the story, I am in no hurry to watch this movie at all.   As, I suspect, is most of the public.  I see now that it had a December release in the USA, and has made a relatively paltry $57 million.   (I'm surprised it made that much.)

I am particularly miffed that Shape took the award for best score, when I had predicted that Dunkirk should definitely get it.

Update: yes, it won best picture.   Ugh.

At some point, hopefully if it is free on a streaming service, I will watch it hoping to confirm my anticipatory dislike.

Update 2:  I hadn't really bothered to read reviews of it before, but I see that Rex Reed wrote one  with the pleasing title ‘The Shape of Water’ Is a Loopy, Lunkheaded Load of Drivel.'

Hero revisionism

Reading this story gives a good picture of how terrifying being involved in a US school shoot up must be for both students and teachers.

In brief - at least a couple of Florida students are saying that a teacher formerly called a hero in the media didn't seem very heroic to them when they were caught in the corridor and he (perhaps following procedure technically correctly?)  refused to let them back in the classroom.

I'm not sure who's right or wrong, to be honest, but you can imagine that causing some disruption in the school for some time afterwards.

Opioids can cause extra pain - huh

I didn't know this.  From the start of an article at NPR:

When patients arrive in the emergency room, nearly all but those with the most minor complaints get an IV.

To draw blood, give medications or administer fluids, the IV is the way doctors and nurses gain access to the body. Putting one in is quick and simple, and it's no more painful than a mild bee sting.

Yet for some patients, this routine procedure becomes excruciating. On my shifts as an emergency physician, I began to notice a strange pattern. These hypersensitive patients often had a history of using opioids.

Shouldn't these patients be less susceptible to pain, instead of more so?

As I looked into it, I found that I was far from the first to notice the paradox of heightened pain sensitivity with opioid use. An English physician in 1870 reported on morphine's tendency to "encourage the very pain it pretends to relieve." In 1880, a German doctor named Rossbach described a similar hypersensitivity to pain with opioid dependence.

A century passed before the phenomenon received serious scientific attention. 

Turns out it is still not well understood.  Read the whole thing.

Disliking Stephen King

My son wanted to watch the recent movie version of Stephen King's It. 

Now, as I may have mentioned before, I have found one - just one - adaptation of Stephen King material which I liked:  The Shining.   And I like that a lot.  But from what I have read, it's almost in spite of the novel that it turned out to be a great movie.  (King himself doesn't like it!)   But every other King inspired mini series or movie I've seen has not impressed.  I didn't even care for Stand by Me, his (only?) non horror work, when I saw it at the cinema decades ago.  (Too much overwrought acting, and characters that I don't recall being all that sympathetic.)

So, would this reasonably well received movie change my mind - especially since I had not watched the earlier adaptation of it, and was therefore coming to it without preconceptions.  

No.   A hundred times no.  

Look, I know you have to make allowances for certain conventions in ghost or horror stories - the most obvious being nervous people walking into darkened rooms/haunted houses/sewer systems that look more appropriate for New York than a country town, when every normal person would run away or at least go in prepared - but it can be pushed so far that it just becomes ridiculous, and so it is, repeatedly, in this movie.

Apart from that, was King himself bullied at school and dislike his parents, because now that I think of it, meanness of kids to other kids, and incompetent or nasty parents, seems to be a feature of a lot of his stories.  The kid on kid meanness is a very big component in this movie, but it doesn't seem to have any context.  It's just there.

The movie reminded me at times of the two other King movies mentioned above - but the use of gushing blood in this one was (sorry to use the word again) ridiculous, as to opposed to malevolent, as it was in The Shining.

Overall, I found it an unpleasant, silly and non-scary story - so very conventional in the way the scary music would start, and even managing jump scares which didn't scare.   

And it convinces more than ever that King is a puzzlingly over-rated creative force.

In nerdy construction news...

Hey, look what I saw yesterday:

Why's this interesting?  Because it's the start of the 10 level office building being built in Brisbane using engineered wood.   (OK, well there's concrete involved at the bottom, obviously, but most of it is meant to be wood.)

I wrote about it in previous posts here and here.   Interesting, no?  (It just is, shut up.)

In more Trump tariff news...

*   Yes, another network confirms what Jonathan Swan told us the other day - that Trump was going off his nut on the night he decided to start a trade war.   (Maybe Kelly made sure the nuclear codes were kept out of the room for a few hours.):

According to two officials, Trump's decision to launch a potential trade war was born out of anger at other simmering issues and the result of a broken internal process that has failed to deliver him consensus views that represent the best advice of his team.
On Wednesday evening, the president became "unglued," in the words of one official familiar with the president's state of mind.

*  I am waiting for the Steve Kates, Trump sycophant extraordinaire,  to explain to the world why it's actually not a bad idea idea at all.   Or is that a challenge too far even for him?   (I'm suspecting he'll go with a "but every single other decision Trump has made has been so good, this one won't undo his tremendous legacy.") 

*  If you look up Scott Adams on twitter, you will see  that not only is he claiming that Trump making decisions irrationally is actually a good "negotiating" tactic (left unsaid is who he is actually "negotiating" with when it comes to tariff wars); he's now on board with the Seth Rich conspiracy.  Funny how Adams doesn't seem to realise that chatting into his webcam every day makes him look like a loser talking to himself.  (Yes, I know, he does have live viewers during these pieces, but it still makes him look like what he almost certainly is - an eccentric lonely looser with no real friends, even if he does have squillions.)      

That got old quick

Andrew Bolt, who thinks Gina "if only Australians would work for $2 a day" Rinehart is an economics genius, quotes her praising Trump to the high heavens:

The United States, under President Donald Trump’s leadership, is showing everyone they are open for business and investment, and truly on the way to making the USA great again.

Whereas Marketwatch notes, post the Trump tariff decision:

The broad-based nature of the tariffs—and the broad-based market reaction—indicate that “investors are not only concerned about this particular action, but also how that’s going to affect the economy in the U.S.,” said James Norman, president of QS Investors, in a phone interview....

Domestic U.S. steel prices were already up 20% since the beginning of the year in anticipation of possible tariffs, said Andrew Hunter, U.S. economist at Capital Economics, in a note. That’s a big potential drag on steel consumers in the machinery, motor vehicle and construction industries, he said, observing that the tariffs could, ironically, raise the incentive for those manufacturers to move production offshore to avoid the tariffs.

Giving thanks

A few things to be grateful for:

*  Mussels (they featured in a very nice pasta meal last night, thanks to wife)
*  Taylors wine (one of those wineries that I don't buy all that often, but when I do, they just never seem to put a foot wrong - and yes, I drank a glass last night with the mussels.)
*  Yeast.   Too many reasons to mention, apart from its role in last night's glass of wine, but here's one I didn't know til yesterday:

Both cocoa and coffee beans undergo a fermentation step after their harvest, where yeasts munch on sugars surrounding the beans. Bacteria also play a role in this process, and the yeast leaves behind flavor compounds that make it into the final coffee and chocolate. Researchers have found that cocoa beans in yeast-free fermentation are left with an acidic, off flavor, and that certain yeasts can lend coffee caramel notes.

A bit like a Philip K Dick story, with fewer androids

Some people have the strangest lives.   This story at BBC is about a woman who was the victim of what might be called a high functioning but delusional parent is pretty remarkable.

Not very surprising

When nuclear power goes wrong, it really goes wrong.   Local contamination around Fukushima is probably worse than first thought:

The team says that, for the first time, the fallout of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor fuel debris into the surrounding environment has been "explicitly revealed" by the study.

The scientists have been looking at extremely small pieces of debris, known as micro-particles, which were released into the environment during the initial disaster in 2011. The researchers discovered uranium from nuclear fuel embedded in or associated with caesium-rich micro particles that were emitted from the plant's reactors during the meltdowns. The particles found measure just five micrometres or less; approximately 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The size of the particles means humans could inhale them.

The reactor debris fragments were found inside the nuclear exclusion zone, in paddy soils and at an abandoned aquaculture centre, located several kilometres from the nuclear plant.

It was previously thought that only volatile, gaseous radionuclides such as caesium and iodine were released from the damaged reactors. Now it is becoming clear that small, solid particles were also emitted, and that some of these particles contain very long-lived radionuclides; for example, uranium has a half-life of billions of years.

Update:  more news along similar lines, from The Japan Times:

In the wake of the 2011 nuclear crisis, radiation levels at homes and areas nearby in a Fukushima village remain around three times higher than the government target despite cleanup work having been performed, an environmental group has said.

In some areas of the village of Iitate and the town of Namie, levels of radioactivity detected at some points among tens of thousands checked in surveys last September and October were higher than they had been the previous year, Greenpeace Japan said in a report released Thursday.

Most of the six houses surveyed in Iitate, located around 40 kilometers northwest of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 complex, logged radiation levels higher than the government-set target of 0.23 microsieverts per hour, ranging from 0.2 to 0.8 microsieverts per hour.

Some areas in the village had seen radiation levels rise from 2016, Greenpeace said. “There is a possibility (the environment) was contaminated again as radioactive materials that had accumulated in nearby forests may have moved around,” it said.

Is it just me, or...?

...does it seem that Nassim Taleb might have some decent ideas, but I can't be bothered working out what they are because: 

a. he seems incapable of putting anything succinctly, and
b. if twitter is any guide, he spends such a large part of every day angrily denouncing and ridiculing other people (in any field) as being idiots that he genuinely seems to have psychological problems.

Just luck

I haven't read the paper, which is on arXiv, but here's the abstract:

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

 A sort of comforting thought, for people of modest means.  (Also likely to be disliked by the Ayn Rand/libertarian branch of politics.)

The very peculiar Newton

Yes, we all know Newton was a strange dude, with interests in alchemy and esoteric religion, but this review in TLS gives some further insights:

Newton tends to come across in popular biographies as a prickly and profoundly ornery recluse whose mind was more at home in the heavens than in conversation with his fellow men, let alone women. Some of this is not exactly wrong. Newton prickled all right. Even as a child, growing up at Woolsthorpe Manor in rural Lincolnshire during the English Civil War and the early years of the Commonwealth, he threatened to set his mother and stepfather on fire and “burn the house over them”.

He was not what you would call a science communicator. The Principia Mathematica, for all its importance as the foundational text of modern mechanics, is written in a fabulously dense and sprawling thicket of Latin that makes the Greek of Euclid’s Elements look positively vulgar. His lecturing style at Cambridge was so wilfully obscure that “ofttimes”, in the words of his early biographer David Brewster, “he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls”. For a man who professed to despise controversy, Newton feuded like a Homeric hero, dismantling the reputation of Robert Hooke and perhaps even having Hooke’s portrait at the Royal Society destroyed in a final damnatio memoriae....

The jottings in Newton’s copy of a Latin and Greek thesaurus give some impression of his fixations. Under the letter S, he added: Sluggard, Swearer, Sabbath-breaker, Shuhite, Sadducie, Sophister, Schismatick and Sodomite. Under P, he wrote: Pagan, Papist, Pharisie, Philistine, Pelagian and Priscillianist. He policed his own diet for signs of gluttony like a desert father. Another Trinity notebook lists under the heading Otiosa et frustra expensa (“vain and frivolous spending”): cherries, milk, butter, cheese, China ale, tarts and custards.

As for his specific religious theories:

It is not clear exactly how or at what point Newton slipped from the Presbyterianism of his Lincolnshire childhood into an idiosyncratic species of Arianism, an ancient school of thought that held Christ had been created by God and was therefore inferior to him. The transformation was certainly complete by the end of the 1670s, though, and there is no good reason to think that Newton had anyone other than himself to blame.

By the middle of the following decade, when he gave much of his energies over to alchemy and the decoding of apocalyptic prophecy, he had an even more remarkable idea. When mankind was still young, “before the first memory of things”, Newton surmised, Noah and his sons had come up with a pure and pristine form of worship that subsequent prophets – Christ among them – had contrived only to debase.

The original religion had found its expression in holy flames surrounded by vestal temples such as Stonehenge and St Bridget’s fire, a Christianized pagan observance that persists today in the grounds of Kildare Cathedral in Ireland. These shrines, Newton wrote, stood allegorically for the place of the Sun at the centre of God’s cosmos. Over time, the metaphors had gradually come to obscure the truths they depicted, and as the sacred learning was passed down by Moses and the ancient Egyptians, the prisca sapientia had degenerated into idolatry.

This sort of claim was unusual but not exceptional in Newton’s time. What was extraordinary was his belief that the Noachian faith had embodied a better and truer conception of the universe than anything that came after it. Modern philosophers could only hope to unravel its insights from the tangle of esoteric riddles in which they were preserved....

This conviction led Newton down some strange byways. At one point he defended the account of Egyptian theology in Aristophanes’ The Birds, where Night is said to have spread her black wings over the chaotic void and laid an egg containing Love, which eventually hatched and created all the gods and living things. Night, Newton explained, was the unseen deity, and Love the spirit that had moved over the face of the waters in Genesis 2. He also thought that Plato had ultimately inherited an understanding of universal gravitation from the same source, and that before him Pythagoras had hit on the inverse-square law by hanging hammers of different weights from taut sheep intestines.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time "taut sheep intestines" has appeared in this blog....

 Anyway, there is still more to read at the review.  

Man child strikes again

Trump's (dangerously?) bad mood seems partly/primarily to do with Jeff Sessions refusing to resign, and in fact starting to push back on his boss's childish insults:

Last Thursday, Mr. Trump began a meeting attended by Mr. Sessions by saying, “I also want to thank a really tremendous attorney general.” He turned to the person seated next to him and added: “That’s Pam Bondi, from Florida.” Ms. Bondi is Florida’s state attorney general.

Trump problems

Jonathan Swan from Axios, who seems very well connected with the White House, is tweeting that Trump is in a completely foul mood at the moment - to an exceptional degree.

The Entertainer, Part 3 (I think)

Ah, I enjoy reading some of the predictions of this 50-something year old Right wing catastrophist  who sings at RSL clubs and outback venues.    (Management really should do him a favour and start slipping anti-depressants into the water he sips between songs.)

When will the walk back begin

Everyone expects that there'll be phones calls made and Trump will walk back from his Democrat friendly ramble about guns made at this meeting:

In 2016, NRA-endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump won the presidency after many months of insisting that his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton was going to grab your guns.
In February 2018, President Trump publicly called for a subversion of due process, and for the government to “take the guns first.”

During a televised meeting with lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, the president and assembled legislators spent the hour riffing on ideas for securing schools and curtailing gun violence in America. Trump ping-ponged between various policy positions and postures, invariably making unforced interjections that would make his staunchest pro-gun supporters cringe.

When Vice President Mike Pence talked about how those who are a “danger to themselves or others” should have their firearms taken away, but also afforded due process, the president jumped in to one-up Pence.

“Or, Mike, take the firearms first, and then go to court,” Trump said, breaking with his own vice president on live TV. “Because that's another system. Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures.”

The president continued, sounding like the gun-grabbing Democrats he’d once warned against: “I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida… To go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you're saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.”

Would love to hear some of the NRA calls being made to Republicans (or to Trump direct) to get him back under control.

Tiny thing makes big discovery

I was listening to Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning talking to the CSIRO guy who designed the tiny radio telescope that made this big discovery.   (It made up for having to listen to a full ten minutes an hour earlier on the wonders of women's team sports - Fran Kelly's personal interests surely results in the most disproportionate coverage of that topic on any radio station in the world.)   

Anyway, this is the story:

Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe — around 180 million years after the Big Bang.

The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light. The evidence hints that the gas that made up the early Universe was colder than predicted. This, physicists say, is a possible sign of dark matter’s influence. If confirmed, the discovery could mark the first time that dark matter has been detected through anything other than its gravitational effects.

“This is the first time we’ve seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang,” says Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University in Tempe who led the work, which is published in Nature¹ on 28 February. “If it’s true, this is major news,” says Saleem Zaroubi, a cosmologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Other teams will need to confirm the signal but, so far, the finding seems to be robust, he says. “It’s very exciting stuff. This is a period in the Universe’s history we know very little about.”

And this is the tiny telescope:

Expect more of this

Just as Republicans in Florida started legislation for this:

The goal: 10 marshals (teachers trained to carry a gun) in every school, which would equate to 37,000 statewide. The state would cover the costs of background checks, drug testing, psychological exams and 132 hours of training. The bill does provide a one-time $500 stipend for those who volunteer to have a gun.

The bill also calls for spending $400 million to put a school resource officer in every school, improve mental health counseling and make public school buildings safer.

....over in Georgia,  this happened:

A social studies teacher barricaded himself inside a classroom at a Georgia high school on Wednesday and fired a handgun once in what may have been a warning shot, authorities said.
No students were in the classroom at the time, and the only injury reported was a student who hurt her ankle running when Dalton High School was evacuated.
The teacher, Jesse Randal Davidson, was taken into custody without incident after a 30- to 45-minute standoff with officers, Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier said. Davidson, 53, serves as the play-by-play announcer for the high school’s football team, police said in a tweet .

Actually, there is much skepticism on Twitter about the Florida plan because of the increase in teacher's liability cover it would guarantee.   Yes, covering a school/teacher for accidentally shooting a student is likely to increase premiums, I would expect...

Who knew that dating a politician could be so lucrative?

I think this is not going to go over well with the general public;  except that presumably Labor figures have done the same thing and so will not be inclined to promote outrage:

Julie Bishop has claimed $32,000 in taxpayer-funded family travel for her long-term boyfriend but says she is not obliged to disclose his financial interests on the parliamentary register because he is not her "spouse" or de facto partner.

Apparently, they live in separate cities, and have been an item since 2014.

But since when does any job, private or public, carry such side benefits for a (for want of a better term) boyfriend or girlfriend who hasn't reached the heights of "de facto partner" yet?:

Ms Bishop has claimed $32,000 in taxpayer-funded travel for him between 2015 and 2017. Ms Bishop nominated him as her designated family member in 2015 which entitles him to free domestic airfares and Comcar rides under the allowance granted to MPs for family reunification. These benefits can be bestowed by an MP on almost anyone and are disclosed in Department of Finance records.

Ms Bishop has previously said she began dating Mr Panton in early 2014. Photographs of the pair published since then show they regularly attend social events such as the Melbourne Cup, Portsea Polo and sporting grand finals, and meet with celebrities abroad.In the first six months of 2015, Mr Panton claimed nearly $10,000 in flights and car rides, including more than $3000 in flights to and from Perth on the same weekend Ms Bishop declared on her pecuniary interests that she had received free tickets to the Leeuwin Estate Concert in Margaret River. The pair were photographed attending the event together.

Nothing a year's sleep wouldn't help

Gee, the head of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, looks like he hasn't slept a wink since Trump became President.  Here he is, telling a Senate committee that his Manchurian candidate President hasn't told him to do anything in particular about Russian cyberattacks:

Apart from the incredible bags under the eyes, he looks relatively young - he's a year older than me but not a sign of grey hair at the temples?   

Why sacrifice?

The Atlantic has an article looking at the matter of human sacrifice; why it was a "thing", and why it stopped.

A pretty interesting topic, with no clear answers.  Seems that some anthropologists argue that it only worked as a social control factor for a society that stayed relatively small - under 100,000 people, say.  Above that, it became de-stablising.

Others argue it went out of fashion as religion improved, so to speak:

But though sheer military might may have been the underlying cause of the disappearance of human sacrifice, the members of the victorious societies likely didn’t see it that way. They probably saw the rejection of human sacrifice as a logical extension of the golden rule, or as a religious imperative. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that societies became less violent as they became better at abstract reasoning. In other words, people spurned violence against others on the grounds that they wouldn’t want it done to them. Turchin and colleagues disagree: With staggering frequency, they argue, it was religion rather than reason that turned people away from ritualized brutality. But a different kind of religion—one that deified not a mortal god-king, but a supernatural “big god.” These were the forerunners of today’s major world religions, and those who spread them railed against human sacrifice. “They basically said, God is repelled by this,” says Turchin.

These new religions—such as Judaism and Zoroastrianism—were born roughly during the first millennium B.C., and though they have yet to prove it, the Seshat group suspects that they provided the social glue that allowed societies to reach newly intricate heights. Without these religions, the researchers think, the complexifying process would have stalled long before it produced the nation-states and multistate federations of today.

Staying classy

In today's list of classy politicians in the news -  Michaella Cash:

Innovation and Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash has repeatedly threatened to name "every young woman" in Bill Shorten's office that she has heard rumours about in an extraordinary row at Senate estimates.

Responding to repeated demands by Labor Senator Doug Cameron to name her new chief of staff, Senator Cash shot back that that was a "dangerous road" he was walking.

"If you want to start discussing staff matters be very, very careful. Because I'm happy to sit here and name every young woman in Mr Shorten's office about which rumours in this place abound.

Update:  I see that Tim Blair, who my blog roll is about to move to the "gone completely stupid and offensive" category along with Bolt, seems to think it was a good bit of "calling out" of Labor's "moral grandstanding".   An idiotic take on the matter, given the way Labor was careful to chase Joyce on entitlements only.  (Has Blair noted that even Abbott this afternoon said it was a brain snap that shouldn't have happened?  Has any Coalition member defended it?)

And David Leyonhjelm - retweeting a crap wingnut meme from Prison Planet:

Leyonhjelm apparently doesn't believe in Googling wingnut memes before passing them on - this one  was debunked at Snopes.

Zero pity felt

Have you heard about this?   Poisonous radio conspiracist nutjob Alex Jones (who has long promoted "false flag" and "crisis actor" conspiracies after major shootings) is pleading for student activist David Hogg (whose face, by the way, keeps reminding me of a young Christian Bale) to help him not be banned by Youtube.

The twitter reactions are pretty funny.

That troublesome Chinese belief

I complained once before that one of the worst things to come out of China (or Asia more generally?) is the belief that certain animal parts carry certain health benefits.   (I keep thinking there must be a single word for that, but what is it?)  Nature reports:

The jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize City, Belize, on the day after Christmas last year. Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs. On 10 January, a second cat — this time, an ocelot that may have been mistaken for a young jaguar — turned up headless in the same channel.

The killings point to a growing illicit trade in jaguars (Panthera onca) that disturbs wildlife experts. The cats’ fangs, skulls and hides have long been trophies for Latin American collectors who flout international prohibitions against trading in jaguar parts. But in recent years, a trafficking route has emerged to China, where the market for jaguars could be increasing because of crackdowns on the smuggling of tiger parts used in Chinese traditional medicine.

Wildlife trafficking often follows Chinese construction projects in other countries, because Chinese workers can send or take objects home, says ecologist Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. “If there’s a demand [in China] for large-cat parts, and that demand can be fulfilled by people living in parts of Africa, other parts of Asia or South America, then someone will step in to fill that demand,” he says. “It’s often Chinese-to-Chinese trade, but it’s turning global.”

Does no one at the top of Chinese government (hello, dictator elect Xi) think that it might be useful to have a government backed campaign to stop the population believing in quasi magical "traditional medicine", at least if it involves animal parts?

Not just piety on their mind

Well, at least it's good to see it's not just Catholics with problems about how the apparently pious carry on sexually:

#MosqueMeToo Gives Muslim Women A Voice About Sexual Misconduct At Mecca

Dressed in a hijab and covered from head to toe, she felt something. Someone — a man — had grabbed onto her butt and would not let go.

The Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, called hajj, was supposed to be the holiest moment of Mona Eltahawy's life. When she was 15, she journeyed there with her family. The magnificence of the Great Mosque had taken her breath away. But that man turned the trip into a nightmare.

If I ruled the world....

....I would  ban the internet advertising companies "Taboola" and "Outbrain" and any other that fills up websites with crappy photo links to fake news and stupid ads.  

I'm thoroughly sick of them.

A bad look

Just what the Church needs right now - monsignors in Rome with child porn and on the prowl in the public squares:

A judge on a top Vatican tribunal was given a 14-month suspended sentence by an Italian court for possessing child pornography and sexual molestation. He then resigned his position on the Roman Rota, the tribunal.

According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Mgr Pietro Amenta, a judge on the Rota, a court that deals mainly with marriage cases, accepted the terms of plea bargain on February 14....

Mgr Amenta was detained by police in March 2017 after he was accused of fondling an 18-year-old man in a public square in Rome. The young man followed him and called the police, who subsequently took Mgr Amenta into custody, Italian newspapers reported.

And there's another one under investigation:

The other is presumed to be that of Mgr Carlo Capella, a former Vatican diplomat recalled from service in Washington in 2017 shortly after the Vatican was notified by the U.S. Department of State “of a possible violation of laws relating to child pornography images by a member of the diplomatic corps of the Holy See accredited to Washington.”

An arrest warrant was also issued in Canada for Mgr Capella one month later for accessing, possessing and distributing child pornography.

Modern "conservatism"

I see that Max Boot is divorcing himself from the description "conservative", and with excellent reason:

Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. Now, as the Daily Beast notes, he has become a conspiratorial crank who has suggested that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was staged by liberals, that Barack Obama is a “gay Muslim” and Michelle Obama is a man and that Adolf Hitler, who sent 50,000 homosexuals to prison, “was NOT anti-gay.” He managed to sink even lower last week by mocking stunned Parkland school-shooting survivors after the Florida legislature defeated a bill to ban assault weapons: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

It is hard to imagine anything more cruel and heartless, but for a bottom-feeder like D’Souza it’s all in a day’s work. As he wrote in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative,” “One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.” (Thanks to Windsor Mann for the quote.) That, in a nutshell, is the credo of today’s high-profile conservatives: Say anything to “trigger” the “libtards” and “snowflakes.” The dumber and more offensive, the better. Whatever it takes to get on (and stay on) Fox News and land the next book contract!

Naturally, just as drug addicts need bigger doses over time, these outrage artists must be ever more transgressive to get the attention they crave. Coulter’s book titles have gone from accusing Bill Clinton of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” to accusing all liberals of “Treason,” of being “Godless” and even “Demonic.” Her latest assault on the public’s intelligence was called “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!”

That's a pretty good explanation of the situation.

Violence re-visited

Trump recently mentioned violent media after the Florida shooting (yes, I know, more as a diversion from taking action on gun control), but the topic did cross my mind again this weekend when I tried watching two things on Netflix. 

First, the (generally) critically well received Mindhunter.   [Spoiler follows].   The first episode starts with a hostage situation, and a very sudden and violent gun suicide.   It is quick, but done in a way you would never have envisaged as acceptable for TV violence, say, 20 years ago.    (Head pretty much blown off like a watermelon.)   The rest of the episode was, I thought, strangely bad in other ways.   The acting and dialogue seemed remarkably stilted and unnatural - no one seemed quite real.   I won't be watching it again.

Then my son was watching The Punisher - first episode perhaps?   I came in late, and was skeptical - I am finding I don't like any Marvel TV or streaming shows that I have sampled.

Well, near the end, the hero goes berserk with a construction hammer, killing or maiming I don't know who (baddies, generically, I assume).   The scene was graphic and unpleasantly violent in a way that, again, I think media representation just would not have contemplated a relatively short time ago.   I see that some people on Reddit and elsewhere have raised questions about the amount of physical violence in the show, so I know I am not alone.   There's something about the idea of a hammer to the head, or watching legs being broken,  that I find particularly grotesque. 

Now, I know - you can carry on about squeamishness about media depiction of violence in many different ways,  pointing to a myriad of psychological studies on its effects and their uncertain results, and get into bigger discussions about how civilised society used to consider actual violence (public executions) as public spectacle.

But I just cannot get over the feeling that certain things make common sense:

a.    if military training had to evolve to overcome the ordinary soldier's reluctance to kill, surely it's not unreasonable to think that modern, graphic first person shooter games are doing the same job on the minds of at least the mentally unstable, aggressive male who has thoughts about shooting up his school or workplace.   (In fact, I would be curious to know whether modern military training finds it's a lot easier to get their new recruits into no guilt shooting these days, given gaming and media depictions of blood and gore.)

b.   psychology has hit a crisis of experimental credibility, yet it would seem that it certainly hasn't spread to skepticism about some of the experiments to do with media violence.    And when you read what some of the studies do (for example, look at whether players of Grand Theft Auto are just as likely to pick up someone's dropped pen), you really do have to wonder about their value.

c.   the relationship between media and gaming violence and real life violence is obviously not simple, otherwise the rate of crime generally would be going up in the US and Australia, rather than downwards as it has been in the last couple of decades.   But does that mean there is no relationship between its increase and potential for negative effects on society or individuals?   No, I don't think.

d.  the depiction of graphic violence is undoubtedly desensitising to the viewing of violence, and how can that be a good thing?    To the contrary, isn't it a positive thing that we now find the idea of watching someone's neck being broken in an hanging as a somewhat grotesque interest in watching death; and if so, why shouldn't I be disturbed that some people have no reservation from watching a realistic depiction of a head being blown off by a shot gun?   Surely the desensitising to the viewing of a violent act make it easier for a person of the "right" mind frame to imagine carrying it out themselves?   The effect may be so marginal as to not reflect in general crime rates, but gee, there are lot of mass shootings happening in the US at the moment.

My negative feelings are intuitive but impossible to shake; and it is so obvious that the graphic depiction of violence is completely unnecessary for a scene to have emotional impact.    And emotional impact is different from desensitising.   Why risk desensitising someone who should not be desensitised to an act they can contemplate doing themselves, be it a shooting, stabbing or hammer blow to the head?    

Why has it become a non issue to Hollywood, gaming and media producers to contemplate the potential effect of their depiction of violence?    It is a strangely non-political issue, too - the Left used to deride movies from (say) the 1980's that seemed to espouse Right wing viewpoints as being too violent;  but then with the likes of Tarantino and the generally liberal bias of 95% of Hollywood and movie reviewers, and  you would have to say that the Left has given up having any moral concerns at all about violence of any kind.  

I think reasonable people should be debating why graphic violence is portrayed so readily and frequently these days, and urging creative types to think seriously about it.

Update:  I think my last lengthy post about movie violence was this one, from 2012, and I stand by what I said then.   I am bothered that the same things now need to be said about Marvel associated Netflix content.

Blame the "therapists"

I've always thought that allowing an "emotional support animal" on a plane is a peculiarly American fad, and one that's so silly that it was going to stop soon of its own accord.  Hence I haven't really paid it much attention.

I didn't realise that it's become a money making internet thing, too:

How is it legal to bring your duck on the plane? Under the federal Air Carrier Access Act, passengers are allowed to bring animals aboard by showing a letter from a mental health clinician or doctor asserting that the pet is part of their therapy. But the law is surprisingly vague about which species can come on board and gives airlines significant discretion. “You are never required to accommodate certain unusual service animals (e.g., snakes, other reptiles, ferrets, rodents, and spiders) as service animals in the cabin,” it reads.

Yet as a quick Google search will show, it’s possible to obtain these letters online for a small fee. Some passengers may very well be exploiting the law to bring pets on planes. And stories about peacocks and ducks in booties on planes are increasingly leading ESAs (and their handlers) to be treated as a punchline. In the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the animals a “scam” and “one of the downsides of a modern culture that too often fetishizes individual preference and expression over communal well-being.”

The rest of the article is an interview with a psychology researcher who says its not even well established that they are good idea.