Some big damage

One of the best sets of photos I have seen of the damage already caused by Hurricane Irma is here at The Atlantic.   You don't often see cars, trucks and containers so tossed around by hurricanes.   It does look like tornado level damage, but over a huge area.

A tad stupid

Sinclair Davidson thinks that it's "a tad hypocritical" of Bill Clinton to defend DACA when it was under his administration that Elian Gonzalez was forcibly removed from his uncle (who thought he should stay in Florida) so that he could be given to his father (who thought he should return with him to Cuba?)

What was, essentially, a custody dispute is not by any stretch of the imagination in the same category as what DACA is about.

To correct my post title:  the comparison is not just "a tad stupid", it's completely stupid.  

Positive things I have heard recently

*  was told by someone who saw it himself that, yesterday morning, a dugong was happily feeding just off the rock wall at Manly (Brisbane) yacht harbour.   Some other guy there, apparently an old timer who has lived and fished in the area for many years, said he has never seen one, or at least, one so close to shore.   [I knew that there were dugong in the southern part of Moreton Bay - in fact, this website from 2009 says there are about 1,000.  But they are are not a common sight so close to shore, obviously.  It augurs well for a healthy local sea environment, I presume, so it pleases me.] 

*  was speaking recently to a surgeon in the Queensland public health system.  Asked how our public system here was going - pretty well, he said.  In fact, he said if people need a major operation, he thinks the equipment and staffing of Queensland public hospitals is such that he considers it is a better choice than going private.  

These were both nice things to hear.

I like airports...

Slate has several articles up about American airports and how bad most of them have become.   One article is entitled:  How the airport came to embody our national psychosis. 

While I appreciate that airports servicing New York, for example, may have their problems due simply to the huge numbers they need to provide for in sometimes hemmed in locations, I think Australian airports are doing pretty well, actually.

I like airports.  I like hospitals (well, new ones) too.   I guess I like all places where people are busy achieving remarkable things in buildings that look clean and modern.

I was in Sydney domestic for the first time in many years recently.   It was a lot better than I remembered.  Pretty great food selection now.  A very large number of recharging facilities on the long tables in the food court.   Security did not take long, even on a Sunday evening, with lots of people travelling home.

As with health care, where we manage to get better results with less money, maybe we just do some things better than the Americans...

 

Ethics question of the day

Is it wrong to wish that Hurricane Irma destroy Trump's cheesy looking Mar-a-Lago resort?

(I hope Disneyworld is OK; and Cape Canaveral too.  The rest of Florida - well, 49.02% of it - deserves at least a mild smiting because of their last electoral college vote.)

The Right in schism

Want to read a Republican hardliner's view on DACA?  Try Michelle Makin, who used to be bigger in the world of wingnutty online commentary than she is now.  Her stone hearted nonsense entitled There is no such thing as a 'deserving DREAMer'  encourages her base to blame immigration for everything from undereducated white guys not being to find a job to crime and murder.   The odd thing is that Trump himself used the same demeaning arguments during his rallies against illegal immigrants generally, yet it seems that even he and 66% of his supporters think the kids of illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay - in other words, that DREAMers do deserve something.

It's an incredible, messed up Party, that's for sure. 

Just a reminder

The heading for an article in 2010:

Atlantic Hurricanes to Become Less Frequent But More Intense

NOAA-Led Study Looks at the Impact of a Warming Ocean  

Postal probably gone?

My feeling is that the High Court should find that the government can't spend the money on the same sex marriage postal survey/plebiscite/Turnbull escape strategy.   George Williams thinks so, and that's good enough for me.

Which would lead me to go back to my previous suggestion:   let the government get a quote from Newspoll for doing a really large sample poll on the matter, and say that if there is a clear majority far enough outside of the margin of error, the Government will let it go to a vote in Parliament.

Update:  Well, HC goes its own way, again.   They're getting hard to pick...

Chaos in government

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank notes how government "works" under Trump:

On Tuesday, even as the administration announced that it was ending protection from deportation for the 800,000 “dreamers” — mostly young people who know no country but America — there were signs that Trump had no idea what he was doing. “As late as one hour before the decision was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind,” Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the New York Times reported, citing an anonymous source.

Sure enough, Trump fired off a tweet Tuesday night that revised his position. He called on Congress to “legalize” the dreamers program and vowed to “revisit the issue” if Congress can’t.

Even Trump’s close advisers seem to have little knowledge of, much less control over, what he says and does.

Trump has signaled that he wants to end a free-trade deal with South Korea, even though his national security adviser, his defense secretary and the director of the National Economic Council all object. He and Defense Secretary James Mattis have contradicted each other about whether to talk with North Korea. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attempts to tone down Trump’s antics have reportedly led Trump to escalate his attacks — on Kelly. Trump has publicly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions and repeatedly contradicted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner have let it leak that Trump ignored their advice on Charlottesville and other matters.

The biggest boost to the economy of a Trump presidency is probably going to be to the publishing industry, as there is going to be a never ending supply of "My first hand experience of chaos in the White House" memoirs.

Lucifer as the misunderstood naughty boy with Daddy issues

Jason suggested I watch the first episode of Lucifer, a combined supernatural/police procedural show with a humorous touch that is on Netflix now.

I did last night, and my thoughts are as follows:

It was enjoyable enough for me to watch again, but I have some reservations.

The actor playing Lucifer does it with a tad too much of what might be called "straight camp" if you ask me, but perhaps that's bit unavoidable given the lines he is given.  The emphasis on his enjoyment of sex I found a little bit off putting.   It reminded me of the movie Michael, in which John Travolta played the Archangel Michael as a supernatural character who enjoyed pleasuring women sexually.   I remember reading at the time that the writer defended this as being closer to the Old Testament version of angels, who walked and interacted with humans and weren't the ghost-like pure spirit creatures as Christianity came to think of them.   That may be right, but I think that supernatural beings enjoying sex with humans is still a very odd concept to the modern mind,  where ever it appears:  I think its a large part of what makes Greek mythology strange to us now.

As for the bigger picture, of Lucifer's depiction as more or less "just doing a job" when he was Lord of Hell: yes, it is sort of interesting.   I found a detailed version of this explained in an article from 2006 at Phys.org, of all places -  reviewing a book "Satan: A Biography". 

Henry Ansgar Kelly puts forth the most comprehensive case ever made for sympathy for the devil, arguing that the Bible actually provides a kinder, gentler version of the infamous antagonist than typically thought.

"A strict reading of the Bible shows Satan to be less like Darth Vader and more and more like an overzealous prosecutor," said Kelly, a UCLA professor emeritus of English and the former director of the university's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. "He's not so much the proud and angry figure who turns away from God as [he is] a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover. Satan's basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he's still part of God's administration."

 That fits in extremely well with his depiction in the show, don't you think?

Frum on DACA - and Trump and the evangelicals

David Frum talking about immigration and the Trump move to pass the buck is, I think, a very good (and pretty balanced) explanation of what's going on. 

In other Trump readings, I thought this article in the Guardian by a former evangelical explaining why he thinks they love Trump despite him being an obvious sinner was pretty good too.  He reckons it's because they recognize a similar aggressive outsider psychology.   Here's part of it:

When I was a young evangelical Christian, I was eager to be oppressed for my faith. The Bible and my pastors had warned me to avoid “worldly” people – celebrities, intellectuals, scientists, the media and liberals. Those were the ones who forbid us from praying in school while indoctrinating us with communism and evolution.

Jesus once said: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.” So I went out of my way to piss people off – telling the goth kids they were prisoners of Satan’s lies, handing anti-abortion literature to the “loose” girls, and forcing science class to run late while I debated evolution with the teacher.

My entire identity became wrapped up in being disliked by a specific group of people, and they were happy to accommodate me. Trump has had no problem arousing hatred from those same “worldly people”, creating what appears to some like an imploding presidency, while others see a heroic martyr against liberalism.

After nearly eight months in office, it’s becoming clear that many of Trump’s actions are not ideologically based, but designed to inspire maximum outrage from climate-scientists, academics, feminists, LGBTQ rights activists – pretty much every demographic that evangelicals hate. Whether he’s banning transgender soldiers from serving in the military, pardoning a vigilante sheriff, or refusing to properly distance himself from white supremacists, it’s not about the act itself, it’s about the negative reaction he gets from liberals.

You’ll never get anything done in government with this approach, but that’s not the point. Just as the point of my witnessing to the lost souls of my public high school wasn’t to convert them to Christianity, it was to see how persecuted I could be.

Which is a remarkably addictive sensation, one that became a competitive game for me and my fellow young believers. My youth-group friends and I would share stories of being punched, spit on, or called “the biggest loser in school” the way other kids would brag about sports or sexual conquests. Just as Morrissey fans discovered loneliness to be a fashionable accessory, we wanted to emulate the sociopathy of our messiah, who said in the book of John: “If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you.”

Sounds reasonably plausible to me, and not really an explanation I have heard before.   

Wild man sightings

Nothing here that's as mysterious as bigfoot/yowie glimpses, but this post about unexpected sightings of what appear to be "wild" men living nude and dirty (or greasy - the story from New Jersey in 1935 is especially odd) is interesting nonetheless:

The group watched this naked individual for several minutes before he reportedly dropped down on all fours and fled, in a way resembling that of an animal. The group watched, stunned, as this wild-looking man “galloped off through the high grass along the edge of the road, along the tracks,” leaving nothing behind but bare footprints that marked his path.

Heading in the same direction the strange phantom fled on their way home, they once again encountered this individual, who was purportedly in a sunken barrel of oil by the railroad tracks, “up to his neck, his hands grasping the outer edge, and moving around in the oil.”

The unsettling incident was perhaps the first of what became known as encounters with “Oily Oliver,” as the degenerate had been so-named by the conductor and motorman on the trolley, who seemed well aware of the fiend when Quackenbush* and his company reported it to them. Similar stories would persist on up into the 1960s, including one encounter two women had while visiting a cemetery, during which they observed a naked, oily man creeping through the weeds toward them.

The writer notes, however, that this story is reminiscent of folk myth from the other side of the world:   

“Oily Oliver” bears some similarity to peculiar folk beliefs in Malay cultures that involve “grease devils,” phantom attackers that cover themselves in grease which makes them slippery, and thus able to evade capture more easily.

* Seriously, the number of American surnames which sound funny to the rest of us is pretty remarkable.  

My crypto-currency skepticism receives a boost...

Spotted at the WSJ:

Meerkat life

The organisation of meerkat life is pretty complicated and tough:

Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) live in complex, hierarchical social groups or "mobs" consisting of two to 50 individuals. These groups are ruled by a dominant male and female, called the alpha pair, that have exclusive breeding rights. The group also contains subordinate females who are typically closely related to the dominant female; subordinate males who are usually the offspring of the alpha pair; and one or more unrelated immigrant males.

Meerkats reach sexual maturity at 1 year old, and males willingly leave their group permanently at around 2 years old to attempt to join or take over another group. Adult subordinate females, on the other hand, are often forcefully (and sometimes violently) evicted by the dominant female — they'll sometimes remain on the group's territory, sleeping and foraging alone or with other evicted females until the dominant female's aggression towards them subsides...

Subordinate females may occasionally mate with the immigrant males from within the group or outside of the group. But this sneaky behavior comes at a price — dominant females routinely kill subordinate females' pups and evict the wrongdoers (sometimes while the subordinate female is pregnant, forcing her to abort).

As payment for their misdeeds, subordinate females that lose their litters or return to the group after being evicted act as wet nurses for the dominant female's pups.

So, I'm unfashionably late to the party

Has anyone in Australia done this variation yet?:

Not quite "peak Guardian", but it's getting up there...

Joy of unisex: the rise of gender-neutral clothing

Salt revisionism

Not a bad discussion here of the "how much dietary salt is too much" debate that seems to have been revived recently.

The problem with geo-intervention

Victor Venema, who does work on climate change, has a post up in which he explains that he thinks taking climate geo-intervention seriously is probably unavoidable, and we may as well start investigating it now.

But he does explain a key practical problem with the concept, as follows:

We would have to keep on managing the insolation for millennia or until someone finds a cheap way to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The largest danger is thus that humanity gets into trouble over these millennia and would no longer be able to keep the program up, the temperature would jump up quickly and make the trouble even worse. Looking back at our history since Christ was born and especially the last century, it seems likely that we will be in trouble once in a while over such a long period.

This danger could also be an advantage, just as the mutual assured destruction (MAD) with nuclear arms brought us a period of relative peace, the automatic triggering of Mad Max would force humanity to behave somewhat sensibly and make people who love war less influential.

My impression is that the main objection from scientists against geo-interventions is their worry about creating such an automatically triggered doomsday machine. Those people seem to think of a scenario without mitigation, where we would have to do more and more Solar Radiation Management. While carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere over millennia, the stratospheric particles (after a volcanoes) are removed after a few years. So we would need to keep adding them to the stratosphere and if we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions increasingly many particles. 

 I am surprised that he does not also consider that natural disasters effectively beyond human control might put a serious hole in maintaining the necessary work - a seriously large asteroid strike, for example, would have economic and society disrupting consequences that I doubt anyone can forecast.  While it won't likely be the end of humanity (it's a big planet), and the dust it throws up would initially cool the place, perhaps to crop destroying and famine inducing levels, when the sky clears enough again the world economy may take a long time to recover before large scale geo-intervention can resume.   This scenario would involve initial disaster from sudden darkness and lingering cold weather, to a reversal where the temperature climbs rapidly to dangerously high levels.

I would much prefer to not have the dangerously high temperatures a possibility.

And besides, at an ecological level, no one knows how ocean acidification is going to pan out.  Lots more algae, sometimes of the poisonous variety;  key crustaceans in the ocean food chain (pteropods) dying out;  oxygen low areas of the ocean that can support little sea life of any variety - these are all realistic predictions of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans, and keeping the temperature down alone won't solve them.

So, I will remain a skeptic of this band-aid approach to dealing with climate change and CO2 emissions.

Trickle down revisited

John Quiggin has a nice post re-stating, in economist terms, the problem with trickle down economics.

Of sociological interest

It's worth clearing your history so you can read the lengthy Washington Post feature on the annual "gathering" of Insane Clown Posse fans.

I really knew very little of the band, apart from seeing the odd photo of their ridiculous act, but limited knowledge is aided by the fact that they are, apparently, genuinely talentless as well as banned by nearly all TV and radio in the USA.

Being a commercial outcast who likes to act insane attracts other outcasts who like to act insane, and they apparently all come together in that fairly saccharine "we are family" way that Americans seem to like to embrace.

As people in comments say, it's like Burning Man for white trash, although I don't know that at Burning Man they really throw trash around for fun.

 It all sounds very ridiculously immature to me;  and somewhat dangerous for the borderline mentally ill who cannot always tell when an act should stop being an act.   The article talks at length about the controversy when the FBI deemed the fans to be gang members.

But if you want a grotesque example of how they entertain themselves, have a read of this:

They said the gathering was a place of radical acceptance, welcoming all comers. “If you can’t find any other place to fit in because society tells you you can’t fit in with this or that group, you’ve got to find your own group,” Creel said. “I kind of think that’s where Juggalos came from. We are outside of the outsiders.”

That point was driven home when I met Adam Roberts. Roberts became a Juggalo legend in 2013 for doing something so out-there even the gathering was shocked. He auctioned off his right nipple at the festival for $100 and then removed it with a scalpel. (He had previously sliced off his other nipple.) “I was going to do it anyway,” Roberts told me while sitting in a golf cart. “A lot of the Juggalos seemed to get a kick out of it. I figured if they liked it I would do it. … I was going to have dermal implants done with diamond tips, so I could have nipples of steel that could cut glass.”

Roberts, who has a ghoulish tattoo that covers his entire face, has yet to follow through on the plan, so he has the featureless chest of a doll. He said this year he ate a live scorpion. Some campers had trapped it and were offering $100 to anyone who could choke it down, but no one came forward. Roberts did it for $70 after chopping off the stinger. What did it taste like? “Seventy-dollar dirt,” Roberts said.