Edging towards modernity

From NPR:

The Philippines, where roughly 80 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, is one of only two countries in the world where divorce remains illegal (with exemptions for the roughly 5 percent of the population that's Muslim). The only other country where divorce remains illegal is Vatican City.

I guess there's not that much need for divorces within Vatican City.

Anyway, change may be on the way in the Philippines:

But a bill passed in March by the Philippines House of Representatives is giving hope to proponents of divorce. It would allow divorce for a variety of reasons, including irreconcilable differences, abuse, infidelity and abandonment....

To become law, the bill needs to be passed by the Senate and approved by the president. But the House bill, which passed by a vote of 134 to 57, is significant since no divorce legislation has ever made it this far in the Philippines, says sociologist Jayeel Cornelio of Manila's Ateneo University. He calls the bill "unprecedented," but also logical in a country where a recent survey showed more than half of Filipinos are in favor of allowing divorce "for irreconcilably separated couples."

"The influence of the Catholic Church, when it comes to political matters and private moral affairs, is becoming weaker and weaker in the country," Cornelio says. "The resistance of the Catholic Church to the divorce bill is increasingly seen as not in the interests of the public but only the interests of the Catholic Church."

Cornelio says a divorce bill is a sensible, and even "inevitable" next step after the passage of the country's reproductive health law in 2013, which allowed poorer Filipinos in particular access to birth control. Many municipalities have been slow in implementing the reproductive health law, which took more than a decade to pass — evidence of how much power the Church still enjoys.
Still, there is an unusual level of bipartisan support for the divorce bill — a matter of concern for the Catholic Church.

China and children

Good post at The Interpreter:  Will China finally end its one child policy?

It makes the point that China has two clear demographic problems - not enough workers and not enough women:

By 2050, one in four people in China will be a retiree. This will definitely put an incredible strain on China’s one-child generation, who will have the 4-2-1 problem of taking care of kids and elderly parents, with but a nascent social safety net for support. With fewer workers paying into the system and more pensioners drawing from it, China’s pension shortfall could by 2050 reach trillions, according to a Deutsche Bank estimate.

There are, of course, other countries with greying populations. Japan takes the lead, but it has a far smaller population and a per capita GDP four times larger than China’s. That is why there’s the common saying in China, “We’ll get old before we get rich”.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that China shot itself in the foot demographically with the one-child policy. From having five people to support one retiree, the country will soon have 1.5 workers per retiree. Its bachelors need brides, its elderly need caretakers, yet its women were reduced by the one-child policy. Coupled together with a long-standing cultural preference for sons, this has led to a shortage of 40–60 million females.

 

Reform already finished?

The modernisation of Saudi Arabia has hit a road bump.  (Or, perhaps more accurately, the government car of modernisation has swerved to deliberately hit a few women who were cheering it on to go faster.)

For months, Saudi Arabia had been enjoying a public-relations windfall. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MbS, the kingdom’s charismatic future leader, seduced the world with his vision for a new, modern nation. There have been live concerts, and cinemas are opening, with many more planned. Women can attend soccer games. Last September, MbS announced a bold promise to overturn the country’s ban on women driving, a change that is set to go into effect on June 24.

Then, late on Friday, it all came crashing down: Reports emerged that the women activists who pressed for the policy change had been arrested and imprisoned. As of this morning, 13 are reported to have been arrested; most are women. Apart from the driving issue, they have campaigned against so-called guardianship rules which require Saudi women to receive permission from a male relative before making many life decisions, like traveling. One of those detained was Loujain al-Hathloul, who was photographed at the 2016 One Young World Summit with none other than Meghan Markle, who married Britain’s Prince Harry on Saturday.

The same article notes a widely told story about the modern prince:

One anecdote about MbS that seemingly every ambassador in Riyadh tells is the “bullet story.” When MbS was 22 (roughly 10 years ago), he wanted to build a business career. On one occasion, he needed a Saudi judge to sign off on a deal. But there was a problem with the contract, so the judge declined. MbS, the story goes, pulled a bullet out of his pocket and put it on the man’s desk. “You will sign or this is for you,” he said. The man signed the contract, but complained to then-King Abdullah, who banned MbS from the royal court.

I won't be booking my holiday visa to Riyadh anytime soon.   

Under pressure

I never would have thought that the concept of "pressure" would apply to the inside of a proton, but apparently it does.  And it's very, very high.  The abstract of a Nature paper just published (my bold):

The proton, one of the components of atomic nuclei, is composed of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. Gluons are the carriers of the force that binds quarks together, and free quarks are never found in isolation—that is, they are confined within the composite particles in which they reside. The origin of quark confinement is one of the most important questions in modern particle and nuclear physics because confinement is at the core of what makes the proton a stable particle and thus provides stability to the Universe. The internal quark structure of the proton is revealed by deeply virtual Compton scattering^1,2, a process in which electrons are scattered off quarks inside the protons, which  subsequently emit high-energy photons, which are detected in coincidence with the scattered electrons and recoil protons. Here we report a measurement of the pressure distribution experienced by the quarks in the proton. We find a strong repulsive pressure near the centre of the proton (up to 0.6 femtometres) and a binding pressure at greater distances. The average peak pressure near the centre is about 10³⁵ pascals, which exceeds the pressure estimated for the most densely packed known objects in the Universe, neutron stars³. This work opens up a new area of research on the fundamental gravitational properties of protons, neutrons and nuclei, which can provide access to their physical radii, the internal shear forces acting on the quarks and their pressure distributions.

Why I am skeptical of Nassim Taleb

I look at Nassim Taleb's twitter feed from time to time, and sometimes read other stuff about his ideas.

I think he has a touch of the Jordan Peterson's about him - he does a very hard, overly self-confident, sell of his own ideas using somewhat opaque or idiosyncratic terminology, and some people are very impressed by that.  Both seem readily overcome by emotions - Peterson can be weepy and sound distraught by Lefty ideology; Taleb is surely one of the angriest, and most arrogant sounding,  Tweeters on the planet.  (I reckon he would deny being emotional, though, and claim all of his angry sounding outbursts are purely intellectually driven.)

I pretty much have to rely on what other people explain as his positions, and here is a useful one by Arnold Kling on Taleb's recent book about "Skin in the Game".   One part:

In his latest book, Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb offers an approach to social and political philosophy that he believes will encourage socially constructive change and increased freedom. He starts with "double-negative utilitarianism," which means to minimize harm. This leads to a focus on the proper management of risk.

Taleb argues that only when people are, themselves, exposed to the adverse consequences of their choices do they take risks that are constructive for society. When they do not have "skin in the game," they take risks that are harmful and dangerous. This leads Taleb to advocate libertarianism, in which decentralized entrepreneurs are heroes, while those who impose centralized decisions are villains.

Hmmm.  "Decentralised entrepreneurs are heros" sounds a bit Randian to me.  You know how much I like Randian capitalist hero-worship.  [Sarc].

But you know what makes me most skeptical - Taleb spends a lot of time on Twitter fretting about GMO food and Monsanto (a topic on which I have some interest, as I have long thought it plain that some GMO ideas - food crops that allow for more and more herbicide to used on them - are dubious long term propositions that people ought to be skeptical of), but he seems to spend no time on climate change, which is clearly the most important global medium to long term risk of all.

As far as I can tell, Taleb is not a climate change skeptic; or at least, he has argued strongly for a precautionary approach to climate policy.   But Arnold Kling is a skeptic, and I reckon he and other libertarians like Taleb because he is part of the libertarian "do nothing" club - he manages to find (more or less) politically tribal reasons to not be concerned about politicians who deny or want to do nothing about climate change.   So, for such enlightened liberations who are not so crass to want to be aligned with Monckton, Singer or other loser and nutty sounding denialists, they can shrug their shoulders and say "no, of course I believe in climate change.  But meh, what can you do?  Now those bicycle helmet laws, anti-vaping regulation, and lower taxes - now that's what really gets me perturbed."    

Readfearn Fisks Bolt

Graham Readfearn does a rather excellent job at detailing how Andrew Bolt's editorial piece on Peter Ridd (which was likely only viewed by his small echo chamber of viewers anyway) was wrong in all key aspects.

(Incidentally, haven't had the chance to use the verb "to Fisk" for a long time.   Whatever happened to Fisk anyway.  I see he still does some reporting, but he is much more ignored than he ever used to be...)

More Peterson skepticism

A Slate article:   Jordan Peterson seems like a terrible therapist.

I think he might deny that what he was doing in these Skype sessions was therapy.  But the more I read about him, the nuttier he seems. 

In other denialists news

Wingnutty climate change denialists are fools easily parted from their money - whether it be for laying out for echo chamber denialist tomes published by the IPA, or an academic wanting hundreds of thousands of dollars for legal fees for a case which, I strongly suspect, he's going to lose.   (That really is a very large amount for legal fees for an employment dispute case, by the way.)

Denialists don't have the best track record when it comes to litigation.

Climate change denialists in trouble

Climate change denialists were motivated right from the start of the disastrous South East Queensland floods of 2011 to try to find humans to blame for the exceptional scenes of mayhem which led to many deaths in a type of sudden flood we just hadn't really seen in this region before.

Hence, apart from dam management, they latched onto one family's ground works as being the cause of deaths, and ran with it in a way that has led to a defamation action that anyone objective would have to say is not going well for Alan Jones and Nick Cater.

Good.

Probably nothing to it

Lots of news about some German researchers finding that that the likely explanation for the EM drive engine producing some tiny apparent thrust is the test apparatus interacting with the Earth's magnetic field.  

I was skeptical about this being a breakthrough from the start.

Teenagers, guns and mental health

They a very good, detailed and somewhat depressing explanation in The Atlantic about how you can never expect to have a system that catches all potential teenage gun killers in the US before they act.   It gives examples of the pre-killing behaviour of some of the guys (it's virtually always guys) who have been notorious mass shooters.  

It's always tedious hearing Right wingnuts saying that the problem is someone should have done something before the killing, when less than 10 States have "red flag" laws that might, in some cases, work to remove their guns.  And besides, for killers too young to own their own gun, they often just use their parents.

The article also notes that there has been a clear decrease in mental health beds available for those who need a lengthy and proper assessment.  And there are other complications too:

A parent of a child 14 or younger can legally commit him to a mental-health facility without an overt act—but generally, only for three days. And here, there is a practical problem: scarcity of treatment. Liza Long says that after Eric put a knife to her throat, he was taken to the emergency room, where they administered a drug to calm him down. Then the hospital informed her they had no beds for him in the psychiatric hospital. In fact, Eric’s social worker told her the only way to get Eric the mental-health services he needed was to press criminal charges against him. “So those were my options,” she says. “‘We have no idea what’s wrong with your kid. We think he needs a psychiatric bed, but there’s nothing available. Here’s a drug that will knock him out.’” She took him home with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug called Zyprexa.

Caldwell hears this all the time. “Twenty-five years ago,” he says, “if you had insurance, you could probably get the kid put into a psychiatric unit for 30 days for an evaluation and try to get a handle on what's going on. Those beds have just disappeared.”

Aside from the practical, legal, and emotional barriers—after all, who wants to commit their child?—parents have another incentive to keep their secret close, as Nancy Lanza did: fear of losing her other children. Several specialists and parents told me that social workers often believe that a child’s erratic behavior stems from abuse in the home. One woman with a violent daughter described how the local Child Protective Services department accused her and her husband of beating their daughter and depriving her of food. The agency threatened to take away their other children and investigated the parents for a year before determining there was no abuse. For her part, Liza Long lost custody of her two younger children after she published a heartfelt blog post headined “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” After the essay spread online, the judge granted her ex-husband full custody of the two children if she insisted on raising Eric. “Why won’t families talk about this?” Long asks. “That’s why.”

And finally, the obvious:

One study tracked school shootings in three dozen countries—incidents in which two or more people died. Half of those shooting incidents occurred in the United States. Given that, according to some studies, Americans are no more emotionally troubled than people in Europe and Canada, the stark difference is guns. Children outside the U.S. “don’t have access to AR-15s or Glocks or other weapons that our kids have access to,” says Dewey Cornell. “That’s a huge glaring obvious problem. It’s obvious to scholars in the field. It’s obvious to folks in other countries. For some reason it’s not obvious to our politicians.”

Peterson attacked

I wrote in my last post that I suspected there was less to Jordan Peterson than met the eye, and this quite effective piece looking at some of his waffley thoughts certainly indicates I was right.

It starts:

If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.) 

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. 

A really bad idea

I've never spoken about Rick and Morty.

I have Netflix,  a son just turned 18, and a general fondness for science fiction comedy - of course I've watched it.   But I'm not a huge fan.   Anyone who knows my tastes in pop culture could probably understand why.

Nihilistic or dark comedy has never done it for me in a big way.  Short bursts of it can be OK, but I don't think anyone should dwell on it as being a meaningful reflection on life - that's corrosive to the soul and society.

There are occasions in the show where the joke genuinely surprise me and gives me a good laugh, but to be honest, it's not that often.   And thematically, with its use of the multiverse as a continual basis for its stories (as well as its own type of dysfunctional family), I thought the show had pretty much run its course at the end of the third season.

So why do I write this now?   It's because of the news that its been renewed for 70 episodes!  

This is surely a bad idea for it creatively.  At a time when it seems universally acknowledged that The Simpsons should have ended more than a decade ago, we have another creative team thinking they can keep milking a comedy set up for, what?  another 8 to 10 years? 

The truth is, any comedy show has trouble maintaining quality for more than about (I reckon) 7 seasons.   Some die faster than others.   I just think it is obvious that Rick and Morty cannot maintain its output with the same "quality" that fans like for that amount of time.

Update:   quite separately from this, I was thinking recently when scrolling through Spotify, is 7 also the accurate number for "great albums any one band is ever likely to produce"  before diminishing returns set in?

A few comments about the wedding

I really don't pay much attention to Royal family news, but when one of them marries it's a spectacle that is pretty interesting even if only to admire all of the organisational skills at work.   And besides, they are the only weddings where you really get to see the bride and groom's faces in close detail in real time - it's a unique worldwide invasion of privacy that has pretty irresistible curiosity value.   Of course, you have to ignore much of the commentary, which can be gushing and claim inside knowledge of emotions with no reliability at all.

Harry and Meghan (I just had to check how to spell her name, that's how little I have read about her) played it pretty cool, though, and it was an entertaining event for the most part.  The missing teeth of one of the page boys as his face was caught in an open mouth grin behind the bride was a particularly funny and cute image.

And what about Teilhard de Chardin getting a mention?  That impressed me (although, to be honest, I was doing some quick tidying up in the kitchen during most of the black bishop's speech, which did seem to go on too long.)   I think de Chardin showed the way forward for modern Christianity, and he's gradually being rehabilitated within the Catholic Church, so I quite like him being mentioned anywhere.

The thing is, I reckon that if anyone remembers their own wedding service with fondness and emotion, it's hard not to like watching the wedding of any couple who look to be undertaking it with both solemnity and pleasure.   Hence, I enjoyed it. 

Random observations

*   I do find Annabel Crabb a very likeable TV presence, but she does sometimes really lay on the anachronistic 50's feminine cos-play look a bit too thick, I reckon:

Please ignore the woman to the right.  She's like the polar opposite of Crabb's fashion sense.

*  Richard Ayoade is pretty entertaining in most things he does, except for the woeful The Crystal Maze which has been showing on SBS.   Apparently, it's an update of an old, popular(?) show, but just like the truly charmless quiz show Pointless, there sometimes is just no accounting for British viewing tastes.  (Not that we can talk, I suppose - I find watching people watching TV the least interesting concept ever devised.)  

*  Bitcoin, which seems only to be a parlour game for tech nerds, is using up a quite large amount of energy.   More governments should just ban it, I say.

*  Oh for goodness sake:   South Koreans apparently share fully in the Chinese belief that certain foods are particularly good in all sorts of "woo" ways  - dog stew is supposed to make men more virile:

Many foods in Korea, such as dog meat stew (bosintang), are deemed to be “good for men.” From everyday foods, such as garlic or chives, to eel soup and gaebul—“penis fish,” a species of marine worm that resembles the male appendage—these ingredients are recommended for their ability to enhance male sexual performance. Bbeolddok-ju, or “erection wine,” is a rice-based wine that’s made with fruits, and comes with a phallus-shaped cap bearing a smiley face.

 Leave the dogs alone - they aren't going to help in the bedroom.

*  American Right wing media has fully constructed an alternative reality that, it seems, will not start to be deconstructed until the rich, old, male money behind it (Rupert Murdoch, Koch Brothers, and others) are dead.   I think it is indisputable that the globe will be a far, far better, safer and saner place when Rupert dies.  

The obvious problem with self driving taxis

The issue that I mused about a couple of years ago gets a lengthy column at Slate: 

The Dirty Truth Coming for Self-Driving Cars:   Trash. Odors. Bodily fluids. 

Will autonomous rideshares be ready for our mess?

Why I am disinclined to see Deadpool movies

From the NPR review:

No one can deny that Deadpool 2, like its predecessor, is filling a hole in the cinematic-superhero marketplace. Its graphic, gleefully gratuitous and mystifyingly mean-spirited R-rated violence is there for a rigorously focus-grouped reason. The mainstream Marvel movies — your Avengers, your Doctors Strange, your Ants-Men — are happy to maintain their white-knuckle grip on a PG-13 rating, the better to maximize their prospective audience. But that means their violence must remain assiduously entrail-free. They're eye-popping, just not literally. Visuals, not viscera.

Maybe Deadpool 2, with its merry fusillade of lopped-off body parts and mangled torsos and arterial spray, is just being more honest about what the world would look like, if superheroes truly existed. Either that, or it's just cynically indulging the bloodlust of viewers who regard badassiness as the only meaningful superhero currency, because they grew up reading the blithely violent (and not for nothing, hilariously awful) '90s comics that birthed Deadpool and many of this film's co-stars.

My simple rule:  maiming should not be condoned for entertainment purposes.

Why have so many people moved past that proposition, in the space of 30 years or so?

Update:   and more commentary I suspect I would agree with, if only I saw the movies, from the NYT review:

 What drives this franchise is the same force that drives so much culture and politics right now: the self-pity of a white man with a relentless need to be the center of attention. He is angry, violent, disrespectful to everyone and everything, and at the same time thoroughly nontoxic and totally cool.

Sure. Great. But there is something ever so slightly dishonest about this character, something false about the boundaries drawn around his sadism and his rage. “Deadpool 2” dabbles in ugliness and transgression, but takes no real creative risks.

I strongly suspect that take on the matter will upset you, Jason!

Kant and the Avengers

I quite like David Robert's article talking about Kant and utilitarianism and Avengers: Infinity War.

He's got one of the most entertaining twitter feeds around, too.  (In one series of tweets, he explained that he has been using pot recreationally since about 14.  He now has teen sons of his own - I was kind of interested what he tells them about it, as surely he is smart enough to know that suing it from  such a young age is now widely regarded as a risky thing for possible development of schizophrenia.)  

Climate change denialism is gradually dying out - literally

I see that Fred Singer (and the Wall Street Journal) is copping a pasting for his column denying sea level rise could be a problem, which sounds so obviously amateurish, and kinda dumb, that people are really surprised it would be published, even by the WSJ.

Singer has been around forever, so I had to check his age.  He's 93! 

Richard Lindzin, the only AGW skeptic scientist who I think has been credited with at least being wrong in an interesting way, is now 78.

Ian Plimer, who's just a geologist gadfly, is 72.  (Pity, I thought he was probably a bit older than that.)

Curry is 63 or 65 - accounts seem to differ - but she looks a bit old for her age.  Monckton is 66, but could pass for older too.   I can't see how old John Christy is, but he was married for 39 years, which would indicate he is likely at least 60.  White haired Roy Spencer is 62.

I'm not sure it's possible to find a climate scientist who counts as a skeptic/lukewarmer who is under 60.   

So, I guess a few of them will be with us for a while yet, but time will eventually remove climate change denialism.   

More Malaysian weirdness

Anwar Ibrahim sure got his pardon quickly.   But I was surprised to see he is aged 70!   I think his hair might be died, but still, in my mind he was probably in his 50's, and he looks (like his pardoner) remarkably fit and youthful for his age.   Is there some mysterious key to eternal youth in Malaysian politicians?  Wannabe youthful vampire Peter Thiel should be looking into that, I reckon.

I also see details via Jason Soon of a Chinese planned (and part constructed) superdevelopment at Johor Bahru, just across the bridge from Singapore.  

What's happening with China (as far as I can make out) is pretty weird, and novel:   mega firms operating with close connections to an ostensibly communist government are engaging in something that we'd probably call rapacious global capitalism if it was coming out of America.  Or, to put it another way,  dubious developments are getting foisted onto poorer countries keen to see any economic activity at all because there seems to be a combination of too much idle money in China and a government that sees its way to global security and domination by, well, building nice things. 

I don't think anyone saw that coming.

And by the way, that Johor Bahru development seems dubiously close to the ocean waterline.   Malaysia, and the Chinese developer, seem to not be planning enough for even 100 years into the future.

As it happens, I've booked a holiday at the end of the year for Singapore, and catching the bus up to Malacca for a few nights as well.  High end hotels in Malacca are ridiculously cheap.  Yet, when I checked whether staying at Johor Bahru was cheap enough to make the commute into Singapore worthwhile, it wasn't.   Johor Bahru also seems to have a lack of interesting things in its own right, although it does have a Legoland which is presumably there to attract visitors from Singapore.   Anyway, I'll be interested to look out the window at the city on the way to Malacca.