While America spins into increasing political turmoil, I choose to talk about....tiny houses

I must have mentioned before that I am a bit of a sucker for looking at tiny houses, mostly on Youtube now.  That New Zealand guys's Living Big in a Tiny House is a deserved success:  he's likeable, always positive, and been all over the world highlighting all types of tiny house.

I can imagine that, as a single man in my 20's, or during the early period of marriage, I could have happily lived in such a very small space.  (My wife was certainly used to living in what we would consider to be pretty much a micro apartment before she met me.)   There is also a lot of talk about how older single women, post divorce and (more likely than men) left with little money could do well in very small residences too.   Assuming you could get over zoning laws that prevent these residences being on their own tiny lot of land, I think it is sort of obvious that they could meet a part of housing market if they could be done well. 

But, let's go through the things that bother me in nearly every single tiny home I see:

*   why do I seem to be the only person in the world who keeps thinking:  "yeah, it's cute and all, but it's a box with windows and doors with no eves.  In wet weather you have to keep every door and window shut??"   Not to mention getting soaked while getting to or from a car.   Look at this as a typical example:

That Youtube channel does feature a lot of New Zealand tiny homes, and admittedly, when it's wet there it's probably not particularly hot and closing windows might not make you feel like you're your in a hot steam box, like it does in Brisbane in summer, when we get most of our rain.   But honestly, isn't any deck more useful covered, even in a cooler climate?

*  Loft bedrooms in which an adult cannot stand up.   That would wear thin pretty fast, I reckon.  My mind even strayed to wondering if some tiny home bedrooms limit couple's sex positions.  

*  Stairs with no rails, in spaces where if you fell off them you would hit your head on a kitchen bench.  Like this:

Years ago, I used to note death trap stairs in fancy schmancy Japanese architectural houses;  now I am continually amazed that adults who buy or build a tiny house can't imagine the risk in walking down stairs like that in darkness, ill health, or while even slightly drunk.  It's not that it's impossible to have a rail on a narrow stairway, for God's sake:

Isn't it just bleedingly obvious that this is ten times safer than that in the previous photo??

*  Permanent versus relocatable homes.   In Big Living, the host is, perhaps 90% of the time, showing people who have found someone else's land on which to park their (movable) tiny home.  (Usually, I assume, for a small occupation fee, although that is never discussed.)   Tiny homes built on trailers are, let's face it, pretty much just a fancy caravan, and Councils have never liked people using their land to live in caravans as the only residence.   For tiny houses to really make a difference, I reckon you have to get away from the permanently trailered ones, and get more into the idea that they are viable actual permanent homes on their blocks of land, without the ongoing bother of body corporate levies for strata title, too.   Sure, I have no problem with them being prebuilt units that are easily re-locatable, but leaving a "house" on a wheeled trailer permanently just isn't the same as a house sitting on the ground (or perhaps more likely, on stumps.)

When I Google the topic, I see that there has been a fair amount of discussion about town planning changes that may be necessary to allow the growth of tiny homes as permanent residences.  See this American article as an example.   

In this context, I have found some discussion of "pocket neighbourhoods", which are planned developments with small residences but usually sharing a common garden or other facilities.  From a Forbes article about them:

Pocket neighborhoods make up small clusters of houses in urban, suburban, or rural settings in which small-footprint homes are arranged around a shared common area. The closeness that is created in these communities encourages interaction among neighbors and is perfect for people who seek a stronger sense of community than is found in a conventional neighborhood. They want a more caring supportive, safer, and connected place to live.

This sounds nice, but is it really that different from what can be offered in a well planned strata title development in Australia?   I suppose it is, if there is a sense of ownership of (say) the shared garden.   Strata title can develop nice, free standing, small house settings with communal parkland, but it's always got pretty expensive body corporate levies - I suppose in part because no one wants wants to put in their own effort to maintain a communal facility, so they pay people to do it.   I would be curious to know how "pocket neighbourhoods" deal with this - I presume it is up to the owners to take more direct control of things like a communal garden, but what do you do if one or two owners couldn't care less about (or are simply unable to make) a contribution to it's upkeep?

 As for the shared garden ownership:  if you put part of the garden on each lot title, you have the issue of a crank owner wanted to keep the rest of the community off their patch.  Although I suppose you could deal with that just by everyone having an easement over every else's patch?   Or maybe, I don't know, you could have communal ownership via a "court company".   This is an idea that pre-dated strata title, and there are still subdivisions in Brisbane that work this way:   the central access road to each lot on the subdivision is owned by a "court company", and everyone who buys in that "court" gets a share in the court company when they buy the lot.  All the court company has to do is collect money to resurface the road when needed, and perhaps pay for public liability insurance.   But the court company doesn't have to deal with all the other stuff your body corporate has to worry about - enforcing by-laws, having an AGM, paying for a management company to look after it, etc.   I suspect the cost of running such a system is substantially less than that under a strata title system.  

Anyway, how small are non-strata lots allowed to be in (say) Brisbane?  As far as I can tell, just doing a quick Google, a small house lot can be 180 - 300m2, although I suspect most are at the higher end of that range.  What's the average floor area for a tiny house?    

Most of the trailer built ones seem to be a maximum of 8 m long by about 2.5 wide (see this company's, for example)  Let's be generous and call that 24 m2.  A single car carport is about 3 by 6 m, so another 18m2.  If you are not going to have a tiny home on wheels, you can go crazy with floor space, but according to Wikipedia, anything under 37m2 in floor area is considered a tiny house.  So, for a rough tiny house footprint, let's go with 30m2 of "house", plus 18m2 carport, plus covered outdoor area of (say) 8m2:  56m2 in total.  

So you should be able to fit three tiny households on the smallest residential lot in Brisbane, and have a few square metres of dirt for yard for each.  Of course, without some extremely careful planning, you might still be able to hear every conversation the neighbours are having in their bed at night, but people do live in some pretty quarters in existing caravan parks and seem to survive.

Speaking of caravan parks, when I Google "subdivision for tiny houses" I get links to articles like this one: 14 Liveable Tiny House Communities, but honestly, most of them just look like up market trailer parks.   And we do have mobile home parks in Australia already which have small, demountable houses sited permanently on rented lots.   My Mum used to live in one on the Gold Coast, and it was pretty nice.   But can't we work this out without the ongoing cost of rental?   My mother could afford it on the pension, but it didn't leave a lot of money left over for anything else.

So, that's what I want to know more about - successful town planning that allows for outright ownership of very small lots, perhaps with communal yards/gardens (and that avoids the cost of body corporate levies as far as possible).   

I'll come back to the topic later....

If I had my way, I'd tax them out of existence

We obviously have too many large vehicles being driven in the suburbs of Australia, too, and they drive me nuts when they can't do a tight turn in a shopping centre car park because of their turning circle.

Ergas at his most pretentious

I got to Henry Ergas' column in the Australian today via his twitter link to it, and what a special bit of irrelevant pretentiousness it is.   

Most of it is about a Greek play,and attacks Palaszczuk and Andrews for their handling of COVID-19, with hyperbole thrown in:

There is, for sure, a chance that they will succeed; the gods, who in Greek tragedy could always be counted on to mete out harsh justice, having long left the scene, little stands between us and the ancients’ presumption, amply justified by every page of political history, that some agents of government will use all the scope they have to entrench their position — including by acting brutally and immorally — unless they are prevented from doing so.

With the crisis removing many of those constraints, our democracy appears to have slipped closer to the edge of the precipice than one might have thought possible.

Not for the first time I say:  what a tedious wanker.   

He finally gets around to some modern political philosophising:

Judith Shklar, the Harvard professor whose lectures on ­Antigone and political obligation were recently published post­humously, captured them brilliantly. The liberalism we inherited from the 19th century, she wrote, was a “liberalism of hope” — the hope, most of all, that one could create the basis for human flourishing.

But these dark times, which offer so much room for manipulation and deceit, demand a renewed emphasis on the “liberalism of fear” that instead of concentrating on how to bring about the greatest good, focuses on averting the greatest ills.

Rather than striving for the utopian perfectibility of mankind, the liberalism of fear seeks to limit the damage, so that we can feel free because the government does not, indeed cannot, terrorise us — be it by handcuffing pregnant women for organising innocent protests or by denying to grieving families the solace of farewelling the dead.

I'm not even sure I can make sense of that last paragraph - but whatever.

The main point is one I have been repeating for years - twits on the Right like Ergas are too interested in culture wars to be able to actually recognise real and serious threat warnings from scientists, be it climate change or dangerous pandemics.  They discount "the greatest ills" because they would rather believe cranks and "do nothing" advocates because they imagine that scientists and politicians who take them seriously are only doing so in order to increase the role of government.  

And as for "danger to democracy" - I hardly notice much of what Ergas writes, but I have only ever seen him defend Donald Trump, which makes his claims of democracy under threat from 2 Australian Premiers all the more ludicrous.

 

Tip for those of us with ageing eyes

First, by way of background:   my eyesight is such that for most purposes I don't need to use reading glasses, although I do have a set that I occasionally use.   I like reading without glasses so much that when I had a cataract operation a couple of years back, I asked for the lens replacement to be a close focus one rather than the more commonly requested distance focus.  My reasoning is that I have been using glasses for distance for about 40 years, and find not having to use glasses in bed and at the computer to be useful. Unfortunately, the result with the new lens was not perfect, there's a bit of "ghosting" around letters.  Apparently, it is difficult for the pre-operation measurements of what an eye needs to be super precise.  However, my left eye, despite having the start of a cataract as well, still does close focus well enough that my brain seems to favour it when reading and working on the computer, and I can get away without glasses.  But super small print on products at the supermarket can still be a problem, and when you are counting calories for diet purposes, it can be annoying not being to read them properly.

 Now that I have bored everyone with the preamble, this is my tip I just realised:  instead of carrying around reading glasses all the time, there's a good chance your mobile phone camera can act as a de facto magnifier instead.   I just tried it with the "macro" lens on my camera, and it worked fine.

You can get magnifying glass apps for phones as well - but with these new phones with their super close focussing, you don't really need them. 

Maybe everyone else already though of this?   I don't think I have ever seen another shopper using their phone close to a label though...

All true

 

I would add:  you can imagine how the Right wing sites would have absolutely freaked out if Obama had done a similar thing in dividing up the parts of America on a life and death issue.   They freak out over imaginary slights from Google, for God's sake.

Will anyone retract their Rowling twitter pile on, I wonder?

So, Nick Cohen has actually read JK Rowling's new book, and is emphatic that the "she's an appalling transphobic" social media pile on against her is based on a completely misleading line in The Telegraph's review.

I think Cohen is a reliable writer - I strongly suspect he would be correct.

I have seen many Australian twitter people (journalists and opinion writers) join in with the "tsk, tsk, why does Rowling do this?" line.   Assuming Cohen is vindicated by other reviewers, I wonder if any of the twitter mob will ever retract, and allow for nuance in how people with sound credentials on the Left are allowed to think about this particular phenomena.

The madness on the American Right regarding the culture wars and politics is certainly the greatest danger to that country and the entire planet;  but it is extraordinary to watch the much smaller scale madness that is identity politics (at least in the West) taking the line that feminists with qualms about how transgenderism is best recognised and understood is turned into "you want us dead because you don't agree with us."  

Still sounds strong

I forgot to mention - I heard former politician and all round know-it-all Barry Jones on Radio National breakfast this morning, talking about the successful ozone layer protection action taken by governments in the 1990's.   He still has a strong voice, and obviously has all of his marbles too.

"How old must he be?" I thought, because he's one of those men who seemingly from a young age could pass for someone substantially older than his actual age.   He'll soon be 88, I see.   

I'm not sure that I would say he was very likeable as a politician/public intellectual - he seems a bit too much of an eccentric loner for that -  but he has always impressed as an earnest hard worker not inclined to extremes in politics, and I sort of admire him for that.    

Update:  here's an interesting and very recent article on Jones in the SMH.  I didn't realise he had been revising his dictionary of biography ever since his first draft in his 20's (!)

A zombie song

Just so you know that my days are not entirely devoted to fretting about Trump and conspiracy belief taking over the United States, on Saturday I listened to Spotify for the first time in months, and it chose a 2006 song for me which I might have heard before, but I'm not sure:  Re: Your Brains.   It's a very amusing lyric with a nice melody, and as such has a definite They Might be Giants vibe about it.  (No doubt, this is why Spotify knew I might like it.)  Reading about the songwriter/performer Jonathan Coulton, I see he is from Brooklyn and does indeed know TMBG (he's played with at least one of the Johns). 

It also seems that Coulton is/was very big in the nerd/gamer world, writing some songs used in some very popular games (which I have not played.)   Seems I should listen to some of his old stuff.

Anyway, I take it he doesn't do proper videos, but lets lots of people make their own.  This one, with deaf signing for the lyrics, struck me as pretty fun to watch:

Kim does something responsible

I don't really know a thing about her, but this is a surprising bit of socially responsible action on her part:

Kim Kardashian West announced that she will join two dozen celebrities in temporarily freezing their Instagram and Facebook accounts on Wednesday because the platforms "continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation — created by groups to sow division and split America apart."

Why it matters: The announcement from such a high-profile user is likely to be a PR disaster for Instagram and Facebook, as well as a boost to the #StopHateForProfit campaign. Kardashian West is the seventh-most followed account on Instagram with 188 million followers. She currently has 30 million followers on Facebook.

 

They would prefer a dictatorship over a democracy, as long as the dictator said he was against abortion

Let's face it - it's the conservative Catholic inability to accept any moral ambiguity at all in terms of any abortion ever that leads them to prefer an authoritarian who treats the actually born like dirt, and who thinks it's cool that he's trusted by other murderous dictators, over a liberal Catholic candidate.  

It's pretty much the case that they would prefer a religious dictator (as long as the religion bans all abortion) over a democratically elected liberal.   (Not that I think many are actually dumb enough to consider Trump is actually religious - but they will take whatever scum they can, as long as he says - or lies - that he agrees with them on the matter of abortion.)

Agreed

Max Boot in the Washington Post points out the hysteria on the Right about America if Trump loses:

“The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us,” proclaims a hysterical cover story in Commentary. “The dissenters are being silenced. The buildings are burning, and the demands are ever growing.” We are living, the author argues, in “France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949.” Derek Chauvin, the police officer whose brutality sparked nationwide protests, is “our own Gavrilo Princip,” the assassin who triggered World War I. This is “an American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, similarly suggests this is yet another Flight 93 moment. She compares the ideology of al-Qaeda to the “Wokeism” of progressives: “Islamists shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Death to America’; the Woke chant ‘Black lives matter’ and ‘I can’t breathe.’ Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee. Both like burning the American flag.”....

Give me a break. And get a grip.

I’ve been criticizing “political correctness” for more than 30 years, ever since I was a student columnist at the University of California at Berkeley. Its excesses continue to irk me. But they are insignificant compared with the threat posed to our country by Trump and the malign forces that he has unleashed.

More than 90 percent of racial justice protests have been peaceful. The far right, not the far left, is responsible for almost all domestic terrorism. A recent study found that right-wing extremists perpetrated nearly two-thirds of attacks and plots in 2019, and 90 percent in the first four months of 2020.

Joe Biden has been clear in condemning violence whether of the left or right. As he said: “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.” Trump, by contrast, employs racist and violent language to mobilize White voters. He won’t even condemn a supporter accused of killing two people in Kenosha, Wis. Trump warns of “anarchy” if Biden wins, but he is the one promoting lawlessness and disorder.

 

 

President Dunning Kruger Peale

When considering Trump's pronouncements on COVID-19 "just going away" and now this on climate change, people seem to be forgetting that he had a close connection to the original "Power of Positive Thinking" spin merchant Norman Vincent Pearle.  As NPR wrote in 2017:

KEITH: That is the voice of Norman Vincent Peale, the author of the best-selling book "The Power Of Positive Thinking," first published in 1952. In the late 1960s, he had a regular radio segment, which is where this audio comes from. He was also the longtime pastor at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, which Trump attended with his family growing up. Peale even officiated Trump's first wedding.

TRUMP: Norman Vincent Peale - the great Norman Vincent Peale - was my pastor. "The Power Of Positive Thinking" - everybody's heard of Norman Vincent Peale. He was so great.

KEITH: That was Trump in July of 2015 at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit, talking about where he got his religious grounding.

TRUMP: I still remember his sermons. It was unbelievable. And what he would do is he'd bring real-life situations - modern-day situations - into the sermon. And you could listen to him all day long. 

 It is, of course, magical thinking, which is the last thing you want in a politician who has to deal with problems which are about more than mere psychology.

The extraordinarily shallow Trump

Fred Kaplan at Slate has an article about the new Woodward book on Trump which you should read in full.  I suppose it would be funny if it weren't so horrifying that, I dunno, 20% - 30% of Americans genuinely think he's a brilliant and charming fellow:  

When Woodward asks what it was like to meet Kim at their first summit in Singapore, Trump responds, “It was the most cameras I think I’ve seen, more cameras than any human being in history,” even more than he’d seen at the Academy Awards.

He then gives Woodward a poster-size copy of a photo of Trump and Kim shaking hands at the border separating North and South Korea. “This is me and him,” he tells Woodward, all excited. “That’s the line, right? Then I walked over the line. Pretty cool.” He goes on to brag that Kim “tells me everything. … He killed his uncle and put the body right in the steps where the senators walked out. And the head was cut, sitting on the chest. … Nancy Pelosi said, ‘Oh, let’s impeach him.’ You think that’s tough? This is tough.”

What a fanboy. No wonder Kim and every other dictator on earth plays the American president like such a wondrously easy mark.

At one point, when talking about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump tells Woodward, “It’s funny, the relations I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, OK?” Woodward writes: “That might not be difficult, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.”

Throughout the book, Woodward proclaims shock (though one wonders why) at how shallow Trump is. Asked about his strategy for dealing with the plethora of crises hitting him, Trump replies, “I don’t have a strategy,” except to “do a good job.” Trump says he knew that he and Kim would get along instantly, in the same way that “you meet a woman, in one second you know whether or not it’s all going to happen.”

Over and over, Trump plasters his pathological insecurity on marquee display. “I don’t think Obama’s smart,” he says, adding, “Hey look, I went to the best schools, I did great. … You know, they talk about the elite … they have nice houses. No, I have much better than them, I have better everything than them, including education.” His uncle, as he has said many times, was a brilliant MIT professor who knew about nuclear weapons—“so I understand that stuff,” the president says. “You know, genetically.”

 

 

How does democracy recover from the internet/right wing media led intensification of conspiracy?

Politico writes:

MIAMI — George Soros directs a “deep state” global conspiracy network. A Joe Biden win would put America in control of “Jews and Blacks.” The Democratic nominee has a pedophilia problem.

Wild disinformation like this is inundating Spanish-speaking residents of South Florida ahead of Election Day, clogging their WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds and even radio airwaves at a saturation level that threatens to shape the outcome in the nation’s biggest and most closely contested swing state. 

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims are already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who make up about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.

“The onslaught has had an effect,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a pollster and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.

“It’s difficult to measure the effect exactly, but the polling sort of shows it and in focus groups it shows up, with people deeply questioning the Democrats, and referring to the ‘deep state’ in particular — that there’s a real conspiracy against the president from the inside,” he said. “There’s a strain in our political culture that’s accustomed to conspiracy theories, a culture that’s accustomed to coup d'etats.”

And  David Roberts tweets:

And he further notes:

I wonder, though:  does Rupert Murdoch have the ability to dampen down QAnon?   As I understand it, Fox News pretty much ignores it, and while it's happy to hype hysteria over THE LEFT WANTS TO KILL US ALL to its mostly elderly audience, promoting the idea that children are being detained underground by devil worshipping Democrats seems just a stretch too far for the network.

But what would happen if the Murdoch family put out the message to its opinion "stars" along the lines "this is getting out of control - people have to believe our conspiracies, but a sensible democracy can't work if people live in complete and utter fantasy land" and told them to actively promote the line that believing QAnon is nuts and has disproved by false predictions so many times that you can't believe a word of it?  Who knows, perhaps they could sell it as a Democrat led conspiracy so extreme as to hurt Trump because it is so nuts?    

I tend to think that a united front from Fox News to attack QAnon at least could not hurt - perhaps giving Republicans cover to come out and call it out themselves.  

 

A complete disgrace and danger to the country

 

Denis did well

It seems quite a few weeks since I watched a movie on Netflix which I could strongly recommend, but last night was a good one:  the 2013 Denis Villeneuve directed Prisoners.

 I had never noticed it before, and as I consider Villeneuve a director who can make great looking movies which are nonetheless narratively unsatisfying, I wasn't in a hurry to watch it.  (It also stars Hugh Jackman, an actor who I generally struggle to like.)  \

But it's really good - well directed, well acted, and long but quite engaging all the way.  Given that it's about a neighbourhood child abduction, and the father (played by Jackman) is a conservative Christian who goes a bit nuts thinking he knows what's really going on, I thought it carried some surprising ressonance to the social milieu which has led to the current QAnon conspiracy craze spinning out of control in the US, and even Australia.  As Jack the Insider recently wrote:

The State of Victoria is in lockdown, not to reduce the infectious spread of the pandemic but because armed forces are secretly battling for control of the tunnels; an underground network used by the deep state to transport abducted children. Scott Morrison is with the deep state. Andrews was, too, before his arrest.

It is not yet safe to go to the tunnels. But be patient. The Great Awakening is upon us.

Welcome to the latest news from QAnon, the conspiracy theory that has millions of followers in the US and thousands in Australia.

Don't get me wrong:  Prisoners does have a mystery which is resolved by the end and it's unusual but not completely ludicrous, like QAnon.

And speaking of Villeneuve, yes, I have watched the trailer for Dune, a book which I have never read, and I didn't even see the David Lynch movie because of so-so reviews; but this upcoming version looks very stylish and probably worth seeing. 

A troublesome sect

How come I've never heard of the long running documentary series Unreported World?   It's apparently on Channel 4 in England, has been around for 20 years, and at least lately, posts new content on Youtube weekly.  It's the English Foreign Correspondent, by the looks, and probably preceded it? 

Anyway, I only learnt of it because a recent episode popped up on my Samsung Youtube app recommendations, Google knowing (of course) that I watch a lot of Asian content.

Here's the episode, about a money hungry Buddhist sect/cult the Dhammakaya Foundation in Thailand, which at least has the coolest, UFO looking temple thingy I have ever seen (this is a screenshot from the start of the video):

 

 

Looks like the start of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 version, and if the flying saucer had a Nazi reception committee.)

 

Here's the video itself:

Surprised I hadn't heard about it before. 

Sharing a date

Yeah, birthdays count for nothing, except it is my 60th today and that one does give even more of a feeling than your 50th that on life's ride you're up and over that initial roller coaster hump, and only have the moderate twists and bumps to continue with until it comes to an abrupt stop.   Not the cheeriest of metaphors, but truth be told, I don't care for roller coasters much anyway.  😊

Anyway, it's good to be alive and well and around to watch things unfold.

I see that a couple of years ago I had a look at famous people who shared my birth date, and noted a couple of low level celebrities.   Looking at a much, much longer list of famous birthdays, and I note the following:

* DH Lawrence: (I've known that one for a long time, but have never read him and have no great interest to start now, either.  I just realised I know virtually nothing about his life, but he has quite a long Wiki entry, so I might read that later.)

* Oh!  Brian DePalma, the director, is 80 today.   I will go to my grave defending The Untouchables as a great gangster film with actually more serious moral content than most of Scorsese's work, and with the most thrilling shoot out sequence ever; so yeah, he's welcome to share my date.

* Ferdinand Marcos would be 103 today if he was still alive:  good to know I share a date with at least one Right wing dictator.   

* Here's a name anyone who has ever owned a pre-digital camera who have read at least once:  Carl Zeiss ("German scientific instrument and lens maker").

* Minamoto no Yoriie, Japanese shogun.  Born 1182.  Never heard of him, but I've taken to telling my kids I must have been Asian in a prior life (it's why I watch so much Asian content on Youtube and Netflix, obviously); and perhaps he is my specific previous incarnation.   No, wait, he was a bit of a dud:

Yoriie showed when still very young great interest in military arts like fencing, and horse-riding. After his father's death in 1199, the 17-year-old became head of the Minamoto clan and was appointed sei-i taishōgun in 1202.^[2] He was, however, criticized for his abandonment of his father's policies, and his mother forbade him from any involvement political activity.^[2] On June 30, 1203 (Shōji 1, 12th day of the 4th month) his remaining powers were formally taken from him and assumed by a council of 13 elders, headed by his grandfather Hōjō Tokimasa.^[2] He ordained as a Buddhist monk. Yoriie, in turn, plotted with the Hiki to subjugate the Hōjō clan; however, he failed, was put under house arrest and forced to abdicate, and was eventually assassinated on July 17, 1204 in Izu.^[2] Yoriie was succeeded by his younger brother Sanetomo, the last of the Seiwa Genji line to rule, at least nominally, over Kamakura. 

All a bit Game of Thrones-ish.  

* Who to end on?   Perhaps a homeopathic murderer?:  Hawley Harvey Crippen [Dr Crippen], American homeopath and first killer to be caught with the aid of wireless telegraphy, born in Coldwater, Michigan (d. 1910).  He has a lengthy Wiki entry too.  All quite famous, it seems, and I think I have heard of the name.   More fun reading.

Anyway, on with life....

My dieting tips

"So, how's the current bout of 5/2 dieting going?" is a question none of my readers ever ask - so I will tell you anyway.

Been going good.   It's great to feel the pants getting looser and wondering if I will have to buy a smaller belt.   I seem to still be losing about 500 - 600g a week.   Not precisely sure where I started, but BMI is now a solid 26 instead of what I think was a verging on 27.

And I have decided it's easier than ever, because I am finding this routine for the 600 cal days is not boring me yet:

Breakfast - cup of coffee (with a small amount of milk) and a banana

Mid-morning - cup of tea (with small amount of milk)

Lunch - Cup of Soup (about 110 cal or less)

Sometime after lunch - 50 g of beef jerky (which is remarkably low on calories, but satisfying)

Dinner - one of the Cole's or Woolies pre made single serve salads.  These are pretty good now, and very convenient.  Usually they are around 250 cal.

 My daily total calories might be a little over 600 cal, but I doubt it ever reaches 700.  Still works.

So my big tips:   beef jerky and supermarket pre-made, individual salads.

Gravity not causing quantum collapse?

Interesting story at Science about an experiment indicating that an idea promoted by Roger Penrose (gravity is what causes quantum collapse) has passed a test.   (Although the ageing Penrose still thinks it is an inconclusive test.)

Excuse me while I swoon over Julia pointing out something useful to know

I happened to see Julia Gillard on the ABC breakfast show today, speaking in her role as Chair of Beyond Blue.

She said that suicide figures for Victoria (of course, the worst affected Australian state with COVID) for 2020 up to August were now available and there had been no increase in numbers over the previous year.   Still, they are worried about the potential for an increase, and hence have produced a video with an suicide prevention message (8 people who once felt suicidal, but came out of it OK.)

This "no increase in suicide numbers despite COVID lockdowns for 7 months" message is not something I had heard of before.   Instead, we get Right wing hysterics like Creighton going on and on about how this is going to devastate people, sending the message that it's reasonable to feel desperate because everything's going to Hell and yes, if you have lost your job your life is ruined, and for no reason.   (Mind you, even that Ian Hickie and the AMA have been talking about increased suicide risk - which is fair enough as a warning to government to try to bring in an adequate response, but I would have thought does run the risk in its reporting of encouraging a sense of inevitability in the vulnerable.) 

So, the positive message of no increased suicides so far should be given more prominence, I reckon.

And, by the way:  OMG, Gillard plays the role of useful ex Prime Minister with such exquisite grace, humour and intelligence, doesn't she?   I sort of swoon over her reasonableness on all appearances she makes.   Compare her performance to a snippet of Tony Abbott last night on Mad as Hell, making a weird "joke" about virgins during a press appearance in England about the lost cause of Brexit - he is still making people like me grind their teeth over what a complete embarrassment he is.      

 Update:  I see that the "no increase" message did appear in the news (at least, on the ABC, the Guardian and The Age - all of which might still be considered Left leaning sites, although not sure about the Age anymore) at the end of August - not sure that I saw it given much prominence on TV news, though.   Certainly, at the start of August, there seems a flurry of "suicides will increase" stories on sites like 7 News. 

Thanks, social media

Another appalling story of malicious rumour mongering on social media in India:

Wild rumours about coronavirus are fuelling opposition to testing in the northern Indian state of Punjab, reports BBC Punjabi's Arvind Chhabra. 

 

"Human organs are being smuggled," Sonia Kaur, who lives in a village in Punjab's Sangrur district, tells the BBC. "Not just the villagers but the whole world is scared of this. Social media is full of such news."

 

Ms Kaur says she has heard of people's organs being harvested under the guise of diagnosing and treating coronavirus. She is echoing the fears of countless others in rural Punjab who are sceptical of the virus.

 

Rumours are flying fast in Punjab that the virus is a hoax, that people who don't have Covid-19 are being taken away to care centres, where they are being killed for their organs, and that bodies are being swapped to allay suspicion. 

 

A mix of fear, anxiety and easy access to social media, especially WhatsApp, has hastened the spread of these baseless rumours in the form of messages and doctored videos. 

 

This has led to protests and even attacks against health workers. Ms Kaur's village was one of several in Sangrur that did not allow health workers to collect samples for testing - crowds pelted them with stones, screaming "Go back, we don't want to be tested", until they left.

One would hope that the Indian government is running some sort of attempt at educating school kids, at least, not to believe rumours on the internet.   Educating old adults in rural areas may well be impossible, I guess...

 

Almost makes you wish bad problems were even worse

This may be kind of obvious, but I haven't noticed too many people saying it:  the problem in a social sense with both COVID 19 and climate change is that both problems work in ways which are very real and very disrupting, but leave a significant proportion of the population being able to claim no personal and immediate effect, despite what scientists and other experts tell them.

This enables the intense politicisation of the response, and a lack of social cohesion.

I mean, if you get a big enough problem - your country at risk of invasion during a war as a perfect example - people will put up with enormous privation and social disruption for years at a time.   Not only that, but some people find the social cohesion from a massive joint response can make the whole thing almost a positive experience.   (I think the ageing scientist James Lovelock says that about his World War 2 years.  By the way, he's 101 now.  Can't be with us much longer.)  

The social difficulty you get is when a problem is real and bad, but not quite bad or immediate enough to shut up the politically and ideologically motivated contrarians from engaging in arguments with cherry picked "evidence" and large slabs of denial of expert evidence. 

You want to feel depressed about the future of cheap overseas travel?

Then read this commentary at CNA:  

Does COVID-19 spell the end of long-haul budget airline flights?

American policing noted

Even by American policing standards, this is outstandingly nuts:

A 13-year-old boy with autism was shot several times by police officers who responded to his home in Salt Lake City after his mother called for help.

Linden Cameron was recovering in a Utah hospital, his mother said, after suffering injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, his intestines and his bladder.

Golda Barton told KUTV she called 911 to request a crisis intervention team because her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was having an episode caused by “bad separation anxiety” as his mother went to work for the first time in more than a year.

“I said, ‘He’s unarmed, he doesn’t have anything, he just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming,’” she said. “He’s a kid, he’s trying to get attention, he doesn’t know how to regulate.”

She added: “They’re supposed to come out and be able to de-escalate a situation using the most minimal force possible.”

Instead, she said, two officers went through the front door of the home and in less than five minutes were yelling “get down on the ground” before firing several shots.

 

 

Count me "amused"

An ancient key to Tenet?

I hadn't heard about this before:  Nolan's film Tenet seems to have clear ties to an old palindrome square:

The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet

A puzzle dug up all over Europe holds the key to Tenet — and turns it into more than a movie.

I'm not sure if I should see the movie at the cinema.  It seems to universally be considered far too complicated and puzzling as to what is going on, but many reviewers think it is well worth the viewing anyway.

I'm a high scorer

If I admit that my score on this appears to be 11 or perhaps even a 12, can I reclaim status as a "conservative"?:

Mystery phone

I have gifted myself (but not yet opened) a new, low mid-range (as is my cheapskate wont) Android mobile phone, even though it is seemingly the most under reviewed phone on the planet.

It's the Vivo X50 Lite.  Now this is a major brand in Asia (I believe), and the X50 Pro got lots of review attention (at least within Asia) due to its internal gimbal camera, which is a pretty cool feature.   But I have never seen that model on sale here, and I don't spend a lot of time trying to walk and take videos, so I didn't see a need to track that down. 

JB Hi Fi and Officeworks do sell cheap end Vivo phones, and they seem pretty good value, with nice screens.   The X50 Lite came out not so long ago, originally at $499, but it has been on sale recently for $399.

The price drop might be because no professional reviewer is reviewing it.  Even on Youtube, where it seems hundreds and hundreds of Asian people try to make a living by posting video reviews of nearly every phone that is released by any company, I think all of the videos are just information or comparison ones where they list the features of the X50 Lite alone or against other similarly priced phones.

Why is no one interested in properly reviewing a (now) $400 phone with 8Gb ram, 128 internal storage, an AMOLED screen, and all of the sensors which should see me get through the apocalypse as long as I also have a solar powered re-charger??

Here are the full specs.  I suspect the processor is very mid range, but if you don't play games on your phone, I doubt it matters that much.  

This phone is so under the counter that when I went to Officeworks to buy it, it had not been put on display, ever.   They had 4 out the back, and it was on line, but they just never bothered displaying it.  (JB Hi Fi has had it on display, so I know what it looks like.  Lovely screen.)

Anyway, by next week I will have opened and used it.  As with all new mobile phones, I expect I will be impressed by the upgraded abilities in my hand.   And I will review it here.  Ha.

System failure of the worst kind

This guy (who stalked and shot his teenage kids in their house, following the daughter from her bus to find out where they lived) just sounds like he lived his entire life as a dangerous sociopath (but of the kind who could con women into having relationships with him):

Police records showed the man who shot and killed his two teenage children in a domestic assault in Sydney’s northern suburbs had been violent towards or stalked four prior domestic partners and one of his other children.

In 2010, John Edwards was refused a gun licence due to a prior AVO, the coronial inquest into the deaths heard on Monday.

But despite a long history of stalking and assault charges registered on the central police system known as the “COPS” database, Edwards was able to successfully apply in 2017 for a “Commissioners Permit” to undergo gun safety training at Hornsby and Ku-ring-gai gun clubs...

The inquest into the deaths of John, Jack and Jennifer Edwards has heard Edwards had an extraordinary relationship history, leaving behind six partners before Olga and 10 children in total.

Police interviewed all but one of the former partners, and found Edwards had a constant pattern of violence, control and stalking. Several former partners and one of his children had made police reports over decades.

Olga herself had reported two incidents to police, including an incident in February 2017, when she had been separated from Edwards for a year, and he stalked her in her "hot" yoga class....

Ms Richardson also told the inquest that Ku-ring-gai Pistol Club refused Edwards membership in 2016 after he was threatening to an officer of the club.

The Ku-ring-gai club informed the Hornsby Gun Club it had refused Edwards membership but did not let any authorities know. Edwards, who owned five firearms, completed his training at St Marys gun club, which had no knowledge of his history.

Doesn't this indicate that the system should be capable of being marked "guns to be surrendered and never to be obtained again"?

The singing tyrants

OK, so there's a reasonable chance you've seen it elsewhere, but I think it's only been out for less than a week, and I thought it was pretty interesting:



The most realistic looking thing about it (in my opinion) is the way their heads bob around.

I think I have linked to the original post of it, so it will presumably stay up, as I notice it is being taken down elsewhere.

People are suggesting that it shows what "deep fake" videos can do, and a lot of very serious people worry that politics is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with the poisonous effect of deep fake propaganda in future.

Call me too optimistic, perhaps; but if what fake videos can do is highlighted by examples such as this, doesn't it make it more likely that people will be more sceptical of  online propaganda using any form of video?   Not sure that I can convincingly make that case out when there are literally millions of Americans (nearly all Republicans) who at least partially believe in the ludicrous QAnon conspiracies - but perhaps with conspiracy and propaganda it's somewhat perversely the case that the lowest tech communication (simple text messages) promulgates the best?   All people have to believe is that such messages come from an insider - they don't have to speculate about whether the image, video or voice has been faked or manipulated on the way.       

Nick Cohen being sensible

I have been saying a similar thing for at few years now:

I once believed that you should fight the extreme right and extreme left “at the same time and for the same reasons”. The phrase had a fine sound to it, even if I say so myself, and it remains true enough. Anyone who has witnessed the public shaming of those who deviate from approved leftish ideology will find Boris Johnson’s attempts to purge the cabinet and civil service of all who disagree with him familiar. The politics may be different but the oppressive spirit is the same.

But in this terrible year, it is worth saying that moral equivalence is not the same as practical equivalence. As the world stands, the fight against the radical right is a fight for the preservation of liberal democracy. The fight against the far left is a fight for justice for the individual denied the freedom to express his or, and more frequently today, her opinions without post-Stalinist inquisitors demanding she confesses her ideological crimes or lose her job.

Both fights are essential but the difference in scale is so enormous it barely makes sense to put them in the same category.

He should also have mentioned climate change...

Reviews you didn't need

*  I've not finished it yet, but I can fully understand why the second season of Umbrella Academy has been so popular on Netflix.   It's terrifically directed, and the story is flowing with far fewer angsty relationship diversions than the first season, which did drag at times.   It's overall much wittier, too.    A very enjoyable bit of comic book based nonsense.  
*  How's this for a late review:  finally got around to watching Mulholland Drive on the weekend.   I thought I had read years ago that the movie was capable of making sense, but I didn't work it out for myself and had to go check on Reddit for the explanation.   It does have strong Twin Peaks vibes,  and I had forgotten that it had started out as another TV project that was converted into a movie.   Unfortunately, I have to say that the overall impression it gave me was that David Lynch was quite overrated - Twin Peaks was fun and enjoyable in its day, but his movie work doesn't really do much for me.   He really did make Los Angeles look like a physically unattractive dump in virtually every interior and exterior shot - perhaps that was revenge for his "creative differences" with the business at the time?  Another thing the movie made me realise (again) was how extraordinarily tame by modern standards R rated movies of even a couple of decades ago could be in pornographic and violent content.  We can all blame the internet and modern video games for that...

A good answer from Biden

Have a look at this short clip.   As someone on Twitter says about his answer:

Trump campaign taking on water

I get the impression there is probably panic developing inside the Trump campaign for the following reasons:

*  sufficient polling seems to be coming out now to conclude that the GOP convention did not lead to any substantial improvement for Trump;

*  Trump's popularity within what you would normally consider the natural ally of any "law and order" President - the military - seems to have taken a substantial hit from which it is unlikely to recover.

Remember I said when the RussianS paying for hits on American troops story came out that I thought it was going to important?   Although it did quickly disappear off the news radar, I still reckon it may have been important for hurting the military's regard for him, as was shown by the recent polling indicating that he had lost popularity there.  Now that credible reporting is out that he privately has the most ridiculously selfish view of military service [confirmed by a Fox News correspondent, no less!], I can't see his popularity with those who he was probably hoping would back him in a post election crisis over disputed election results will ever be returning.

Truth be told, the upper reaches of the Pentagon would have been privately grinding their teeth from day one about what a complete ignoramus he is, but it has taken some time for the dismissive view of him to filter down to lower ranks.  

Even the kerfuffle about whether Stars and Stripes would close looks bad for Trump.  He has said it will not close, but the timing of the suggestion it would close within weeks looks very peculiar.  

*  The Trump open encouragement for his supporters to vote twice smells of desperation. 

*  Trump's judgement in what to say about real or virtual dictators who kill their political enemies remains as "off" as ever.   I know it won't matter to his cult followers, who are blind and dumb, but surely Trump's campaigners don't think this is a useful line to be running in a week when another Russian poisoning of an opposition politician is confirmed:

At a small campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa., President Trump on Thursday praised himself for wanting to “get along” with Russia and said that when he hears people talking about Russia in the news he “turns it off.”

“They always say, ‘Trump is radical, he is off the — he is too radical, he will get us in wars,’” Mr. Trump said. “I kept you out of wars. What happened in North Korea? I got along with Kim Jong-un. They said that’s terrible. It’s good that I get along. If I get along with Russia, is that a good thing or bad thing? I think it’s a good thing.”

*  That said, it is a worry that the electoral college seems so skewed now that Biden may have to win the popular view by a really substantial margin to be sure of getting enough electoral college votes.

Family performance

Given that I lack any ability at all with musical instruments, and even the simplest sheet music may as well be hieroglyphics to me, I find it particularly remarkable that I have a daughter (rapidly approaching the end of Year 12) who can now play pieces like this on her violin (no visuals, just the audio):



There is one other piece she played recently that I might upload too.   

Otters as pets

Apparently, Youtube channels devoted to pet otters have become a thing in the last year or so.   They are very cute to watch, if this one is anything to go by:



A 2019 article in Nature Conservation discussed the trend:

In response to growing reports of otters in the pet trade, and suggestions that the popularity of pet otters on social media may be driving demand, we collated YouTube videos of pet otters to test for trends in the number of videos published, their exposure (number of views) and popularity. We used English-language search terms to provide a global overview, as well as local language search terms for four South East Asian countries identified as being of potential importance in the pet otter trade (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam), and Japan. We found that not only had the number of videos depicting pet otters increased in the last two to three years (2016–2018), but that their popularity and/or engagement had also increased. Notwithstanding some country-level differences in the details of effects observed, the greatest increases in both the number of videos produced and their popularity occurred in Indonesia and Japan. At a global-level, commercial “viral” video sites appeared to be influential in terms of posting highly popular pet otter videos. At a national level, potentially influential videos tended to be produced by four or five individual otter owners....

Our results show an increase in social media activity that may not only be driving the apparent increase in popularity, but also amplifying awareness of the availability of these animals as pets, as well as creating and perpetuating the (erroneous) perception of otters as a suitable companion animal. At a global level, there are welfare concerns associated with otters in the pet trade, and, in South East Asia specifically, there are serious conservation concerns.

 As cute as Aty the otter is in the video above, I would have thought the cost of feeding an otter fish would be enough disincentive from trying to have one as a pet.   (But then again, we know the huge cost of feeding lions and tigers hasn't stopped people keeping them as "pets" in all sorts of countries.) 

Worst Attorney General

Greg Sargent at Washington Post on why Barr is such a dangerous jerk (short version - he buys into the Right's decades' long, culture war inspired, escalation of anything to the left of them as the absolute evil enemy of everything good in the world) :

Barr gave a shocking interview to CNN late Wednesday that left zero doubt about his intentions. Barr refused to denounce Trump’s suggestion that people should try to illegally vote twice (by mail and in person), supposedly to test vote-by-mail’s validity. Trump brazenly repeated this on Thursday.

Barr also repeated his frequent claims that vote-by-mail elections have been riddled with fraud and that a foreign power could fabricate thousands of mail ballots. Both are utter nonsense. But in saying them, Barr is telegraphing his willingness to legitimize Trump’s eventual effort to try to invalidate untold numbers of mail ballots, which Trump has already told us is coming.

Meanwhile, Barr is party to another extraordinary move: Trump just approved a memo declaring the intention to restrict federal funding to Democratic-led cities designated as “anarchist jurisdictions.” Barr will determine which cities earn this label.

This is being widely denounced as illegal, and it may go nowhere. But let’s focus on its stated rationale: A city will be designated as such if it has “permitted violence and the destruction of property” and “forbids the police force from intervening to restore order.”

The idea that these officials have deliberately allowed violence and restrained police from restoring order is crucial. In reality, officials are working amid extremely complex, fast-moving conditions to balance the restoration of order and public safety with respect for civil liberties and peaceful assembly, while (ideally) avoiding abuse of the awesome powers of state violence....

Here's the more general point:

Trump’s reelection case is premised on not just on the idea that Joe Biden and Democrats are too weak to control leftist violence. It’s also that they are willingly allowing those forces to run rampant, in the full knowledge that they are out to destroy the very possibility of civil society itself.

Both Trump and Barr have delivered major speeches spelling out this worldview. Commemorating Independence Day, Trump likened his own struggle against “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists” to the struggle to defeat fascism in World War II.

Trump is at war with the left, to rescue civil society itself. He recently declared: “We’re saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.”

For his part, Barr, speaking to the Federalist Society last November, infamously declared that “it is the left” that poses the true threat to the “rule of law,” through a “scorched earth, no-holds barred” war against Trump.

Barr also voiced support for a strong executive, unshackled by oversight and legal nitpicking, declaring that it has delivered glory at moments of great national struggle against fascism, communism and “Islamic fascism,” which elevates the war on terror into an epic civilizational showdown. As Laura Field details, Barr belongs to a movement of “reocons,” or authoritarian reactionary conservatives.

Indeed, Barr is drawing on a long tradition of “anti-liberalism,” which is hostile to liberal democracy in part precisely because it doesn’t cast politics as a perpetual emergency struggle against an overarching enemy, and instead values proceduralism and compromise, which sap the moral will and decisiveness of the polity.

Barr did not explicitly declare the war against the left akin to the war with fascism. But Trump has. And by labeling the left an existential threat to the rule of law alongside a paean to the glory of the executive unfettered at times of crisis, he creeps right up to the precipice of this claim....

 Barr’s grotesque exaggerations of the leftist threat help give Trump justification for urging right-wing vigilantes to take matters into their own hands, lawlessly.

Good analysis.

Some COVID thoughts

*  the Victorian lockdown certainly seems to show, again, that strict lockdowns work;

*  there seems to be surprisingly infrequent polling on whether Dan Andrews and his government are suffering in popularity over this.   Polling back on 11 August indicated 70-something percent support for the current lockdown;  perhaps it has eroded a bit since then?  On the other hand, as case numbers come down, and it seems to work, I wouldn't be surprised if support is still pretty high.   We need to know, so (if public support is still high) we can gloat at the tiny fists being waved about in anger at Catallaxy about this is the worst civil rights crisis ever.  Sinclair just loves to go all civil/property rights on matters which kill and sicken people (in favour of the thing that will sicken them), just as he did with tobacco plain packaging. 

*  news about the possible long term effects of COVID infection on the heart is pretty worrying; except to the likes of Adam Creighton, for whom there is no hill high enough to die on over this.

*  Fauci is never coming back into Trump's (or his cult's) "good books".  No one sensible would ever want to be there, anyway.

The French method

I followed a link to an article in The Economist about a big new university in France, and read this  explanation as to rather different way they do tertiary education:

A HUGE MODERNIST university campus is emerging amid farmland on a plateau south of the French capital. The University of Paris-Saclay, officially launched this year, merges some 20 higher-education and research institutions. It has a teaching and research staff of 9,000, catering to 48,000 students—more than Harvard or Stanford. Specialised in science, it is France’s attempt to create, in President Emmanuel Macron’s words, an “MIT à la française”. Such ambition once seemed fanciful. Yet in August Paris-Saclay stormed into the Shanghai world university ranking, grabbing 14th place overall and 3rd in Europe after Cambridge and Oxford. It took the top international spot in maths.

France’s two-tier higher-education system baffles outsiders. Three-fifths of its 2.7m students are enrolled in universities. These are public. Until recently they did not select undergraduates at entry; they charge no tuition bar a small enrolment fee, and are often sneered at as second-rate. An elite minority, meanwhile, attend selective grandes écoles, for which entrance exams require at least two years of post-secondary-school cramming. To confuse matters further, research is traditionally not carried out in universities or grande ecoles but in specialised public institutions.

Over the years, this unusual structure has led to much French frustration about foreign perceptions. The country has world-class engineering schools, economics departments and mathematicians. After America, France has more Fields medal-winners for maths than any other country. Yet its fragmented system—partly down to the deliberate splitting of big universities after the 1968 student protests—has left it under-performing in world rankings and lacking global star appeal.

I had no idea the French were so into maths.   [At this point, I'm tempted to make a reference to menage a trois, but will leave that to actual comedians.]

Anyway, it looks like a successful merger.

 

Public service announcement from the Republican Party

(There's a near 100% chance that someone else has already done this on Twitter, but I haven't seen it yet.)

A small Hollywood story

One of the few entertainment industry persons I follow on Twitter is Ed Solomon, who wrote Men in Black, amongst other movies.  (He did the Bill & Ted adventure movies too - the third of which has just been released to mostly favourable reviews.)

He reminisces about the MIB movie quite a bit, and how it changed from his initial ideas after discussion with director Barry Sonnenfeld (whose taste in comedy has also appealed to me across quite a few movies).  Anyway, this tweet amused me:

 
I have to say, I remember when I first saw MIB at the cinema, this reveal really did strike a particular note of pleasure because of the way it reminded me of science fiction-y fantasies I sometimes imagined as a child.   I am sure it is a key part of the reason why the movie has been regarded with deep affection by so many people.  

Pop culture notes

Well, I can only welcome this news:

You see, to annoy my son, who feared the Youtube app on the TV would be flooded with K Pop recommendations, I watched the Dynamite clip twice in the last week.  (I wanted to see it anyway, to see why it became the fastest instant hit in Youtube viewing history.)

Ignoring the aspect of the deliberately androgynous styling of some (or all?) in the group (and also ignoring the terrible, exploitative conditions that apparently most K Pop group members have to work under), I think the song is pleasant enough pop, and sounds to my ear rather Bruno Mars-ish.   (My daughter agreed when I pointed this out.)  It is, at the very least, harmless.

Which is more than I can say for the that WAP song, which I could have ignored if it weren't for noticing the ill advised entry of annoying twerp Ben Shapiro into criticism of it.

Apart from what whiny conservative male voices (and in the case of Shapiro, I mean that very literally) have had to say about it, there has been a broader discussion of the dubious merits of "feminist empowerment" by trash talking and acting as badly as men.  See this thread in Reddit for example:

It's had 1,600 or so comments, which is good. (Mind you, a lot are trying to change her mind.)

Anyway, it's good to see that happy, all ages friendly K Pop should have knocked ultra sleazy, surely- you-do-not-want-your-daughter-(or-son)-thinking-of-sex-like-this WAP off the top position.   (No sexual pun intended, either.)

Going back to K Pop:  while I think I made some comment here a few years ago that it seemed that K Pop was really upping the androgynous style, I see that the topic of why this is a thing has been discussed on line for years.

Someone speaking in an article in 2013 suggested this, and it sounds more-or-less plausible:

I think that, according to Western expectations of gender, the overwhelming majority of male K-pop idols would be considered androgynous. But I don’t know that that has to do with K-pop challenging the gender binary. I think this has a lot to do with the “objectifiability” of K-pop idols, as is the fetishization of cuteness. Part of femininity as a social construct in nearly every culture are passivity, perceived weakness, harmlessness, and allure based on the preferences of the observer. And, of course, with cuteness, you have a performance of childishness, a major feature of which is a lack of agency. K-pop idols are someone else’s moneymaker whose worth is based on the ability to be non-threatening fantasy fodder for their audience, which translates into money spent. No wonder nearly EVERYONE in K-pop is what the West would consider hyper-feminized (women, too). This isn’t unique to K-pop. Teen heartthrobs in the West tend to be more feminine, as they have to appear innocuous and available for objectification too.

An article in 2018 notes:

That wasn't always the case. In the 1980s and 90s the salaryman was the prevailing male aesthetic. Suits, luxury watches and a traditional strong male look were the norm. Korea has mandatory national service and that moulded and defined what men thought would look appealing.

"In the 80s and 90s, men in Korean pop content were largely portrayed as tough guys in gangster and detective films, and rebellious young men in some TV dramas," says Sun Jung, the author of Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption.

But all that changed in the mid-1990s when music group Seo Taeji and The Boys came onto the scene, says Prof Elfving-Hwang. They used rap, rock and techno influences and incorporated English language into their music.

They kick-started fan culture which has now become a major force in the music industry, she says.

Then followed the big entertainment companies churning out K-pop girl bands and boy bands, and their influence has been like nothing before it.

Yes, well, it is interesting to wonder how much of this is driven by the entertainment companies dictating taste.  More from that last article:

"Compared to the 80s and 90s, now there are a lot more soft masculinities - pretty boy images and gentle male images - represented in media, and consumers welcome and widely consume them," says Dr Sun Jung.

They came to be known as Khonminam - combining the words for flower and a beautiful man. She says it takes inspiration from similar concepts in Japan of bishonen or beautiful boys and Shojo manga - girls comics.
 1
But it's not feminine.

"I think the phenomenon should rather be explained through the notion of hybrid or versatile masculinity - soft yet manly at the same time - which is different from effeminised," says Dr Jung.

She cites Song Joong-ki, the star of hugely popular Korean drama "Descendants of the Sun" as the embodiment of this. He may be a khonminam in his look, but as a special forces captain in the military he is also a tough guy.

It goes on to discuss beauty products aimed at young men too, and God knows that there are a lot more of that on the shelves of Japan than Australia.

Anyway, I still think it is all pretty peculiar - a culture specific fashion trend that has been around for longer than I would have expected; even though, as noted above, Western acts aiming at a teen female audience have long de-emphasised masculine features too.   But it's as if something of dubious fashion merit, like 70's glam rock, perhaps, lasted 20 years instead of (what?) 10?