Yglesias sounding sensible, again

He argues here that the fundamental problem with the GOP tax plan is not cutting corporate tax per se, but cutting it way too far than anyone ever thought was necessary or wise. 

The GOP and its divorce from reality

Yes, the first tweet shows their pure denialism - or perhaps more accurately, plain lying; the second tweet just makes no common sense; except, perhaps to those ideologically determined to get to limited government, no matter how the economy and society is hurt getting there.   (I suppose that in their lizard brain, limited government is always good for the economy.  Eventually.  Roadkill on the way doesn't matter.  Just like Laffer said Kansas would all work out if you only gave it another 10 years.  Yes, 10 years while education was defunded, highways unrepaired, etc.)

Update:  this lengthy explanation at Slate at how the Kansas experiment went wrong, yet the GOP seems determined to try it again at a national level, is very good.

Update 2:  when even columns in the WSJ are raising the same concerns as Slate, you know there is something to it.

Milo's numbers

The professional troll Milo is best ignored, but the SBS report on his first, vacuous, Australian press conference says:

Yiannopoulos has sold 10,000 tickets for his speaking tour of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, the Gold Coast and Adelaide.

I find those numbers a little bit hard to believe, actually.  I presume they have come from his own publicist (or his own mouth?) 

Same sex marriage by the numbers

The Economist gave some numbers for gay marriage in an article recently:

One possible explanation for the nonchalance is that the number of gay marriages has been fairly small. When they were legalised in Britain in March 2014, the government expected more than 9,000 gay weddings in the following year, but fewer than 6,000 took place. “It hasn’t taken off as I would have hoped,” says Emma Joanne of Shotgun Weddings, a photography firm based in Brighton, Britain’s gayest burgh. American polling data suggests that just one in ten lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults are married to somebody of the same sex. Many gay people are young, and young people seldom marry, regardless of their sexual leanings.

Women have been keenest to go down the aisle. In Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands, marriages between women outnumber marriages between men. Women’s unions are also more likely to break down. In the Netherlands, which legalised same-sex marriage in 2001, 82.1% of opposite-sex marriages joined in 2005 were still intact in 2016, compared with only 69.6% of marriages between women. Gay men were the commitment champions: 84.5% of their marriages had endured.

Not sure I would read too much into what happens in the Netherlands, but it is a little surprising that the gay males were divorcing less than straight couples.

Actually, it's really hard to track down more up to date figures for same sex marriage in the UK.  The obvious website that should cover it is not accessible at the moment.

Just because!

One other observation:  watching both the path of the Republican tax bill in the US at the moment ( which has many, many problems) and the way Brexit has gone (a huge "divorce settlement" of £50 billion, and that's with lots of important stuff still to be negotiated), it is extremely hard to give any credit to the way the Right/conservatives deal with policy now.  

It all seems to be a matter of wanting to get their way again, never mind the details.   Nothing seems properly considered and honestly debated.    (Of course, Britain finds itself it in the very weird situation of Labor also supporting some sort of Brexit - it's like political and economic common sense has left the land.)   

It seems, I think, to all be tied up a churlish reaction to the culture wars - "you Lefties have had your way for too long, with your feminism, gay rights, transexual rights, climate change scaremongering, anti-smoking campaigns, and wanting to take my tax money for your so called health care and social safety net.   Enough of that - we're bringing in new policies because - they're not your policies.   No body cares about the details, losers."

A sporting observation

I can never envisage developing an interest in cricket, but it's unavoidable noticing some media commentary on the game at times.

I have recently released, listening to some fans of the sport talking about the recent Ashes First Test in Brisbane (I think that's what it was - I often would not even know which match is what in what series even if I see something is on),  that cricket fandom seems to have devolved into perpetual whingers - unhappy about the players, the pitch, the team management, the weather, how it's nothing as good as it used to be, etc etc.  And this general air of dissatisfaction with the state of the game seems to have been hanging around, more or less, for years now.

I'm really not sure why they are still devoted to following a game that can take up such an investment in time if they find so much to complain about in it...

Your bit of Kant for the day

I didn't realise how much Kant was "into" anthropology (or at least, what might be called anthropology in his day).  From an article at Philosophy Now:

Kant suggested that the most important question in philosophy was not that of truth (epistemology), goodness (ethics), or beauty (aesthetics) – the topics which so fascinate academic philosophers – but rather the anthropological question, ‘What is the human being?’ He also suggested that this question could only be answered empirically, and not by resorting to, say, metaphysics. This implies, of course, that we can learn more about the human subject by studying anthropology (ethnography), sociology, psychology, ethology, and now evolutionary biology, than by engaging in speculative academic philosophy about human beingness, in the style of Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida.....

Through his philosophical writings and with regard to his profound influence on subsequent scholarship, Immanuel Kant has rightly been acclaimed as one of the key figures in the history of Western thought. He had a deep interest in the natural sciences, particularly physical geography, but what is less well known is that he also gave lectures in anthropology for more than twenty years. We are told by his student Johann Herder that the lectures were in the nature of hugely entertaining talks. At the age of seventy-four Kant published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). (By ‘pragmatic’, he meant the use of knowledge to widen the scope of human freedom and to advance the dignity of humankind.)

In this seminal text Kant suggested that there were three distinct, but interrelated, ways of understanding the human subject: firstly as a universal species-being (mensch) – the “earthly being endowed with reason” on which Kant’s anthropological work was mainly focussed; secondly as a unique self (selbst); and thirdly as part of a people – as a member of a particular social group (volk). (Notwithstanding the last element, Herder always insisted that Kant, with his emphasis on universal human faculties such as imagination, perception, memory, feelings, desires and understanding, tended to downplay the importance of language, poetry and cultural diversity in understanding human life. But as a pioneer anthropologist, Herder also emphasized that anthropology, not speculative metaphysics or logic, was the key to understanding humans and their life-world, that is, their culture.)

Long ago the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, following Kant, made a statement that is in some ways rather banal but which has always seemed to me to encompass an important truth. Critical of dualistic nature-culture conceptions of the human subject, Kluckhohn, along with the pioneer psychologist Henry Murray, suggested that every person is, as a species-being (a human) in some respects like every other person; but they are also all like no other human being in having a unique personality (or self); and, finally, that they have affinities with some other humans in being a social and cultural being (or person). These three categories relate to three levels or processes in which all humans are embedded; namely, the phylogenetic, pertaining to the evolution of humans as a species-being; the ontogenetic, which relates to the life history of the person within a specific familial and biological setting; and, finally, the socio-historical, which situates the person in a specific social-cultural context. So Kluckholm, not unlike Kant, thought human beings need to be conceptualized in terms of three interconnected aspects: as a species-being characterized by biopsychological dispositions and complex sociality; as a unique individual self; and finally, as a social being or person, enacting social identities or subjectivities – which in all human societies are multiple, shifting and relational. For an anthropologist like Kluckhohn the distinction between being a human individual and being a person was important, for many tribal people recognize non-human persons, while under chattel slavery, the law treated human slaves not as persons, but rather as things or commodities.

Interesting, somewhat...

Islamic dog terrorism

So, it seems that in Jordan, a cleric's comments were taken as a fatwa to go out and kill dogs, which led to lots of people getting out to shoot up (or poison) stray dogs.   It was all started by a girl dying of rabies after being bitten by a stray.

Not that big a story, perhaps, except that the article in The Atlantic is interesting because of its discussion of the odd status of fatwas per se in Islam:

But the peculiar thing about Jordan’s “holy war on dogs” is that it doesn’t exist, according to Jordan’s Dar al-Iftaa, the institution that issues religious rulings. The mufti’s words were never intended as a command to kill, said Ahmad al-Hasanat, secretary general of Dar al-Iftaa. “It is forbidden to kill dogs like this,” said al-Hasanat. Contrary to portrayals of the fatwa as a brutal imperative to kill, the original fatwa only allowed killing of a dog that is threatening one’s life, al-Hasanat said. “If there are dogs living on the streets, no one is saying to kill them.”

The potential issue with fatwas is not that they are strict religious commands, but the opposite: They are non-binding religious opinions, only sometimes put in writing, that are left open to the individual’s interpretation and choice of whom he wants to obey. Typically given as answers to individuals’ specific questions, fatwas are based on deliberation and analysis by qualified religious scholars called muftis. The difference between fatwas and court rulings is that no one is obligated to follow a fatwa; it’s not a law, and ignoring it incurs no penalty.

“Religious authority is not forced,” al-Hasanat said. “We only give advice. If someone takes it, great. If not, what can we do? I give him a fatwa, and he decides.”

As for the status of dogs in Islam, it seems all kind of confusing:

Dogs have long been considered unclean in most schools of Islamic law, said Berglund, who published a paper on the status of dogs in Islam. But there is no basis in the Koran or hadith for mass killings of dogs—nor is there an imperative to do so in the fatwa. The driving force behind Jordan’s dog shootings is not Islamic government, it seems, but Jordanian people’s preexisting irritation with an uncontrolled stray dog problem. In 2014, for example, local media reported that residents were asking the municipality of Zarqa to get rid of strays after dogs attacked an elderly woman and several children, but that the officials refused, saying that killing dogs was forbidden and against Islamic law.

“Probably a lot of people in Jordan are just fed up with stray dogs. It’s a very human thing. You pick up this fatwa to get rid of the dogs harassing your family and stealing food,” Berglund said. “If this mufti had said it’s permissible to kill horses or donkeys, people wouldn’t have started to kill horses or donkeys. There are plenty of fatwas on helping the poor, too, but look how many people do nothing for the poor.”

In this case, religion may be serving people’s social aims, not the other way around. Whereas foreigners assumed the “war on dogs” was coming from the demands of strict religious authority, it may actually be the opposite: Jordan’s religious flexibility has allowed space for dog-haters to use a fatwa as an excuse to kill them.

Update:   I'm going to be very even handed here, and raise the question of Jewish attitudes to dogs.  If they aren't so keen on them either, it is just a Near East cultural thing that has spread further afield with both Islam and Judaism? 

Interestingly, there are lots of articles on the 'net asking whether Jews generally like dogs, or not.   The best article I've quickly read, so far, is perhaps this one in The Tablet, which notes that the evidence is strong for at least an ambivalent attitude towards both dogs and cats.  (I didn't realise before - while dogs get a mention here and there in the Bible, cats never do.)   Here are some interesting paragraphs:

For the most part, and in spite of some recent scholarly attempts at rehabilitation, dogs were held in contempt in Israelite society due to their penchant for dining on blood and carcasses (I Kings 14:11; 16:4, 21:19, 24, and 22:38). They were regarded as urban predators roaming about at night, barking and howling, in search for food (Psalms 59:7, 15), and such dogs could easily attack anybody who got too close (Psalms 22:17, 21) or bite those who foolishly tried to show them affection (Proverbs 26:17). Outside of the city there were wild dogs, busy devouring carrion and licking blood (II Kings 9:35-36; Exodus 22:30). Very few people would have wanted anything to do with them. The only hint of any positive role for the biblical dog is found in Job 30:1, which makes reference to “dogs of my flock,” perhaps indicating that in biblical times there were dogs who served as sheep dogs or herders.

The basically negative and at best ambivalent attitude of biblical Israelites was not that different from prevalent attitudes in general in the ancient Near East, which often stressed the impurity of the dog and its contemptible status. True, there were exceptions to the rule; some dogs did occasionally enjoy somewhat of a higher status, some Canaanite cults may have sanctified canines, the Hittites liked to use them in purification and healing rites, and the odd dog may actually have been kept as a pet—and if it lived in Phoenician Ashkelon might have been buried in the dog cemetery. However, these were exceptions to the generally negative stereotypes that existed in both ancient Israel and in neighboring lands.

 Dogs fared a lot better in some other ancient cultures:

 Greeks, Romans, and Persians loved dogs. Dogs were functional: They served as hunting dogs, sheep dogs, and guard dogs. Dogs could pull carts, and there were even performing dogs. Some dogs were said to be able to heal with a lick of their tongues. They were popular pets and companions for men and women of all ages: A “boy and his dog” and even a “girl and her dog” were quite common, and many women had a small lap dog as a pet. In Persia, dogs did all of the above-mentioned tasks and were popular, but they were also revered, taking on the status given to cats in Egypt—in part because the Persians mistakenly identified the spiny hedgehog as a dog, and this animal was instrumental in ridding houses of poisonous snakes.

 Cats, not so much:

Cats were a lot less popular, although as mousers and enemies of vermin they fulfilled an important function. Yet keeping them as pets indoors or even in the barnyard could be problematic since, in addition to mice, they had a tendency to attack or eat other pets in the home or chickens or fowl in the barnyard. Not only were they not “guard” animals like dogs, but it was often necessary to guard against their feral nature, even when supposedly domesticated: They were necessary but not loved. In Persia, though, they were khrafstra, noxious creatures, the same as the mice and the rats that they ate.

 Interesting, I'm sure you'll agree.

Not taking it well

The conservative cohort of Catallaxy (that's about 95% of them) are not taking the same sex marriage survey result at all well:

That's possibly the most ludicrous attempt at a put down of a politician I have ever read...  

Butter history

NPR links to a February post  reviewing a book about the history of butter.   Don't think I've heard of this before:

Even the first-ever documented student protest in American history is linked with butter. Harvard University's Great Butter Rebellion of 1766 began after a meal containing particularly rancid butter was served to students, who (not unlike modern college-goers) were frustrated over the state of food in the dining hall. As reported in The Harvard Crimson, Asa Dunbar (who would later become the grandfather of Henry David Thoreau), incited the student body into action by hopping onto his chair, shouting, "Behold our butter stinketh! Give us therefore butter that stinketh not!"

The Don

I'm sure there was some lengthy profile done in Fairfax, probably, while Don Burke was still on TV about how many people had left his show saying that he was a complete jerk to work with.   The details coming to light now show how much he was an intensely sexist, offensive jerk who, like Weinstein, sounds lucky to have avoided sexual assault charges.

But I have to say, guiltily, that some of the stories are so crude and so "real life Sir Les Patterson"  that I keep thinking how some of them done in a movie satirising such a character could play as shockingly funny.   Not funny to be a real women trying to fend him off;  it's more some of the ridiculously crude things he thought he could say to women and not have them take offence.

Marvel explained

Even though I'm not the world's biggest Marvel movie fan, it's hard not to be impressed with the "Marvel Universe" as an essentially good natured commercial success. It is therefore interesting to read in Vanity Fair how much of that is down to one young-ish guy - Kevin Feige - who I have never heard of, and whose photo doesn't even appear in this lengthy feature.

I suspect Jason is over there reading it now...

Amusing sarcasm

And Then There's Physic's twitter feed has a sarcastic go at the Matt Ridley's Global Warming Policy Foundation:

More random stuff

*   Had an anxiety dream last night in which I was in a university lecture theatre, where I had agreed to give a lecture (just introductory, I think) on black holes, but completely forgotten to prepare for it.  Some famous physicist was supposed to be coming to watch it as well.   My big concern was whether I knew enough to "wing it" with the lecture, which was due to start any minute.  Fortunately, the dream did not extend to the start of the lecture....

*  Have I mentioned before, but Japan, which is very big on cloth and fabrics, is the best country from which to buy nice but reasonably priced men's handkerchiefs.  I still do not understand how the modern youngster gets buy without one.

*  I like Uniqlo shirts, and shorts, too.

* The Washington Post has a story about a rare form of cancer which often gets initially mistaken for persistent jock itch (!):

For more than two years, Schroeder had been coping with an extremely rare, invasive cancer called extramammary Paget’s disease (EMPD), which had invaded his scrotum, requiring multiple surgeries. Women account for roughly half of EMPD cases; the cancer, often misdiagnosed as eczema or contact dermatitis, attacks the sweat-producing apocrine glands, including those in the genital and anal areas.

The slow-growing cancer, which in men is frequently misdiagnosed as “jock itch” — slang for a fungal infection — can be fatal. And while treatment is often grueling, for Schroeder the worst part was his sense of isolation: He had never spoken to anyone who shared his diagnosis.

 *  Man, there was a serious outbreak of nuttiness at Catallaxy on the weekend, with Steve Kates spending an entire post deriding a commenter there who is actually one of the more-or-less sane sounding ones.  Not to mention another commenter who spent ages going on about claiming he wasn't able to sleep because there was an evil presence in the master bedroom - for no clear reason at all.  (It was all a bit of "hamming it up" he says this morning.   The point?)

I'm sure that the site is a great example of the psychological phenomena that repeatedly saying things aloud convinces the speaker of the truth of the matter, even if was something was originally held in the mind with weak to moderate conviction.   Thus, for example, the repeated quip that "leftism is a mental illness" moves from what they may have originally sensed as a partisan witticism with some element of truth (I'm not saying I agree with that) to something that many on the site have come to genuinely believe as a an absolute truism, and with no humour in the observation at all.    This is why it such a harmful place - with no calls for moderation in comments from other commenters, or (rarely) from Davidson, it has become descending whirlpool for encouraging righteous certainty of wrong, obnoxious and uncharitable views. 

Now, must go prepare my lecture notes...

Queensland election

Well, provided Labor gets back with a seat or two to spare, that wasn't too bad an outcome for the Queensland election.

The best thing, of course, was One Nation only gaining a seat (maybe two?) and the evidence that even the people of Ipswich see Malcolm Roberts as a nutty loser.

My favourite tweet about him (amongst many which ran with "he's an alien" line):

Oh, it won't up load.  Back later.

Here it is:

To Coco or not to Coco (and a bonus list at the end)

For some years now, I haven't cared for Pixar films, and even puzzled over the critical high praise that the occasional one still achieves.   (See Inside Out - which is on my mental list of the most undeservedly  over-praised movies of all time*.)

But it has one out now on a Mexican theme, and I've been feeling increasingly interested in all things about that nation and culture for years, so I think I should probably see it.   Christopher Orr in The Atlantic thinks so, but then again, while he also has noted the decline of Pixar, he thinks it's not as good as Inside Out.  (?)   What's a reader of movie reviews supposed to do?

*  OK, lets get some of those title down on the record:

Forest Gump:   don't exactly hate it, but found it basically glum and depressing and just couldn't see the point.   Sometimes eccentric movies are worth it just for the eccentricity - not this time.

The Godfather:   noted here before that I only finally saw recently on streaming TV, and found abundant flaws in the story and acting that left me very surprised at how it maintains its status.   Again, not terrible terrible, just puzzlingly over praised. 

Unforgiven:    hated it.  Only viewed it once, when released at the cinema; immediately puzzled about what critics saw in it from a directorial or story point of view.   I don't think I had even evolved my full blown dismissal of Clint Eastwood as bringing anything of value to cinema at that time - this movie was probably the start of it.

Inside Out:  not emotionally resonate or funny at all;   other audience members seemed to me pretty bored too, yet it was seriously praised by the great majority of American critics in particular.  Don't get it.

Chariots of Fire:   a simple, simple story: so simple what was the freaking point of telling it?  High praise evidence only of the disproportionate effect a memorable theme can have on a movie's reception.  Otherwise, it really was an incredibly slight film.

The Truman Show:  contains no redeeming value at all.   Look, I consider reality TV to be pretty awful and don't watch it; but making a whole movie (as opposed to, say, a 30 minute Twilight Zone exercise) about how cruel and awful it could become and how our hero will endeavour to escape it has to contain some plausibility and not just be a fantasy exercise for it to work.   This movie doesn't.   I found it such an awful waste of my time that (I'm embarrassed to say), I actually expressed my disagreement to a stranger I was walking past on the way out of the cinema who was praising it to his girlfriend.   They slipped away quietly, not willing to engage in critical debate.  Sorry about that...

The Piano:   come on, surely you have to have two X chromosomes to think this is the most brilliant movie?   I've no problem with stories from a female perspective, but there was just something so overwhelmingly, blatantly "I'm a woman director putting a strong, resilient woman's story on screen"  about this whole exercise it felt like the male audience was being punished, or frozen out, or something.  (To be honest, I remember little about the story - am more remembering some of my reaction and discussion with female friend I saw it with at the time.)  Oddly, my mother didn't mind it - but of course, she has the chromosomes for it.

Ghostbusters (the original):  well, I only add this because of the nutty enthusiasm for it of alt.righters into attacking last year's OK-ish female version.   From memory, the original wasn't that big a hit with critics, and I would certainly agree that it wasn't really all that funny, although basically harmless.   Fast forward to 2016 and it seems that a certain group of males (admittedly, nutty obnoxious ones with no sense of proportion) seem to think it was comedy gold that was the most meaningful experience of their childhood.   Weird. 

Update:

Silence of the Lambs:   not offensively bad, just that I found it not particularly scary, tense or engaging.  I couldn't see was particularly well directed, either.   Teaches you that a movie can be remembered for just once sequence - her first visit to Hannibal.   The rest of it - couldn't see the reason for any praise, and have never watched it a second time.





That's it for now  - must come back to expand this list as I recall more.

All about crossing the road

Sounds like a bland post, but it's surprisingly interesting.  I didn't know anything about the recent move in the UK to deliberately build "shared spaces" at intersections, and how well they work for most people:



(On a minor point - I'm pretty sure this American narrator actually pronounces analysis as "anal - ysis", with "anal" as in the body part.  How many Americans do that?)

Things have improved

First:  Hey, Jason, it is not a case of a "few drunken rants" by Gibson.   According to Joe Eszterhas,  Mel's views in private were (are?) just shockingly nuts and he was (is?) a completely gullible antisemite.  Read this article, if you never have.   I don't know how he has kept any other than the most superficial of friends.  Update:  this article asks a good question - How on earth did Mel Gibson get forgiven by Hollywood.?

Back to the point of the post:   I suspect it was my relatively late use of sunglasses as an adult that might have doomed me to this (I used to read books sitting in the sun in the Botanic Gardens without sunglasses all through university) but my increasingly smeary vision in my right eye means I'll be having a cataract operation in January.

Which has led me to wonder about the history of cataract surgery.  It's more lurid than I knew:

Cataract surgery is one of the oldest surgical procedures known, first documented in the fifth century BC.^[12] In ancient times, cataracts were treated with a technique called couching, which could only be performed when the lens had become completely opaque, rigid, and heavy to the point that the supporting zonules had become fragile. The eye would then be struck with a blunt object with sufficient force to cause the zonules to break so that the lens would dislocate into the vitreous cavity, restoring limited but completely unfocused vision. Centuries later, the technique was modified so that a sharp fine instrument was inserted into the eye to break the zonules to cause the dislocation.

Fast forward 2,000 years or so, and things improved, a little:

The first reported surgical removal of a cataract from the eye occurred in Paris in 1748.^[13] The advent of topical anesthesia made this procedure more practical. The early techniques involved removing the entire opaque lens in one piece using an incision that went halfway around the circumference of the cornea. It was critical that the lens remained intact as it was being removed, so surgery was restricted to so-called ripe lenses: cataracts so hardened that they would not break into pieces as they were being removed. This limited the surgery to only the most advanced cataracts. Since fine sutures did not exist at that time, patients were kept immobilized with sandbags around their head while the wound healed. Consequently, the early literature reporting cataract surgery routinely documented the mortality rate (secondary to pulmonary emboli).

Fortunately, now they need the tiniest of holes:

The evolution of smaller surgical incisions was matched by the development of new lens implants created out of different materials (such as acrylic and silicone) that could be folded to allow the lens to be inserted through a tiny wound. At the present time, commercially available lenses can be inserted through wounds a little over 2 mm.

 This is a pretty good period of history to be living in...

Right wing pays out

The Guardian notes that the Australian Spectator, edited by the clown haired (and brained) Rowan Dean, has had a big loss in a defamation case:

Spectator Australia, the conservative magazine already struggling to survive with paid sales of about 8,000 copies, will be deeply wounded by a $572,674 payment to a Toowoomba family who say they were defamed by the publication. Editor Rowan Dean, who was Mark Latham’s co-host on the doomed Sky News show Outsiders, has maintained his silence about the eye-watering sum and how it will affect the Australian arm of the UK magazine.

Denis Wagner, one of four brothers to take legal action, told Weekly Beast the family just wanted justice after the magazine published an article, “Dam Busters! How Cater and Jones burst Grantham’s wall of lies”, which implied they were to blame for the Grantham flood. “We are pleased with the successful resolution of the claim, which vindicates the stance we have taken in this matter,” Wagner said. “We are now focusing on vindicating our reputations in our cases against Alan Jones and Channel Nine.”

The large out-of-court settlement was made ahead of a defamation trial that had been set down to start in Queensland this month. The Wagners took action against conservative commentator Nick Cater, as well as broadcaster Alan Jones, radio stations 2GB and 4BC and Channel Nine for a 60 Minutes story involving Cater. A commission of inquiry in 2015 cleared the Wagners of any responsibility and inquiry head Walter ­Sofronoff QC concluded the flood was “a natural disaster and that no human agency caused it or could ever have prevented it”.

At a $100 a year to get the magazine, the payout is the same value as 5,000 odd subscriptions.    Ouch.

Presumably, flood conspiracists Alan Jones and Nick Cater are going to be coughing up dollars too.

By the way, whatever happened to the class action against the Queensland government that started in a fanfare of Hedley Thomas articles, but seems to have petered out?    Would like for it to die, too, given that it was mainly promoted by climate change denialists.

Globally ill

I often can't find much to post about on a Friday, especially if it's a busy day ahead.  Of course, I could go over to Catallaxy and watch the further self debasement of Steve Kates going so far beyond mere "brown nosing" of Donald Trump that only his feet are still visible, but even that gets boring after a time.

Anyway, here's one article from Discover that looks interesting - the matter of the global reach of mental illness, and how one researcher is trying to get treatment available in all countries, not just the rich ones.