Something worth seeing in Dubai

I have always felt ambivalent about visiting Dubai - I'm pretty sure it would be impossible not to be impressed by some of the structures and facilities, but the history of imported, poorly treated labour that built it is somewhat off-putting.   (I'm also disinclined to visit any nation where sorcery is still a crime.)
 
Anyway, the Burj Khalifa is something that I'm sure I would spend a lot of time looking at, both during the day and at night.   They use it for some pretty remarkable light show displays:



Got that via Gulf News.

The Enlightenment and all that

I noticed an interesting thread on Ross Douthat's twitter feed about the matter of the Enlightenment and racism.    I think he's basically supporting Jamelle Bouie on the matter, but to be honest, I haven't read Bouie's threat to get to the bottom of the argument.

But - it is basically about saying that the Enlightenment was not all sweetness and light, to the extent that it lead to scientific arguments to justify racism.  The arguments against racism essentially came from enlightened religion more than from a scientific view of the matter.

This seems a fair summary, from someone else on twitter involved in the debate:

Yzaguirre says elsewhere that he thinks it's wrong to "fetishise" the Enlighenment.

Which brings me partly to the reason I wanted to blog about this.  

Libertarians tend to be big on promoting the Enlightenment and science - yet as a political movement, they have been at the forefront of funding and promoting anti-science denial of climate change, simply because they don't like the obvious policy prescription (a tax on carbon).

How hypocritical is that?   Extremely, and with dangerous consequences for the entire planet.  

A mystery

The ABC has been heavily promoting Mystery Road, and it received some good reviews by Left-ish reviewers, so I gave it a go last night. 

I was underwhelmed.    Very, very thin character writing if you ask me, and an outback atmosphere that felt cleaned up for inner city audiences.   (Well, I have to admit I am not expert at knowing the atmospherics of remote Australian towns, but then, I've never been to a lot of European countries either but can still get a sense of authenticity from a crime show.)  

Very, very little about it (actually, nothing) felt convincing to me, and its only benefit might be as an advertisement for sunscreen to prevent premature ageing.   (That's mean, but it's either that or really, really unlucky genetics that account for Judy Davis's extraordinary appearance.) 

From my camera today

Yes, it's the wood frame office block, the construction of which I've been following:

You're all fascinated I'm sure!

Yet more wood:

And here's an older pic, just to continue the theme:

Once a jerk, always a jerk

I had the impression that the (now pardoned) Dinesh D'Souza had become an unhinged jerk only later in life.   Remember this quote from Max Boot?:

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.”

But I see from this Mother Jones article from 2014, being widely tweeted today, that he was well and truly a jerk even in college:

Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

As to Trump's decision to use his pardon power, David Roberts' comment sounds right:

More about Babylon Berlin

Gee, this Netflix show (watched episode 5 last night) continues to impress, for the following reasons:

*  the cinematic scale and direction is obvious in every episode - so many extras costumed up;  streetscapes, nightclubs and subway stations that are completely convincingly art directed (if that's the word) for the era.   No doubt, some of it is digitally created (I have read that one recurring street setting is), but it is very hard to tell where it begins and ends, and most of the settings look satisfyingly large and real.   No wonder it was so expensive to make.

*  I don't know if this will continue for the whole series, but it's pleasantly different to find that the main character, an out of town police detective trying to investigate something in Berlin, seems to be so hapless in so many ways.    It's not played for laughs, but he just seems so unlucky all the time, and it's starting to amuse me.

*  If you ignore the sordid sex aspects, it does make nightclubbing in the era look a hell of a lot more fun than nightclubbing seems to have ever been in my lifetime.   No chemically induced party drugs or electronic doof doof music for them to have a good time - just champagne or spirits and live music.

*  It makes you want to know more about the actual history.   That's not a bad thing at all...

Some links of interest:

The Truth About Babylon Berlin, featuring this take: 

There is some gratuitous sex and violence in Babylon Berlin, which at first had me thinking the show would be just another titillating TV sensation. But the attention paid to costumes, architecture, historic events and other details kept me watching, and it paid off. Aside from being an over the top noir thriller with a labyrinthine plot, the series also serves as a basic primer on the Weimar years.

Heh:  Salon praising it for showing that some women of the time did not shave their armpits.

A professor of German studies has a slightly different take on the aim of the show.  Not entirely sure if he is right, but worth reading.

Spygate is failing

Trump's died in the wool "base" may soon have a problem on their hands - support for Trump's cynical and stupid "branding" of "spygate" is not getting support from Republican congressmen, or even some key Trump supporters on Fox News.    Has Rupert had enough??  (I doubt it, but this is an odd turn of events in the propaganda network):

Asked to respond to Gowdy’s remarks, a Fox News commentator known for defending the president also cast doubt on Trump’s claims. Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano (better known and often quoted by Trump as Judge Napolitano) said claims that the FBI placed an undercover spy on Trump’s campaign “seem to be baseless.”

“There is no evidence for that whatsoever,” Napolitano said. The fact that the FBI source spoke with “people on the periphery of the campaign,” he said, “is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations.”

Update:  Politico has a story to the same effect, noting this:

Late Wednesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted a lengthy segment on the matter featuring appearances by two Trump campaign aides who alleged came into contact with the informant — Carter Page and Sam Clovis. But despite Hannity’s protestations, neither affirmatively said a spy had infiltrated the campaign.

"Were you spied upon. Did a spy approach you?" Hannity asked Page.
“I’m not sure, Sean,” Page replied.

Clovis, who oversaw the campaign’s foreign policy team, told Hannity that the informant contacted him, but didn’t pump him for information.

And this:

Dershowitz joined in Wednesday morning by conceding that he was “on the way to being persuaded” that the FBI’s use of an informant was proper.

The most clueless and ridiculous political commentator in Australia

It's a wonder RMIT isn't looking for ways to sack Steve Kates, given that his political commentary on Donald Trump and the e-vil Left (by which he means anyone who does not see Trump as the masterful saviour of the world just as he does) is so deeply, deeply embarrassing he must surely be putting off some people from studying there:

Political derangement is a mental disease for which the left is highly susceptible. PDT is demonstrating that every principle they have lived by is wrong, but rather than being willing to learn, they have become even more worm-eaten than ever. It is not just sickening to watch, of course, but frightening. 

Climate denialist will be forever in denial

Another good column by Graham Readfearn showed the dishonesty and ignorance of "Jonova", who claims that the old "carbon rise lags temperature rise" argument was what set her off on her life of climate change denial, despite the fact the explanation for it was always well known.

Note the conspiracy ideation she shows too:

  She was asked if there had been a “Road to Damascus” moment for her on climate change.  She said it was in February 2007 when her husband had told her that in the Earth’s geological past, there had been a 700 year lag between a rise in temperatures and a rise in CO2.

This led JoNova to Google for a bit. While this didn’t shoot down the argument that CO2 causes climate change, it did make her think that “the media is hiding something.”  According to Jo, all the scientists know this fact, but they don’t want to debate it.

It is obvious:  to deny AGW and climate change is caused by our CO2 emissions requires strong belief in conspiracies.  

The very definition of ...

...clueless white privilege:

[And look, I'm as cynical as anyone of the overuse by the Left of "white privilege", but you really only have to visit Catallaxy to see confirmation that as a concept, it certainly exists.]

Update:  a funny-cos-it's-true tweet spotted:

As I have been saying for some years now....

Heavy Rain, Not Sea Level Rise, Is the More Immediate Climate Change Threat Now

But don't worry, the sea level rise problem will be here soon enough.

Sack Jonathan Swan

I keep complaining about how Axios, a good site with generally objective judgment, employs Jonathan Swan, whose twitter feed keeps confirming he dislikes the cultural Left and is too sympathetic to Trump because of it.

Latest evidence - he "liked" another NRO column endorsing the "Obama and the FBI were spying on the Trump campaign, this is just wrong".

Sack him!

Didn't take long

As I wrote only two months ago, regarding the revived Roseanne, it's a wonder that all of her co-stars and (I think) some of her old writers and producers agreed to go back to the show, given her history of ludicrous and offensive tweets, nutty interviews and famous fighting with her production staff in the later years of her first show.  They must have known it would be like working with a ticking bomb.   I hope John Goodman, a great character actor, didn't knock back too many movie roles for it.

I see that Breitbart has the best, wingnutty outrage comments about the cancellation, ranging from "they're shutting down free speech!" to "it is not racist to call a black woman a monkey!  have you seen her photo?" 

More twitter stuff I agree with

It's the paranoid streak in American (and Australian wingnut) politics writ large, and it is obviously unhealthy and dangerous to democracy, and why I despise Rupert Murdoch for using it for profit:

Impossible to disagree

David Frum deals with it at greater, more eloquent, length:

Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.

It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others. But Trump’s version of this disconnect comes most especially to the fore at times of national ritual.

The brightness on distant planets

I watched Stargazing on the ABC last week, and enjoyed it enough.  (The "world record for number of people looking at the moon" seemed rather pointless, but people seemed to support getting out and it was a science-y thing, so what the hey...)

Back here in my backyard, while I wait for the dog to finish its wee before going to bed, I've been noticing how bright Jupiter and Mars seem to be at the moment.   The brightness of Jupiter in particular put me in mind of the question of how bright things would seem if you were an astronaut on one of its moons.  I remembered that this had been dealt with in a Robert Heinlein juvenile, where he had written that the eye on Earth is flooded with light during a bright day and just ignores the excess (so to speak); the result being that even on a Jovian moon, daylight would still look pretty much as bright as a day here.

I wondered last week if this was right, and have now just Googled the topic.   It would seem to be not too far off the mark, according to explanations at Quora and this table, which indicate that being on moon of Jupiter would be brighter than a hospital operating theatre.   They're all pretty bright, aren't they?  (Oddly, it makes one comparison indicating that being on Neptune the brightness would be able the same as "typical public bathroom".)

Things would be starting to look pretty dim at Pluto (somewhere between "public bathroom" and "typical night lit sidewalk"), but you would still be able to see colours.  In fact, this very neat NASA web page lets you enter your location, and come up with the next time that the light outside would look like midday light on Pluto!   Neat.  For me, it will be tomorrow morning at 6.24 am.   (Sunrise is 6.29am.)   I know the sky is still pretty bright at that time, but I will take particular note tomorrow while at the breakfast table.   I hope my son is still there too, so I can inflict some unwanted science on him.  I love doing that to my children....

Distant, small objects

How many small planets (asteroids?) do you think they've now discovered way beyond the orbit of Pluto and Neptune?    840, apparently, which does seem a lot to me.

And one will be visited next year by that New Horizons probe that went past Pluto last year.  

Speaking of that probe, there was a talk by the NASA folk who worked on it on Radio National last week (in the Big Ideas series.  Here's a link to the podcast.)   It was very interesting.  

Live in a nasty fantasy world of their own

I am gobsmacked at the ludicrous conspiracy/fantasy world uber Catholic CL lives in, when he has this to say about the video of an African guy who quickly scaled the outside of an apartment building in Paris to rescue a dangling child:

and:

Then the commenter with the name that is no doubt meant to be sardonic, but I reckon it's accurate, weighs in:


It's not just foolish, it's nastily foolish - Muslim, African = fraudsters prepared to put 4 year old in danger, in their tiny minds.  

Nearby sorcery

NPR has a lengthy story up about poor old PNG and the uptick in sorcery motivated killings.

If ever a country could do with some re-invigoration of modern Christian evangelism, this would be it.

A sitcom appreciation

Oh look.  The very fine American sitcom (which never really took off here) The Middle has come to an end, and someone at Vox writes in praise of it as a very underrated show.  I agree.

Regarding current sitcoms from America:   have tried looking at Modern Family a few times - seems pretty awful to me.   Last time I saw Big Bang Theory, I thought it had run out of steam again (after having staged something of a recovery after the silly story lines involving Howard being an astronaut.)   I have also seen a bit of the revived Roseanne.   Sorry, but it doesn't have the same spark as the best of its first incarnation.   That actress who plays Darlene, though - she seems to have never aged.

In short, good sitcoms from the US are currently hard to find.