Must be the making of a conspiracy theory of some kind in this

Pope Francis went to a female Jewish psychotherapist for 6 months when he was 42.  A tad unusual, but apparently Argentinians really like their psychotherapy (why?):

Among the other women he confided in was his psychoanalyst whom he consulted between 1978 and 1979. These were trying years for Pope Francis as he was transitioning from the difficult task of provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina to rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel.

The pope’s visit with a psychoanalyst is not surprising, considering that Argentina has the highest number of therapists per capita in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

“I consulted with a Jewish psychoanalyst. For months I went to her house once a week to clear up some things. She was a doctor and psychoanalyst, and she always stayed put. Then one day, when she was about to die, she called me. Not to receive the sacraments, since she was Jewish, but for a spiritual dialogue. She was a very good person. For six months she helped me a lot, when I was 42 years old.”

Well, that makes sense...[no, it doesn't]

With the expectation that Trump is about to announce a big change to that DACA system, an article in The Atlantic talks about the odd politics around it:

Five years ago, President Obama ordered that young illegal immigrants be protected from deportation, a program known as DACA. As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to rescind that protection. He could have done it on his first day in office—but he didn’t, and still hasn’t, for reasons no one quite understands.

Now, President Trump appears poised to revoke DACA. The action has not been officially announced, and administration sources believe that the impulsive president’s mind is not totally made up, but he is reportedly planning to do so as soon as Friday.

If he does, he will have effectively been boxed in by immigration restrictionists—potentially against his own better political judgment. “I do not think Trump wants to do this,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told me. “But they’ve cornered him. This artificial deadline has created the moment the opposition needed to force a decision.”

Immigration policy is the battleground for the White House’s warring factions, and DACA is ground zero. Around 750,000 undocumented youths now benefit from the program, which allows them to work and go to school without fear of deportation. Allowing the so-called “Dreamers” to stay is broadly popular even with Trump’s base: Nearly 80 percent of Republicans, and three-quarters of Trump voters, support it. But immigration hardliners like the pundit Ann Coulter, Breitbart, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been vocal proponents of ending the policy.

 The article explains how the Republican Party is split on this, with State attorneys taking action against Obama's scheme a big part of the problem, and that it would appear that Trump actually has his heart in the right place, for a change (in that he doesn't want to hurt the youth protected by it.)   Yet he is not strong enough to overcome the "restrictionists".   If he had any abilities to actually get political foes behind him, instead of just abusing everyone who disagrees with him, maybe he could have actually changed minds.

What a mess the Republicans are.  When will it end?

People can do amazing things

I forget where, but I think I saw someone doing this on TV, and it's really surprising how well it can work:

Like some bats and marine mammals, people can develop expert echolocation skills, in which they produce a clicking sound with their mouths and listen to the reflected sound waves to "see" their surroundings. A new study published in PLOS Computational Biology provides the first in-depth analysis of the mouth clicks used in human echolocation.

The research, performed by Lore Thaler of Durham University, U.K., Galen Reich and Michael Antoniou of Birmingham University, U.K., and colleagues, focuses on three blind adults who have been expertly trained in echolocation. Since the age of 15 or younger, all three have used echolocation in their daily lives. They use the technique for such activities as hiking, visiting unfamiliar cities, and riding bicycles.

Something I don't understand...

Having nuclear weapons always goes hand in hand with having the missiles to deliver them, and there was talk in the media a few weeks ago about North Korea having received theirs from a Ukrainian factory:

North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines probably from a Ukrainian factory with historical ties to Russia’s missile program, according to an expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.

The studies may solve the mystery of how North Korea began succeeding so suddenly after a string of fiery missile failures, some of which may have been caused by American sabotage of its supply chains and cyberattacks on its launches. After those failures, the North changed designs and suppliers in the past two years, according to a new study by Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

You certainly don't get the impression that a country barely able to feed itself is capable of making anything but the most basic missile.

So - why is it so hard to stop the supply of missiles to North Korea?   Did they receive a very large batch a few years ago that they are just working their way through now?    Surely, you would think, the Ukraine and even Putin would think it a good idea to work hard on the matter of black market supply of missiles and missile components? 

A Douthat attack

Ross Douthat really gets stuck into Dinesh D'Souza in his latest column, which is also interesting because it makes it feel like Ross, as a sophisticated conservative, is barely clinging on to anything the Republicans believe on economic policy these days.

It's true:  D'Souza is like a walking Catallaxy thread - full of hyperbolic claims of evil in anything Democrat or even vaguely progressive.   Any credibility he used to have has long gone, and he is a prime example of the poisonous, nutty element that dominates so much now in the American Right.   (He is, of course, a climate change fake skeptic, as is compulsory for all Right wing culture warriors.)

Anyway, go read Ross.

A Close Encounter Anniversary

Way to make me feel old - it's the 40th anniversary of the release of the Spielberg classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the New York Times has a good story  looking back at its reception at the time.   (The movie's also getting a short remastered re-release in the US, which I think I read on Reddit is actually back to the original version, dropping the later tagged on scenes within the spaceship, which I didn't really care for.   Some things are best left unseen.)

I really liked it from first viewing, which was with high school friends, and it was probably the first Spielberg movie that I saw at the cinema.  (I didn't see Jaws for quite a long time later, and I still tend to think it is a relatively minor work in the Spielberg catalogue - it's more like a preamble showing what he would capable of later.) 

But Close Encounters - it was quite a joy because I had read serious books about UFOs in my teenage years, including those by J Allen Hynek, the astronomer who was always the most credible writer on the topic and who appears briefly in the film.   It was therefore clear to me that Spielberg was incorporating elements from some credible, still unsolved, sightings of the last 20 years from the US in particular.   (He is credited with the screenplay.)   I knew by this time that the Bermuda Triangle books were nonsense, so I wasn't as keen to see that element in the film, but hey, it made for some great images.

It was the film that showed me that Spielberg was a smart guy and natural wit too - as with Poltergeist*,  one of the things I have loved about him is his ability to combine humour and shivers in the one shot or sequence.   My favourite example from CE3K:  our hero's first encounter with a UFO while stopped on the road in his van - shot face on through the windscreen so we can see another car come up from behind, stop, and then drive around him.  Next set of lights (looking again like it could be a vehicle) approaches, stops, and then slowly rises in the air, unnoticed by Roy until he is blasted in bright light from above.   Just a brilliant idea, so well executed.   I don't really know of any other director who has done that type of nervous laugh scare so well.

Spielberg himself has claimed in much later interviews that, with his large extended family of many kids, he couldn't write a movie like that now, with a father effectively abandoning his children.  But the fact it happens is key to the film having a semi-religious feel about it - suggesting as it does that there are matters of greater transcendent importance than family ties.  And besides, we don't really know if he is going to be whisked away for 30 years, or just a week.

So, a great film that I would be happy to see again in its original format.    Long live Spielberg.

*(OK, he is just the writer on that one, and the director Tobe Hooper died just last week, but Spielberg was definitely on the set a lot too)

Update:  Homer mentions Duel in the comments, which I am pretty sure I saw on TV before I saw Close Encounters.  I didn't see it on the cinema release it got overseas.  I did enjoy it a lot, but for whatever reason, I don't think I have ever seen it a second time.   So Close Encounters was the first Spielberg at the cinema.

The move made

I've finally made the move to Netflix, and am catching up on some shows that I know had been a success in the US.  (And no, I am not really inclined to even try Game of Thrones.)

Some observations so far:

Stranger Things:   Only watched the first two episodes, and have to say I feel a bit uncertain as to how much I should like it.   I'm very fond of many 1980's films, and have commented before about how there was a certain aesthetic about them that I miss.   So on the one hand, I am enjoying this deliberate attempt at a sort of rehash of the Spielberg/Carpenter look and themes;  but I am finding myself a bit too distracted at being reminded of specific scenes from specific films.   I suspect that will stop as the show goes on.  Those twins who are making it must have watched Spielberg even more often that I have...

Mr Robot:   saw the first episode last night.  Pretty intriguing; good to see Christian Slater on screen again.   That lead actor - I hope the ease with which he shows what might be called "resting mad face" doesn't reflect his natural facial expressions in real life.  [Update:  I forgot, that's not on Netflix - it's just that I paid for a season pass on Google Play last night - all of $13.  DVD manufacturing is going to be in serious decline, I suspect.]

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:  pretty amusing comedy, with a likeable star.  And Carol Kane, too - haven't seen her for years. 

Netflix, at its current cost, and range of shows, is remarkably good value.  

Here it is

I had been wondering when a Martin Scorsese appreciation of Jerry Lewis was going to appear, and here it is.    

As it happens, I have never watched King of Comedy, although I had a friend who saw it at the time and said it was very good.  I should try it now, on Google Play, perhaps.

Time for a "most creative alternative use" competition for bag squeezing machine

I deemed the silly Juicero story blogworthy back in April, and am not surprised to see it fail.   Creative owners now unable to get their bags of pre-diced fruit will have to see what other things in the house it can usefully squeeze.

Communist and gay

I made brief mention in an earlier post about Right wing panic attacks that gay marriage is a Marxist/socialist/feminist plot to turn all of our youth into limp-wristed/butch (as the case may be) homosexuals/gender benders. 

Now, it has to be said, it's not as if there aren't Marxist progressive feminists types out there who do have an avowed, um, queer affirming society agenda?   Look at Roz Ward, as the obvious recent example.

But it's also true that actual communist countries didn't show any particular sign of sympathetic tolerance of homosexuality. And their "we're all in this together" feminism of encouraging women into the workplace hardly changed any cultural ideas about gays.

I just Googled the topic and found this letter which is pretty interesting.  Harry Whyte, a serious British gay young Communist wrote at length to Stalin in 1934 trying to get him to reconsider the criminalisation of sodomy.  What I find surprising about the letter is how current the arguments feel -  arguing that panic about the corrosive effects of allowing a small percent of homosexual live their life don't really make sense, and that it is an innate sexuality that can't be cured, etc. 

It counts, I suppose, as a more or less well reasoned argument that Marxism, as properly envisaged, has nothing to fear from legal homosexuality.   (He does gild the lily by seeming to claim that bourgeois capitalism encourages opportunistic homosexuality - but hey, he was trying to convince Stalin.)  Anyway, it's quite a different argument from later feminists that Marxism and justice require the breakdown of gender and sexuality roles.  That's where it all gets silly, and it's no explanation for how quickly many countries have learnt to tolerate homosexuality.

Trans chumps

I have to say, I agree with this NYT column complaining about the nauseas way progressives (and Vogue magazine!) are glamorising transexual Manning.

Origami buildings

I find something very appealing about this idea:

Not so CRISP

Ground breaking genetic and biological research these days seems incredibly ripe for claims that have to be soon retracted.  Looks like the successful use of CRISPR technology on human embryos may be one of these:

Doubts have surfaced about a landmark paper claiming that human embryos were cleared of a deadly mutation using genome editing. In an article¹ posted to the bioRxiv preprint server on 28 August, a team of prominent stem-cell scientists and geneticists question whether the mutation was actually fixed.

More words of wisdom from Catallaxy [SARCASM]

Same sex marriage is starting to frazzle their composure (hahahahahaha - as if they ever had any) at Catallaxy, and some fairly remarkable statements are appearing in threads lately:

At some point there is going to be a backlash, and we are going to go back to jailing sodomites if not throwing them off tall buildings. I should find that utterly disgusting, but perhaps not quite as disgusting as that article.

I suspect that almost all men and a lot of women find homosexuals disgusting. Maybe even homosexuals feel the same. It is something that people can be conditioned into denying, human beings are good at deceiving themselves. We should probably conceal it in their company out of kindness, and we *should* treat them kindly. But pretending that it isn’t a horrible mental disease may be going too far for our own mental health.

Uhuh.

And poor old dover beach: 

The Yes campaign are terrified that the soft center of Australian politics that has been swayed largely by a decade of inane rhetoric, I.e.. Love is love, marriage equality, is going to realise that a Yes vote would put anal sex on the same normative plane as sexual intercourse. Further, that erasing the category of sex from marriage will further the claim that sex is just gender. And this and more would find its way not only in sex education programs but throughout the curriculum. That is why a fire brigade of Yes advocates was sent out the day after the No ad. Panic stations.

Oddly, I didn't imagine that lesbian couples (a bigger percentage of which, one suspects, may be more likely to be keen  on marrying than male couples) were all that interested in the sexual activity that dover seems to think same sex marriage is all about.  And don't a reasonable number of gay men avoid it as a matter of preference too?   In any event, this article from last year should definitely kept out of the reach of Catallaxy threadsters - they'll be talking about it for hours on end.

Update:  by coincidence, I see that Philosophy Now has a free article on line entitled "The Further History of Sexuality:  from Michael Foucault to Miley Cyrus" (!).   Actually,  it's not bad, and parts would actually be embraced by those at Catallaxy who insist that the normalisation of gay sexual relationships is all part of a Marxist socialist plot.*   It ends on this note:

As we have seen, Foucault’s analysis of the shifting significance of homosexuality in Western culture over the last two centuries identifies two stages, corresponding to the production by power of its own opposition:
(i) Homosexuals identified as a ‘deviant’ group, the target of medical and legal intervention.
(ii) Homosexuals accepting this identity, as gay people, and campaigning for equality and integration into general society.
This second stage can be said to have culminated in the recent acceptance, in many countries, of gay marriage. But the ending of this conflict inevitably generates a completely new situation, in which:
(iii) The division homosexual/normal having been overcome, the category of ‘homosexual’ itself loses its rigid borders and begins to dissolve into contemporary ‘pansexuality’.

 *  They don't seem to notice that decades of quasi Marxist attitudes towards women doing their bit in the factories and fields to build the socialist paradise  in Russian and China has actually led to the least gay friendly nations on Earth.  Some Marxist feminists may well think this way - it is not a realistic explanation of why many Western nations have accepted gay relationships.

Because I am a cool dude...

...(well, that's what I like to tell my teenagers) and just to show that Taylor Swift is not the only pop music I sometimes notice, I predicted more than a month ago that Imagine Dragons Thunder would be a hit (after I heard some guy on ABC radio make the same prediction), and I think it is.   This band actually has had quite a few good songs, and I don't know that they are objectionable in any sense.

Anyway, here's the video:

The issue of AGW and intensification of rainfall explained

Chris Colose has chosen to explain via a series of tweets starting here that increased warming under AGW was always predicted to led to increased intensification of rainfall.  

Well worth reading.  

My crypto currency skepticism maintained

From an article in SMH:

The surge in bitcoin's value, which started all of this, comes despite the fact that bitcoin's underlying utility remains debatable. While it has been used as a form of payment in some investment deals, relatively few merchants who sell things to consumers in the real world accept it.

There is little doubt blockchain – which is being used by the big banks, the ASX and others to speed up and reduce friction in transactions – is a big innovation. But no one has been able to explain what any crypto-currency using it actually achieves. If you aren't engaged in secret cross-border transactions, normal money still seems to work.

As people who are better versed in this world than me have said, bitcoin still looks like a solution in need of a problem. And if the biggest crypto-currency of them all still has this question hanging over it, then what does it say for the rest of them?

Thinking too much about herself

Once again, I will inappropriately ponder the question of Taylor Swift.  (Hey, I have a teen daughter, it gives me something to talk to her about.)

The video for the (still pretty awful) new single does indeed show that there is some deliberate self deprecation going on - especially at the end where a whole row of Taylors in her various former images appear and argue with themselves.   They spent quite a bit of money making the clip, by the looks, but there are far too few shots of her at her most attractive - nicely made up and taking a bath in a tub of diamonds.

Anyway, it probably indicates she's not genuinely that obsessed with her past feuds, but it still seems that she spends too much thinking about her image and reputation in any event.   Can't she just decide what look and image she currently likes, and sing pleasant pop songs without so much self referential stuff?

Update:  at the risk of annoying Homer no end, here's Slate's kinda witty take on the video:

Swift’s tour de force of deflective petulance is amazing: It’s essentially a catalogue of every public feud she’s had that, without naming them, manages to extend, mock, and, most important, commodify them. (Side note: Do you know anyone in real life who has “feuds” who isn’t utterly insufferable?) “Look What You Made Me Do”—it’s right there in the title—is an anthem that turns the abrogation of personal responsibility into a posturing statement of empowerment. With its tense “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? … ’Cause she’s dead!” it embraces the possibility of calling “Do over!” as a form of self-realization, and imagines a world in which a clean slate means never having to say you’re sorry because every conceivable way you lash out must be someone else’s fault. Is Taylor Swift to blame for anything? How can any of us know? There was violence on many sides, many sides.

Odd, poverty driven, disease of the day

I had missed an earlier NPR story about this disease podoconiosis - caused by walking barefoot for years in volcanic soils, such as in parts of Africa - but they have an update to it here.

Never heard of it before, and it looks like it has horrible effects - all for the want of footwear.  

I know I'm not going to catch it if I am a tourist, but the African continent seems to suffer from so many diseases in the water, or insect carried, or even from just walking barefoot, it kind of puts me off ever wanting to go there.  

Just not funny

Just as being under 35 and having at least several gay friends seems a crucial determinant of giving lavish praise to gay written ABC comedy like Please Like Me and The Family Law, each of which I gave an honest try but for which I did not care, I think it takes being in a certain demographic to find the comedy of the two female comedians behind The Katering Show and last night's Get Kracki!n  hilariously funny. 

I've complained about them before - see my comments about The Katering Show, which, after last night's experience with their second project, I think were too generous.

Get Kracki!n takes the key problem of the earlier show and makes it much, much worse.    It is a parody/satire that (to use that mocked explanation from a Woody Allan movie) doesn't just bend the stick, but breaks it, repeatedly, in the way the audience of a University review might find funny, but not the rest of us.

Some women and men of a certain age or background find the completely unrealistic outbreak of "honesty", involving lots of swearing and mock live to air chaos, hilarious.  They probably all love Tim Minchin too.   I beg to differ.

Happily, I see that, despite The Guardian reviewer giving it a 4 star review, most of the comments following indicate that it didn't go over well even with your Lefty biased average Guardian reader, for whom one would think the "women being crude" aspect would not be a concern.

It's basically poorly written comedy by a couple of women who, I suppose I should say, might be good at comedy acting if they weren't doing their own material.