For the parents of 10 year olds

It occurred to me this morning that if you are a child wanting to build a small diorama of a wind farm for a school project, you could readily convert a used electric toothbrush head into a tiny model of one wind turbine. 

Of course, since one of these lasts a very long time, if you want a whole wind farm, you had better start saving them from preschool.

You can thank me later...

Not the sharpest officer

I don't think I have read this story before, of how Auberon Waugh got himself shot by being remarkably stupid:

On National Service in Cyprus in 1958, Auberon Waugh, having ‘miraculously’ become an officer, was sent out with his troop to cover the Nicosia-Kyrenia road between the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize the barrel from in front and give it a good wiggle’. As recounted in his autobiography, the incident unfolds in a laconic slow motion: ‘I realised that it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest. Moving aside pretty sharpish, I walked to the back of the armoured car and lay down.’ Six bullets had gone through him, inflicting injuries that compromised his health for the rest of his life and contributed to his early death at the age of 61 in 2001.

That's from the start of a review of a book about him. 

Still not normal

Just took a couple of photos, in Brisbane's western suburbs, first looking West:

And this one is looking north-east, where and if you look carefully you can just make out some of the city high rise buildings in the smoke haze:

It is quite windy.  Not good.

Bizarre and sordid crime noted

Well, that must have been a challenge for Children's Services:  The Guardian reports on a truly unusual crime in England, in which the parents of 6 children (from their incestuous relationship) murdered two of them, and tried to kill the rest.

One very strange detail, perhaps indicating that the kids might not have had the best of educations?:

“The children believed and even told officers at the scene that their father was dead, having died in the second world war.”

(The eldest children were teenagers.)

Just lies continuously

In fact, whenever Trump claims that he is responsible for something that has never happened before, it seems like a 99% chance that it is an outright lie.

Some commentary on fuel reduction burns

As noted on Radio National, a couple of people with expertise in the area talk about fuel reduction burns. 

ROSS BRADSTOCK: The notion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stop hazard reduction is a piece of fiction.

ISOBEL ROE: He says there's more pre-burning happening in New South Wales than ever, but state agencies don't have the money to do the amount of burning needed to prevent fires like those in the state this week.

ROSS BRADSTOCK: Hazard reduction will only put a dent in risk. It will not eliminate risk, because the amount of hazard reduction you would have to do to eliminate risk is beyond the financial resources of the state. 

And someone from Tasmania adds (I am sure the transcript has an error here, which I have corrected):

ISOBEL ROE: Professor David Bowman works in pyrogeography, the study of wildfire, at the University of Tasmania.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: What we're really talking about here is the tension between a command-and-control and regulating the use of fire in the landscape and a more organic, self-organising use of fire: 'the old school' way of doing it.

ISOBEL ROE: And he says, as the population grows in semi-rural areas, the harder it is to light safe fires.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: And they're becoming increasingly complicated because of the effect of shrinking safe weather windows and increased intensity of the fires.
But as you come down into the settled areas, the complexity of planned burning increases. As you get more land tenures, you have to have more sign-off, more regulation, more agreement.

ISOBEL ROE: Professor Bowman believes the budget for hazard reduction burning needs to dramatically increase, not just to increase burning but to develop better ways of doing it.

Update:  there was more on this in The Guardian.

Factcheck: Is there really a green conspiracy to stop bushfire hazard reduction?

Short answer:  "no".

Hurricane damage revised, upwards

Michael Mann is heavily promoting a new paper that applies a more sensible way to assess whether destruction from hurricanes in the US has been increasing.  His thread starts with this:

and goes on to explain the findings of a new paper, but I won't copy all of the tweets:

A summary of the paper itself is at phys.org:

Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an "area of total destruction," meaning how large an area a storm would have to destroy completely in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: the size of the "area of total destruction."

In previous studies, it proved difficult to isolate the climate signal. The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It was hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth, and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method, this doubt has been cleared. The weather has, indeed, become more dangerous on the south and east coasts of the U.S. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team is more congruent with the climate models used to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes.

 Roger Pielke Jnr is a famously obnoxious commentator on climate change, a trait he seemed to have picked up from his father.  (Both become nasty towards people who don't see things exactly the way they say things should be seen.)

I therefore predict that Pielke Jnr will be furious with this new analysis and will get into a flame war with those supporting it.

Appalling

As I have complained bitterly before, Malcolm Turnbull wasted his dumping by not going on a rhetorical rampage about how the Coalition must purge itself of climate change deniers in its ranks for it to have credibility on climate related policy.   You should go and listen to the clip on Twitter of this ignorant twit (from a "financial" background, not science) claiming that the BOM is inappropriately adjusting temperature records:

And where is he from?   Queensland (of course) - the state that specialises in producing the stupidest politicians. 

Get them into it young...

Spotted this in The Guardian:

The caption:

Funerals are held for American Mormons killed in an ambush in northern Mexica.

The age of the kids wielding shovels is, um, a little weird, no?

When he produces the goods on condoms that men don't mind using, then he can talk tax...

I'm being a bit mean - there's not much doubt that Bill Gates is one of the better billionaires in terms of charity work; but I didn't like his hedging on Warren vs Trump last week.

Some people think he was talking in code:  that of course "the most professional" candidate would not be Trump.   And it's true, he may have concerns about the vindictive vanity of Trump would mean a complete freeze out from Federal government co-operation with Gate's plans.   (It has already stopped work on experimental nuclear in China.)

But really - if a basically decent billionaire can't say something like "if it was a choice between Trump and some weirdo genocide supporting communist Pol Pot, sure I would vote Trump.   Otherwise, as if I would vote for that idiot", then what's the point of being a billionaire?

Gates probably does suffer from over-confidence in his own judgement (I guess it comes with the billionaire territory), and I'm not sure that he has got that many runs on the board for innovation in areas that now interest him.   The research into better condoms, for example - where has that gone?   I'm not sure that his nuclear dreams are all that well founded, either.

And I'll end by noting this Onion article, which amused me:

Not normal

Brisbane from Mt Cootha lookout today, covered in smoke haze:

Honestly, it is hard to credit how stupid the Right has become (and an anecdote about certainty)

Over the weekend, I noticed this widely mocked D'Souza tweet (and I'll just add the commentary on it too, because it is completely accurate):

Some people wondered whether he meant the "is the Earth heading to a new ice age" issue raised in the 70's;  but not, his response seemed to double down on this being a valid analogy.   It's breathtakingly stupid, yet he had plenty of support from Trumpers on twitter.

Then other people notices a tweet from 2015 from someone who now works for Trump:

As the Raw Story report explains, though, she followed it up in 2015 with this:

Lots of people were sceptical and think that this was a mere attempt at a "save" when she realised the wild stupidity of her first tweet.   A Fox News contributor being sarcastic toward the then candidate Trump policy on building a Mexican wall?  I don't think so...

And apparently Hugh Hewitt used to be considered a reasoned, moderate conservative voice:  he's now a Trump suck up like 95% of former "reasonable" commentators on the Right:

  

Update:   I also read over the weekend about how Steve Kates used to be a long haired, pot smoking, fornicating (by the sounds) hitch-hiker through Europe in his younger days. 

Sounds like he would have been very certain of his Lefty (quite hippy sounding, actually) views back in the day;  now he is very, very certain of how appalling the Left are and how "damaged women" are ruining politics, etc, etc.   Here's another recent rant, about the Trump impeachment process:

We just get used to it but these people on the left, these people in the media, these socialist nobodies, wish to overturn the democratic process. They should be put in jail. Not only are these people corrupt to the core, not only are these people ignorant, not only are they attempting to overturn our political system, they are as incompetent in their inability to make sound policy as it is possible to be. We treat much of this like a joke, but that is only because they have been unsuccessful. In fact, they have only been partly unsuccessful. They should be treated as the traitorous scum they actually are.

AND LET ME ADD THIS about the person the left is trying to overturn as president: Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved. The Democrats are soul-sick and vermin. Their leading presidential candidates are policy fools with not a single moral scruple between them. They are liars and thieves, all of which is known.

I've said it before:   it's a good rule of thumb not to trust (or at least, have reservations about) people who were once 100% certain of one political or cultural thing, who then swing around to be 100% certain of the opposite.


I would even apply this to the religious.

I remember once, as a teenager, meeting with a group a good humoured country (Catholic, 50's-ish) priest (in a casual setting), and while I can't remember how it came up, he make a joking reference to the question of whether Heaven really existed.   His quip was something like "well, I certainly hope so, or else I've wasted a lot of my life."   I remember thinking at the time that this was somewhat endearing - a man who had devoted his life to the practice of a faith, but at some level intellectually willing to contemplate the possibility that it's not based on reality.   And take that possibility in good humour, not despair.

Even someone like CS Lewis (who switched from atheism to theism to Christianity) I put in the "not as certain as he liked to make out" category:  I think it fair to say he suffered a bout of late life grief induced doubt as a result of his wife's death.  Also, as we now know, Mother Theresa was worried about her faith, too.

Who knows, maybe Kates sometimes wonders whether he is on the right track.   But at least with silent doubters like Lewis and Mother Theresa, they were (for the most part) making generous gestures and statements towards others based on a faith that they sometimes had doubts about.

Kates, on the other hand, is just nasty and dumb - using extermination linked, fascistic language towards the Left while pretending it is only the Left that uses it against the Right.   A complete sucker for the Right wing spin machine that is uninterested in truth or fairness, and just absorbed in a culture war that isn't interested in facts or science.  Terrible.

Bedroom light

I took the photo, of my son's mess of a bedroom, yesterday because I thought the orange, smoke filtered glow reminded me of the Spielbergian use of light (in ET in particular).

He was packing to go camping with a group of old high school friends; his first adult trip of that kind.  We did a trial run through of putting up the tent we have not used for a few years, so he shouldn't embarrass himself in that regard.  Even better, I think, is that I understand he probably will have no mobile phone reception (it's the beach side of Fraser Island) for nearly all of the week.  I will be interested to hear how he copes with days of limited screen time.   Maybe it will rewire his brain?   Then again, if they are attacked by a pack of dingoes, it's a beach drive to get help.   

He'll be fine...but I will wonder what he is doing quite a few times a day.

A case study of flash flooding in one American town

What a neatly presented story here at NPR on a town in Maryland that has had to face up to major changes following deadly recent flash floods.  (It looks great on my laptop, anyway - not sure how it looks on a phone.)

Confirming what I have been saying for quite a while:  the increased intensity of rainfall is the one of the clearest, earliest example of the dangers presented by climate change. 

About Mormons in Mexico

I was waiting to read more about why there are a bunch of Mormons (breakaway ones at that, which usually means polygamy) in Mexico, and ABC Australia (Blessed Be this Broadcaster) is where I found it:

In the late 19th century, many high-profile Mormon families fled Utah's anti-polygamy laws and headed to the north of Mexico.

By the time of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, there were thousands of Mormons in colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora.

There have been major setbacks — many Mormons had fled back to the United States amid the violence of that revolution — but today there are estimated to be more than a million members of the Latter-Day Saints in Mexico.

According to Jason H Dormady, writing in Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands, the farming and ranching town of Colonia LeBaron remains a place where "fundamentalist Mormon polygynists continue to thrive and struggle against the narcotics violence surrounding them in the 21st century".

The article explains more about the history of the LeBaron family.  

I did not know anything about this until now....

Back soon

A bit busy with this and that, including having a swollen thing that shouldn't normally be swollen checked out.  Should be OK, he says hopefully...

I have more Melbourne Cup thoughts...

People claim that you just can't ban horse racing - there are too many people making a living out of raising, training, riding, and shooting horses to do that.

Ending an industry by government fiat is always tricky, hence I make the following transitional suggestions:

*  the ultimate goal:   a racing industry based on human ridden, robotic horses, powered by rechargeable batteries (to be charged from solar farms on former horse stud land)

*  transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

About Islam and dogs

Well, I didn't know the details given in this article about how nuttily upset with dogs some parts of Islam can be:

Followers of the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, mainly found in East Africa and South-East Asia, are taught that dogs are unclean and impure.

If they touch a dog they must wash the area of contact seven times — the first time with dirt and the remaining six times with water.

This ruling is based on a hadith — a second‑hand account of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which states:

"Cleanse your vase which the dog licked by washing it seven times and the first is with earth (soil)."

If the person fails to do so, their prayers are rendered invalid.

These rules also extend to clothes, dishes and other items with which dogs have contact.

This arduous purification process deters Shafi'i Muslims from having any encounters with dogs, which they have come to view as unclean, aggressive and dangerous.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, stray dogs that roam the streets, and even dogs kept domestically by non-Muslim neighbours, are avoided by Muslims at all costs.

What is the sense in the "first wash with earth" rule??

The rest of the article goes on to explain the controversy that some rather pro-dog Muslims have faced in Malaysia:

Syed Azmi Alhabshi, a Muslim-Malaysian pharmacist, is among the people encouraging more compassion towards dogs.

In 2014, he decided to organise an event called "I Want to Touch a Dog".

Held at a large shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, it attracted more than 800 people, 200 volunteers and dogs of different breed including poodles, golden retrievers and German shepherds.

It was designed to demystify dogs, but the event also exposed its organiser to criticism from doctrinaire Shafi'is and Malaysia's state-backed religious authorities, and even death threats.

Mr Alhabshi eventually spoke at a press conference apologising if he had offended Muslim sensibilities.

"With a sincere heart, my intention to organise this program was because of Allah and not to distort the faith, change religious laws, make fun of ulama (learned men) or encourage liberalism," he said.

The matter did not end there.

In 2017, the Department of Islamic Development of Malaysia (JAKIM) issued a religious ruling reprimanding a Muslim woman for uploading a Facebook post showing pictures of her pet dog Bubu.

JAKIM argued that keeping a pet dog violates the norms of the Shafi'i school and undermines Islam in Malaysia. 

Gawd.   Those parts of Islam with dog phobia need a reformation on the topic.

The new sweepstake

Which Melbourne Cup racehorse will be the first to be sent to a knackery?

By the way, I really dislike the word "knackery".  No explanation - it's just that it has an ugly sound about it.

Nations ruined by social media

Interesting opinion piece by an activist in the Philippines, who blames the incredible popularity of Facebook and other social media there as fuelling a corrupt but populist government:

Americans, look to The Philippines to see a dystopian future created by social media 

The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told me this month that the Philippines was used by that company as a “petri dish” for testing tactics used for behavior modification: among them, to disseminate propaganda and manipulate voter opinion. After all, Filipinos lead the world in spending the most time online (more than 10 hours a day) and on social media for the fourth year running. With Free Basics, Facebook is our internet.

Wylie said what Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, learned in the Philippines and other countries in the global south, that they could “port” to the West. The United States had the highest number of compromised Facebook accounts in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The country with the second largest number of compromised accounts? The Philippines.

In Australia, meanwhile, climate change propagandist Sinclair Davidson has no problem with Facebook allowing political ads that are outright lies.  What a surprise. 

(My take on the matter of Facebook and political ads - if it is too much trouble to fact check them, just don't allow political ads, as Twitter has decided.   Oh, and it should enforce its astroturf rules too.)