Three parts politics

1.   I used to find Tim Dunlop a tedious bore when he had a gig as a News Ltd blogger, but in small doses he's occasionally OK.   Here, he complains about the easy ride which the media (including Fairfax) seems to be giving Tony Abbott now.   It's all "oh well, he doesn't want to discuss his actual policies yet; we'll just have to leave his inconsistencies and shallowness alone then."

I would add - Chris Uhlmann on the ABC gives him the easiest ride of all.   This is always puzzling, given his wife is a Labor MP.   Uhlmann used to express skepticism about climate change, although I have not heard him comment about it for a long time.   If one thing has become clear in the last couple of years, it's this:   amongst political commentators, and economists, climate change skepticism is a reliable sign of unreliability.

2.  Bernard Keane on Crikey writes that the winter break has actually not gone too bad for Julia Gillard:

But the winter break certainly didn’t play out according to opposition plans. July 1 came and went without any drama associated with the carbon price. August 1 then came and went without drama. Yesterday’s jobs data for July saw a lift in employment after June had seen a sizeable fall. Non-official inflation data suggested our main concern might be deflation, rather than the rampant price rises predicted by the Coalition. Even many Liberal voters, far more likely to see the economic cloud than any silver lining, professed to have not seen any price rises.

Then there was the curious framing exercise, delivered via a one-two punch from first Wayne Swan and then, this week, Julia Gillard. Swan risked ridicule by embracing his inner Boss, but the Springsteen stuff enabled Swan, and Labor, to get a cut-through message out about its values in a way that just another speech, just another interview, would never have done. Moreover, it complemented one of the government’s few reputational strengths, the impression that it is more inclined to manage the economy for working Australians rather than business, as voters tend to think the Coalition does. It also comes at a time when the government has near-utopian unemployment, inflation and interest rate figures to boast of.

I think he's write, and the surprise bounce in Newspoll would have been welcome with open arms by the PM.  I like the way Bernar refers several times to Abbott's flakiness.  He has him down pat, explaining Abbott's inconsistency with his others in the Coalition as follows:

Manifestly, Abbott was let down by his staff, who failed to brief him, or gave him dud advice in encouraging him to wish away a key factor behind rising power prices. It also confirmed the impression that, once you get him off attacking the carbon price and asylum seekers, Abbott is a flake. Malcolm Turnbull, for all his many and varied faults of political style, was across most issues as leader because of his genuine interest in public policy. That’s why he was able to offer intelligent en passant comments on the electricity issue this week.

Part of the impression of Abbott’s flakiness, of course, is that he prefers a political approach to policy, which is why he’s now adopted a media policy of wanting freedom of speech for News Ltd but greater censorship of the internet, a stance that grates with those of us who like consistency and rigour, but that maximises his political interests.

But Bernard is a realist:

This government’s history is to follow up a good fortnight like the one it has just had with some sort of self-inflicted debacle that reverses all the momentum and ensures that Abbott’s flakiness is never subjected to sustained pressure.

True.  But maybe it will change, one day...

3.    Alan Kohler is well worth reading on the electricity prices issue.   Everyone is right, apparently.

The Iran issue

I thought this cautionary piece about Israel and Iran was not bad. It is unclear whether a strike against Iran might be gearing up for before the US election.

I think one thing everyone is curious about is how technically a military attack would be run, given the targets are dispersed and underground. Still, it is hard to imagine that any politician in the US (well, apart from the nuttier Tea Party types) are enthusiastic to see what an attack would do to the world economy.

Dengue noted

A travel writer in the SMH notes how he and he wife caught the worrying dengue fever in Thailand. As he says at the end, the worry is always that a second round with it could kill.

Ninja in history

From a review (with the great title "Silent but Deadly") of a new book about ninja:

But what did anyone actually know of ninja? They were mostly men, sometimes masked, hiding in shadows, able to move undetected and to use a host of martial skills to achieve their impossible missions. Unlike the death-obsessed samurai, they were pragmatic. They were often sent to spy out an enemy stronghold and to do this effectively they needed to return successfully to base. Assassins of infinite patience, they were light (the ideal ninja was a flyweight 132 lb), flexible and able to hide by hooking on to ceilings. They could silence dogs, and disguised their body odour with a bland tofu diet. One famous ninja was a dwarf who, according to some accounts, assassinated a heavily guarded warlord, Uesugi Kenshin (who may actually have been a woman in drag), by hiding in his castle toilet and drilling him per anum with a telescopic spear. Man reasonably speculates on this story and wonders how a shit-coated dwarf ninja managed to sneak out of a castle on high alert.

Mars plans

While you're at Wired (see last post), you should look at its nicely illustrated list of former plans for manned exploration of Mars.  

I still say:  just go to the Moon first, and learn how to live there.

Corn won't grow without water

Wired has an article about the limitations on what can be done to make corn drought resistant:

Yet even if drought tolerance hasn’t been a central commercial priority, it hasn’t been ignored. As Keaschall noted, Pioneer has worked on it since 1977, and so have hundreds of academic scientists. A more fundamental problem is sheer biological intractability.

Unlike pest or herbicide resistance, drought tolerance doesn’t come from a few easily added genes. It’s the result of complex traits involving hundreds of genes, their activity difficult to orchestrate. “Drought is not going to be a single-gene solution,” said Keaschall.

Even when the genetics can be grasped, they’re often antithetical to farmers’ aims. A slow-growing plant with tiny leaves that shutters its metabolism in the absence of rain would do fine during a drought, but for farmers it’d be slightly more useful than a cactus.

Indeed, inasmuch as high productivity is required of drought-resistant corn, the limitations of genetics may be inescapable. “If you add it all up, what it says to me is that there are limitations to what you can do in a plant like corn,” said Gurian-Sherman.

That makes non-genetic approaches, such as using cover crops to manage soil characteristics and fine-tuning planting times, all the more important. But those methods are knowledge-based, and it’s much harder to monetize knowledge than genes.

The "we don't have to do anything about AGW, it will be good for agriculture" crowd should take note.  (They won't.  They are selectively stupid.)

Inferational

Grey parrots are pretty clever, as this report of a recent experiment shows:

... the team showed the birds two opaque boxes, one of which contained food. The researchers then shook the boxes allowing the birds to hear that something was inside just one of them. The birds then guessed correctly which box had the food in it, walked over and tipped it over and ate their treat. Next, however, the researchers tried shaking just the empty box, producing no sound. This time, the birds were able to infer that the food must be in the other box and ran to it when given the chance, accomplishing a feat the team says, humans can’t handle until the age of three. They also say that dogs and monkeys failed when given the same test and that it seems that other than the birds, only great apes and human are known to be capable of such inferential thinking.

No wonder she got on the plane at the end of Casablanca

BBC News - Morocco: Should pre-marital sex be legal?

I didn't know things were quite this regulated in Morocco:

The editor of Morocco's Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia daily newspaper, Moktar el-Ghzioui, is living in fear for his life after he expressed support for pre-marital sex during a local television debate. 

"The next thing there was a cleric from Oujda releasing a fatwa that I should die," he says.
"I am very scared for myself and my family. It's a real blow to all the modernists who thought Morocco was moving forward."

According to article 490 of the penal code, Moroccans can be jailed for having sexual relations outside marriage. This is based on Islamic law, which bans unmarried people from engaging in sexual activity....

An unmarried man and woman were recently jailed for six weeks after they were caught having sexual relations.

If you thought slippery slope arguments about gay marriage were bad, you've heard nothing yet:

Imam Hassan Ait Belaid who preaches at a mosque in the commercial capital Casablanca says article 490 is part of the culture of a non-Western society.

"If the code is removed, we will become wild savages. Our society will become a disaster," he says.

 Politicians like to get in on the act too:

But Morocco's Justice Minister Mustapha Ramid, from the newly elected Islamist government, has made it clear that he will not change the law.

 "Legalising sex outside marriage is an initiative to promote debauchery," he said recently.

 However, some of these traditional ways of thinking can have some awful consequences:

...last year, a judge ordered a 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, to marry the man who had raped her, in order to preserve her family's honour.

She committed suicide in March after she was severely beaten by her husband.

Anyway, this raises the question - when was fornication in the West illegal?  Wikipedia provides a partial answer:

In England in 1650, during the ascendency of the Puritans, fornication was made a felony. At the Restoration in 1660, this statute was not renewed, and prosecution of the mere act of fornication itself was abandoned. However, notorious and open lewdness, when carried to the extent of exciting public scandal, continued to be an indictable offence at common law .

 I was more surprised to read of the American situation.  I thought they had only fretted about which orifices were involved, but apparently not:

 ...some jurisdictions, a total of 16 in the southern and eastern United States, as well as the states of Wisconsin^[8] and Utah^[9] passed statutes creating the offense of "fornication" that prohibited (vaginal) sexual intercourse between two unmarried people of the opposite sex. Most of these laws either were repealed, were not enforced, or were struck down by the courts in several states as being odious to their state constitutions. See also State v. Saunders, 381 A.2d 333 (N.J. 1977), Martin v. Ziherl, 607 S.E.2d 367 (Va. 2005).

What the heck?   Ordinary fornication was a crime in Virginia until 2005!?  (Mind you, the footnotes to the article about the Martin v Ziherl  case indicate that it only attracted a $250 fine (sounds like it could have been handled as an on the spot ticket) and had not been enforced against consenting adults since the mid 19th century.

Still...I have to be more careful before I mock Muslims. 

Not sure if this is a good idea...

QA: Michael Nesmith on His Surprising Return to the Monkees | Music News | Rolling Stone

One thing I do know:  having Michael Nesmith looking like a grandpa makes me feel rather old.

Complicated evolution

BBC News - Many human 'prototypes' coexisted in Africa

The story of the evolution of humans seems to always be getting more complicated.  For whatever reason, though, I just don't find it all that interesting.  

In defence of renewable targets

Here's a defence of government enforced renewable energy targets even when you have carbon pricing.

Sounds relatively convincing to me.

One other energy fact that I have heard a couple of time this week in the discussion about Australian electricity cost is that demand for electricity is falling quite significantly.   Climate Spectator has run some articles about this, but I hadn't been paying attention. 

Gender mix up kids

What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? - NYTimes.com

This magazine length article looks at the issue of kids, particularly boys, who from a young age are attracted to feminine dress and interests.   Not a problem in my household, but you can see how it must be a difficult issue for parents to know how to react to.

A look at the Mormons

Adam Gopnik: Mormonism’s History and Meanings : The New Yorker

Gopnik has a good article here about the history of Mormonism.  I don't think it contains many surprises, but I just note these paragraphs about some of the religion's more curious ideas:

 Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species. “God that sits enthroned is a man like one of you” and “God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man” were two of his most emphatic aphorisms on the subject. (People who were “exalted,” in Smith’s language, were men moving toward godhood, as God himself had once been a man who achieved it.) Although in many other respects, as Fluhman and Bowman point out, Mormonism was orthodox in its outlook—Jesus is the sole Messiah, and his history as told in the Gospels is taken to be true, if incomplete—the doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith’s cult from the others, and scared the pants off even charismatic Protestantism: the Protestants were willing to accept that we are made in his image, but not that we are made of the same flesh.

This doctrine led in turn to various theological niceties, which seem to have risen and receded in the faith’s theology over the years: one is that the birth of Jesus had to have been the consequence of a “natural action”—i.e., that God the Father knew Mary in a carnal way, in order to produce the Messiah. (This doctrine is currently in disfavor, but it had a long life.) Another is that God, being an exalted man, must have a wife, or several wives, as men do; she is known as the Heavenly Mother, and is a being distinct from Mary. (Smith’s belief in exaltation evolved into the belief that other planets were inhabited by men even more exalted than we are; Smith taught that the truly exalted will get not just entry into Heaven but a planet of their own to run. This is now taken, or taught, metaphorically, the way conventional Christians often think of Hell, but it was part of the story.)

Libet re-considered, again

Brain might not stand in the way of free will - life - 06 August 2012 - New Scientist

An interesting report here on a new experiment revisiting the matter of the brain's "readiness potential" and whether it really means free will is an illusion.

Lovely planet

Found via Bad Astronomy, have a look at this pretty picture of Earth from a new weather satellite.  There doesn't seem to be all much green in Africa, does there?

Site meter mystery

Site Meter has been acting crazy for a week or more;  all due to a server move apparently.   Now it doesn't seem to be working at all, and I can't tell where visitors are coming from.   (Well, not from my longstanding favourite visit counter, anyway.   Google Stats works, but it presents too much information, almost.)

Last week, some Spiegel Online blog mentioned my mocking of James Cameron.  A couple of weeks ago, a Finnish magazine blog mentioned my Olympics orgy post.  I need to know whether my new found popularity in European language websites is going to continue.  I am still also waiting for the Revolver map counter thingee to show when I have had a visit from Iceland and Madagascar.   But obviously, I am gradually (very gradually) taking over the world, so it will happen one day.

What a record

Found via Planet 3.0, this Media Matters post about the pattern that the Wall Street Journal always seems to have followed on environmental issues is very revealing.

New blogs noted

The kerfuffle over Watts and Muller last week has led me to find two Australian climate skeptic watching blogs - Watching the Deniers is back and looks nicer than it did before.   Then there is also a newcomer uknowispeaksense, which looks pretty promising.   On the international side, it's about time I added Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

An American blog about various things apart from climate change gets a look in too.

Real Climate finally talks about the Watts/Muller war too, but in a way that doesn't add much.

Anyway, must get around to adding the new ones to the roll...

Watts down with that - Part the Second

I really think Anthony Watts might be starting to crack up.  This post from a couple of days ago, begins with:

I’ve been sitting on this little gem for a year now, and it is finally time to point it out since nobody seems to have caught it.

It's about the BEST temperature analysis.  Watts complains that, following a 1 to 5 scale of how well weather stations are sited, the enemy Muller's BEST analysis has put the mid range class 3 in with the high quality classes 1 to 2.  And this is just wrong, so wrong, according to Watts.  He's been waiting to see if they would correct this for a year.

But the nutty thing is - he then goes on to point out that the BEST papers acknowledgement they have done it, and explain that they think it is the right thing to do.  In fact, as the temperature trend was lowest in class 3 (for whatever reason), adding it to the worst two categories (4 and 5) would make them seem not as bad as they would otherwise be.  (Remembering that the Wattsonian theory is that poor siting of stations leads to a warming bias in the temperature record.)  

So what the hell is Watts complaining about?  

And yet, being the Watts worshipping automatons that they are, quite a few comments to the thread are along the line: "ho, ho, ho, you really caught them out this time, Tony."  (Thankfully, there are some comments saying - are you really sure this is significant, Tony?)

Really, I don't know what he's going to come out next.   I wouldn't be surprised if it was something to do with how the density of his moustache is significantly better than Richard Muller's.

A big, new, thing discovered

The headline in the LA Times is: Oh, come on! It's a salamander...sort of, but the first line gives you an idea of what to expect from the photo:

Biologists studying a drained river in Brazil have discovered a new species of amphibian that looks disconcertingly like a male organ.

Researchers have called the eyeless creature, known formally as Atretochoana eiselti, a "floppy snake," but it is not a reptile. Rather, it is an amphibian more closely related to salamanders and frogs.

It is a disconcerting looking creature, and it's surprising that new things like this can still be discovered these days.