California and big government

Why don't "small government/low taxes always is best" advocates address the matter of how California now has the world's 5th largest economy?   This was in the news a lot last week.  The New York Times explains:

As the state has blossomed, outpacing many others, it has reinforced a liberal narrative about growth, that a state can have big government and a booming economy, too. (Texas is the conservatives’ counterexample: a big, fast-growing economy under laissez-faire government.)

California has strict environmental protections, a progressive tax system and an ascendant minimum wage, now $10.50 an hour and set to rise in stages to $15 in 2023. The state welcomes immigrants, celebrates ethnic and linguistic diversity, and actively tries to combat climate change. And with all that, its economy continues to soar.

“We have raised income taxes and imposed increasingly high fees to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “None of that has overridden the attractiveness of this state for talent and innovation and entrepreneurship.”

California’s economic success underpins the state’s audacity and its defiance of President Trump. It is an invisible buttress when the governor and attorney general harangue the Trump administration, as they did recently at a news conference in Sacramento, for “basically going to war against the state of California.”

 Everyone acknowledges the state does have its problems too.   But one of the big ones (unfunded future liability for pensions) is apparently shared by many other, less liberal states.   

Out of Iran

Vox went and found one not entirely nutty expert who supports the Trump pull out of the Iran deal, but I have to say, I don't find his reasoning terribly convincing, and all of the objections the interviewer raises make more sense to me.

In other Trump pull out/not pulling out news, a lot of people on Twitter are finding very plausible the theory explained at length at the New York Magazine that Trump is the true beneficiary of a (much bigger than Stormy Daniels') affair silencing deal.   If that turns out to be true, I suspect it might be the personal scandal that would start undoing Trump's grip on the Presidency. 

What a suck up

A secular hymn

So, I'm slowly catching up with what the young'uns have long known about technology and music by paying for a family subscription to Spotify.   (It does seem ridiculously good value.)  I'd never used the app before until last weekend.

For someone of my vintage, it's remarkable to think how this digital world really makes previous decades of physically collecting recorded music largely redundant.   Not that I have ever collected much myself - listening to music probably plays a smaller role in my life than it does for the average person.   But still, I can retrospectively now deem my lack of interest in acquiring vinyl and cds as justified by technological changes that I never saw coming.

I say this by preamble of posting a song by Michael Nesmith which I hadn't listened to for years - Harmony Constant.   At the risk of sounding morbid, I've always felt that this would be a good one to play at a (my?) funeral service, as it definitely has a spiritual aspect and is rather uplifting.   I have found a good bit of commentary about the song here, calling it a secular hymn, which seems accurate.   



Update:  Hmmm.   While it's OK seeing Nesmith singing the song, his vocal in that version isn't that great.  I much prefer the album version which can be heard on the next clip, starting at 2min 55sec.   But you should listen to his cheering version of "Different Drum" at the start too.

Fantasy budget time again

David Leyonhjelm likes to do a fantasy libertarian budget every year, although it's hard to see why he bothers, since the details need never change when you're an ideologue who lives by simple rules (government is essentially bad; taxes must be absolutely minimal so that government must be tiny.)

One thing of interest, though, is how his libertarian policy is completely against government foreign aid (other than short term disaster aid), which presumably would mean leaving that field wide open to the big pockets of China - a country with internal policies which are pretty much the complete antithesis of what libertarians like that's actively seeking to spread its influence with foreign aid deals.  Way to step back and let China buy its way into favour with all of our near neighbours, Senator Blofeld.


    

A good idea, I think

It was only back in October last year that I wondered why it didn't make sense for governments (at least in sunny states, like Queensland) to make it compulsory for new house builds to have solar power and battery storage.

It seems I wasn't the only person thinking about it, as California is likely to go down that path (at least for the solar cells, if not the storage):

California may soon be the first state in the nation to require virtually every new home be fitted with solar panels.

The mandate, which would take effect in 2020, is expected to be approved by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday as part of the state’s ongoing push to move from fossil fuels to renewable power.

Under the proposal, all new homes and apartments three stories or less would be required to include solar installations. Exceptions would apply to houses built in shady areas or new structures that include other sources of renewable power.

The proposal is expected to raise the average home cost by nearly $500 annually over the term of a 30-year mortgage, according to state officials. However, homeowners are expected to save nearly $1,000 a year on their power bills, officials said.

I think that this idea would go over well in at least Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.   I'm not so sure about Victoria and South Australia, where cloudier, wetter winters than the northern  States enjoy probably make solar power seem of limited use for several months of the year. 

Time for more climate change whiplash

This article in Nature News:  Can the world kick its fossil fuel addiction fast enough is another in the long line of "climate change whiplash" reporting we've been seeing for a few years.  On the one hand, emissions are clearly still going up when the economy picks up; on the other, past estimates of the decreasing cost and increasing deployment of renewable energy were clearly underestimates, and a lot of renewable energy deployment is in the pipeline.

As to whether market based policy is going to work fast enough, there seems to be increasing doubt:

But politics can also help to bring about rapid change. While Trump is fighting on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry, leaders of other countries are moving in the opposite direction. The United Kingdom and France have both announced plans to ban the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040. And more than two dozen countries have committed to phasing out coal by as early as 2030.

These types of mandate are a sign that energy politics might be shifting towards more brute-force methods, says Michael Mehling, an energy and environmental-policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Economists tend to favour market-based programmes, such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System, but Mehling says there is little evidence that such arrangements will drive the kind of rapid transformational change needed to meet global climate goals. Old-school government mandates might be the last resort, Mehling says. “If the decisions are made at a sufficiently high level,” he says, “they can change the landscape pretty much overnight”.

In any case, as I've been posting for some time, it's not as if those who are supposed to be the Right wing proponents of small government and free market solutions (libertarians and so called "classical liberals") are actually interested in addressing climate change at all:  they are more interested in corporations making money now, and a gormless in principle belief that governments never doing anything is better than governments doing something, such that they will clasp any reason (ranging from entertaining outright denialists to a "it's too late now anyway" defeatism) so as to justify not endorsing any policy action.   They are worse than useless, and just need to be bypassed.  

And to be fair, the Left of politics needs to be criticised for a certain gullibility in the policies and advice they have promoted, too.   At least they are interested in solutions, which is the first step in the process.

But look at the revision now going on regarding the estimates of the social cost of climate change, just in the matter of agriculture.  From this paper's abstract:

Despite substantial advances in climate change impact research in recent years, the scientific basis for damage functions in economic models used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) is either undocumented, difficult to trace, or based on a small number of dated studies. Here we present new damage functions based on the current scientific literature and introduce these into an integrated assessment model (IAM) in order to estimate a new SCC. We focus on the agricultural sector, use two methods for determining the yield impacts of warming, and the GTAP CGE model to calculate the economic consequences of yield shocks. These new damage functions reveal far more adverse agricultural impacts than currently represented in IAMs. Impacts in the agriculture increase from net benefits of $2.7 ton⁻¹ CO₂ to net costs of $8.5 ton⁻¹, leading the total SCC to more than double.

That's some massive change to an input into an IAM, isn't it?

And further to my skepticism that IAMs could have adequately worked out the cost of intense rainfall and sea level rise, I note from a review of a new book on the latter (my bold):

Projections diverge on how fast the inundation will proceed if nations stay on a “business as usual” path in their greenhouse gas emissions. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a maximum of about three feet by the year 2100; James Hansen and colleagues project several times that much over the same time frame; a recent research paper that recalculates the dissolution of Antarctic ice warns of five feet as a median estimate. Sea level rise on such a scale would submerge an area inhabited, just now, by 153 million people. For an indefinite number of decades or centuries after that, the rise would continue.

As former presidential science advisor John Holdren once pointed out, human beings have three options: reduce the amount of climate disruption they are causing, adapt as intelligently as possible to the change they can’t avoid, and suffer. “The question – the issue that’s up for grabs – is what the mix going forward is going to be,” Holdren has said.

Under a “work and hope” scenario – one in which the world cuts emissions with extreme speed and hopes that the more optimistic climate change projections are the accurate ones – sea level rise might be limited to something like two feet. But even that more modest figure would imply worldwide consequences exceeding our ability to comprehend them. “Staggering,” “catastrophic,” and other alarm words have lost much of their voltage. In these busy times, “trillions” are the new “millions” – and thus rather negligible. But two feet of sea level rise is, beyond question, coming.

So, have IAMs been worked out on the "best case" scenario of 2 feet by 2100, when it may be 2 1/2 times  that, and causing the re-location of 153 million people? 

But, again, why should this be taken as a licence to do nothing in terms of CO2 reduction?   Even if it takes 200 to 300 years (instead of 100 years) of increase to reach a 3 metre sea level rise, slowing down the rate surely buys time for (some) cities to respond.  

It's about time I revisited the matter of ocean acidification too.  That is a key area that, I believe, is not realistically amenable to to geoengineering, regardless of what techno-optimists may think can be done temperature wise.  

Oh look, another libertarian do-nothing

For reasons unimportant to this post, I was searching through this blog for past entries about Helen Dale, and was reminded that she had written this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis. 

A year after that, she started her (brief) career as a staffer for David Leyonhjelm, the accidental Senator whose party's policy is still a facade for denialism:

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its existence, sometimes dramatically, and that changes in climate have impacted human civilisation. Much of human history has been subject to the effects of global warming or cooling – the origins of the Sumerian, Babylonian and perhaps also biblical stories of a great flood, for example, are probably due to a massive rise in sea levels following global warming 7,600 years ago.

Global cooling from 1300 to 500 BC gave rise to the advance of glaciers, migration, invasion and famine. The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 AD led to the Vikings establishing colonies and trade routes.

Whether human activity is causing climate change or not, the important issue is whether governments are capable of implementing policies that mitigate it without reducing the prosperity of future generations.

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the Liberal Democrats would favour market-based options.

And Leyonhjelm himself makes denialist quality tweets, such as:

 I also see (from her Facebook page, I think) that Dale is attending the Friedman Conference in Sydney later this month, which as I have already noted, is having climate change denialists Ian Plimer and "Jonova" as speakers.

What's the bet that Dale will not make a scene at the conference about it inviting as speakers only full blown climate change deniers?  

And that Chris Berg will appear on the ABC again and not be challenged about his similar status as fellow traveller with climate change denialism.  

Intense rain, climate change, again..

It's long been a theme here that new records for intensity of rainfall and resultant flooding, due to even the relatively modest increase in the atmosphere's water carrying capacity is likely the first big problem with climate change in many parts of the world.

And it's a hard one to deal with:   sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.


Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by the news of (what sounds like) a new rainfall record in Hawaii, which has caused lots of damage:

A staggering rainstorm on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the latest clue that climate change-related impacts are already threatening the islands. On April 14 and 15, a gauge in Waipa recorded 49 inches of rain in 24 hours. For perspective, the rains from Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches last year, occured over a four-day span.  

The state is still assessing the full extent of damage, and Gov. David Ige recently announced a plan to help farmers who suffered losses during the storm. More than 220 people had to be airlifted to safety by the Army and National Guard as a major road was blocked by landslides. A herd of bison was carried off by the flood waters, with some animals having to be rescued from the ocean.

A group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that investigates extreme weather and climate events is analyzing the storm to  determine whether the storm broke the national record for the most rainfall within a 24-hour period.

The current 24-hour record  is 43 inches, set in Alvin, Texas in 1979.

Setting a new record will be just the latest reminder that as the climate warms,  parts of Hawaii are already experiencing bigger torrential rains and will likely see more frequent tropical cyclones. Pao-Shin Chu, Hawaii’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Hawaii, noted that his research showed that the Big Island has seen more frequent heavy rains in the past 50 years.

“If given a one degree C warming, the atmospheric moisture is expected to increase by 7 percent. With this additional moisture available in the air, it may help trigger heavy downpours if other conditions are right,” Chu said by email.

Of course, the damage caused in a rural area is not even necessarily preventable by better drainage.   It can be hard to retain a hillside if it collapses.

Here's a recent article, too, from DW about extreme weather being validly linked to climate change is increasingly proved by science.  Interesting that it deals with the Roger Pielke Jr claim that that increased costs from weather events is more related to increased building in risk prone areas (and therefore not proof there are more extreme events causing damage.)   The insurance industry doesn't believe it; scientists don't believe it.   And Pielke Jr's continuing contrarianism is fading from influence, anyway.  Good.

A cluster of a rare, unpleasant disease

Ocular melanoma?  Hadn't even heard of it, and for some unfortunate people from a town in the USA, there's a cluster of it for completely unknown reason.

Read about it at NPR.

Pascoe has a point

See his tweet here, about how way low company tax in the UK is not helping their economic growth much.  Read the thread too.   Perhaps I like his point further down more:

Everyone's an expert

Hey, I see via an extract at Catallaxy that Henry Ergas is critical of the Gonski 2 report on education, and this is what he thinks:

No one could sensibly blame the subsequent worsening on ­inadequate funding. Having grown by almost 30 per cent in real terms since 2000-01, public ­expenditure per student is at all-time highs. Nor are there too few teachers: while the number of ­students increased by 25 per cent during the past 40 years, teacher numbers rose 60 per cent, halving the student-teacher ratio compared with the 60s.

What has changed, however, is that how well students do in school no longer matters. University places used to be tightly ­rationed, and tertiary admission depended on the scores students received on completing secondary schooling; now, with 44 per cent of students proceeding to university and that proportion set to rise further, test scores scarcely have any enduring impact.

The contrast with the countries whose performance the report wants us to emulate could not be starker. Although the report seems entirely unaware of this fact, in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese-speaking jurisdictions — which invariably dominate the league tables — matriculation rankings are the primary factor determining students’ long-term prospects. Put in the language of sociology, these systems are sternly unforgiving, offering few or no second chances.

And even in Finland, whose ­approach is less harsh, Amanda Ripley’s widely acclaimed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, concludes that “school is hard, and tests affect students’ lives”, “creating a bright line” that shapes ­future career opportunities.

 He might have half a point here, but has he seen anything about the ridiculous extra curricular tuition system in Korea, in particular?   You can obviously go too far in that direction, making student's lives an absolute misery; but yeah, it'll make your education system's average performance look good internationally.  

And I'm not sure if it is true still, but I understood that the Japanese system used to be mainly about getting into a good university, but the degree of work involved in many of the arts/business university courses once a student got in was pretty easy.   

I also find it hard to be too critical of the "alternative paths" emphasis to get into university now.  I mean, I think it really is clear that some 17 year old students just haven't reached the level of maturity needed to devote themselves to higher education, but that may well change within a couple of years.

I also like the way that medical schools here do check the personality suitability of people to do medical degrees now.  

I don't think our education system is perfect, and it is really frustrating the degree to which teaching is pretty clearly prone to fads and ideas that flow in and out of popularity every decade.   I mean, I thought Naplan testing was a pretty obviously good idea, but didn't really realise that some teachers had opposed it from the start as setting up the system to be gamed by schools that would use the test in ways that were not intended.  The Naplan skeptics seem to have won the day, too.  Or at least, that is my impression.

Currently, when I look at the matter of how teachers are supposed to assess work submitted by my high school attending son and daughter, my overwhelming impression is that the academics are still very prone to overcomplicating the theory of teaching and assessment.   But even then, without my having studied teaching and education, I don't really know whether my gut reaction is right, or whether the assessment criteria they use now are much better than what used to exist.  

So the frustrating thing is that everyone thinks they are an expert, and it is very hard to judge the better way forward.   And it is always treated like a neverending crisis, yet we still end up feeling pretty comfortable that we're making new engineers, doctors and scientists who aren't endangering our lives with their incompetence.   So it can't be that bad, surely.  

The Russians prey on the paranoid streak in the US right

The Guardian reports:

Speculation about a US armed forces exercise that led some Texans to fear that the Obama administration was plotting martial law was stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign, according to a former director of the CIA.

Russian bots were so successful in planting wild ideas during a military exercise called Jade Helm in 2015 that Russian social media bandits launched another offensive the following year, attempting to influence the presidential election itself, Michael Hayden told MSNBC.

“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most – many – Texans that Obama planned to round up political dissidents, and it got so much traction that the governor of Texas had to call up the [state guard] to observe the federal exercise to keep the population calm,” said Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 after serving as director of the National Security Agency.

“At that point I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time.’ And at that point I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process,” Hayden said on Morning Joe on Wednesday.

So, the Trumpkin, wingnut Right don't realise how easily they are manipulated by a foreign nation's BS rumour mill, and when evidence to show that they were manipulated comes out, they have to reject it in order to deny their gullibility.

What a bad state for American politics.

Meet the future incels

A distinct lack of female faces amongst this group of American high school students having a counter protest to the March for our Lives gun restrictions rallies.   And what's the "Saturdays are for the the boys" meme?   Is that the day their divorced dads take them to the range?

Update:  This is the explanation of the relatively recent, US specific, "Saturdays are for the boys" meme.   It says that when it became popular:

Over the next few months, the hashtag took off, as men shared videos of their various acts of drunken debauchery with the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter. 

 So yeah, just what you want a bunch of young gun rights dudes to be hoping to get into - drunken debauchery with guns.

Hitler's bones

Slate talks at length about a new book published in France, in which the authors explain that a re-examination of a bit of jaw held by the Russians re-affirms earlier conclusions that it is from Hitler.   A piece of skull the Russians also hold - that's not so clear.  But the teeth in the jaw allow for some reasonable certainty:

Sognnaes and Ström did not have access to the actual jawbone and relied on testimonies of Hitler’s dentist and physicians, X-ray plates taken after a 1944 assassination attempt, and findings of the Russian autopsy to assert that “Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.” 

Charlier analyzed the teeth with a stereo microscope and was even able to dissect a few particles he involuntarily brought back with him in France, stuck to his laboratory gloves, and concluded that the jawbone presented to him is not a “historical forgery.” He asserts: “We are certain of the anatomical correspondence between the radiographies, the descriptions of the autopsies, the tales of the witnesses, especially those who made these dental prostheses, and what we had in hands.” Brisard and Parshina add, with similar confidence: “We can state that Hitler died in Berlin on April the 30th, 1945. Not in Brazil at 95, nor in Japan, nor in the Argentinian Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific.”

One line struck me as a bit like something out of James Bond, or Mission Impossible:

The description of their investigations makes for a lively tale, full of appointments not honored, rude secretaries, and unexpected twists, like the purchase of a bottle of Armenian cognac to mollify an archivist or a visit to a storage room where all oxygen is expulsed at night to trap any illegal visitors.

Malthus, Thanos and workhouses

Given that the Avengers movie (not very wisely, in my opinion) gives the villain-in-chief Malthusian/environmental motives for laying waste to countless numbers of people across the universe, it's interesting that I just stumbled across a Philosophy Now article that looks at Malthus himself and his specious argument.

I see that Malthus actually changed his views in one key respect, but (so the article argues) his initial pessimism continued to be very influential:

In 1805 Malthus was appointed to the first professorship of Political Economy in England, at the new East India College in Haileybury, where he remained until his death. His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1820, was much more upbeat than the population Essay. Here, in fact, Malthus saw food production sufficient for centuries to come. Yet he did not alter later versions of the population essay accordingly. And those who controlled all the major journals in the field of economics ignored – indeed snubbed – his Principles. Thus when Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics the “dismal science” in 1849, it was due to Malthus’s population theory, not his economic theory....

....when Malthus says in the first Essay that the existing English poor relief laws “tend to increase population,” while doing nothing to increase the food supply, he thinks he is describing the actual world.....In the end Malthus is posing a hypothetical, not an actual problem. And hypothetical problems don’t require draconian solutions.

Besides, it’s not as if the existing Elizabethan Poor Laws, in force since 1601, were generous. Nonetheless the New Poor Laws of 1834 tightened the screws, mandating that workhouses be built in every parish as the sole source of poor relief, and that conditions there be worse than what the poorest free laborers could find on their own. Husbands and wives were separated from each other, lest they continue to multiply, and even from their children. Yet even so, workhouses could be better than life outside.

The situation provided plenty of material for Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate to the poor. “Are there no prisons,” he snaps? “Are there no workhouses?” But “many cannot go there,” he is told, “and many would rather die.” Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As one Dickens scholar remarks, “Malthus hung over England like a cloud.”

The article notes that workhouses did not officially end in England until 1929 - much later than I would have expected.

Which led me to have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on the matter of English workhouses.

It's quite interesting, and includes this photo from 1911 - barely over 100 years ago - of women eating dinner at the St Pancras workhouse:

It's good to have been born in the second half of the 20th century.

An over-egged argument with an element of truth?

He does go on at unnecessary length, but I could see his point, at least in parts:

Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism

Saudi Arabia - sort of joining the early 20th century 118 years late

A good article at NPR about the Saudis feeling some "culture shock" at the sudden attempt at modernizing social views by their new Crown Prince.

I didn't know baby photos had once been banned for religious reasons, for goodness sake:

Comedian Khaled Omar takes the mic and begins his act, lamenting how he has no baby pictures of himself. His parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s, when ultra-conservative religious authorities deemed photographs haram — forbidden, they said, by God...

Omar's punchline gets a good laugh: Now, he says, not only are photos suddenly not forbidden — but all the people who banned or tore pictures up are now happily posing for selfies. He still wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures.

Conservative towns are having a hard time accepting it:

While some rumblings of discontent are apparent in the kingdom's big cities, it's more obvious in smaller towns, such as Huraymila, about an hour's drive north of Riyadh, past plenty of camels and new construction in the desert. The town of wide boulevards and squat, sand-colored buildings has a conservative reputation. You can't buy cigarettes, and music in public remains unwelcome. When the government entertainment authority tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town refused to attend it.

They are also going to be encouraging tourism, for like, the first time ever?:

Consider the changes in April alone: The kingdom rolled out its plans for its first-ever tourist visas, held its first Arab fashion week and opened its first cinema in 35 years.

A 26-year-old man in Riyadh, wearing a thobe, a long white gown, says the changes are nothing short of shocking.

It's about the last country I would be comfortable visiting.  Well, maybe after North Korea. I can just imagine the ease with which one could be framed for doing black magic, or for looking lustfully at a woman, or something weirdly specific to their still antiquated beliefs.  I mean, seriously, this report is just from November 2017:

In the midst of Riyadh’s latest “anti-corruption purge” carried out by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a government body elsewhere was busy giving a course in defeating an alternative form of evil hiding between the walls… black magic.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice concluded a training programme on Wednesday called the "development of scientific skills in the fight against witchcraft."

The course took place in Ramada al-Hada in the city of Taif, located in the Mecca province, southwest of the country.

The 27 participants of the programme were taught how to “scientifically battle witchcraft,” and received certificates of attendance from the head of the Taif Governorate, Sheikh Yahya bin Ali al-Hazmi.

Distressing comedy news

I missed that the ABC has renewed the woeful "Tonightly" with Tom Ballard.

It has been distressing me that it has also leaked like a broken sewer pipe out of ABC Comedy channel (why did they think it was worth doing that - they have been struggling to find enough old and new shows to fill it) onto the main ABC channel.

I dropped in on it last night to see if Ballard was still as bad as I formerly found him.

Yes, he is.  Still swearing like a bogan in a pub (to no effect other than as a sort of repetitive  punctuation), and with a delivery that is pretty much always begging for laughs: half acknowledging that the humour that he just tried didn't really work.   I read someone at Catallaxy, CL I think, described the audience as always giving "pity laughs", and for once, I think he is reading something right.

It's an appallingly underwritten show with an appalling host, and a pretty tiny audience.   I hope it's cheap to make, as I can see no other potential justification for not giving it a mercy killing. 

Low islands and climate change, revisited

Early in the life of this blog, I used to criticise the reporting of politicians and environmentalists claims about sea level rise being about to cause the more-or-less immediate demise of low lying Pacific islands.   The situation, when you looked at the details, was more complex, and this was hardly ever reported.

Move forward, and there was a recent report which climate ignoramus Andrew Bolt seized upon with glee - 

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.
It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

I meant to comment on it at the time, because, I thought, a mere small growth in the area of a low lying island (caused by currents pushing around sand and ground up coral, I believe) tells us nothing about the habitability of the island.   The immediate problem with sea levels that I had seen on some documentary shows was the ground water becoming replaced with salt water.  

An article at Carbon Brief explains this well, and supports my hunch from earlier this year.  A new paper suggests that many low lying atolls will be uninhabitable due to the groundwater issue earlier than expected - perhaps by mid 21st century.

Not everyone agrees - it would seem that New Zealand (which was the source of the "Tuvalu is growing" study) has some scientists who are busy downplaying the issue.   (Given New Zealand's reputation as a lifeboat island for South Pacific islanders, one wonders if there is a bit of a motivation for such studies.)

So, I still think my early criticisms of media gullibility on the issue were valid;  just as my criticism of climate change denialist's complete dismissal of the very same issue is valid now.