Too many satellites for too little benefit

I posted earlier this week about the increasing number of satellites and the increasing number of systems that all do the same thing.   It seems even worse than I realised, if this article is anything to go by:

The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.

The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

As I said in my last post, I don't understand how this civilian access to competing GPS systems works - given that most mobile phones specs say they can use two or three of the current systems.   How does the EU stop phones accessing their signal?

Anyway, back to the story of too many satellites:

But OneWeb – in which the UK will own a 20% stake following the investment – currently operates a completely different type of satellite network from that typically used to run such navigation systems.

“The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites,” said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester. “OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

“What’s happened is that the very talented lobbyists at OneWeb have convinced the government that we can completely redesign some of the satellites to piggyback a navigation payload on it. It’s bolting an unproven technology on to a mega-constellation that’s designed to do something else. It’s a tech and business gamble.”

Giles Thorne, a research analyst at Jeffries, agreed. “This situation is nonsensical to me,” he said. “This situation looks like nationalism trumping solid industrial policy.”

Every major positioning system currently in use – America’s GPS, Russia’s Glonass, China’s BeiDou, and Galileo, the EU project that the UK helped design before losing access to due to Brexit – is in a medium Earth orbit, Thorne said, approximately 20,000km from Earth. OneWeb’s satellites, 74 of which have already been launched, are in a low Earth orbit, just 1,200km up.

Bowen said: “If you want to replace GPS for military-grade systems, where you need encrypted, secure signals that are precise to centimetres, I’m not sure you can do that on satellites as small as OneWeb’s.”

Rather than being selected for the quality of the offering, Thorne suggested the investment was made to suit “a nationalist agenda”. OneWeb is nominally a UK business, with a UK HQ and spectrum rights registered in the UK through Ofcom.

OK, I just realised - maybe the UK loss of access to Galileo is more to do with military access rather than civilian access?  Yes, that seems right, according to this UK government page:

In the event of the UK leaving the EU without a negotiated agreement, the majority of position, navigation and timing services provided by Galileo and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay will continue to be freely available to all UK based users. The Prime Minister has made clear the UK will not use Galileo (including the Public Regulated Service) for defence or critical national infrastructure.

The UK will no longer play any part in the development of Galileo or European Geostationary Navigation Overlay programmes. This means that UK-based businesses, academics and researchers will be unable to bid for future EU Global Navigation Satellite System contracts and may face difficulty carrying out and completing existing contracts. For example, it may not be possible for businesses or organisations which currently host Galileo and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay ground infrastructure to continue to do so.

To prepare for this scenario the UK is exploring alternatives to fulfil its needs for secure and resilient position, navigation and timing information. These contingency options are made possible by the expertise of the UK space sector and will be assessed on their own merits. The government will invest £92 million from the Brexit readiness fund on an 18-month programme to design a UK Global Navigation Satellite System. This will inform the decision to create an independent system as an alternative to Galileo.

Still, this loss of access to Galileo's more sophisticated services sound like one of those issues that would have been completely glossed over when the populists were running their pro-Brexit campaign, and it sounds like it will cost a lot to replicate.

Intelligence that makes me do that Homer Simpson drool

My God.  I am watching Planet America Fireside Chat on ABC News, and once again it's such exquisitely intelligent commentary it makes me want to do that Homer Simpson drool when he thinks of pork chops.

"Smart, witty people being reasonable....gaaaaaah!"

Conservatives and their social media

I see that even at Catallaxy, the first attempt at a Twitter/Facebook alternative that wasn't going to "censor" conservative opinion - Gab - has been derided as being so taken over by (I think) white nationalist nutters that even the routinely offensive members of Catallaxy are warning each other not to try it.   (I wouldn't know - I see no reason to switch from reading Twitter.) 

So the second attempt at freedom to be as offensive as they want - Parler - is currently getting a lot of promotion from conservatives.   I reckon the prediction here will be correct:

Two things - conservatives continue their attempt to reinvent the meaning of censorship; and they seem gormlessly intent on proving via these attempts at alternatives that there is extremely good reason for companies providing social media platforms to have standards that they will enforce in order to make them want to be used, and commercially viable. 

Exactly

It's why I moved the link to his blog to the section "Gone Completely Stupid and Offensive".

Women and sport and my confusion

As readers would know, I pay very little attention to sport.   It's only occasionally of interest - State of Origin rugby league; the spectacle of Olympic openings and of some individual sports - how can you not be impressed by how people learn to pole vault or ski jump?   And if an athlete seems a nice enough person, it can be good to see them win and get some benefit out of years of what would otherwise be more-or-less wasted effort.

But when it comes to women's team sports, I cannot muster any interest, let alone enthusiasm, at all.  Hence today's excitement about Australian and New Zealand hosting the FIFA Women's World Cup leaves me completely cold, and once again baffled as to how they have become popular. 

I like to think my inability to want to watch a team of women is sound in evolutionary biology terms.   Men's team sports, particularly the only one I ever watch (if only a few times a year), rugby league, is readily interpreted as a substitute to watching a team of hunters planning and moving as a pack to hunt their quarry.   Or, to update the analogy, as a substitute for watching competing lines of men trying to acquire ground in battle.   (This is why it makes so much sense to me as to why it should be my preferred code - not like soccer or AFL where clear lines moving up and down a field of play don't exist.)

This reasoning leaves little room for an explanation for people liking ball hitting games like cricket, baseball, or even tennis; although with the latter, it is so concentrated on the individual's stamina and talent, I can see why it has some appeal.  With cricket and baseball - well, they both often have the crowd amusing themselves while the play itself is boring, so they have their own weird dynamic of crowd solidarity that is not exactly part of my make up, but it's obviously a thing.

But back to team sports - I can't shake the feeling that gender really matters to why I don't have any interest in them because what is happening on the field is nothing like what women have ever done in an evolutionary sense.   It's different from watching a woman who is good at an individual sport - I see nothing wrong with that, unless it's something like weightlifting.  (But hey, I couldn't care less about what men do in some obscure sports, either.)

Yet, I seem to be alone in this, and lots of men (increasingly, on both sides of political spectrum, too) will say they are enthusiastic followers of women's team sports.

I really don't understand how that has happened.   I find it so strange, especially when in quite a few sports there is a high proportion of lesbian players, rendering any more base evolutionary biology explanation irrelevant, that I am starting to wonder if there is something weird going on, like plastics chemicals in drinking water, or something.  [I am joking.  Sort of.   Seriously, I find this more surprising and inexplicable than Western societies' turnaround on gay relationships.]

   

Could be a fair summary?

The Economist has an article behind its paywall, but here is the headline:

Sounds about right, is my hunch.  And it makes for a very real problem for politicians.   Of course, I am very glad that it is Trump caught in the dilemma.  

World War 1 (and a gripe about education)

I find myself full of admiration for the people who put together these witty, all age friendly, largely accurate, summaries of history.  I encourage you to view these two videos summarising (in barely 15 minutes, combined!) the rather notoriously hard to simplify history of World War 1, and hopefully you will agree they are both dense with information and give an overview that is so often lacking in education:





It also makes me feel that schooling in my life time, and probably before it, is not so great at the Big Picture when it comes to history and historical developments.    I guess you could say, if you are a conservative, that the move away from teaching the Western canon is a key example of failure to give an overview:  but I guess there are overviews, and then there are narrowly biased overviews which modern educationalists think are important to avoid.

It is a tricky area, but as I say, I am very impressed by those people who are trying to make learning more about complicated history more digestible.  

I had been wondering the same thing

World's greatest democracy still can't get democracy right

What the hell do Americans find so hard about having polling stations stay open until all of those who arrived before closing get a chance to vote??   Why do we see so regularly this theatre of urgent applications to judges to get the polling station to stay open to let long delayed voters vote? 

I would be really embarrassed about this if I were an American:

So long to the Segway (and my plans for electric scooters to help save the world)

Well, this is really going to date people in the future:  grandparents will be able to tell kids about the start of the 21st century when you could see sometimes see police (or mall cops, or tourists) riding a dangerous standing electric thingee:

Segway, which boldly claimed its two-wheeled personal transporter would revolutionize the way people get around, is ending production of its namesake vehicle.

The Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers but perhaps better known for its high-profile crashes, will be retired on 15 July, the company said in a statement.

The funniest thing, of course, was all the build up to its disclosure as a "revolutionary" device that will change our cities.  And then the vastly underwhelmed TV host with her (justifiably) dismissive  "is that all?".  Is that clip on Youtube?    

As for what is effectively its successor - the electric scooter - I still haven't tried one, but it keeps occurring to me that in my not-so-radical-but-why-does-no-one-else-think-of-this plans to reduce carbon emissions, the government could probably do a lot worse than give every student who graduates from high school an $800 electric scooter as a personal transport device to tide them over until they can afford to buy an electric car.  Segway makes a good one, but so does Xiaomi, and it is important to please our coming Chinese overlords, so I would go for one of those. 

(I still think three wheel electric scooters would be safer, but seems that few are made.)

Just what we needed...more satellites

I seem to have not noticed this development:

China on Tuesday launched the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system designed to rival the US GPS network, marking a major step in its race for market share in the lucrative sector....

Beidou – named after the Chinese term for the plow or “Big Dipper” constellation – is intended to rival the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.

“I think the Beidou-3 system being operational is a big event,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“This is a big investment from China and makes China independent of US and European systems.”
China started building its global navigation system in the early 1990s to help cars, fishing boats and military tankers navigate using mapping data from the country’s own satellites.

It's been operating at some level since 2018.   I'm not sure how they make money from these services - I presume GPS chip manufacturers pay for access to their particular network.  I notice mobile phone specs do often list the GPS network they can use, but I haven't notice "Beidou" before.   What if I check Huawei phones:

Currently, Huawei mobile devices support the following navigation systems: GPS/AGPS/Glonass/BeiDou/Galileo.

 And this:

On December 27 last year, Ran Chengqi, director of China Satellite Navigation System Management Office and spokesperson of BeiDou Satellite Navigation System, said that 70% of China's smart phones use Beidou system.

So yeah, coming soon to your next mobile phone.

And OK, next question:  if a phone can use any of the different services, how does it pick one to use at any particular time?    Does it look for the first signal from any of the systems it can use and then go with that system?   I just Googled the question, but the answer is not yet clear.

Would be impressive, in an evil overlord sort of way, if the Chinese system allowed them to track anyone whose phone chose to use their network.   Is there already a conspiracy theory based on this? 

Update:  by coincidence, Axios has a short article up about "the looming threats posed by space junk".   It's one of those issues that seems constantly talked about, but with little effective action being taken.  

Director death noted

You know, I don't believe I have ever watched more than 30 minutes of any movie by the late Joel Schumacher, and that was probably Flatliners, which I thought very silly.

He was openly gay, and from what I have read and seen, it is easy to see a gay sensibility in some of his comic book movies at least.  He was no ordinary gay dude:  he claimed to have slept with "up to" 20,000 men.  Let's see - at age 80 and assuming 60 years of highly active sex life, that works out to 333 men a year.   If you allow for some slowing down in his 70's, the maths could easily indicate more than 365 in a year, or a new partner every day.

Of course, he could have been lying.  And the actual quote is "10,000 to 20,000".  I'm just looking at the extreme.   But seriously, whether straight or gay, and whether 10 or 20 thousand, numbers in that range indicate something more like pathological compulsion than anything healthy.    

Topical Nazi killings

With all the talk of Black Lives Mattering, it's topical that France 24 should point out something I hadn't heard of before - the appalling treatment by the Nazis of black soldiers fighting for France in World War 2:

“It started at the end of May 1940, in the Somme region,” Fargettas explained. “There was no order from high up saying that colonial prisoners of war should be killed or even ill-treated. It was impulsive, but the German military hierarchy did nothing to even try to stop it.”

This hatred of black soldiers goes back to the First World War, Fargettas continued: “The Germans used them to accuse the Allies of savagery on the battlefield. The German army had itself been rightly accused of atrocities against civilians, especially in Belgium. Consequently, in response they used the image of the African sharpshooter as a propaganda weapon.”

The peace settlement adumbrated in the Treaty of Versailles meant that the Ruhr and Rhineland, along Germany’s western border, were occupied by France. Many troops from French colonies were stationed there. “In Germany there was a very intensive, mendacious propaganda campaign accusing African soldiers of mass rape and kidnapping. This is what the Germans called the “black horror on the Rhine”; slander which the Nazis would reuse.”

When many Wehrmacht soldiers entered France in May 1940, they had memories of this propaganda. African soldiers were abused by the invaders throughout the country. “These troops often fought very well, while of course the Germans sustained many losses despite their success in the Battle of France, so that produced anger which added to all the resentment already stored up,” said Fargettas.

On June 19, 1940, the violence culminated in the Chasselay massacre. This was two days after Marshal Philippe Pétain’s notorious announcement that he would seek an armistice with the Nazis. The 25^th regiment of Senegalese riflemen was posted to the northwest of Lyon, to delay the enemy’s entry into France’s third largest city.

“The Germans expected to seize Lyon quite easily,” Fargettas recounted. “But on the morning of June 19, they faced very strong resistance, in battles lasting for several hours. After the Wehrmacht won the first battles in the afternoon, they executed French as well as African prisoners. But on the next day – after the last pockets of resistance were defeated – they divided the prisoners into two: The French on one side, the Africans on the other. They led the latter down an isolated road. They were sent to a field and machine-gunned.” During these massacres, some French soldiers were also executed or wounded for trying to intervene.

More Trump watch

I hope this is true (the bit about him not wanting to go out on stage)...

...because I did watch some of the speech being live streamed, and I did think at the time that he seemed to be taking a long, long time to come out on stage, and wondered whether it was because he was backstage throwing a fit over the empty seats.

Man in denial

OK, maybe there is a bit too much gloating and laughing going on about how Trump's campaign didn't even half fill its stadium; but on the other hand, there seems to be people in denial at Catallaxy:

I wonder how the Steve Kates brain is processing the estimate of only 6,200 at the stadium; and the absolute lack of evidence of protesters causing any significant problem around it?  Cult members watching the decline of their cult can take quite a while to process it...

Low on my list of travel priorities

A few weeks ago I noted how Bangladesh was upset at its portrayal in the Netflix action movie Extraction, which was meant to be set in an extremely grim looking Dhaka, although none of it was filmed there. 

So, on the weekend I was looking at the back catalogue of Youtube videos by one of the travel vlogging couples I don't mind mind watching, Kara & Nate.  They were in Dhaka a year or so ago, and put out several videos.   As always, they try to find the most positive things to say (not sure whether there are sponsorship reasons for some of that).  But gee, it would take a lot more than their "this is crazy!" amusement to make me want to go to Dhaka:





They seemed to be the only Westerners in the entire city, but I am not exactly surprised that it is low on people's "must see" list.

So then, seeing I seemed vaguely interested in Bangaldesh, Google threw at me the next day a 30 minute story by Al Jazeera news  from 2017 called "Bangladesh's biggest brothel", about an appalling shanty town in the Bangladeshi countryside that has about 1,500 prostitutes, many of whom spoke openly about their lives and problems.



It was awful.

Whoever works in the Bangladesh Tourist Board (and they do have one) has their work cut out for them.

Unmasked

I was in the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane on Saturday, and it was a cool, showery day.  I thought, seeing I had some left in the car, I would wear a mask, given that I usually associate such weather with catching a cold.   I also wasn't sure how crowded it would be.

Turned out it was pretty busy, and that nearly no one was wearing a mask.  I was paying close attention once I realised I seemed to be alone, and I spotted exactly two people wearing them - both Asian.   There are always plenty of young Asian people in the city, and even most of them were not wearing them.

It's true, with days going by with no new cases in Queensland, let alone Brisbane, there should be little to fear.   But I still would feel more comfortable if wearing them was treated as standard for a few months yet.  

By the way, I presume that we ought to be seeing very little transmission of ordinary colds and flu this winter season due to the hygiene care that shops and other places are still taking.  Is anyone trying to keep of that through our GPs, I wonder?

Ha!

Yes, this is amusing:

Referencing the half full stadium that Trump and his campaign was claiming had issued one million tickets to his cult members.

Update:  liked this, too:

Most postmodernism from Republicans

It's been pretty funny reading Twitter about this today:

Rep. Matt Gaetz created a social media frenzy Thursday when he revealed he had a teenage son named Nestor and later introduced the young man during an appearance on Fox News.

Gaetz (R-Fla.) shared that he has a Cuban-born son to explain why he became so irate when Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), who is black, said the white lawmakers in the room couldn’t understand what it was like to father a black child.

Many raised doubts about Gaetz’s claim of a secret son. He never mentioned his son in his biographical data or elsewhere. An old photo surfaced online of Gaetz with Nestor in which the congressman refers to him as a “local student.”

He also appeared as an intern in one photo.  Which explains this tweet:

The appalling Tucker Carlson had Gaetz and his "son" on his show, yet never asked the obvious question:  how did a (then) 31 year old single man manage to adopt a 12 year old Cuban "son".

The answer appears to be as simple as this:    

Gaetz told People Magazine in an interview that he never formally adopted 19-year-old Nestor but that Nestor has lived with him since immigrating from Cuba at age 12.

 So he's not a son, biologically (of course) or legally.   I saw someone sympathetic to Gaetz said that Nester was mainly raised by Gaetz's parents, which would make more sense.

So, for a Republican, "son" means just whatever they want it to mean:  a young dude he's "raised", probably more like "been in the same family house with", but that's close enough for fake outrage when arguing with a black man.

Gaetz is also single, leading many to speculate on whether this is a gay relationship.   I expect not, as this would be the weirdest way ever to come out.

The unifying President

Trump is so appallingly un-Presidential in language and sentiment that this has become normalised, but it shouldn't be.   This thread is correct:

Trump watch

What a baby.

And here he is trying to suck up to the police unions, again, as authoritarians are want to do; as well as making inappropriate pre-trial comments on what will be a high profile case with the potential to cause further rioting: 

 He has no idea how to be a responsible President.

Branch stacking

Is it just me, or is my sense correct that most of the public find branch stacking scandals to be pretty uninteresting and less important than most journalists find them?

How to respond to racism

In the case of Sinclair Davidson, you leave it up on the blog you can moderate.

Why?

And why does RMIT tolerate staff who moderate a blog leaving it up?

Update:  If I am not mistaken, it has been removed - but with no explanation.

While that is good, I remain somewhat puzzled as to why he doesn't make it clear that such clear racism is not to be posted in comments.

Update 2:  wait:  although the original comment is gone, it had been copied into another person's comment, in full, so it is still in the thread!

Sinclair, Sinclair:   if you are (and I assume you are) the one who deleted the original comment - why not make a clear statement on the blog that it was unacceptable and such blatant racism is not to be repeated?? 

Set some standards and be clear about it, for God's sake.

Update 3:  the reposting of the comment is now deleted.  Again, no comment from Sinclair on the blog as to why, though.

Meanwhile, in movie making land

I like those visual effects videos which have long showed how much green screens have taken over TV and movie production;  but  this video showing the next level - virtual sets using massive LED screens - is even more fascinating: 

Some quantum stuff to consider

This paper (or article) at arXiv is written at a relatively non-technical level.  I have only skimmed it at the moment, but will come back to read it later:

Bell's Theorem, Quantum Probabilities, and Superdeterminism

Things not going well in Alabama

A report in the Montgomery Advertiser about the local council considering making mask wearing in public compulsory (my bolds):

Jackson Hospital pulmonologist William Saliski cleared his throat as he started describing the dire situation created by the coronavirus pandemic in Montgomery to its City Council before they voted on a mandatory mask ordinance. "It's been a long day, I apologize," he said.

"The units are full with critically-ill COVID patients," Saliski said. About 90% of them are Black. He said hospitals are able to manage for now, but it's not sustainable. "This mask slows that down, 95% protection from something as easy as cloth. ... If this continues the way it's going, we will be overrun."

More doctors followed him to the microphone, describing the dead being carried out within 30 minutes of each other, and doctors being disturbed when people on the street ask them if the media is lying about the pandemic as part of a political ploy.

After they spoke, and before the council voted on a proposal by Councilman C.C. Calhoun to mandate mask-wearing in public in Montgomery, Councilman Brantley Lyons questioned whether masks and six-foot distancing really helps. They do, the doctors replied. Lyons was unmoved. "At the end of the day, if an illness or a pandemic comes through we do not throw our constitutional rights out the window," Lyons said.

From the crowd, doctors called for him to visit the hospital sometime.

Instead, the council killed the ordinance after it failed to pass in a 4-4 tie, mostly along racial lines, with Councilman Tracy Larkin absent. Councilman Clay McInnis voted with three Black council members — Calhoun, Oronde Mitchell and Audrey Graham — in favor of the ordinance. Lyons, Charles Jinright, Richard Bollinger and Glen Pruitt voted against it.

Bad news for the Fox News audience, then

An odd study:

In the study of people aged over 55, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, researchers found 'repetitive negative thinking' (RNT) is linked to subsequent cognitive decline as well as the deposition of harmful brain proteins linked to Alzheimer's.

The researchers say RNT should now be further investigated as a potential risk factor for dementia, and psychological tools, such as mindfulness or meditation, should be studied to see if these could reduce dementia risk.

Lead author Dr Natalie Marchant (UCL Psychiatry) said: "Depression and anxiety in mid-life and old age are already known to be risk factors for dementia. Here, we found that certain thinking patterns implicated in depression and anxiety could be an underlying reason why people with those disorders are more likely to develop dementia.

"Taken alongside other studies, which link depression and anxiety with dementia risk, we expect that chronic negative thinking patterns over a long period of time could increase the risk of dementia. We do not think the evidence suggests that short-term setbacks would increase one's risk of dementia.

Adam Creighton re-confirms his foolishness

Look, as I have said before, I have never held Creighton in high regard; but with today's column in The Australian:  Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts, he re-confirms  himself as the most ignorant fool.

He decided early on to go with one take on the COVID-19 problem and he is sticking to it, obviously in such a way that no evidence is going to change his mind.

Most of the column is devoted to the COVID pandemic, but when it gets to climate change, he only quotes this:

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

This claim has been debunked years ago - Creighton reads only what he wants to on the topic, obviously.  As for quoting Benny Peiser - his qualifications:

Peiser studied political science, English, and sports science. 

Yeah, the man to trust.   

The rule of thumb should apply - if anyone is running with "climate change is no problem" line after all this time, they are not to be trusted on any topic, even one they are supposedly an expert on, such as economics.   It's a solid marker for foolishness, not knowing how to tell a genuine expert from a charlatan, and an inability to admit to past error.   

Movie scene debunked

I guess if you haven't seen Da 5 Bloods yet, but you think you will give it a try, you won't want to read this article that debunks a key scene in the movie.

But if you have seen it, you will be interested.

I see that the movie continues to get many more realistic reviews from audiences than from professional critics.  

Where does my Himalayan rock salt come from?

I've lately been using Himalayan rock salt (crushed pretty fine) in cooking (Coles own brand), and I like it.  It flows easily, and is sort of easier to see where you have applied it compared to your common white cooking stuff.   I didn't buy it, but I assume it must have dropped in price in order for Coles to be doing their own in-house branded version.

It's from Pakistan, apparently, and that made me curious as to what the salt mines there might look like.   NPR reports:

The salt is mined from rolling red-brick hills that rise from marshes in Khewra, about two hours from the capital, Islamabad. They are hundreds of miles from the iconic snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and the area shimmers with heat. The hills — known as the salt range — are distant tendrils of the Himalayas and are a remnant of a lagoon that existed some 600 million years ago, said Shahid Iqbal, a lecturer in the department of earth sciences at Quaid-i-Azam University.

Mining here was once a small-time industry that attracted little attention. Some 400,000 tons of salt are exported a year, largely as crude rock, according to Nadeem Babar, the adviser to Pakistan's prime minister on petroleum and natural resources. About a quarter of those exports were shipped at around $40 a ton to India — Pakistan's neighbor, with which it has fought four wars. The salt was literally blown out of mines, hauled in trucks and dispatched some 160 miles to the border.

Here's a France 24 video about the salt mining enterprise there, including tour into a pink salt mine cave:



I posted recently about the Indus valley civilisation, and noted that Harappa has a big archaeological site that looks as if it would be good to visit.   But it's in Pakistan too.

It's a pity that it is considered a very unsafe place to travel, as it looks as if it could have a decent tourist industry if it could get its act together.
 

Foreign viewing

My son's starting to complain that I only ever want to watch foreign made shows on Netflix now, and he might have a point.  It's starting to get hard to remember the last English speaking series we watched - probably Haunting of Hill House.  [Update:  how could I forget - it was Lost in Space, season 2.]

But this has been a great thing about Netflix, the variety of high quality foreign shows.   I guess I could always have watched Nordic noir crime on SBS, but dark crime is a genre that doesn't hold much interest to me, generally speaking.  And don't go pointing to my fondness of Babylon Berlin as hypocrisy - while lots of bad crimes happen, often in seedy settings, it also has Weimar politics, young Nazis, prostitution, drug addiction, cults, gay bars, military spying, lots of scenes confirming that German food has always been pretty crap, a rich sooky son with a haircut that really annoys me, and a nutty hypnotist whose radio show (my son said, wittily) is like an early successful podcast (for the alt.right of the day, I would add).

We finished watching the third season of BB last night, and I ended up enjoying it a lot, even though I still think it was not quite as satisfying as the first two seasons.   Did anyone else notice how much Gereon seemed to get beaten up and injured in this season?   It's a wonder he sticks with the job, really.

I am still dissatisfied with the unexplained mystery about his brother (or is he?) Anno.   Actually, I think this Reddit theory about him might have something going for it.

Anyway, it seems they planned on season 4 to start being made later this year.  I hope COVID-19 doesn't stuff that up.

When Lefties turn on their own

Well, as things go, this is all storm in a teacup, but I'll explain why I'm posting it.

Back in 2014 I wrote a mildly worded post about the surprising fact that, although a lot of people (including me) assumed Josh Thomas had picked up an accent from somewhere in England, he is from Brisbane.  I think it fair to say he sounds nothing like someone raised in the western suburbs of my fair city (although I noted at the end of the post that I have had some odd comments about my own way of speaking too, years ago), and this has been the source of much puzzled speculation. 

For some completely inexplicable reason, over the last few years when I look at Google stats on Blogger, this post is nearly always one of the top "most viewed" posts on the entire blog.  (The other one is called "Lucky Snakes".)  It would seem some mystery of the Google search algorithms as to why this happens.   Maybe there are lots of comedians that people around the world think are using affected accents?   But it seems a very odd topic to keep getting, I dunno, a hundred odd hits a day for.

Anyway, with Josh having been noted as making some (at least) insensitive comments on diversity in TV writing and casting back in 2016, I see that this has given people of the Left (as I assume most people who call out "racist!" on Twitter) permission to come out and say "And by the way, his ambiguous accent really annoys me".  For example:

If you want to see some much more critical commentary on him, search Twitter for his name, or "Josh Thomas accent".

For what it's worth, I think the "racist!" attack on him is way overblown, and I say that as someone who doesn't find him funny and didn't like his show that Lefties generally swooned over.

But the mystery of his accent, and how Google directs people to my post about it, remains.


  

Important issue of the day

The Washington Post notes:

The proof is in the pancakes: Adding lemon juice or vinegar to milk is a bad buttermilk substitute

A couple of points I would add - in the article, the writer compares pancakes she makes by adding vinegar to milk.  I have done that too, but the slight smell of vinegar in milk is annoying.   I only ever use lemon juice for this reason.

Secondly, she says that the vinegar added did not make her milk change consistency.  As I think I have noted here before, I have found that the temperature of the milk seems to affect its ease of curdling with lemon juice.  As I want it to thicken a bit, I warm the milk slightly in the microwave first, then add the lemon juice.   This usually works.

Sure, using store bought buttermilk might be the ideal, but who remembers to do that?

My Starship scepticism

I see that, after the success of Elon Musk's rocket and capsule delivering a couple of astronauts to the ISS, Musk told his company that he wants to put "top priority" on the Starship development.

While congratulations are due to Musk and his engineers for the cool aspects of his Falcon rockets (especially the self landing boosters), I tend to have low trust in engineers who smoke pot during interviews, pick stupid names for their baby, and accuse blokes of being pedophiles just because they didn't want his useless assistance.  And besides - that Starship looks so 50's science fiction retro, I've always had my suspicions that artwork has played too much role in its design.

For these reasons, I haven't been paying much attention to the whole Starship idea.  I have noticed its test engines blowing up, of course.  But I just had a look at the whole concept, via the Wiki page (which I assume Musk fan boys keep as accurate as possible.)

So here's my entirely amateur prediction - the Starship is going to have a very difficult time getting credibility.  Why?:

*  the Falcon rockets he's currently having success with are all using the very conventional kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel.  Starship is based on using a new, never used in spaceflight before, liquid methane and oxygen fuel mix.   So, that's why the engines keep blowing up.  (It also explains why methane features so much in Netflix's Lost In Space, I guess.)   Here's a Wired article explaining the advantages of a methane engine, and the difficulties in making ones which are meant to be re-useable at an unheard of rate compared to (say) shuttle engines.   Also the nutty manufacturing rate Musk thinks he can reach:

“Since they’re using so many of them on the Super Heavy vehicle, they’re going to have to be ramping up manufacturing to an absolutely insane pace,” says Dodd. “Elon’s talked about making one in 12 hours, which would be unheard of in the industry. Even if they make one a week that’s pretty impressive.”

*  the re-entry shield:  the Wiki page says they are still probably going to be ceramic tiles.  Sounds familiar?  The same type of technology that NASA had so much trouble with?   The spaceship part is then due to land vertically like a Falcon.  The space shuttle landing as a glider seemed risky enough:  humans trusting the retrorocket landing system to work perfectly every time is going to take a lot of trust in technology that is new, and is going to be a disaster waiting at every landing (compared to the relative simplicity of capsules descending by parachute).

* for the flights to Mars (and even the Moon), there is apparently no planning for radiation shielding.  Musk thinks people will just take the risk and that's it.
 
 I therefore reckon that there are going to be some spectacular failures in developing this pet project.

And his ideas as to how quickly Mars could be colonised are just nuts.   He wants to get there but it will be more like a suicide mission if he gets his way.

Only the best speechwriters

Seems to me that, although they are obviously hitting his super fragile ego with their tweeting about his ramp walking abilities (honestly, it was not that bad), anti-Trumpers should be making more of a point of this embarrassing reference in his actual speech:

Update:  Fred Kaplan at Slate gives a review of the terrible speech, which seems pretty obviously only held at all for Trump to be able to use in election ads.

Google continues to educate me - this time about the ISS

I was aware that the International Space Station used gyros to adjust its position in orbit, but I never understood how complex maintaining the space station is.   You certainly don't get to put one in orbit and just let it continue on its way without lots of monitoring.    

This video gives a good explanation:



I also liked this little detail about the computer that monitors it:

The attitude control computer (GNC MDM) contains the software that does all of the necessary calculations for attitude control. It takes in the actual attitude and subtracts the commanded attitude to determine the error it needs to correct. It knows the rates of the ISS. That is very sensitive, so sensitive that we can tell when the crew wake up by watching the behavior of the CMGs as the crew start to move around the vehicle. The software also needs a set of user provided parameters such as the vehicle mass properties and inertia tensors. These are located in data slots called CCDBs (controller configuration databases). We have a stockpile of these CCDBs for different vehicle configurations. For example, if a Progress cargo vehicle arrives and docks to the Russian Segment, we will have a CCDB slot designed for that configuration. When it leaves, we will swap to another one.

Recipe tried

Yes, this recipe which I posted about before for future reference:

is really nice.  Not exactly a main evening meal on its own [what vegan recipe ever is :)], but I liked it a lot.  I even bought  a $4.50 pomegranate and felt that the dish really did need its sharpness.   (My wife grumbled about the fruit's cost, but with sweet potatoes at only $2.50 a kg at the moment, we could afford it.)  I also reheated half a potato in the microwave today for lunch [power level 7 for 2 minutes] and it came out nice, again.

I wish my family all liked it as much as I did.  It's one of those dishes where they go "yeah, it's OK", but with insufficient enthusiasm that indicates they would not welcome it being made again any time soon.

Bad blood(s)

I recently posted a favourable review of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, so I was pretty keen to watch his Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, especially seeing it seemed to be getting very strong reviews.

It doesn't deserve them.

A four word description kept coming to mind while watching it - way too heavy handed.  Practically everything in the movie can be so categorised:  the history lessons (although no doubt worthy); the score (you'd swear it was a Spielberg-esque John Williams one at times); the amount of blood spray any bullet wound seems to cause (I still suspect gaming culture has caused Hollywood to go over the top in blood sprays); the other bits of violent dismembering (hard to speak more of that without being a bit of a spoiler); the dialogue which often feels less than naturalistic.  Even the portrayal of the Vietnamese (and French!) felt a bit off to me.

It also feels as if the movie has been made 10 or 20 years too late.   As one reviewer has noted, it would have made a lot more sense (in terms of how hard the guys must have expected their task to be) if they were doing it as younger men than the 70-odd year olds that they must be to have the movie set in the present day.  Is it a screenplay that has been around 20 years waiting to be produced?  That could explain it.

Having said it all this, it's one of those movies that is obviously so well intentioned that it feels mean giving it a strongly negative review.   And I can say it never bored me;  it is well filmed and looks like it had a significant budget; and I liked the aspect ratio changes to reflect different eras.  But I just kept thinking - this is so heavy handed.   And imitative in ways that seemed unnecessary and more distracting than useful.  

It's very clear to me that the movie is getting strong reviews more for its (extremely) topical politics than its intrinsic success as a movie.   And (even allowing for racists and contrarians giving it a zero), the audience reviews on websites I have seen are reflecting this, as they are on average well below the marks given by professional reviewers.  I expect that this will continue, as more viewers rate the film on line.  I've noted on Rotten Tomatoes that one reviewer predicts that it will not age well, and I strongly suspect that's right.

I don't agree with this bad review's complaint about how slow it is - as I have indicated, that didn't bother me - but overall, it still rings closer to my perceptions than the glowing reviews.

And you know why I have some confidence in my assessment - my son seemed to agree with any critical comment I made while watching it.   

One final point - I often complain about violence in movies, but it isn't really at the heart of my dissatisfaction here, partly because I often felt it looked so overdone as to not be realistic.  I do wish, however, that Lee did not put in the full clip of that famous Saigon street execution at the start of the film.   He initially cuts away from it, but then goes back to show the full aftermath.  My son seems to think that if that can be used in a movie or documentary, then no one ever has any reason to complain about movie violence of any kind.   In a way he is almost right - but the answer is, no, it should not be used in movies.



   

Another unfortunate English childhood

I was reading a review of a new book about Charles Dickens by the (extremely prolific) writer AN Wilson, and was struck by this part near the end:

In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The teacher who introduced him to Dickens was himself utterly sinister and Dickensian, the skill with which he impersonated Fagin and Squeers “all too convincing”. The shards of Dickens sustained his spirits among the privations and abuse visited on him by the paedophile headmaster and his monstrous wife, uninhibited sadists in Wilson’s vivid, detailed account.

Wilson is 10 years older than me, so we are talking of a dire schooling situation in the 1950's, not from earlier in the 20th century.

I see that Wilson wrote a column in 2011 in the Guardian about what the headmaster and his wife did, and how he escaped.  It was appalling treatment, but it sounds as if he was not one of the boys sexually touched, even if tormented in other ways.

As Wilson came out of the experience to have a very successful life, is it OK to say that I find it blackly amusing to hear, once again, of the terrible reputation of what went on in British private schooling in the first half 20th century.   I am reminded of the startling passage in Evelyn Waugh's autobiography about the brazen teacher who made an open statement of what he did with a student, only to leave the school shortly thereafter to continue a career of bouncing from school to school with sudden departures after preying on boys.    (That's one thing the internet has, to its credit, help prevent.)

Why was this such a British thing?   And one which the well-to-do were seemingly prepared to risk exposing their kids to by packing them off to boarding school?   Well look here, it seems someone has written a whole book about that:  Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class.   The Google preview of the book (I found it by googling Evelyn Waugh and pedophile teacher) contains this provocative explanation by his son Auberon written in the Spectator in 1977 (and one which I suspect his editor would not let him write today):

Well, good for Auberon, I guess.   But I'm rather glad I was born here and not in an English family wealthy enough to consider boarding school.

Update:  because I feel a bit guilty about this post, I'll add a link to another article at The Guardian about some anti-boarding school campaigning (not only for its poor reputation for sexual assault, but its general psychological harm to do with a feeling of parental abandonment) from 2014.

In other American cult news (apart from the Trump one)

This sex and nudity cult is called "Carbon Nation"??  And what's this about "refraining from bathing"?  Even nudists like to shower, don't they?

This happened in Hawaii:

Police have arrested 21 individuals in a pair of sweeps in Puna subdivisions related to Gov. Ige’s COVID-19 emergency proclamation....

Social media posts have claimed that members of the “Carbon Nation” are on the Big Island. The group is referred to in numerous media accounts as a cult that has been kicked out of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.

Police confirmed the group’s leader, Eligio Lee Bishop, a 38-year-old self-professed cult leader known as “Nature Boy,” was among those arrested Thursday in HPP, but didn’t give the Tribune-Herald the names of the others arrested on the second day.

According to a Dec. 6, 2019, story in the Costa Rica Star, Bishop refers to himself as “God,” and the group “believes in nudism, polygamy, and refraining from bathing.”

The Costa Rica news outlet’s story also said Bishop “allegedly requires cult members to surrender all their money, credit cards, bank accounts, and pin numbers, in order to worship with the group.”

Googling more about "Nature Boy", I see from a 2017 article that his move into cult-dom was a relatively late career choice:

In 2009, he was arrested for forcible entry in Georgia. Two years later, he faced charges of theft and was arrested for aggravated battery. No charges were laid in the latter incident, he said. He was a model and an exotic entertainer, confessing in a Facebook video to having sex for money.

Attempting to avoid furthering a life of crime, Bishop attended school to become a barber. He filed for a business licence in 2014, opening his own shop in Georgia.

He also claims to have worked on the Mo'Nique Show — a talk show hosted by the Atlanta comedian of the same name.

In a Facebook post from June 2016, Bishop posed with a backpack, writing "the Ascension journey has begun." He was heading for Honduras, urging commenters on the post to let him be their "guide out of the hell realm."

His following grew over time. Now, he has more than 17,000 on Facebook.

Another site called "Cult News" goes into a lot of detail about this nutter and his beliefs:

Nature Boy preaches that the “end times” are near, and that he is the messiah. His rhetoric includes a theory about people of color living close to the equator. According to him, this is imperative for maintaining health and peace of mind. One must leave what he calls “Babylon” (America) and live a natural lifestyle in the Tropics. There, people must eat his version of a B6 diet, and defecate at the base of trees. There will be no need for a doctor or medication. In the world of Nature Boy, all disease is psychological. 

There's more, but it still seems that he into cult leadership mainly for the sex.  As are most of the women followers, I assume.  Although they do have to put up with men who don't wash.  

Update:  good grief, he has had a surprisingly big presence on Youtube as well as Facebook for years.  An absolute rambling nut.

Some dinner

Looking at the 'real' reason for Trump's Dallas trip...

....you have to suspect that some of those half mill donors must be worried about getting value for money.   Even the betting markets have finally turned against him.

Chait on illiberal liberals

I think Jonathan Chait's column "The Still-Vital Case of Liberalism in a Radical Age" sums it up pretty well:

The preconditions that permitted these events to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left. My own writing output reflects this enormous disproportionality. It is also true that the intended (if not always actual) target of the left’s illiberal impulses — entrenched systems of inequality — remain an oppressive force in American life, and that the cause to dismantle them is just.

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant. One can oppose different evils, even those evils aligned against each other, without assigning them equal weight.

Both American public opinion and many institutions have moved left on race and gender during this time. It is a positive change opening humane new possibilities for reform, but it has come along with some illiberal side effects. Over the last few weeks, as protests against the murder of George Floyd produced outrageous brutality against protesters, the good primary effect and the bad side effect seem to have advanced rapidly in tandem.

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

Working from these premises, many reactions by the left that might seem bizarre to somebody unfamiliar with this world (say, an older or more moderate person who doesn’t work in academia or the progressive movement) can make perfect sense. Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety.

 I could probably be accused of saying that the issues of illiberal colleges is one of "trivial hijinks of some college students" too, and I am happy to be gently reprimanded for that.

But presumably Chait would agree with me that, in the bigger picture of world problems (*cough*, climate change; *cough* economic policy) it is a relatively small issue.

We're having a moment

People, people:  let's calm down a bit.

It's always tricky, judging where righteous anger turns into counter-productive acts of mere symbolism which start to ostracise maximum public support for worthwhile reforms.

But some of the things going on at the moment are starting look like they are tipping over that edge.


Update:  on Aboriginal issues - I just managed to read Henry Ergas's column today in the Australian (you can get to it behind the paywall if you go to the link on his tweet.)   I think he's going to cop some criticism for the way he gets to an end position that I have suggested many times.

Look at these paragraphs:

It was not indigenous Australians who destroyed thousands of Aboriginal jobs in country areas by suddenly raising the wages of cattle station labour in 1965; it was the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Nor was it indigenous Australians who decided, just as the commission’s judgment was having its devastating effects, to massively subsidise remote Aboriginal settlements, condemning generation after generation to inadequate housing, an education scarcely worth having and a future shorn of jobs and hope; it was the Whitlam and Fraser governments.

And it was not indigenous Australians who removed the prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol by, and the sale of alcohol to, Aboriginal people that had been in force throughout Australia since 1929.

It was state and territory governments that, in keeping with the 1960s zeitgeist of self-determination, repealed those controls and decriminalised public drunkenness, plunging fraying Aboriginal communities into a spiral of alcohol-fuelled violence and helping to ensure that indigenous offenders are nearly three times more likely than non-indigenous offenders to be intoxicated when they commit their crimes.

This annoys even me - someone who has never managed to find much interest in aboriginal culture. (So sue me: I find cities and technology of any kind more interesting than low tech hunter/gathering, or even low level farming if you want to believe Pascoe.)

I just think it's counterproductive and insulting to suggest that following "the zeitgeist" of self - determination was the wrong thing to do over the last 70 years.   I think it's even wrong to broadly suggest that government was wrong to support at least those substantial settlements where people did want to keep a connection to land.

But at the end of the day - yes I think it is fair to say that the problem is that living in a location, or even a cultural milieu (such a family with a long history of welfare dependence, even if within a town) with little or no chance of having a strong connection to the economy (not just in a financial sense, but in the broader human sense of the opportunities for a broader range of life experiences) causes boredom and a sense of lack of purpose.   (Which leads to drug abuse, higher crime, and continues in a cycle.)   But the trick is how to encourage people to get out of the situation, and the balance between self determination and policies to encourage people to make the choice to try something new.

This is a challenge for all indigenous peoples in the modern world.  Cultural pride (and our respect for their mistreatment in the past) can take some a certain distance to self respect and good functioning in the modern world; but to be honest, the evidence is that, at least for the Australian situation, it's not going to be a universal panacea to their problems.   I do wish well intentioned people would stop thinking that it is. 

Yay for the pangolin

The Guardian has reported:

Pangolin scales have been removed from an official 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine in a move lauded by animal protection groups as a key step in stamping out trade in the scaly anteater, the world’s most trafficked mammal....

The news of the delisting from the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pharmacopoeia, reported by China’s Health Times newspaper, comes after the country’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration (SFGA) raised the protected status of pangolins to the highest level last week, with immediate effect.

“I am very encouraged,” said Zhou Jinfeng, secretary general of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), who has long pushed for better protection of pangolins and for stopping the use of their scales. “Our continuous efforts for several years have not been in vain.”

In February, China’s National People’s Congress pushed forward a ban on the consumption of meat from wild animals, though there has been uncertainty as to what wildlife will still be allowed for use in TCM and the fur and leather industries.

Nice photo the article ran, too:

JK explains

JK Rowling writes a detailed explanation of her interest in, and concern about, transgender issues.  It's well written, and to my mind, well reasoned and convincing.

The rabid attacks on her are undeserved.   She deserves more support from some prominent folk, and hope she gets it.

Some quick takes

*   Yeah, this business of attacking statues:  it's starting to get a bit too much of a "cultural revolution 2" vibe about it.   It's not the end of the world if some ill deserving historical figure gets his bronze dumped in the river; but it's not as if it ultimately does much to achieve social reform, either.   Moving Confederate hero statues in an orderly manner, though - that's OK.   But kids - getting out and voting is much, much more important.

*   Speaking of Confederate - the NASCAR decision to ban the flag is, I reckon, going to drive the wingnut Right berserk.   Honestly, I would not be surprised if there is some nutter who goes on a shooting rampage over this.   I have opined before that it's pretty incredible that it has taken this long for Americans to realise the insult that pride in that flag represents to such a huge slab of Americans.   David Roberts recently tweeted:

and recommended this New Yorker piece by the great Adam Gopnik:  How the South Won the Civil War.   I haven't read it yet, but must do so soon, before the shooting starts again.

Or - am I misreading this?   Is this cultural moment so strong (and polling indicates it is) that even the great majority of NASCAR fans will accept this?  

*  Ah, Sinclair Davidson:   out there calling a private company's decision not to provide a movie as part of its product line "censorship".   Who knew that a libertarian could be so post modern as to insist "censorship" means just whatever he wants it to mean, and those private companies had better agree with him and stop doing it.  And so should the ABC, or it should be defunded! 

He just makes the stupidest statements on issues involving racism, closely followed by issues of free speech and "censorship".  

Oh, and to round it off:   he's a complete loser on the matter of tobacco plain packaging.  Ha.

An air of desperation Part 3

American policing noted

Here's what follows in the tweets:

Essentially, it appears this was a classic "good guy with a gun" scenario. And once again, because the good guy was black, it didn't end well. 

Store owner Kevin Penn was holding a robber at gunpoint while he waited for police to arrive on March 15. When they did, his lawyer tells AL dot com, he announced the gun, took out the clip and ejected the bullet in the chamber. 

 

Within 4 seconds of officers entering Penn's store, one of them had punched Penn, breaking his jaw and knocking out several teeth, per the article. 

 

As I type this, Decatur Police are reportedly holding a press conference to discuss the incident. Why didn't they do so in mid-March, when it happened? Because the public finally found out this weekend with the release of the video to social media by Penn's supporters....

Like many Alabamians, I'm reminded of another recent "good guy with a gun" scenario that ended even more tragically. E.J. Bradford, a black man, was fatally shot in the back by Hoover Police after pulling a gun to stop an active shooter at the mall on Thanksgiving Day 2018. 

 

Seeing Bradford running, police immediately assumed he was the shooter and shot at him 4 times, killing him. Only later was the public told he was not the killer, who was still on the loose. The officers' actions were later ruled "justified"

Bram, Walt and Dracula

Well, this is all amusingly odd.   From a review of a book about Walt Whitman:

Bram Stoker wrote a fan letter to Whitman in which he seems to be angling for a date (‘I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked…’). Stoker proselytised zealously for Whitman’s work, which, even in bowdlerised form, struck British readers as an American offshoot of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘fleshly school’. Stoker did meet Whitman, but can’t have experienced his magnetism as entirely positive if we are to believe the claim that he went on to base the character of Dracula on the American poet.

This made me realise that I knew nothing about Bram Stoker.  According to Wikipedia:

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed homosexual who used his fiction as an outlet for his sexual frustrations.^[17] In 1912, he demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain: it has been suggested that this was due to self-loathing and to disguise his own vulnerability.^[18] Possibly fearful, and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of his friend Oscar's trials generated, Stoker began writing Dracula only weeks after Wilde's conviction.^[18][19]

Here's a post at Brain Pickings with Stoker's first, gushing, letter to Whitman.  It seems the bit about his weight is edited out?   Another site gives us the full Stoker self disclosure:

I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like— people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me.

Stoker included his physical description, because he surmised from Whitman’s works and his photograph that he would be interested to know the “personal appearance of your correspondents.” Wrote Stoker: “You are I know a keen physiognomist.”

Actually, that article goes on to give details of 3 times Bram met Walt, and seems to deny that they went badly.   So Walt may not be the inspiration for Dracula after all.  Bram Stoker still sounds quite the oddball, though. 

Some charming French content

France seems to have a lot of people who still use handkerchiefs - my kind of people.  Of course, they might all be over 70, but who knows? 

The children in the second part look particularly charming too.  I maintain that, amongst caucasians, the people on the streets of Paris when I was there (a long time ago) were collectively the most attractive I have ever been amongst.