Dream jumble noted (and the contents discussed)

Yesterday we drove to Mulgowie for the farmers market where we saw live chickens for sale and one get lose when the seller was trying to pack up;  I watched some of the Commonwealth Games from the Gold Coast, and then (for the first time) Black Hawk Down on Netflix with my son, who at one point said "why do some of the helmets they wear look like bicycle helmets?".

So, naturally (I presume), this morning I woke from a dream which initially featured terrorists being chased by an army on the Sunshine Coast, one of them being Saddam Hussein who had been in hiding, and it segued into a story where a retired, traumatised Army sergeant started working in a studio with other ex army types who were paid to wear bicycle helmets with a single antenna type thing on top (like the Reddit logo) and smile as a group into a camera which would beam their happy faces into chicken farms, it having been worked out that to chickens in captivity, they looked like happy chickens and this had a calming effect on them.

That last bit is nearly as good as the dream I had as a young man in which Michael Parkinson was interviewing a grasshopper in the interviewee chair, and I realised in the dream that this was very odd.

Anyhoo, back to the day's events in more detail:

*  there's someone selling meat again at Mulgowie, which makes the trip all the more worthwhile.  Free range pork from a farm in the area, and we had some particularly nice Italian sausages made from (previously) happy pigs at lunch.

*  the Commonwealth Games - looks to me on TV like they are a success.  True, the opening ceremony was too long, but it's funny how it's pretty much the "daggy games", with sports such as lawn bowling meaning you have quite old competitors in the mix, as well as some very young ones.  (An 11 year old table tennis player, I believe!)   It does make it feel like a more inclusive event, though:  way less intimidating than the Olympics.   The television images of the Gold Coast have looked good (at least when the sun is out), the stadiums have looked pretty full even for the more esoteric events (men's hockey - who normally goes to watch that?), and the fact that world records are being broken at quite a pace makes it seem a relevant sporting event.  So, yeah, I think it will be counted as a success despite the cynicism about why they exist at all.

*  Black Hawk Down:   terrific realism (with only a couple of exceptions), and I was curious as to where it was filmed (a couple of Moroccan cities, as it turns out  - which certainly serves as a disincentive to ever visit them - maybe it's the "magic" of Hollywood, but the urban areas on screen did look awful.)   Clearly, the script pleased the US military enough to have their full co-operation, but watching it now with the benefit of post Iraq invasion hindsight, it's hard to avoid some cynicism towards the "of course we always comply with the laws of war" hard sell that is pretty continuous throughout the film.  (It came out in 2001, a couple of years ahead of the Iraq misadventure.)   I would also say that the film doesn't reach the emotional impact that it seems to be striving for in some parts, but it was well worth watching.

Hard to disagree

Let's all again pause and be gobsmacked about what Trump gets away with claiming, without so much as a shrug of the shoulders from the gormless, "but he's our lying, bullshitting President", Right.

Update:  at the same event, I think:

President Trump said on Thursday, when talking about immigration at a West Virginia event, that women are being "raped at levels that nobody's ever seen before." Trump was in West Virginia for a tax reform discussion. 

And elsewhere at Axios:

President Trump tonight says he's directed the U.S. Trade Representative to consider an additional $100 billion in tariffs on China, and that the administration may take other actions to "protect our farmers and agricultural interests." The White House says it's announcing these new measures "in light of China's unfair retaliation" to an earlier $50 billion in proposed tariffs.

Why it matters via Jonathan Swan: This is exactly what the free traders who formerly worked in the White House feared, Trump in a macho pissing match against Chinese President Xi. Trump has a blunt understanding of leverage and believes the worst thing he can show is weakness. He also believes, as he tweeted, that the U.S. already is so far down on the scorecard with China that he’s got nothing to lose.

By the way, I thought Krugman's column on the China trade war was pretty good and balanced.

Update 2:  the Wisdom of the Elder (that's sarcasm, by the way) from Catallaxy:

We shall see....

Ahahahhahahahaha

Just having a quick scan of Catallaxy to get my blood pressure up, and noted this assessment of marginal media culture warrior Mark Steyn from even more marginal culture warrior CL:

Steyn was just wrapping everything up into an all-you-can-eat meal deal of dazzling polemic. It didn’t work on this occasion. He does this sometimes; he’s still the Chesterton of our time and, people, appreciate him because when he’s gone (cent’anni!) a black hole will be left.

Just ludicrous.

Everybody needs a hobby [Pt 4 in a long running series]

Such as...setting up office in Melbourne as a gynaecologist and fertility expert when you didn't even graduate from university at all, let alone qualify as an actual doctor.   This is something that's apparently not that hard to do:

He saw a further 23 people who were desperate to become parents and who, collectively, over hundreds of hours put their hopes in his hands, at his rooms in Brighton and St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

But it was all a sham. The women weren't pregnant.

In truth Dr Raff wasn't a gynaecologist, he wasn't even a doctor. He was nothing but a charlatan. He had studied at university but never gained any tertiary qualifications....

On top of all this, the aspiring parents paid Raffaele Di Paolo a combined $385,000 over a decade-long con during which he claimed he was a gynaecologist, obstetrician and an expert in fertility matters, with qualifications from Melbourne and Italy.

Di Paolo, 61, is now in jail waiting sentence after being found guilty of fraud, indecent assault and sexual penetration charges following a recent County Court trial, during which he denied the allegations.

How did he do it?  Simples:

Prosecutor Ray Gibson told the jury Di Paolo registered a company named Artemedica and purported to be a properly registered and qualified doctor and gynaecologist, and went as far as hiring a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist to assist him two days a week.  His patients came to him after having unsuccessful fertility treatment elsewhere, although in some cases women were referred to him by chiropractors or osteopaths. One couple was referred to him by a doctor at the Epworth Hospital.

 This is a very strange story.

Dr Phone

Your smartphone may well do some things better than a human doctor:

A smartphone application using the phone's camera function performed better than traditional physical examination to assess blood flow in a wrist artery for patients undergoing coronary angiography, according to a randomized trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

These findings highlight the potential of smartphone applications to help physicians make decisions at the bedside. "Because of the widespread availability of smartphones, they are being used increasingly as point-of-care diagnostics in clinical settings with minimal or no cost," says Dr. Benjamin Hibbert of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Ottawa, Ontario. "For example, built-in cameras with dedicated software or photodiode sensors using infrared light-emitting diodes have the potential to render smartphones into functional plethysmographs [instruments that measure changes in blood flow]."

The researchers compared the use of a heart-rate monitoring application (the Instant Heart Rate application version 4.5.0 on an iPhone 4S) with the modified Allen test, which measures blood flow in the radial and ulnar arteries of the wrist, one of which is used to access the heart for coronary angiography. A total of 438 participants were split into two groups; one group was assessed using the app and the other was assessed using a gold-standard traditional physical examination (known as the Allen test). The smartphone app had a diagnostic accuracy of 94% compared with 84% using the traditional method.

Yet more warnings about e-cigarettes

An assistant professor from Harvard who has been involved in e-cigarette research notes how they have known for years that they can produce formaldehyde:

Nicotine isn’t the only thing e-cigs deliver; they also deliver formaldehyde, a carcinogen. It seems equally fair to call them Electronic Formaldehyde Delivery Systems.

Do manufacturers intentionally put formaldehyde in e-cigs? No, they don’t. But there’s some fundamental chemistry happening that can generate formaldehyde. E-cigs often use propylene glycol or glycerol to help transport nicotine and flavors and to create the big vapor cloud. We’ve known for a long time that when we heat these so-called carrier fluids they can transform into formaldehyde.

Sure enough, when we measure what’s coming out of an e-cigarette, we have found formaldehyde. Sometimes, a lot of it. A letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine caught widespread attention in 2015 when its authors reported that they had found emissions of formaldehyde from e-cigs. There was some initial push back from skeptics who claimed that the e-cig vaping conditions in the research used too high of a voltage (an actual user, they argued, would be deterred from puffing hard enough to generate the excessive formaldehyde because it would taste bad). Of note, one author of that critique receives funding from a group that has accepted money from tobacco companies, and another received money from an e-cig company.

It seems the hired guns were a bit quick to draw, so to speak. Study after study since then has confirmed that e-cigs can deliver formaldehyde to the user. My colleagues and I found, in a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, that under typical conditions the formaldehyde coming out of an e-cig can even exceed what is known as ceiling limits — a level of formaldehyde in the air that is not allowed to be exceeded in the workplace, even for one second.

 

The article goes on to explain that there are other flavouring chemicals in some e-cig liquid which produce different, lung dangerous, compounds.   He does concede that nonetheless, they may be "safer" than cigarettes, but that does not mean "safe":

To be sure, e-cigs may be a useful tool for smoking cessation for those who are addicted to traditional cigarettes. E-cigs are safer than cigarettes, no question. But “safer” does not mean “safe.” And all e-cig users need to be informed about the risks of inhaling these chemicals.

 And as for the concern that they are acting as a gateway to real smoking - yes of course there is good concern they work that way in the US, at least:

Consider this: 22 percent of eighth-grade smokers used e-cigs first. That’s one in five — an astounding number of kids. The addictive nicotine in e-cigs is contributing to the next generation of traditional cigarette users. Will we then recommend that they use e-cigs to help them quit? This is the opposite of a virtuous cycle.

Although many states now restrict e-cig sales for those under 18, it’s clear that kids are finding ways to access e-cigs. And in my opinion, e-cigs are being marketed toward this age group. Who else is interested in puffing on an “Alien Blood”-flavored e-cig?

The groups opposing the legalisation of nicotine producing e-cigarettes in Australia have some pretty good arguments going for them.

Meanwhile, libertarians can continue sucking away unhealthfully instead of just quitting via patches or whatever other aids have long been adequate.    Bit of the old "evolution in action", perhaps?    

That's a lot of black holes

NPR reports:

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy appears to have a lot of company, according to a new study that suggests the monster is surrounded by about 10,000 other black holes.

The centre of galaxies sounds like a very dangerous place to be...

The F word

From a Vox article which notes some interesting facts from the book "Does it Fart?":

The entry on sloths explains that while they eat a lot of plants, they avoid releasing gas through the quirk of their slow digestion. “They only poo about every three weeks,” says Rabaiotti.

If gases accumulated in sloths’ intestines over that long a time, they might get sick — and even burst. So would-be sloth farts are simply reabsorbed through the intestines into the bloodstream. The gases are then respired out of the lungs: literal fart breath.

There are some cases where researchers just don’t know if animals fart or not. Like with salamanders and other amphibians, which “may not possess strong-enough sphincter muscles to create the necessary pressure for a definitive flatus,” the authors write. Gases may ooze out of their bums continually. Is that a fart? Some questions in science are best left to philosophy.

Down the rabbit hole they go

I see the conspiracy obsessed (no) brains trust at Catallaxy is now convinced that Russia has been set up by anti-Trump Western intelligence in the recent nerve agent poisonings:

Putin tells CL who to suspect, and he dutifully agrees.  And he counts BA Santamaria as a hero.  Heh.

Time for more Spielberg love

Stop your whining:  how can you possibly know too much about this nicest of directors?   From an article in The Sun, I learn these things:

*  he could live with Indiana Jones being a woman (cue alt.right horror);

*  he's "long" insisted that his actors and actresses get paid the same;

*  he has deliberately stayed off social media

*  he spent half a day with the Queen when she invited him to screen War Horse (a pretty underrated film, in my opinion) at Windsor Castle.

I warned my daughter recently that when he dies, I'll be wearing black for the rest of my life in the style of Queen Victoria.  Perhaps without the bustle in the dress, but something similar.

Krugman on Trumpland

Krugman's column on the problems in "Trumpland" contains one typo that hasn't been fixed yet, I think (either that or I am reading the sentence wrong), but he notes the big picture regarding income disparity between the US poorer regional areas and the urban rich:

Mississippi isn’t an isolated case. As a new paper by Austin, Glaeser and Summers documents, regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption.

An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors — specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.

So what is the matter with Trumpland?

For the most part I’m in agreement with Berkeley’s Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” is must reading for anyone trying to understand the state of America. Moretti argues that structural changes in the economy have favored industries that employ highly educated workers — and that these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: Their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage.

While these structural factors are surely the main story, however, I think we have to acknowledge the role of self-destructive politics.

That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions — but which they won’t accept. Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill — and would create jobs in the process — are also among America’s poorest.

Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.

Speaking of education cuts, I have been very surprised to read how poorly some US States do pay their teachers:

In fact, the amount teachers make can vary greatly by state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest 10 percent of high school teachers earn less than $38,180 and the highest 10 percent earn more than $92,920. 

And look where the lowest paid teachers are:

1. Oklahoma
Annual mean wage: $42,460
2. Mississippi
Annual mean wage: $43,950
3. South Dakota
Annual mean wage: $44,210
4. North Carolina
Annual mean wage: $45,220
5. West Virginia
Annual mean wage: $45,240

Yes, it all aligns with the argument that the American Right has become obsessed with policy prescriptions that are shooting themselves in the foot.   

Didn't realise I was transgender

Well, according to the way Ottoman Empire used to think about gender, apparently. That's the oddest and most novel thing I learnt from this curiously entitled Aeon article:  What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism.

There's a lot that's not new in there - the Foucault-ian bit about older societies not thinking of homosexuality in the same way we do now, for example.  But this paragraph, explaining what the author concludes after (in his words) "combing through five centuries of Ottoman literary works searching for sexual terminology"* was something new to me:

In particular, it indicates that one can speak of three genders and two sexualities. First, rather than a male/female dichotomy, sources clearly view men, women and boys as three distinct genders. Indeed, boys are not deemed ‘feminine’, nor are they mere substitutes for women; while they do share certain characteristics with them, such as the absence of facial hair, boys are clearly considered a separate gender. Furthermore, since they grow up to be men, gender is fluid and, in a sense, every adult man is ‘transgender’, having once been a boy.   

I don't know: this academic uses "heteronormativity" a bit too much for me to be sure I trust him, and his bio does put one category of interests a bit uncomfortably close to another:

His current research interests are cultural and intellectual history, the arts of the book, gender and sexuality, and human-animal relations, all in the context of Islam and particularly Turkey. 

But if he's right, it seems an odd way for the old Turks to have categorised folk.

* sounds like something a teenager would do if regular porn was not available

A complicated dream

Is there a word for the type of dream from which you half wake, and have trouble stopping as you drift back into sleep again even though you would like it to stop?

Sometimes, though, the effect is the opposite - a dream from which you half wake, recognize as telling a particularly interesting story, and wish you could get going again.

This morning I had such a dream.  It was some vaguely science fiction-y/spy story, with something about aliens and a doomsday machine being built by scientists, who were being shut down for working on such a dangerous project, but someone recognized the need to get it going again because it may be needed to fight off aliens.   There were underground facilities, people being shot unexpectedly, a sense the story had finished happily, only for another key character to be shot and the realisation it hadn't ended after all.   I'm not sure that I was a participating character - it was more like watching a TV show or long movie.

I presume this arose from having watched the end of season 2 of Mr Robot last night - not that I have enjoyed the show as much as the dream.   But yeah, there is a sense of a long, never ending story from watching that show.

Shadow protector

From Japan Today:

Because most Japanese people don’t really like the idea of having a roommate, a lot of these young people end up living alone, including young women. But while Tokyo is much safer than large cities in many other countries, crimes do happen, and criminals often consider young women who live alone to be easy targets.

To help address this problem, and also to put the minds of female tenants at ease, apartment management company Leo Palace 21 has developed what it calls the Man on the Curtain system, which is shown starting at the 1:15 mark in the video below.

Using a projector controlled by/attached to a smartphone, Man on the Curtain throws a silhouette of a man onto your curtains, so that when people outside look at your windows, there will appear to be a guy inside, thus masking that you live alone.

If you’re wondering how that’s better than just putting a cardboard cutout by your window, Man on the Curtain is full-motion, projecting videos of actual actors (in silhouette) for an extremely lifelike look. Currently, the system has 12 different options, including such intimidating routines as a boxer throwing practice punches, a marital artist going through a karate kata, a bodybuilder working out with dumbbells, and a sports fan swinging a baseball bat around.

Since it’d be easy to deduce that a short loop is a fake, each video is roughly 30 minutes long, with a variety of motions. Leo Palace 21’s introductory video doesn’t get into the specifics of how the system is operated, it seems like it’d be easy to program it to cycle from one routine to the next, which would give you about six hours of silhouettes before any footage needs to be repeated.

 Given Japan's national problem with young men failing to put much effort into finding a girlfriend, it might have been more realistic to throw in a sequence with a guy doing..well, you can guess.

Dumb as...

Ha.   Steve Kates posted the viral video of the Sinclair Broadcast Group stations reading out the statement about "fake news" and how they don't do it, all with no apparent insight that it's a conservative, Trump supporting company that has made its news hosts look like robots.

There are scores of comments following which are oblivious to the true point of the video as well.   Then someone says "maybe Kates is criticising all media?", which is extremely unlikely, since Kates shows no sign of getting his American political news from anything other the most biased, one eyed, wingnut sites.   He was even in early on being open minded on the "Q conspiracy."

Even after a couple of commenters have made the point that the video is actually being promoted by the Left to criticise the conservative Sinclair group, you get the information challenged, angry, angry entertainer  saying this:

Man, they are dumb...

A good bit of Spielberg

I often forget to watch The Feed on SBS2, but it's lucky I saw it last night, because it featured a very nice interview between the always likeable host Marc Fennell and Spielberg, as well as the two leads from Ready Player One.  (Not that they have much to say, which is fine by me.)

Ready Player done (and yay for 1941)

Of course you knew I would be off to see Ready Player One this weekend.

I think it shows again that Metacritic is a more reliable guide than Rottentomatoes:  unfortunately, it's more of a 64 than an 76. (Actually, that RT score has come down from 80-something a day or two ago.)

On the upside:  even though hyperkinetic in many parts, Spielberg hyperkineticism is better than that by other directors.  There is still directorial flair there, and I have to say that it puts motion capture to good use to create an immersive feeling to the virtual world.

On the downside:  it's still motion capture in a virtual world.  This does drain the story of real risk and consequences.    I mean, as has already been said elsewhere, it is like watching while someone else plays a game at home:  it may be tense and involving for the player, but after a while, the over-the-shoulder viewer gets less interested because they don't have anything at stake, and they can see that the player doesn't really either, apart from testing their own skills. 

Hence, I quite liked a lot of the inventiveness of the scenario for the first half, but by the last third, I felt no real tension and the imagery became less interesting.   I think the screenplay is a large part of the problem:   despite the bad guys being prepared to kill, they really don't seem to put much effort into it.  There are hints of how it could have been more risky for players - at one point the hero mentions that there is a weapon that can be used in virtual reality that will kill not over the avatar, but the player as well.  (How is not explained, and it doesn't get referenced again.)   I think this is the major issue.

That said, my son liked it more than I did, and it has the benefit of being one of those flawed movies which packs enough content that it becomes interesting to discuss the ways in which it is flawed.   (I'll throw another one in - the acting is pretty curious and questionable as well.)    I think the movie will do well enough at the box office, but won't be a runaway hit.   But then again, I thought the same of Black Panther, so my judgement of young audience reactions is not always correct.

In another Spielbergian aspect to this Easter weekend, I had noticed that his widely panned 1979 film 1941 was about to be taken off Netflix, so I re-watched again for the first time in many years.

I still think it's a very amusing and pretty thrilling movie, and what a contrast to RP1 in that it shows all the benefits of pre-CGI movie making: scores of stunt people involved in doing risky looking things, often not as a joke itself, but just to provide the atmosphere of chaos.   I remember critics disliked it because there seemed to be so much money put into it with (what they thought was) little pay off.  But for some people the excess itself is part of what's funny.  If you're going to make an obvious, corny joke, doing it with a dangerous and real explosion in the background makes it seem funny that they bothered doing it at all.  A very "meta" way to find humour, I suppose, but it works for me.

It still looks terrific, and yet the special effects were nearly all physical - the miniature Hollywood Boulevard and amusement park were enormous, apparently, and because the action was at night, the fakery was much better hidden than would otherwise have been possible.  

And besides, the soundtrack by John Williams is really him at his peak - the march theme I still find stirring, and the dance hall tune to which the great indoor dance/fight happens keeps replaying in my head.       

So, yeah, I still had a pretty good Spielbergian weekend, but not quite in the way he intended...

Trumpian politics

Vox's Matthew Yglesias went away for a week:

I spent last week in Madison as “writer-in-residence” at the University of Wisconsin. While it was hardly an off-the-grid experience, it did take me out of the daily news cycle for the first time in a while. Diving back in kind of reminds me of Charlton Heston waking from his space travel to discover that he’s on a planet run by orangutans. Except instead of orangutans*, we have the Republican Party.

And he then catches up on last week's controversies in the article entitled "Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can't wake up".   Sounds accurate.

I liked these paragraphs in particular:

To be fair to Trump and to the surreal nightmare he’s made American politics, the other thing that happens if you step away from the news cycle is you see that things are basically fine. During the election, I saw two possible scenarios for a Trump administration. Down one road lay cataclysm, whereas down another road Trump would pleasantly surprise us with his job performance. 

Reality has confounded both expectations, with Trump displaying no hidden depths whatsoever, even as life continues to be basically fine for most people. America has its share of problems to be sure: sky-high child poverty rate, unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, infrastructure woes, childcare woes, prescription drug affordability woes, you name it. 

But these are basically longstanding issues that our political system writ large has failed to address. They don’t hold a particularly close relationship to the fact that the president is a racist buffoon who is possibly being blackmailed by the FSB over some sex tapes.

The article also contains one of the more amusing corrections I have ever read:

Correction: An earlier version of this article implied that chimpanzees ran the government depicted in 1968’s Planet of the Apes and its sequels when in fact political authority was vested in orangutans and chimpanzees served as a kind of scientist and intellectual caste.

Trump fan confirms she's still as mad as a cut snake

So, this is the quality of the Hollywood star that Trump has chosen to congratulate because she supports him:

On Friday night, Roseanne Barr tweeted a bizarre message that no one seemed to understand.

“President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world. Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere,” she wrote, adding he gets the benefit of the doubt from her.

As the article goes on to explain, it's all part of the utterly ridiculous Q conspiracy arising from that obvious source of high quality intel - 4chan.  

A detailed explanation of the history of the absurd conspiracy theory appears in New York Magazine.  It contains this amusing line about 4chan:

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office.

I remain puzzled as to why America decided to give this nutty woman her show again.   Don't get me wrong - I used to like it a lot in its first few seasons, but I thought it was pretty well known that her head got too big for her writers, and the show went down storyline paths that made it unwatchable.   Surely there is every chance that it will happen again.   

Hell on Saturday

Seeing it's Easter Saturday, it's a good time to talk about Hell.

The Catholic Herald reports that there was yet another kerfuffle in Rome this week when an old atheist wrote that in a recent "one on one" with Pope Francis, he (the Pope) expressed a view not compatible with Church teaching:

Eugenio Scalfari, co-founder and first editor of Repubblica, published his latest conversation with Pope Francis in the paper today. After an introduction in which he says “I have the privilege of being his friend”, he relates their conversation on Tuesday at the Santa Marta Palace in the Vatican where Francis has lived since his election.

They begin talking about the Passion and Creation, then Scalfari, well-known as an atheist, reminds the Pope about saying that good souls are admitted to the contemplation of God.

“But the bad souls?” he asks. “Where are they punished?”

“They are not punished, those who repent get God’s forgiveness and go among the ranks of the souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and can not therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls,” Scalfari quotes Pope Francis as saying.

However, Scalfari fails to follow up this statement, moving immediately on to a question about politics.

The Vatican has distanced itself from the report, and this Scalfari does not take care to record words precisely (or at all) during his meetings:

Eugenio Scalfari, 93, has caused controversy before when reporting on his conversations with Pope Francis. In 2014 he said that Francis had claimed that two per cent of all Catholic priests, including bishops and cardinals, were paedophiles. He has admitted after previous conversations with the Pope in 2013 and 2016 that his supposed interviews are entirely based on his memory of the conversations; he doesn’t record them or take notes.

 The article notes this about the annihilationist view:

The theological position that Scalfari ascribes to Francis, the annihilation of the unsaved, became popular in the 19th century with the birth of Christian sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and Christadelphians. Some 20th-century Anglican clerics who have considered the possibility of annihilation include Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple and Evangelical theologian John Stott.

 Don't think I knew before that the JWs and Seventh Day-ers both held that view.  As to what Christadelphians believe - I've never looked into that obscure denomination at all.

Anyway, it's an idea that has considerable appeal for those who think eternal physical punishment is a bit much, especially when it comes to mortal sins of the "not respecting God enough" line.  Sure, no one's going to sweat too much about your average homicidal dictator spending forever in hell, but for not attending Mass?

There are other ways to lessen the modern "that's a bit much" reaction to permanent Hell:  most notably, the CS Lewis promoted line that Hell and Purgatory are one and the same, hence Hell is not permanent for anyone unless they so choose.  (Although even then, he argued that the escape route closed forever once Christ returned and the world - universe, I always presumed - ended.)

I think CS Lewis's view is pretty close to that taken by Dante - certainly, this article on Dante and Purgatory suggests  that he invented the idea that Purgatory was not just a place of purifying punishment, but one in which the participants themselves worked towards moral improvement:

But perhaps the most original aspect of Dante’s version of Purgatory is that the souls in Purgatory are in the process of moral change. They suffer, but not simply in order to repay a debt: they are suffering in order to become good. The consequence of this is that they willingly undergo the suffering, they understand the reasons for it, and they are acquiring the new habits of thought which will enable them to go to Heaven. For Dante, Purgatory is not only a place where you pay the debts you incurred when you sinned: it is in fact the place where you reflect on those sins, and where you change the psychological tendencies which led you to sin. This leads to extraordinary richness in the depiction of character. Whereas, in the Inferno, the sinners met by Dante tended to be fixed in the habits of thought which led them to sin, in the Purgatorio Dante faces the challenge of depicting souls who are in a process of change. 

 

It is also a place of prayer. Throughout Purgatory, hymns and psalms are sung, and prayers are said. This element in Dante’s Purgatory -- radically new in depictions of Purgatory -- is in keeping with his imagining the general tendency of the souls of Purgatory to reflect on their failings.  

Which all puts me in mind of the extremely pleasing The Good Place.  Although the four souls the subject of that show don't sing hymns and psalms, they are all obviously working (under the guidance of Chidi) on moral self improvement, while coping with (admittedly much milder than Dante's!) forms of punishment.  So, yeah, the show is completely consistent with Dante's take on things.

But even if you don't want to play around with various guesses of how Hell and Purgatory operate, you can try and double guess just how many Catholics are destined to Hell despite their clear (and rather open) sinning against the teachings of the Church.   See this article:  Are most Catholics in America going to Hell?

It demonstrates the ways in which modern thinking about what it means to do something with "full knowledge and deliberate consent" allows for some rubbery interpretations.   This is pretty much exactly how the Church has dealt with annulments of marriage, and I think most middle of the road Catholics see that process as a pretty disingenuous way of allowing divorce and remarriage in circumstances where in centuries past, the Church would have had nothing to do with it.   The problem the Church has made for itself is that it makes some liberalising concessions, but then pretends it's always been entirely consistent.  (Same thing when it comes to allowing the rhythm method for contraception, but put a condom on as an extra precaution and it all becomes sinful.  Yeah, sure, and presumably some are destined for Hell for that deliberate act even with their wife.)    

Mind you, the matter of line drawing in morality is a tricky thing.   If I criticise the Church for the way it sometimes handles it, I should criticise the secular for some of things they manage to talk themselves into as well, such as excuse making for infanticide that Peter Singer used to engage in.

Anyway, I've strayed a bit from the original topic.   The Catholic Herald has a separate article up pointing out that Pope Francis has made plenty of statements - including recent ones - confirming his belief in Hell.   And, rather oddly, there have also been reports over the last couple of years that demand for exorcists has risen a lot (at least in Italy) lately, and the Vatican has been happy enough for more to be trained.

So, Hell is still around, but still subject to great uncertainty.  An allowance by the Church that the exact mechanism of how the afterlife works is shrouded in mystery and incapable of definitive teaching (at least beyond the basic matter that some form of Heaven and Hell exists) would be a good concession to realism, but I'm not holding my breath...