Why do our anti-Keynesian economists ignore the value of the Australian dollar?

A genuine question here for any reader who knows economics.

I've noticed that journalist Adam Creighton at The Australian has become the darling of the "small government, must-cut-spending, Keynesian-policies-will-be-the-death-of-us" set of economists at Catallaxy.  (Julie Novak called him the best economics journalist in Australia.  She means he agrees with her.   Actually, I see that he has been around for some time, being a contributor to the IPA-lite think tank the CIS, and writing many articles that align with the views of Australia's Tea Party-lite economists.)

Anyhow, Creighton has a column in the Australian today in which he attempts to talk up the down side of a slide in the value of the Australian dollar.   He goes as far as to write this:

But officials, politicians and even businesses should be careful what they wish for.

By eroding businesses' and workers' purchasing power, a weaker currency harms far more Australians than it helps. Meanwhile, trying to shift the value of the dollar is even more difficult than knowing what its correct value is.

He starts with the rather extreme example:

Andrew Lilley, 25, an inner-western Sydney professional with an economics degree, says he spends about 70 per cent of his discretionary income online at foreign vendors.

"I pretty much only buy groceries in Australia. I buy all my clothes, music, books and instruments from foreign providers," Lilley tells The Weekend Australian, suggesting the savings are huge.

I suspect Andrew Lilley might read Catallaxy, because I have noticed over recent years that it attracts readers who are proud to crush Australian retail under foot as far as possible by shopping overseas on line. 

People who buy clothes and shoes on line particularly annoy me - I think it is the lowest form of consumer misbehaviour possible to try something on in a shop (as is especially essential in shoes, surely) and then go home and buy it on line.   Yeah fine, pay nothing for the service you just got by a real person in a shop.  Make it harder for the rest of us who like to have shoe shops as part of the retail mix to find a good one near home.

But I digress - Creighton scratches around to find economists who think the reduced value of the dollar isn't really that good a thing, and does not provide a very convincing case.   (I would have thought that in economics, a change in anything can always be found to have a negative impact on someone.)  

His article reminded me of something I have noted here before - in the last few years since the Australian dollar climbed higher and higher, the economists at Catallaxy (and, as far as I have noticed, the right wing economics commentators in The Australian) have shown next to no interest in the effect of the high Australian dollar on the economy.  True, Judith Sloan had one column in The Oz and at the blog on the topic in December 2012, but she didn't even spend much time on its effects, just whether it was possible for the RBA to do anything about it.  She decided not, and then no one at the blog ever mentioned it again.  (Well, as far as I have noticed.)

Now, with Creighton's column,  I get the suspicion that they perhaps are not only not interested in the topic, but kind of like the dollar being high. 

Is it their ideological commitment to fighting government spending, size and regulation that leads then to (nearly) never talk about other factors that have a major effect on the economy?

Or is there something in their whole attitude to currency that means the Australian anti-Keynesians just don't want to talk about it?

Certainly, the Tea Party Right in the US is known for its obsession with the return to the gold standard;  as far as I know, the Australian anti-Keynesians won't go there, but I don't really know why when it includes Steve Kates, who is as emphatically "Tea Party" as they come.

Some possible insight into Sinclair Davidson's views about money turned up in this post this week, and while I am no economist, this statement to my ear had a ring of eccentricity about it:

 Now I’m happy to believe that fiat money will result in inflation, and I’m happy to believe that economies can and will shrink or grow, and I’m happy to believe that goods and services can become more or less valuable as relative prices change.  I’m not convinced that fiat money can result in deflation – paper money becoming more valuable? 

What I half expect is that Davidson and Kates have some views about currency that they just don't like to talk about.

But if anyone has any other theories about their lack of acknowledgement of the detrimental effect of the high Australian dollar, let me know.

Update:   an anonymous comment below reminds me that Sinclair Davidson did talk about the Australian dollar in a 2009 WSJ column.  I am pretty sure I have read it before, but had forgotten it.

Reading it with the benefit of hindsight, the article highlights the deficiencies with his permanently ideological driven analysis.

At the time of writing, the Australian dollar was on the way up, and it is noted that "It is possible that the Australian dollar could eventually reach parity or even beyond."   Indeed, this possibility came true: 

Davidson's main point in the column is that the Australian approach to not taking steps to try to intervene with the dollar's rise was the right one to take.   Now, it seems to me that at that time of the early rise, he may have been right, as (so I understand) intervention in currency markets is not without risks and problems, but his reasoning is purely ideologically driven.  For example:

 A depreciating U.S. dollar is a market signal that the U.S. needs to export more and save more. It is a symptom of extremely loose monetary policy and high government spending in Washington. It is also a warning about inflation, given a dollar today buys fewer goods than it did a year ago. U.S. policy makers are reinforcing this cycle by refusing to reform America's "too-big-to-fail" financial system and avoiding tough decisions on spending priorities. In a sense, the falling dollar is a signal that the U.S. needs reform at home.

Central banks abroad that buy dollars to control the dollar's fall are both ignoring and subverting these market signals.

The assumption is that "market signals" on currency always point the way to what is good for every nation on earth - the currency market always knows what is best.   Kinda naive, no?  

And what if the US government completely contradicts the so called "market signal", as Davidson would argue it has, over the next four years?   Well, from the chart above, you can see exactly what happens, but because he is ideologically driven, I would bet my last dollar that he would never change his prescription from what it was in 2009.

And what about the attitude here:  " If the prices of Australian goods and services are rising on world markets, this provides a clear incentive for Australian firms to either reduce their costs or to improve the quality of their offerings."  

Yeah sure, just how much, and how quickly, does he think quality can improve to compensate for most of a decade under US80c followed by an extremely rapid rise, and 3 year pause, at above parity?  And how far does he think wages should drop to compensate for such a rapid 25c rise?

The other thing about the chart above is the reminder of just remarkably low the Australian dollar was during the entire Howard government, versus how remarkably high it was during the entire Gillard government.  The effects of this on the performance of the Australian economy under Labor is virtually never acknowledged at Catallaxy.

Interesting asteroid news

Massive asteroid seen steaming off : Nature News & Comment

Ceres seems to intermittently vent water vapour.  Lots of water might make it a particularly human friendly place to visit or live.  But then again, if the water boils because of internal radioactivity, maybe not.

We'll soon know more about it:

Also mysterious is why Ceres has a substantially greater abundance of
water than Vesta, an asteroid that orbits the sun at approximately the
same distance, Campins writes in a related News & Views article.
If Vesta and Ceres started out with different amounts of water, that
suggests that the asteroids may have originally formed in different
parts of the solar system. The same sort of cosmic migrations, Campins
notes, could have brought asteroids and comets deep into the solar
system, seeding the Earth with water as well as a variety of organic
chemicals — and thereby playing a considerable role in the origin and
evolution of life.

NASA’s Dawn probe — launched in September 2007 and due to arrive at Ceres early in 2015
— could offer answers to such mysteries. “We don’t really have to
guess: in a year we’ll be there,” says Christopher Russell, a planetary
scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead
investigator for the mission. As well as taking high-resolution images
of Ceres, Dawn’s sensors will help to map various minerals on its
surface.

If only he was really still in Opposition

Tony Abbott uses global stage to take a swipe at Labor over financial crisis

As quite a few people have been saying, it's like Tony Abbott can't make the mental shift from being Opposition Leader to PM:

According to the Prime Minister, the Howard government had helped the economy but Labor had undone all the good work.

''In the decade prior to the crisis, consistent surpluses
and a preference for business helped my country, Australia, to become
one of the world's best-performing economies,'' he told the high level
group containing many of the world's top business and political leaders.

''Then a subsequent government decided that the crisis had changed the rules and that we should spend our way to prosperity.''

The comments seem to suggest Australia did not need to
stimulate the economy through 2008-09 under Labor, despite the
near-unanimous advice of economists and Treasury to do just that.

The stimulus program has been accused of waste, such as the
pink batts scheme, elements of the school halls program, and cheques
sent to the deceased or to people living permanently overseas.

However, the Australian government also received widespreadpraise and recognition from around the world for its aggressive response to the global challenge with swift policies credited with avoiding the recession from which virtually all comparable economies are yet to fully recover.

The highlighted line in particular indicates that Abbott has been soaking up the exaggerated and simplistic catch phrases of the likes of the IPA.

He really needs to be a one term PM.

[Blogger really has some formatting issues which are hard to sort out lately.  Sorry.]

The problem with nuclear

I've been meaning to note that John Quiggin's recent post about why nuclear power is not likely to be any sort of fast magic bullet in terms of getting the world off carbon based energy is an interesting read.

I wasn't aware that there had really been any discussion of small modular nuclear as a future option for Australia, but it appears there has.   JQ is very skeptical, given that they are being developed slowly in the US, let alone anywhere else.  

I would question why it has to be this way, though.   When nations need to, the US in particular, they are capable of incredibly rapid and large scale development of new technologies (the Manhattan Project being the obvious example.)

For years I've been saying that with nuclear, it seems that what's been lacking is a serious attempt at national or international scale to decide on which new nuclear options are best for passive safety, rapid development and deployment, and then diverting all effort down that pathway.  One suspects that the smaller scale nuclear would have to be capable of more rapid deployment, if only because the infrastructure around them does not have to be so massive.

But JQ might be right - it may be best in the short and long run to try to by pass nuclear altogether.  I can't really tell...

The Australian and Indonesia

When I posted in December that The Australian's attempt to justify Rudd era telephone tapping of the Indonesian President's wife seemed a bizarrely harmful thing to do while Australia was trying to smooth over the relationship with that country, I had a hard time noticing anyone else making the same observation.

But I felt vindicated when I noticed a few days later that the Lowy Institute blog seemed to agree, although the focus on its story was more criticising the intelligence community for running with that "defence". 

Now the same commentator (Stephen Grenville) from Lowy has targetted The Australian specifically:

The national broadsheet, The Australian, has taken a leading role on the current tensions with Indonesia. Based on a 'well-connected insider who asked not to be named', the paper made the case that the phone tapping of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's wife was just a normal part of commonly accepted practice. SBY shouldn't feel insulted by the justification given: we had to do it because she is the power behind the throne.

More recently, The Australian gave prime space to the argument that the 'boats policy (is) a boon for Jakarta as well.' 

How can we make any sense of this? Are naval intrusions into Indonesia’s territorial waters actually helpful for SBY? Is his palpable anger at this and the phone-tapping just part of the usual shadow-play?

 And the reason Grenville thinks The Australian runs with these unhelpful Indonesian stories may well be in the ill considered attitude of its Chief Editor Chris Mitchell, who Grenville shows has made exaggerated anti Indonesian claims before.

It really seems clear to me to be a case of the Right in Australian media and politics going out of its way to hurt Indonesian relationships for domestic political benefit (being seen to be tough on boat arrivals.)

By the way, the Lowy Institute blog and website really seems pretty good.  Onto the roll it goes.

Blog(roll)worthy

There are a few sites worth adding to the blogroll, and I'll introduce them here:

*  Climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon has long been worth reading, even if I think he tends to be too conservative in terms of staying out of the debate on what response to climate change is appropriate.  (He is rather like James Annan in that respect.)    I see that he is one of the key players in establishing and posting at a new group climate science blog Climate Change National Forum.  This effort looks well worth following. 

*  Sou at Hotwhopper is not a climate scientist as such, but she really does an excellent job at shooting down claims made at Watts Up With That.   Really puts the effort in, she does.

* Homer Paxton comments here pretty frequently and I've been mean and not added his blog to the roll til now.  His Friday links are pretty comprehensive and worthwhile, and he's banned from Catallaxy, so that adds to his credibility (on most issues, at least...)

*  Someone, somewhere I was reading today, recommended Ed Yong as one of his favourite science story aggregators.  Yes, his blog (now at National Geographic) does look pretty interesting.   I liked his story at Nature, too, about how that pest stomach bug Helicobacter pylori seems to be behind unusual outbreaks of stomach cancer.

Deniers losing

An insider's story of the global attack on climate science

An interesting account here of the New Zealand legal action which spectacularly failed to show that temperature adjustments by their weather bureau were wrong or fraudulent.

I also saw recently that Mark Steyn's lawyers have withdrawn in his defence of defamation action by Michael Mann.

Climate change denialists are too silly to realise when they are on the losing side of legal action.

Update:   Hello, Steyn-iacs.   There certainly seem to be a lot of you out there....

You need to take a leaf from the likes of Roger Scruton (conservative philosopher), Kerry Emmanuel, Barry Bickmore (Republican climate scientists), Katheryn Hayhoe (evangelical Christian climate scientist):   believing scientists is not an intrinsically anti-conservative thing to do. 

Your ideological commitment to not believing a well established consensus of scientific opinion is a scandal on the Right of politics in the US and Australia.  Just because Al Gore did a documentary (which I never watched, incidentally), you're never going to believe the science? 

The Fat Controller strikes again

Middle East Potato Scandal

Kuwait launches probe into allegations over Israeli potatoes | GulfNews.com

Manama: Kuwait’s commerce ministry has launched an investigation into
reports that Israeli potatoes were being sold in cooperative societies.

“The ministry is currently coordinating with several parties to reach a
conclusion about the allegations and ensure that they are not
malicious,” ministry sources told local daily Al Kuwaitiya.

“The ministry has a zero-tolerance policy towards the import and sale
of Israeli products and if there are Israeli potatoes in the stores,
there will be stringent action against those involved,” the sources
said.

Cheese, subs and fresh air

BBC News - USS Nautilus: A record-breaking sub

I like the quirkiness of some of the anecdotes here from a guy who was on the first crew of the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus.  For example:

"I hated cottage cheese, but one time we stayed submerged for a long
time and when the ship surfaced I began to crave cottage cheese. I think
breathing the recycled air changed my metabolism."

When they surfaced and began to pump fresh air back into the Nautilus "it was so clean and so sweet it made you light-headed"...

"For every 100 feet in depth, there's 44 pounds of pressure per square
inch of the vessel. So when we went deep in the ocean, the hull would
compress and the locker doors would pop open."...

"The US Navy sent psychologists on board the Nautilus because they
were concerned about the effects on the personalities and mental health
of the men who would be confined in such a small amount of space for
long periods."

They found no impact, he says, but some submariners would talk gibberish and pretend to be crazy.

Quantum consciousness on the cards again?

Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' corroborates theory of consciousness | e! Science News

Penrose & Hameroff's much derided theory that quantum effects in brain cell microtubules are key to animal and human consciousness seems to still be a possibility.

It works for the guys

Confronting a Sexual Rite of Passage in Malawi - Beenish Ahmed - The Atlantic

We all know that some tribal societies have had the oddest ideas about how to mark the transition of puberty, but I don't recall reading before about how they deal with it in Malawi.  (People who think the Dutch take sex education too far too early just should not read it.)

The main thing that struck me while reading the article is that teenage boys must consider it a fantastic system.    The adverse consequences in terms of health seem to primarily fall on the girls/young women, although of course some guys run the risk of getting HIV too. It's remarkable how the emphasis seems to be entirely on teaching girls how to please men.

It seems amazing that it has not earlier come under attack.

Rhodes scholarships don't seem to have great results...

Tony Abbott wants Syrian 'goodies' to help and end the civil unrest | News.com.au

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott arrived at the World Economic Forum
repeating his line that the Syrian situation was "baddies vs. baddies." ...

“The difficulty in Syria is that - as I famously, perhaps infamously
said during the election campaign - it often seems like a case that
involves baddies versus baddies,” he said.

“I guess the best way for all of them to demonstrate that at least
some of them are goodies is to lay down their arms and try to ensure
that the conflict… starts to subside.”

Judith Curry: credibility in freefall

Rabett Run: Curry vs. Curry


More proof, if it was needed, that Judith Curry has no credibility in the way she approaches the overall question of climate change.

Quite serious if correct

Frequency of extreme El Ninos to double as globe warms : Nature News & Comment


And here's another report from ABC: Extreme El Nino events set to double

An inconsistency unexplained (yes, he's still talking about kid's movies)

I realised today that I seem to have inconsistent views on animation.

In my negative comments about Frozen, I said that computer animation that is close to photorealistic but which portrays humans with a cartoonish aspect (consider the enormous eyes in Frozen, for example) is distracting, as it makes the characters look like moving dolls.

Yet in my positive review of ParaNorman and Coraline, I made it clear that I can get a very particular kind of enjoyment from well done stop motion animation, where the characters really are "moving dolls".

This does seem odd, and I am not sure of the explanation.

I suppose I should say that it is not as if stop motion per se makes for a pleasing film - God knows there was a lot of stop motion dross made in the 60's and 70's for kids' TV (Christmas themed specials in particular) and I was never a fan.    But then again, the quality of the animation in those films compared to the output of Laika or Aardman movies at their best just bears no comparison.

(Speaking of Aardman, I enjoyed Rex the Runt on TV a great deal, and like the wry humour of Wallace and Grommit, but their last movie "The Pirates" was a serious "miss".)

So, to enjoy a stop motion film, it has to still have a good script.  But when it does, the appreciation of all the manual, hand crafted work that has gone into creating them somehow makes them very special.

As to why I don't like computer animation when it has the same sort of visual effect - I am still not sure.

I was partly inspired to think about this while listening to a repeat of The Uncanny Life of Puppets on Radio National.  I have good reason to be thinking about puppets over the last year - I did, after all, see one of the most spectacularly successful stage shows featuring a giant puppet only 6 months ago.

I think that this comment on why puppets can be effective is perhaps relevant to stop motion animation:

Amanda Smith:  In playing around with scale - puppets are often smaller or larger than life size - in that playing around with scale, and in looking lifelike but not too lifelike - as puppets also often are - is this something to do with their kind of strange compelling power? In looking sort of human but not entirely?

Neville Tranter: It’s very strange because what happens to the audience is: the audience know it’s a puppet. Everything is transparent. You can see right through it and it’s all in the imagination. It’s pure suggestion. But at the same time the fact that you can see how it’s being done makes it  even - strangely enough - it makes it even more magical.

Oddly, last week I also heard a bit of Phillip Adams talking to stage actor/director Robyn Nevin, and they mentioned how the very artificiality of stage productions is sometimes what makes them  particularly memorable. 

All very complicated, our perceptions of representations of life, isn't it?

 

Marriage and divorce

A couple of odd stories about marriage, divorce and religion:

*  Utah polling indicates that in the space of a mere 10 years the State has gone from aggressively against same sex marriage to a 50/50 "meh" attitude.   

While I am still completely unconvinced about gay marriage, it is polling like this in Western countries which makes me think it is inevitable and not worth fretting about.   I suspect it will come in and be an option taken up by fewer and fewer couples over time anyway.

*  An American study indicates it's not good for your marriage to even live near a bunch of conservative Protestants:

Divorce is higher among religiously conservative Protestants – and even drives up divorce rates for other people living around them, a new study finds.

Paranomal & ParaNorman

A couple of nights ago I feel asleep on the sofa while the TV was on, but woke up in time to see the last half or so of Paranormal Activity, the faux reality movie very much in the vein of Blair Witch Project.  It made a lot of money, at least compared to the cost to make it.  (Box Office Mojo says $193 million on a - wait for it - $15,000 budget.)  So there have been several sequels, not that they seem to attract much critical attention now.

I thought it was crap.   Sure, watching it late at night while everyone else in the house is asleep made it feel a bit creepy at times (it's really the silence that is effective), but by the time it got to the climax, it was just silly.   Bizarrely, it got an 83% approval score on Rottentomatoes, although I see David Stratton found it "extremely unthrilling, very obvious, very clichéd. We've seen it all before."   Hear hear.

The second movie I watched this weekend with "para" in the title was last years ParaNorman.   I bought it on DVD for my daughter as a Christmas gift (not the only one, I hasten to add) and this was the second time we watched it together.

It is a terrific film.

Made by the same company (Laika) that made the very impressive, if somewhat narratively unclear, Coraline, it uses the same beautiful and engaging stop motion animation to great effect.   If you liked the look and feel of Coraline, you will also love this movie.

Apart from its look, the script combines humour that is sometimes slapstick, sometimes beautifully subtle; scares and (honestly) emotional depth that may get to the adults watching more than the kids.

I'm happy to see I am not alone in enjoying it - there's an 87% approval rating at RT, and it got an Oscar nomination last year (but losing out to Brave - what an absolute travesty of a decision that was!)

It didn't make much money at the box office - $107 million on a $60 million budget; and even Coraline was only marginally more financially successful. (I am also disturbed to see that the very enjoyable Wes Anderson stop motion version of Fantastic Mr Fox was pretty much a financial disaster that barely recovered its budget.  Why don't more people go to see these films at the cinema?   Done well, they have a "hand made" warmth and charm that is just a pleasure to watch in every frame. And there sure doesn't seem to be a lot of justice in the world when the cheapo Paranormal Activity makes so much money for so little craft.)     But it seems at least that Laika is successful enough that they have another film coming out in 2014, and this very charming teaser trailer gives you an idea as to why their films cost so much:



I see there is also a great short video from the studio about the making of ParaNorman:



May this company continue to have critical success, and make more money in the future too.

A likely explanation for some ball lightning

Natural ball lightning probed for the first time - environment - 16 January 2014 - New Scientist

I don't think it can possibly explain all ball lightning - such as the well attested cases where small balls have appeared inside houses and even an airplane - but it appears there is a good explanation for one type:

In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event. When a bolt struck the ground, a glowing ball about 5 metres wide rose up and travelled about 15 metres, disappearing after 1.6 seconds.

The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there's also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

Movies really could be much shorter...

Neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds

Not such a great idea

Privatising Australia Post � Harry Clarke

I like it when Harry Clarke gets in a narky mood, and the second line in this post about privatising Australia Post is a great example:

Its a weak argument from a posturing bunch of low-intellect phonies who are promoting self-interest, neo-con ideology and third-rate economics.

The reasons why are set out succinctly in the post, and I find them pretty convincing.

Heinlein taken down

Libertarian types like to quote Robert Heinlein's comment that "an armed society is a polite society", yet anyone who has been to the United States can't see much evidence for that.  (I am surprised that I can Google up no evidence of a sociologist ever doing study of this: comparing States which have the most lax concealed carry laws with those with much tighter restrictions.)

Of course libertarians are not much interested in evidence anyway, they just have an ideological agenda to run; but it seems pretty obvious to normal folk that an armed society is not primarily a more polite society (if it is more polite at all) - it's primarily a more dangerous society for getting shot.

And the thing that really strikes me about the last year or two of shooting tragedies in the US is how readily it's glossed over that it was legally purchased weapons that were involved the killing.  I mean, doesn't that make it obvious that it doesn't matter that the buyer appears to be a "good guy" at the time of purchase:  what matters is how the gun eventually comes to be used.   In other words, the problem is the guns being everywhere.

A good article in The Guardian puts this all in perspective.  Here are the crucial paragraphs:

The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.

To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.

Stunning figures that for any sane person means we are very glad to live under Australian gun laws rather than American.   Here's the final paragraph from the article:

 You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.

Another fake crisis considered

Economists dispute audit commission's federal government growth claims

This time on the size of government.  Some of these figures are from the ACTU, which means they should be approached with some caution, but still, here it is:

It says the commission should also be aware the size of government has not ''expanded significantly'' if it is measured by reference to government employment.

''In June 1996, the Commonwealth employed 354,800 people in the general government sector. As at June 2012, the number stood at just 250,000.

''Commonwealth government employment is lower now, as a share of the population or total employment, than it has ever been before. ABS statistics show that the number of people employed in the general government sector [across all levels of government] fell in 2011-12 for the first time since 1998-99.''

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows Australia has one of the lowest-taxing, lowest-spending governments in the OECD.

According to the most recent figures, Australian government spending accounts for 35 per cent of nominal GDP. In the euro area, it is 49.5 per cent. In the US it is 38 per cent

And Andrew Leigh weighs in:

''It's recognised by all serious commentators that the size of government in Australia is pretty close to Korea and the United States, and far smaller than Sweden and Finland,'' Mr Leigh said.

''Australia is a low-taxing country and the tax-to-GDP share fell by about one percentage point under the previous government.''

Sounds pretty convincing to me. 

Already prepared for next Halloween

Found here.  And no, I would not wear speedos with it. 

Physics worth doing

Backreaction: Why quantize gravity?

Poor Bee Hossenfelder isn't having much luck in finding funding for her field of quantum gravity, but she makes an elegant argument in this post as to why this is a subject worth research dollars.  

Fake crisis already averted

Australia ranked one of the three best countries to do business in

Interesting to note that it was a conservative think tank claiming this - before there was any talk of an Abbott "repeal day".   Apparently, our nightmarish over regulation looks different from the US.  

Missing heat in some detail

Climate change: The case of the missing heat : Nature News

Here's a pretty lengthy and interesting discussion on the "missing heat" issue, mainly concentrating on what goes on in the Pacific Ocean.   You know, PDO, El Nino, etc.

It notes that there is a minority view that AGW might be driving the lengthy La Nina conditions which, if true, might provide a long term mechanism for some cooling.   (It would mean models need adjusting down.)   However, many modelling attempts apparently indicate the opposite, that longer term AGW will drive more El Nino's.

The article ends on this note:

Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

It sounds a bit peculiar, doesn't it, talking of the Pacific as if it is one dish of water that "shloshes" about from one side to the other.  

A Quiggin post where Spielberg gets a mention

John Quiggin - The Repubs won’t Douthat (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

This Quiggin post is of interest because he again notes the movement ("defection") of several formerly Republican intellectuals to the left in the US, and predicts that Douthat may have to do the same if he is intellectually honest.

Sounds plausible.

But also - Steven Spielberg as a Democrat funder gets mentioned in comments a couple of times.  Seems some people think he would oppose tax increases on the top 20% percent,  but how dare they pre judge him on that!

In other Spielberg observations (by me):   I have been meaning to note for some time that 2013 was kind of depressing on the upcoming movie front because no one knows what Spielberg will next direct.   It seems he has been uncommitted to anything for about a year now, and I have no idea what he has been doing with himself.

I suppose he's entitled to a break, but please, Steven, come back!  I have a few ideas if you are short of them.

(Update:  In other Spielbergian news, I noticed somewhere recently that Poltergeist is to be remade.  Why?  In a sign of the bankruptcy of novel ideas in Hollywood, it seems a hell of a lot of 1980's films are now slated for remake.  None of them as good as Poltergeist, though.)

More from the "only in America" files

*  12 year old boy carries sawn off shot gun to school and shoots two students.   Yeah, Heinlein, an armed society is a polite society, is it?   (I thought about that yesterday too about the story where an argument in a cinema turned into a fatal shooting by at 71 year old.)

*  Neo nazis try to take over a town. 

Evil Twins

BBC News - Twin DNA test: Why identical criminals may no longer be safe

I didn't realise there have been a number of cases around the world where prosecutions have been thwarted by the police being unable to be sure which identical twin committed the offence.

Evil president sounds pretty normal to me

What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic

Nothing special about this report about what's its like to be in a cafe when Obama turns up for a staged media event, except that it makes the President sound rather normal.

I suspect Rush Limbaugh will still find something sinister about it.   (Limbaugh is the subject of another Atlantic article today, which notes his recent explanation that he intuitively knows true Conservatives are right about everything, and never sexually harass people.  Republicans who have strayed from the "true Conservative" line on anything - such as Chritie - don't get the same treatment though.)

Surprising coral

Coral reefs in Palau surprisingly resistant to naturally acidified waters

Scientists have found corals in one place with surprisingly highly "acidified" water which are doing surprisingly well.   They hasten to point out this goes against a lot of other examples in the world, but the reason why this bunch are fine remains very unclear.

Biology is very complicated...

Fun research

Reflections in the eye contain identifiable faces

Has this already been used in a crime or science fiction show?   I feel pretty sure it has, but can't remember where.

Scientific explanation for beer goggles

New study shows alcohol impacts vision by 30 per cent

Proof that Second Amendment nutters are vindictive nutters

Target: Me - Dick Metcalf - POLITICO Magazine

Read what happens when a gun loving, life long, career shooter and journalist makes a legal observation deemed to be heresy amongst his kin:

“Way too many gun owners seem to believe any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement,” I wrote. “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

It's a miracle...sorta

Miracle fruit brings a change in taste › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (ABC Science)

While in Canberra on holiday we went to Questacon, the gigantic kids' science centre, and in its shop I found "miracle fruit" tablets.  We gave them a try last night at home.

This red berry fruit has featured on some TV programs in the last few years, and an interesting account of what they do (make sour acid things like a lemon taste sweet) is at the link above.  The thing you buy at the shop is a biggish tablet made from the dried pulp of the fruit.

The effect really is interesting to experience, not just because it makes lemon taste entirely palatable (to the detriment of your tooth enamel no doubt),  but because (as Karl says) it makes it taste really intensely sweet, rather as if you have popped a few saccharine tablets on your tongue at once.  And the effect seemed to last quite a long time.   Normal sweet things aren't much changed in flavour.

I was interested to read in Karl's account that in the early 1970's, it was hoped that it may be used as an artificial sweetener of sorts:

It took until 1968 for two separate groups of scientists to isolate the active ingredient. It turned out to be a chemical that was mostly protein with about 191 amino acids, and about 14 per cent carbohydrate (sugars such as mannose, galactose and fucose). The active ingredient was given the name 'miraculin'.

Soon after miraculin was isolated, Robert Harvey, an American biomedical postgraduate student, became aware of its wonderful property. 

At the time, the artificial sweeteners (which have sweetness, and virtually zero kilojoules) had a slightly noticeable after-taste. 

But Robert Harvey realised that miraculin did not. He tried mightily to market it as an alternative sweetener, one that was based entirely upon a natural product. 

But in 1974, just as he was about to launch it, the US Food and Drugs Administration refused to classify it as 'generally recognised as safe', despite the West Africans having eaten miraculin for centuries with no problems. 

Robert Harvey could not afford the several years of testing needed, so miraculin never made it into the marketplace.

All rather interesting...

Just get Bolt on board and be done with

Ha!  The intellectual, um, bogan-isation? of the Catallaxy blog is nearly complete, with "come back and fight, you Lefties, there's still a culture war I want to win"  Nick Cater now becoming a regular poster there, apparently.

The blog has gone into a tail spin of intellectual credibility over the last couple of years - for any post that actually contains something useful in terms of economic analysis (it happens about once every three or four months now) there will be scores of posts of the kind where Judith Sloan tosses her hair and complains about all the tosh from teachers and Greenies she had to put up with over the years;  Steve Kates doing his excruciatingly simplistic Tea Party/Fox News analysis of US politics (when he's not explaining again how he's the only economist who really understands Say's Law);  and Sinclair Davidson hyperventilating about how anyone (including Jews) who dares question the wisdom of repealing s18 of the Racial Discrimination Act is an enemy of All Things Good.  (The IPA campaign on freedom of speech has been the most hyperbolic think tank campaign I can ever recall.)

What I don't understand is how these people do not see that the way they talk on this blog harms their credibility generally.  The blog is certainly, to my mind, a thriving advertisement against any economics student even contemplating going to RMIT. 

Libertarians think a society where this can happen is a good idea

Man shot dead at movies after texting | World news | theguardian.com

A retired Florida policeman has been charged with murder after allegedly shooting a man who texted during a film.

Authorities said Curtis Reeves, 71, and Chad Oulson, 43, got into an argument before the screening of the film Lone Survivor when Reeves asked Oulson to stop texting.

“Somebody throws popcorn. I’m not sure who threw the popcorn,” said witness Charles Cummings. “And then bang, he was shot.”

Who knows until they are visited

BBC News - Few asteroids are worth mining, suggests Harvard study

There's an enormous amount of uncertainty, it seems, as to the number of asteroids which may be of the metallic iron-nickel variety which is presumably the main type worth mining.

A pro space mining source also claims this in the article, and count me as surprised:

"We have only discovered 1% of the asteroids in the Solar System - and we are discovering them at a larger and larger rate. We discover two or three asteroids a day. If we get from 1% to 10%, then the 650,000 asteroids we have discovered jumps to 6.5 million."

Some startling figures

Quark Soup by David Appell: Climate Change: The Next 10,000 Years

David Appell has been reading up on how long human induced climate change is likely to last.  The answer seems to be - at least 10,000 years.  (!)

Time to look at fertilizing the oceans again, perhaps, as the only large-ish scale means of reducing CO2 that seems vaguely possible.

Bad news for gym owners

Do fast workouts really work?

The article is light on detail, but it does seem that the idea of short, sharp workouts being as good as long, tedious exercise has really caught on in the US.

Good news for people like me, who have always found lengthy exercise a boring waste of time.  Harry Clarke recently linked to this article, from which I have cut the example set of exercises:

 

Interesting.   Perhaps I should now spend two years evaluating which set of exercises is best for me.

Guardian goodness

Two good columns in the Guardian recently:

*  Greg Jericho on the pitfalls of privatisation (why is it he sounds so much more convincing than "just privatise everything" message of Julie Novak I heard on Radio National last week - perhaps it's because he actually suggests an evidence based approach, rather than a pure ideological one?)

*  Lenore Taylor on the culture war approach of this Abbott government.   Donnelly leading a review of curriculum is a bit of a joke;  in my view, he's become a perpetual whinger who doesn't acknowledge improvements towards the centre that education has made over the last decade or so.

I'm waiting for Abbott to announce a Rupert Murdoch led enquiry into media ownership and regulation in Australia.  It would make as much sense.

Drug problems can turn up in the oddest places....

Charts: Vermont's "Full-Blown Heroin Crisis."

No, he didn't like it

We went off to see Frozen yesterday, and I for one came away completely underwhelmed.

The last couple of the so-called Disney "princess"movies - The Princess and the Frog and Tangled - were great in all respects.  In Tangled in particular, the combination of the beauty of the animation and music in a key scene nearly brought me to tears; but both movies made a real effort in the slapstick-y style of the humour to appeal to boys as well as girls.

Frozen is a fizzle is any way you care to compare it.   The music is a mess in all respects - it starts off sounding awfully like something from the Lion King (for no discernible reason), then has an all male chorus song with lyrics I couldn't decipher, and the "hit"tune is of the pretty generic Broadway pop-ish style that is quite forgettable (it reminded me of the style of a couple of the songs I have heard from Wicked.)  

The computer animation has received lots of praise, but I have to say that when you get to this level of photo realism, the characters start to look at bit distractingly like actual toys:  it's as if you were watching Ken and Barbie come to life, which is OK in a Toy Story movie, but not so much in one where they are meant to be people.   I have noticed this a bit before in other computer animated movies, but it bothered me particularly in this one for some reason.

The biggest problem is with the story and characters - the title character is pretty resolutely annoying throughout the whole thing; the sympathetic male lead is underwritten; and it really is (to my mind) the most relentlessly girl oriented Disney film since (probably) the Little Mermaid, but without the fantastically catchy hit song.   And, it's just not very funny or witty. 

So why has it been a substantially bigger box office success than Tangled?   (Box Office Mojo shows US box office of $300 million already; Tangled had only $200 million.)  I have absolutely no idea.  

Both movies seem to have the same high scores on Rotten Tomatoes, and I was surprised to see that Anthony Lane from the New Yorker was listed as liking Frozen.   But this is an example of the sometimes dubious tallying of Rotten Tomatoes, as when you go read his actual review he hardly gave it a strong endorsement:

In short, where is our villain? Idina Menzel, who voices Elsa, played the green-faced lead in “Wicked,” on Broadway, so everything is set for vengeance and spite, but nothing happens. True, Elsa starts waltzing around in a long skirt slashed to the thigh, which is hot stuff for Disney, but, still, Cruella de Vil would skin her alive.

The other sister is Anna (Kristen Bell), who follows on from Belle, in “Beauty and the Beast,” and Rapunzel, in “Tangled,” being spunky and reckless, with a hint of tomboy, though retaining her capacity to swoon if anything princely shows up. Most of the men, by contrast, look milky and mild, with a hint of tomgirl, and, once a chatting snowman is introduced, presumably to keep your toddlers satisfied, much of the movie turns to slush. Disney has thus arrived at a mirror image of its earlier self: the seriously bad guys and the top-grade sidekicks—the Shere Khans and the Baloos—are now a melting memory, while the chronic simperers, like Cinderella, have been superseded by tough dames. As Anna sings, “For years I’ve roamed these empty halls, / Why have a ballroom with no balls?” Go get ’em, sister. 

 He's still the wittiest reviewer around (and that also explains the reminder of Wicked from the songs.)

My negative reaction to the movie caused some interesting family revelations - both my wife and daughter rated it as better than Tangled or Princess and the Frog - my wife saying she particularly didn't like the latter.  I only recalled her saying she quite liked the music from it,  and in fact I bought her the CD.   (My daughter and son both like the Randy Newman jazzy style of the music, actually.)  I kept wanting to explain last night why I thought this movie was crook - the family kept telling me to stop going on about it, but fortunately there is always this outlet, which I can always imagine someone has read to this point, even if no one actually got past the first line. 

The other big, intensely girl orientated animation by Disney/Pixar, Brave, was also a dud.   It seems to me someone at Disney has suddenly forgotten how to make them.

Cold weather

I suppose I should put a link or two here about how the cold American winter is not that cold for the country, polar vortex or not.

I thought this post at Wonkblog dealt with the whole climate change denying mocking response of the Right very well.  Except that, of course, most of them are too stupid to read it.

Truly, the Right is currently intellectually bankrupt, but when will this finally pass?   We really have to wait for the next global heatwave (to get past 1998 on Roy Spencer's chart) before they'll reconsider?  (Funnily enough, Spencer's figure for the month of December 2013 does not even show it as a particularly cool month, globally.  Yet Roy himself has joined in the "ha ha!" mood, showing what an ideologically driven tosser he is.  Judith Curry did the same on her blog about the ship stuck in ice in Antarctica - quoting serious papers discussing why Antarctic sea ice is lately increasing, none of which doubt AGW - but then going "ha ha, isn't it hilarious how this is a PR disaster for AGW.")

They are not to be taken seriously.

It might be important, or it might not

Cloning quantum information from the past | KurzweilAI

If I could understand the explanation better, I might be able to tell if this is of significance to the issue of an understandable means for a future resurrection.

An odd thing to be wrong about

N-test legacy in stratosphere bigger than thought

It was previously thought that plutonium radionuclides—radioactive atoms which can take decades or thousands of years to degrade—were present in the stratosphere only at negligible levels.

It was also believed that levels of these pollutants were higher in the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere that is closest to the ground, than in the stratosphere. Both ideas turn out to be wrong, according to the new study, whose authors also found no likelihood of a hazard to health.

Radiation levels in the stratosphere are "more than three orders of magnitude higher than previously thought," study co-author Jose Corcho of the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection told AFP.

Somehow, I expected scientists to have a better grip on this topic than they appear to have had.

A look at US income inequality

Is income inequality as bad as Obama says? In many ways, yes. - CSMonitor.com

This seemed to me to be a pretty fair and dispassionate look at the topic. Yes, they do have a problem. 

Frank should give Steve a call

The Agony of Frank Luntz - Molly Ball - The Atlantic

I haven't really noticed this Frank Luntz before, but given that he is a right wing figure who appears to have slid in depression after Obama's election win, and blames it all on Obama being a divisive figure who is ruining society, he should get on the phone to Australia's own analyst of the "damaged women" who foolishly voted for Obama, Steven Kates.    They appear to have much in common. 

(Actually, at least Luntz has enough nous to recognise Romney made major campaigning mistakes.  I don't think Kates has even acknowledged that.   But their insistence that the problem is with a large slab of the public - which was just too stupid to understand - marks both of them as political dunderheads.)

More brain boosting discussion

Can I increase my brain power? | Science | The Guardian

I should have added this to my last post, but for those interested in the future of artificial brain enhancement (I'm hoping for a electric skull cap to hold off deterioration by the time I'm 80), this article is a pretty good read.

Three odd science stories for the New Year

*  I didn't realise it was so big, either.  (The Andromeda Galaxy, if you could actually see it fully in the night sky.)

*  The NSA is looking into quantum computing?   That, along with Google (and its near impossible to follow rules about what they can do with info they glean from use of their products) means you may as well abandon any last hope you had of future privacy right now.  In fact, you should probably buy and install the bedroom webcam while they are cheap before they become compulsory.

*  The hunt for evidence for time travel on the internet fails for now.  I could have told them that.  Some years ago I invited future scientists to email me (they don't have to personally visit, just send the information back in time) next week's winning Lotto numbers, but they never arrived.  (Just in case - future scientists, you can find my permanent email address at the side.  Don't give up!)

Drug commentary

So, while I was on holiday, I see that David Brooks has copped a lot of flak for his column which might be summarised as "sure, I tried marijuana as a teenager too, but all successful people realise that it's basically for losers.  We shouldn't experiment with legally selling it."

Much of the criticism is over the top, I think, and they let indignation get in the way of some sound points.  (See the Slate article Should Black Kids Pay for David Brooks’ Pothead Sins? as a good example.)

And, let's face it, it is hard not to be a little annoyed with the "don't do as I did, you young 'uns, or you might not end up as President" approach of, well, US Presidents.  

As for libertarians;  for goodness sake, they keep on citing Portugal's decriminalisation of possession of drugs as if it is something they think should be emulated, when in fact the system is nothing like an easy going libertarian dream at all.  Sure, the possessor of small quantities may not face court, instead they face this (assuming Wikipedia has it right):

The drugs are confiscated, and the suspect is interviewed by a “Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction” (Comissões para a Dissuasão da Toxicodependência – CDT). These commissions are made up of three people: A social worker, a psychiatrist, and an attorney.^[9][10] The dissuasion commission have powers comparable to an arbitration committee, but restricted to cases involving drug use or possession of small amounts of drugs. There is one CDT in each of Portugal’s 18 districts.

Oddly enough, one of the fairest takes on Brook's article is to be found in an Economist blog, even though that magazine keeps on talking up relaxing drugs laws.   (And, everyone has to admit that America has had issues with dealing with drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal one.  But the Australian and European approaches have generally not resulted in excessive criminal prosecution for small time users, and we have long been advanced in matters such as the methodone program for heroin users, and needle exchange programs.)

As it says in the Economist article that I'm recommending:

The point is that however the cost/benefit formula is constructed, there are factors on both sides of the equation. Lives have been ruined by marijuana as well as by its prohibition. It may be facile to lament the legalisation of the drug while ignoring the damage wrought by prohibition, but it is equally silly to assume that there will be no losers from the unprecedented experiments in Colorado and Washington. Mr Brooks may sound supercilious and priggish, but he is a columnist for the New York Times; that is virtually a job requirement. He does not explicitly argue for prohibition to be maintained, as many of his critics appear to assume. Nor would his conclusions be incompatible with widespread decriminalisation of marijuana, which would alleviate much of the harm of prohibition without carrying the implicit imprimatur of state approval Mr Brooks dislikes so much (that is not my position, nor that of The Economist, but it is not a dishonourable one). Opposition to marijuana legalisation is the position of a substantial if dwindling minority. Perhaps Mr Brooks's column is best understood as an expression of that minority concern.

[Update: here's a short article from a site I am completely unfamiliar with, linking to other pieces I haven't actually read yet, about the genuine complexity of legalising the use of marijuana.]

As for a broader bit of commentary on drug use, I was quite impressed by this article in Slate:

Cocaine trafficking horrors: Users are complicit in the atrocities of the drug trade

in which a scientist can't get over the fact that rich Americans who want their cocaine simply will not factor in that they are feeding a horrendous situation in Mexico.  Sure, they can say the true blame is the government anti-drugs regime (at an international scale) that sets up the money to be made in drugs by criminals.  Put surely the proper, moral thing to do in that case is to campaign against that approach to drugs, while not personally feeding the system that is causing criminal mayhem in poorer countries.

I imagine some readers might argue that you could say the same thing applied during Prohibition, and ask whether I think all people who went to a "speakeasy" in that period where immoral too.  Well, basically, yes: I think they were if they knew the extent to which they were directly fuelling murder in their country.  The thing is, as bad as gang warfare might have been in the mafia in that period, it was  nothing on the scale of what people can read about in the situation in Mexico and other countries today.  (Read the Slate article on that point.)   Also, people are (or should be) better exposed to the effects of their paying for drugs now given modern communications compared to how people got the news 90 years ago.

The argument that cocaine is a drug which, like marijuana, is capable of use just for occasional recreational fun is a two edged sword - libertarian types will puff up and get indignant about why such a drug is criminalised and banned at all, but I say the fact that some users only want it for that special one night buzzy feel makes it even worse that they will not consider the dire consequences of their feeding the criminality in Mexico.

Why can't people just live with the one, ancient, social (but still dangerous) drug that comes in thousands of taste varieties?  

UPDATE:   Add Slate's David Weigel to the list of writers over reacting to Brooks.  In fact, while Brook's "confession" of once not being to perform in front of his class due to overindulgence was a bit embarrassing, Weigel comes up with is own confession which I find a tad cringeworthy in its own way:

Actual confession: I smoke pot. I've never bought it, but I've had it when friends bring it out to enliven a party. Frankly, I'm a terrible pothead. Having never really smoked cigarettes, I'm all thumbs at lighting a pipe or joint. The last time I smoked, earlier this week, the product overcame the wan barriers of my tolerance and I passed out on a kitchen floor—actually a pretty excellent goodbye-to-the-old-year metaphor, though somewhat embarrasing at the time. (UPDATE: Should note that the time before this, pot was part of a lovely evening of conversation and record-playing. It's like any other drug, and the experiences vary.)

David, David.   As I assume you are mature enough to not pass out through over indulgence in alcohol any more, it's not that great an advertisement for marijuana to tell us you passed out from it a bit unexpectedly only last weekend.

And then he runs with the "it's not so different from alcohol anyway" argument:

Point is, I didn't fear or confront any other consequences. I knew I wouldn't because none of the people I've smoked with, in D.C. at least, have found it impeded their work any more than a bit of heavy drinking would. As a habit, it's somewhat less dangerous than heavy drinking, as it neuters the violent instinct, is hard to overindulge on, and isn't as fun to ingest. (Your choice: Suck on a wet roll of paper full of vegetation in your friend's bedroom, or knock back an aged and aerated red wine across the table from a date?)

 Oh OK, so like I argue, good alcoholic beverages can taste great and  (I take David's word for it) are more fun to ingest.   So why do people who want to use it (say) once a month so insistent that they are missing out on much if they can't get it?  Go buy a particularly good bottle of one of that "more fun to ingest"drug instead.

Look, as the Economist article suggests, what most of these attacks on Brooks are suggesting is that moderate personal use of marijuana should be largely decriminalised, because the over the top approach to criminalising it in the US has gone too far.  Australians and Europeans can largely agree with that.

But the Brooks article is about the effect of outright legalisation, which is quite a different thing.

New Year improvements

I'm suffering a touch of New Year, post Christmas holiday ennui, especially as going to Canberra made the sensation of  humidity and heat of Brisbane feel more extreme than ever.   Tonight I am sure I can smell the smoke from the week long fire on Stradbroke Island too.

Anyhow, before I start posting my fascinating notes from a driving holiday, I am thinking about getting serious about losing weight, and that intermittent fasting idea does hold appeal.

Here are a couple of recent articles about it:  one from the Los Angeles Times, warning that it is not really studied enough in humans; and another from the BBC, indicating that it seems to have long lasting effects beyond weight loss.  (And really, that could be a reason to try it anyway.)

I did think about this a couple of months ago, and started looking around for reasonable options for the 600 calorie days (I would just follow the Michael Mosley plan of 2 days a week fasting - Tuesday and Thursday seem the picks of the week, and certainly the "fast every other day" version has no appeal.) It is trickier than I thought working out a day's eating to exactly 600 calories, and often sources on the web refer to brands of food from overseas, but I could get there, I'm sure.

Perhaps next week is the start.We'll see...

Now to greet me every morning....

Humble beginnings

A pleasant Christmas, World.

Good Christians

Heart of the slums

This was a pretty remarkable story in Fairfax over the weekend about a couple of Christians who take their religion very seriously in terms of helping others.

Amongst other things, I did not realise Bangkok was quite as "slummy" as the article indicates.

You can tell the news isn't inspiring me this weekend...

Yes, I'm down to re-posting cat Christmas photos...

Baby face

I was very amused by the photo used for this story on Slate this morning:

Smoke away, kids

If Marijuana Legalization Sends the Wrong Message to Teenagers, Why Aren't They Listening? - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Reason, unsurprisingly, poohs poohs the idea that legal marijuana (medical or otherwise) has caused an increase in teenage use of the drug.   Yet it does note:

It is true that marijuana use among teenagers has been "drifting higher in recent years" (as the University of Michigan researchers who oversee the Monitoring the Future Study put it). But this upward drift began around 2007, whereas the first medical marijuana law (California's) was enacted in 1996. In between, past-month use among high school seniors went up and down, but it did not exceed the 1996 rate until 2011, 15 years after cannabis was first legalized for medical use. It certainly does not look like marijuana reform is driving increases in adolescent pot smoking. If you dig a little deeper, comparing cannabis consumption trends in states with and without medical marijuana laws, there is little evidence that such legislation boosts pot smoking by teenagers.

 and they end up saying:

  I would therefore not be surprised if legalization is accompanied by an increase in marijuana consumption by teenagers, although not because of the message it sends so much as the increased access it brings.

Yeah, talk about your finest of lines, there.

In all honesty, given that there seems to me to now be clear acceptance amongst the medical researchers that teenagers in particular should not be using marijuana due to its effect on still developing brains, what I am most surprised at in the Reason story is the percent of American teenagers who do use it by year 10, let alone year 12.

This, of course, will be a matter of little concern to libertarians. 

Note to time travellers

Was Jesus a common name back when he was alive?

If one was travelling back to Israel at the time of Christ, it seems to me that it may not be all that easy to identify Him until he started to get a reputation as a preacher*:

Many people shared the name. Christ's given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration of Yeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of Jesus' death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in reference to four separate characters—including a descendent of Aaron who helped to distribute offerings of grain (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:2)....

What was Jesus' last name? It wasn't Christ. Contemporaries would have called him Yeshua Bar Yehosef or Yeshua Nasraya. (That's "Jesus, son of Joseph" or "Jesus of Nazareth.") Galileans distinguished themselves from others with the same first name by adding either "son of" and their father's name, or their birthplace.

Now, I don't know how big a town Nazareth was at the time, but it seems a very good bet that there was more than one "Jesus of Nazareth", and (I would guess) another local "Jesus, son of Joseph" sometime before our Jesus hit 30.

And while on the topic:  I see that Wikipedia has at this entry (under the subheading "Jesus") a list of science fiction books and stories featuring time travel back to Jesus' time.

The one story idea which I don't see mentioned there is a time travelling expedition from the future to make sure the Jesus story as shown in the Gospel happens.  (Sponsored by someone from the Catholic Church who has lost faith, but figures on utilitarian grounds that the net benefits of belief to society would be worth the fraud, and employing one of the modern illusionists of the kind we see on TV now apparently performing convincing tricks in the middle of the street.) 

Having thought of this idea quite some time ago, it has had the unfortunate effect that when hearing a Gospel reading at Church, my mind often wanders to how a modern illusionist would replicate the effect.   Certainly, the glowing or shining appearance of angels, especially at night, is easy to imagine with simple UV light; unconsumed burning bushes (yes, I know, wrong Testament) would be easy as, too, and so  on.


*   Yes, I know a bit of Jesus identity confusion did feature in one episode of Red Dwarf, and I'm not being completely original.

Abbott's understanding questioned (again)

RET cuts: Why Abbott has got it all wrong on green energy | Crikey

The argument about the effect of renewable energy on costs to business and households is, I do tend to find, a difficult one to follow.

But, given that I think Abbott is not smart enough to know who to take advice from, I'm naturally willing to believe he's wrong on this, for the reasons outlined in the article above.

The creepy Watts

Quark Soup by David Appell: Being Clear About Watts

It's been clear for years that Anthony Watts is immature in his personal attacks on people in climate science he disagrees with.   (Who can forget his snide questioning of whether they are patriotic enough to fly the American flag), but David Appell has been a recent target of his attention.

What's clear is that Watts just makes things up, both on science*, and in his personal attacks.  

* He had no basis for a claim he made to Andrew Bolt, which I covered a couple of years ago.  Andrew Bolt never corrected it.

Bitcoin dissed

Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire - Charlie's Diary

I have pretty much ignored the Bitcoin story - it seemed to be a popular idea with the same Libertarian crowd that likes the idea of floating artificial islands of nerds doing whatever Libertarians fantasise think it would be cool to do together all day (I dunno - play paintball?) - and therefore it was safe to assume it was a bad and anti-social idea.

So, today I see an article by Charlie Stross with his list of reasons why it is, indeed, a bad and anti-social idea.  (I would have my doubts about the carbon cost issue, though, but everything else seems fair enough.)

I repeat my recent theme - Libertarians are useless.  It probably would be a good idea if they all lived on one giant ship together, as (of course) they would be well armed (you know, just in case), and within 12 months some argument over an arcane matter of economics that no one else in the world worried about would result in a civil war and the sinking of their ship, both literally and metaphorically.

Two issue Tim

What did I say in ranty post yesterday about Tim Wilson not exactly being inundated with work as Human Rights Commissioner?

I noted two issues he is or is likely concerned with:  s18C as used against Andrew Bolt (he's against it), and the anti bikie legislation in Queensland and elsewhere (where anyone could accurately guess - he'd be against it.)

And so it came to pass (it is nearly Christmas), Tim has an article in the Fairfax press this morning in which he talks about two issues - the ones I identified.  (Oh, alright, he mentioned a third one, which has already been decided yesterday by the High Court, so he ain't going to be taking a lot of phone calls on that matter either.)

So we can pretty much see the future here:   Tim will have a lot of arguments at Commission meetings about how his mate Andrew Bolt should never again face the horror of being taken to court when he refuses to acknowledge insulting, race based, mistakes, and will fail to persuade them that the law should be abolished in its entirety. 

And he might take some extra phone calls (more than the 4 or so the HRC currently annually takes on freedom of expression issues) from bikies, in which his response will be "mate, I sympathise, I really do.  And I'm writing an article about it as we speak.  But not much else I can do at the moment, we're waiting on the High Court decision."

What a completely useless, partisan, appointment.

Update:  I see that in comments flying about the internet, many have noted that one would have thought the biggest concern of a "Freedom Commissioner" might well be the incarceration of thousands of attempted immigrants on Christmas and Manus Island.   Has Tim ever been known for talking about them, instead of his mater of Bolt and his really hurt feelings?   Is there a little bit of a problem with "freedom of expression" from those who are involved in this hush-hush business?   And is there anything that the HRC could do about it anyway? 

I see that someone says he was on Insight once when the topic was assylum seekers, but no one has turned up what he actually said.

But lots of people haver noticed his tweet from 2011:

Walked past Occupy Melbourne protest, all people who think freedom of speech = freedom 2 b heard, time wasters ... send in the water cannons

Yes, just what the HRC needs:  a commissioner not afraid to use water canon on people he disagrees with.    

The Useless Libertarians Who Think They're Useful

I don't recall the libertarian types of the Institute of Paid Advocacy (the right wing think tank funded, at least formerly, if not presently, by tobacco companies, and now in the pocket of Gina Rinehart and - I expect - Rupert Murdoch) being particularly concerned about s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act until Andrew Bolt found himself being prosecuted under it.

I assume that Bolt decided to fight rather than apologise for making inaccurate claims in an article with a clearly ridiculing tone.  Or was he put up to a fight by his bosses prepared to fund his defence for the purposes of a bit of corporate grandstanding?  Who knows?  In any event, Bolt lost, has been carrying on like the biggest martyr ever in the history of Australia for free speech, despite his offending columns still being easily Googled to this day (with a "corrective notice" as ordered by the Court heading them), and all the while has had his hand held by the likes of John Roskam and Tim Wilson of the IPA, and Tony Abbott (the professional weathervane who became Prime Minister) while being told soothing words about  how outrageous this whole action has been and he really is a tragic victim.

This has, psychologically for Bolt, been the worst thing that could have been done.

But the IPA, taking their cue from that and the Labor government's Finkelstein review into media regulation (which went no where, given that the government had no particular media scandal to hang their hat on) have decided that Freedom of Speech is the top way they can build a fake political crisis; and their supporters, clearly not the brightest people when assessing genuine political problems, have been happy to send money, despite the publicly available financial reports on the IPA website showing they have cash reserves of 1.5 million dollars which they appear to be saving merely for a rainy day.   Fools and money, etc.

And now this is all topped off by the Abbott government appointing Tim Wilson to be a "Freedom Commissioner" on the Human Rights Commission.   Yes, Tim Wilson from the organisation that has as a policy position the abolition of the HRC.

In this exchange on the Drum with the President of the Commission, Wilson was all outraged that the Commission did not specifically use the words "free speech" in a submission made to the government a year or two ago.

But what is more interesting is what Triggs notes in response (at 2.31) - the Commission takes 17,000 calls a year from the public, with a total of 4 being about freedom of expression.

Yes, Brandis:  for the sake of 4 complaints a year, there is a need to have a Freedom Commissioner on the HRC.

Wilson's sole job seems to be to advocate for a repeal of s18C - the Bolt section - and Wilson's background in IP, trade and climate change denialism indicates no particular experience in matters of human rights at all.   (Oh sure, he's no doubt been to dinners with Andrew Bolt and assured him he's a martyr.)    What else he is supposed to spend his time on once the 18C issue is dealt with by the government - who knows?    Prime advocate for bikies, perhaps, to have the freedom of association in criminal gangs?   Yes, they'll be some useless grandstanding to be done over that, perhaps.  And apart from that issue, given that the Abbott government is not going to introduce anything like what Labor was contemplating for media regulation reform, what is he going to spend his time on?

This is the most blatant political appointment conceivable to an unqualified big mouth and wannabe politician from what has become he most disreputable think tank in the land.  (On that last point, as an example - as far as I know, Sinclair Davidson has never sought to defend the IPA's adoption of Gina Rinehart's Northern Australia "special treatment" program from this criticism by John Quiggin.  Indeed, Davidson carries on like the biggest drama queen of all on the free speech issue, recently telling anyone from the Jewish lobby who are expressing concern about repeal of s18C that this is a some sort of dramatic fork in the road.)

Remember my rule of thumb:  any person who has a good education yet spends their time on climate change denialism - they're not to be trusted on anything.  This applies to Wilson, and anyone from the IPA.   Of their crew, I only have a bare tolerance for Chris Berg, who (as far as I know) tends to steer away from the climate change issue.  Yet he, of course, is also a Freedom drama queen.  They all are. They are also useless and not to be trusted on the matter of the development of good policy.  They know the answers already (small government!  less taxes! climate change is a fraud! Repeat and repeat), and always work backwards from there.