Back to the Mozilla story...

A very mealy-mouthed effort in the Schumpeter blog at The Economist to excuse the scandalous bullying of Eich to leave Mozilla, I think.   But I do recommend one of the comments following:

It's the new phenomenon of homophobophobia, some sort of weird overcorrection for past wrongs. It's like intolerance is such a reprehensible thing that we must be intolerant of it. The truly worrisome thing is that he did nothing overtly intolerant. He was merely supporting something that was, until just a year or so ago, felt by the majority of Americans. Now that that has switched over to a minority, the new majority, empowered by a new standard of political correctness, feels free to persecute the former majority.

Homophobophobia.  I like it.

Credlin analysed

Quite a fascinating profile of political uber operative Peta Credlin in the Fairfax press today.

A few impressions:

*  the way she interacts with Abbott is no doubt the reason for the long standing rumour that they have been more than just friends;

*  the profile is full of assessments which are bending over backwards to excuse her (fully acknowledged) belligerence and aggression on the basis that she has a large part of the Abbott "success";

*  she sounds like exactly the type of overly ideologically driven person who takes politics too seriously and therefore is a detriment to a healthy political climate.

Template works in progress

Got to do something about that heading.  Am working on it...

Wow

There is something especially eye-catching and exhilarating about this picture I just saw on The Independent, even if I have no great desire to hurl myself out of a plane unnecessarily:

The unreliable Andrew Sullivan

It seems to me that Andrew Sullivan gets paid less attention now than he used to, but a comment at Slate about the Mozilla "you must support gay marriage or leave" story led me to check his views.

It turns out that he is pretty appalled by the Mozilla story:

This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.

So, good call.

But just above that, he weighs in on the Mayo Clinic pro circumcision paper, and it turns out to be pretty much an anti circ nutter:

The question is whether the slight and contested medical benefits of circumcision outweigh the mutilation’s effects, and whether permanently dulling a man’s sexual sensitivity is something we have a right to impose on boys and men without their consent.

The "loss of sensitivity" angle of this movement has always struck me as crazy, given the perfectly happy sensations God knows how many billion men have had after the operation. 

So, just goes to show - it's hard to find a pundit who always makes sense.

Kissing festival noted

From the Jakarta Post photo caption, a description of an odd festival:

Kiss me, if you can: A Balinese girl (right) tries to avoid a kiss from a man during the Omedan Omedan kissing festival in South Banjar , Denpasar, Bali, on Tuesday. Balinese believe that the festival, held every year on Bali Island, ensures the good health of those taking part and prevents bad luck from hitting the village. During the festival, village priests dump buckets of water over couples to douse their passions.

Catholic priests miss out on such fun.

Anti liberal Left discussed

Brendan O'Neill, playing up to his annoying role of blowhard contrarian with political and philosophical views seemingly picked up at random, wrote on Spiked earlier this week that he couldn't understand how gay marriage became such an orthodoxy so quickly (fair enough, I've said the same myself), but then settles on the reason being:

...the weakness of modern society’s attachment to traditional institutions and long-term commitment, and to the ability of small elites in our post-political age to shape the public agenda in a scarily thoroughgoing fashion.

Again, no problem with the first line up to "institutions", but as for "long term commitment", well the "conservative" argument for gay marriage is that it may enhance commitment amongst same sex couples.  (Not that I am convinced that is a realistic assumption.)  But O'Neill then goes on to concentrate on the scary "small elites".  He ends with this:

For the transformation of gay marriage from just an idea to a juggernaut in the blink of an eye actually has little to do with the expansion of tolerance, but rather speaks to the very opposite phenomenon: the emergence of new forms of intolerance that demand nothing less than moral obedience and mandatory celebration from everyone - or else.

I don't see how the position he ends up at is really much different from the right wing view he earlier derides:

As for the anti side’s claim that a sharp-elbowed gay lobby is demolishing marriage as we knew it, and probably laughing as they go - that veers towards conspiracy-theory territory, echoing the old right’s nonsense about Western culture being under threat from pinkos ‘marching through the institutions’.

So, I think his column is a bit of a dog's breakfast, and his complaint about "new forms of intolerance" does little to explain how the younger generation has swung so strongly in favour of gay marriage.

A much better take on some of the nutty Left's intolerant aggro is to be found at The Nation, in a column about the stupid anti-Colbert campaign. 

It's incredible that some on the Left have apparently lost the ability to recognise satire aimed at the Right.

And I have to agree that campaigns against people who have supported the no gay marriage political cause are too precious, intolerant and annoying.

So, yes, it has to be admitted, there is some resurgence in Left wing anti-Liberalism.   I still don't think s.18C needs amendment at this time, though!

UPDATE:   Slate runs a column in which it is argued that all CEO's who don't support gay marriage deserve to go, because they are anti rights:

Opposing gay marriage in America today is not akin to opposing tax hikes or even the war in Afghanistan. It’s more akin to opposing interracial marriage: It bespeaks a conviction that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others. An organization like Mozilla might tolerate that in an underling, and it might even tolerate it in a CTO. But in a CEO—the ultimate decision-maker and public face of an organization—it sends an awful message. That’s doubly so for an organization devoted to openness and freedom on the Web—not to mention one with numerous gay employees.

I hope this gets some push back in comments!

But regardless of this, which you might say supports O'Neill's complaint, I still do not think that such campaigns have been behind the rapid acceptance of gay marriage by the younger generation.  Indeed, it's not behind things like the quite rapid growth in Catholic acceptance of gay relationships, and now marriage.

The philosopher's underpants, and more

I just posted about circumcision, then philosophy, so it seems apt that we now move on to philosopher's underpants.

I was unaware until watching a recent episode of Horrible Histories (I think its writing is not as good as last season, by the way) that English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is credited by some as having "invented" underpants.

That seems a big claim, but there is some support for it from this 2005 article in Times Higher Education:

The creator of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" principle naturally believed that the dead should be made useful to the living. He would have loved to have carried a donor card. As it was, he left careful instructions about the fate of his body. His medical disciple, Thomas Southwood Smith, was to dissect his body while lecturing on its parts, and an auto-icon was to be created afterward. 

In recent years, the auto-icon has enjoyed much attention and has been a source of many surprises. One of the more unusual emerged when, some 20 years ago, his clothes were taken to the Textile Conservation Centre, then an outpost of the Courtauld Institute at Hampton Court, where they were conserved and left a good deal cleaner than they would have been when he first put them on. 

Bentham was found to be wearing knitted underpants. These later became common male underwear, but he was clearly way ahead of his time - most of his contemporaries just tucked the tails of their shirts between their legs. It is not widely known that the great philosopher of jurisprudence and ground-breaking social scientist was also a pioneer of pants. 

And so, in the 1980s, Bentham's knitted underpants were photographed from every possible angle by a keen young researcher to accompany an article for the journal Textile History , with which I was then involved. Months later, I noted that the piece had not appeared. When I asked why, I was told that the woman in question had left the centre to get married. "Surely marriage and writing an article about Jeremy Bentham's underpants are not incompatible," I found myself saying. Yet the piece has still not been written. I do not know if the young woman is still married.

But, as I expected, the history of underwear is a lot more complicated than that, and the Wikipedia article on undergarments seems a pretty good summary.  I note the "modern era" or mens underwear seems to date for the 1930's:

Modern men's underwear was largely an invention of the 1930s. On 19 January 1935, Coopers Inc. sold the world's first briefs in Chicago. Designed by an "apparel engineer" named Arthur Kneibler, briefs dispensed with leg sections and had a Y-shaped overlapping fly.^[5] The company dubbed the design the "Jockey" since it offered a degree of support that had previously only been available from the jockstrap. Jockey briefs proved so popular that over 30,000 pairs were sold within three months of their introduction. Coopers, having renamed the company Jockey, sent its "Mascul-line" plane to make special deliveries of "masculine support" briefs to retailers across the US. In 1938, when Jockeys were introduced in the UK, they sold at the rate of 3,000 a week.^[5]

In this decade, companies also began selling buttonless drawers fitted with an elastic waistband. These were the first true boxer shorts, which were named for their resemblance to the shorts worn by professional fighters. Scovil Manufacturing introduced the snap fastener at this time, which became a popular addition to various kinds of undergarments.

The article talks about earlier forms of men's underpants, though, and links to an entire article on the "union suit", popular from the mid 1860's, which I suppose you could say was an undergarment "onesie". (If I had seen this picture, I would have thought they were "long johns", but they apparently are the two piece version.) As far as the way union suits were worn, Wikipedia claims:

It was not uncommon until the mid-20th century for rural men to wear the same union suit continuously all week, or even all winter.

However, there is no citation for that claim.

And finally, Googling for the history of  washing underwear has led me to this rather esoteric article:  A History of War Time Laundry and The U.S. Army.

It's contains some rather interesting information:

World War I marked the first real attempt to provide front line soldiers with clean clothes through laundering and sanitation. The risk of massive non-battle disease, coupled with the advent of chemical warfare, kicked slow moving sanitation plans into high gear. The first American military portable laundry unit was completed in October 1917 by the Broadbent Portable Laundry Corporation. It consisted of four trailers carrying the laundry equipment, two trailers carrying supplies and a steam tractor as prime mover and power source. 

Laundry companies were organized to operate the systems led by one second lieutenant and 37 enlisted soldiers. These companies were attached to units who could provide hardstands, good roads and considerable maneuver space. Unfortunately WWI front line soldiers never received adequate laundry service as most of the units were operated primarily in the rear. More than 90 percent of the soldiers on the front line had disease-carrying lice. 

In the years before World War II, the mobile laundry and sanitation units were redesigned into smaller units with a washing machine, an extractor and two steam-heated tumblers for drying clothes. Contracts were let for 1,331 systems and by October 1942, several hundred had been shipped to mobile laundry companies for training. 

Technological changes and innovations continued throughout World War II. An airborne laundry system with two self-contained skid-mounted units needing only fuel, water, and oil to operate. It could be mounted in either a C-47 or a CG-4A glider. The system was designed to service soldiers at isolated sites far from fixed facilities, primarily on the islands of the South Pacific.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, General Patton had a laundry platoon following him around, but they apparently could still acquit themselves well:

With the new units capable of reaching the front lines, the "laundry men" had to pull patrol duty, fight snipers and survive many bombings. One laundry platoon followed Lieutenant General Patton across France and set up on a river bank. In the midst of a battle between American tanks and German Infantry, Technical Sergeant Rufus Pressley, the platoon sergeant, and his men "joined in the fight, captured eight Germans, killed a few, and chased off the remainder." (Quartermaster Training Service Journal, 10 November 1944, page 24.) 

 Gee.  Why haven't I heard about the glorious fighting laundry platoons of World War 2 before?  (Slight snigger.)

Anyway, there's another gap in my knowledge filled.

Putin's narrow philosophical interests

From Philosophy Now:

Kremlinologists were granted a glimpse into Vlad ‘The Inscrutable’ Putin’s ideological motivations, when the Washington Post reported that he had ordered Russia’s regional governors to read three weighty books by 19th and 20th century Russian philosophers. The books are The Philosophy of Inequality by Nikolai Berdyaev; Justification of the Good by Vladimir Solovyov and Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin. Putin has quoted from these three philosophers a number of times in recent speeches. Commentators scrapped over what all this might mean. David Brooks of the New York Times said that the three philosophers shared three central ideas: Russian exceptionalism, devotion to the Orthodox church, and autocracy. He claimed that all three had lurid, grandiose visions of Russia’s mission in the world. Others (such as Damon Linker) claimed this to be an oversimplistic reading.

Simple operation, big benefits

Gawd, this will send some anti-circ nutters into a frenzy of attempted rebuttal:

A paper in Mayo Clinic Proceedings finds that the benefits of infant male circumcision to health exceed the risks by over 100 to 1. Brian Morris, Professor Emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney and his colleagues in Florida and Minnesota found that over their lifetime half of uncircumcised males will contract an adverse medical condition caused by their foreskin. The findings add considerable weight to the latest American Academy of Pediatrics policy that supports education and access for infant male circumcision.

In infancy the strongest immediate benefit is protection against urinary tract infections (UTIs) that can damage the kidney in half of babies who get a UTI. Morris and co-investigator Tom Wiswell, MD, Center for Neonatal Care, Orlando, showed last year that over the lifetime UTIs affect 1 in 3 uncircumcised males. In a systematic review, Morris, with John Krieger, MD, Department of Urology, University of Washington, Seattle, showed that there is no adverse effect of circumcision on sexual function, sensitivity, or pleasure, which dispelled one myth perpetuated by opponents of the procedure.

The rate of circumcision in the US is still quite high (81% overall, although much less amongst Hispanics.)   I am surprised - I would have thought the rate would have dropped a lot, as it has in Australia, once the medical bodies initially moved somewhat against it.

But Professor Morris is strongly pro:

"The new findings now show that infant circumcision should be regarded as equivalent to childhood vaccination and that as such it would be unethical not to routinely offer parents circumcision for their baby boy. Delay puts the child's health at risk and will usually mean it will never happen." 

 I don't think you can get it done in public hospitals in Australia.  I wonder if that will change?

Steve's simple guide to fiscal policy

As far as I can make out, this would represent a common sense approach to future taxation and spending by the Australian government:

*  broaden somewhat the GST and increase the rate modestly.

*  retain the mining tax - it is clearly not harming the industry (hello, new mine funding for Gina) and why give up even a couple of hundred million dollars for ideological reasons?   (Also, does anyone know what that might increase to in future, once the miners run out of fiddles to avoid it.)

*  scrap the Abbott parental leave tax - no one apart from Abbott and a couple of feminists who Abbott would not normally think had anything worthwhile to say believe it is necessary or good for the country

*  adopt the Labor plan for a floating carbon price.  It may or may not work, but it is better than government "direct action" spending which everyone knows has no chance of working and is bad for the budget bottom line.   The current level of tax is not hurting the economy in any substantial way;  the Coalition has done a disgraceful job of encouraging people to think their energy bill rise is only due to it (and that they weren't compensated for it in other ways.)

*  Push hard at all international forums for agreement to remove the ability of large, enormously profitable multinational companies to pay tiny amounts of tax.

*  Do not implement Abbott's mad promise to increase defence spending from 1.5% of GDP to 2%.   Defence is a permanent bottomless pit of desirable spending, all for a country which hasn't used its Air Force in anger for nearly 50 years now.   For an ocean surrounded country, having some submarines will always make some sense; always having the latest in fighter jets doesn't.  Sure, look to high tech (like drones), but it must be cost efficient.

*  Once a week, tar and feather an economist or employee associated with the IPA on TV (the ABC, of course).  It won't directly solve the fiscal problems, but would provide entertainment at very cheap cost, satisfy the IPA of its hypocritical desire to be on the government funded media which they hate, and raise the chances of more sensible economic, social and climate change policy from anywhere.

Update:  has anyone mentioned estate taxes yet?   I recently discovered that England still has quite a large one, and so does the US both at the Federal level and (often) at the State level.  Why are Australians declining a source of funding for useful things like health and aged care services from people who actually don't need money anymore?  A federal one which kicks in only at total estates worth (say) $1,000,000 or more may or may not be worthwhile, as I presume it would lead to avoidance measures which may be difficult to plug.  Still, I wouldn't want to rule it out prematurely. 

Above ground fish

BBC News - Hong Kong's fish farms in the sky

Interesting.  That's all.

Republicans stuck

John Cassidy writing in the New Yorker says the Republicans are stuck on stupid.  (Well, OK, that's my phrasing, not his, but close to the mark):

Here’s all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s effort to face reality, moderate its policies, and present a more coherent policy platform to voters in 2016. David Camp, the Michigan Republican who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and who in February introduced a sweeping tax-reform plan that, at least, recognized the basic laws of arithmetic, is leaving Congress. Paul Ryan, the conservative Moses of Capitol Hill, is sticking around. On Wednesday, he unveiled the latest of his right-wing manifestos, thinly disguised as a serious budget, proposing to repeal Obamacare, privatize Medicare, and slash spending on Medicaid and food stamps.

No, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. The Republican Party’s reform effort, which was heralded by a March, 2013, internal report that said that the G.O.P. was trapped in “an ideological cul de sac,” is over almost before it had begun. On issue after issue (gun control, immigration, gay marriage, Obamacare, climate change, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage), suggestions that the Party might revise its extreme positions have been stomped on. The ultras have won out. And nowhere is this more true than in the biggest policy area of all: taxes and spending.

A problem I am in no danger of encountering

Too much running tied to shorter lifespan, studies find

Saudi Arabia really, really, doesn't want tourists, does it.

A new terrorism law in Saudi Arabia targets atheists and dissent of all types.

Be warned Jason Soon, if your aircraft ever has to divert into a Saudi airport, your twitter account may be used in evidence against you...

The happy medium

In the debate about free speech and s18C Racial Discrimination Act, Jason Soon links to a pretty good article about the American attitude to free speech, which talks about the heavy emphasis of individualism in that country that colours many of its entrenched policies.

The article also makes brief mention of how in Britain, an offensive tweet can lead to police arrest.

(Here's a more detailed article on that topic.) 

These articles should, in my view, make people appreciate that in Australia, on this and other social matters, we actually have a happy medium between these two extremes*.   We don't have the spectacle of  a lawyer's picnic which leads to the Supreme Court having to decide whether to hear a case about the free speech right of 11 year old school students to wear T shirts proclaiming their love of "boobies"; nor do we have Andrew Bolt claiming (as much it would enhance his persistent martyr act) that he is in fear of arrest because of his columns. 

The Human Rights Commission and courts seem to have been working away on complaints under the RDA in a sensible fashion, seeking mediated resolutions of cases they deem not to be merely trivial.

This is good.

I see no need to change it.

*  I would argue we have reached the same happy compromise in our health system, for example.

PS:   I think it's pretty funny how The Australian seems to be on a desperate search to find aborigines or Jews who support amending the Act.  Every couple of days, there is a report that reads "See - here's one other person in a minority group who supports this amendment.  (We'll let you know when we find another.)"

The Right is the problem

From an opinion piece in the LA Times:

Thankfully, Americans don’t buy his [James Inhofe's] extreme take. They do believe global warming is a thing, but they aren’t persuaded just yet that it’s a critical problem.

One study found that that is partly attributable to conservative media's dismissive coverage of the phenomenon. The Gallup Poll finds that 81% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans think the seriousness of global warming has either been correct or underestimated, while 68% of Republicans and only 18% of Democrats think the problem has been exaggerated. 

And I see that, in Australia, the IPA is again hosting a tour of Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change contrarian scientists who makes a living from fossil fuel interests by claiming all other climate scientists are wrong.   As Skeptical Science notes, he's been singing the same song since at least 1992, and was wrong then, and is wrong now.

He's actually probably more objectionable than the IPA's previous guest, Monckton.  The latter is more obviously a buffoon. 

Now I'm worried

Sure, of the IPA crowd, Chris Berg seems the most affable, but he's still not to be trusted.

Here he is today arguing that cybercrime "is not the bogeyman it is made out to be."

Here he is in 2010 noting that pressure cooker bombs are "weak":

Then there is ''Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom'', which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed ''close to the intended targets''.

It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully.

Here's a photo of the aftermath of a couple of weak old pressure cooker bombs, which killed 3 and injured 264, which appear to have been made following instructions from the very same on line Islamic terrorist magazine, the articles of which Chris said "when they're not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal."




Yes.  Very banal.

Experiment in non censorship noted

The New York Times had an article  on the weekend looking at the question of what is known about the effect of internet pornography on teenagers.

The answer proposed is:  not much.

This is not surprising.  As the article says, it's not as if you can easily get ethical consent to do studies that compare one set of teenagers deliberately exposed to certain types of pornography with those who are not exposed.  And, for those who have seen some pornography, proving causal connections is particularly difficult:

After sifting through those papers, the report found a link between exposure to pornography and engagement in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or sex at a young age. But little could be said about that link. Most important, “causal relationships” between pornography and risky behavior “could not be established,” the report concluded. Given the ease with which teenagers can find Internet pornography, it’s no surprise that those engaging in risky behavior have viewed pornography online. Just about every teenager has. So blaming X-rated images for risky behavior may be like concluding that cars are a leading cause of arson, because so many arsonists drive. 

American scholars have come to nearly identical nonconclusions. “By the end we looked at 40 to 50 studies,” said Eric Owens, an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and co-author of “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. “And it became, ‘O.K., this one tells us A, this one tells us B.’ To some degree we threw up our hands and said, there is no conclusion to be drawn here.”

This is one of those areas where, regardless of the difficulty of drawing causal connections, there is good reason to take a common sense approach that limits on the amount of pornography available to teenagers be limited.  The availability of hard core pornography via the internet in virtually every teenager's house is a novel situation we have never really seen the likes of before.  It is not the equivalent of soft core Playboys being found in a secret stash.   And video and photography of real people engaged in the real activity is also rather different from fictional, written accounts - the latter is an act of imagination that everyone knows has not involved a real person using their body in a morally dubious fashion.

Thus, I have never had a problem at all with the idea that the "standard" household feed of internet access should make some attempt at filtering out what would be called x rated video and photographic pornography, even if it is a certainty that what's left will never be as "safe" as Reader's Digest, with an "opt in" choice to be made by those who want it.   Australian internet companies and libertarian types have always claimed that this was virtually impossible to achieve for technical reasons. Yet, as the NYT article points out:

Starting late last year, Internet service providers in Britain made “family-friendly filters,” which block X-rated websites, the default for customers. Now any account holder who wants to view adult material needs to actively opt in — effectively raising a hand to say, “Bring on the naughty.”

The initiative, which was conceived and very publicly promoted by the government, is intended to prevent what Prime Minister David Cameron called the corrosion of childhood, which, he argued in a speech last year, happens when kids are exposed to pornography at a young age.

Tech commentators who are against any form of filtering always argue that a determined teenager will be able to get around it.  That hardly seems the point when one is considering children under 13, who are not likely to be highly motivated to searching out pornography anyway. And even for your normal teenager, the (shall we say) low threshold for arousal probably means that we can acknowledge that the filtered feed may have enough material for their, ahem, purposes; but this is still better than full unlimited access to a world of demeaning examples of sexual activity. 

I am sure that it would be widely considered a bad thing if (hypothetically) all laws regarding access to adult shops were revoked and newsagents and bookshops were suddenly to open vast sections devoted to the most lurid and explicit DVDs and magazine covers, and could hand out sample copies to 14 year olds.  Why is reasonable, age related regulation of access to the physical thing accepted, but the cyber version is supposed to be completely open or it's painted as some sort of censorship crisis?    Opt in plans do nothing to prevent adults accessing what they want to access.

So, I am very interested to see how the English new scheme works out.  There is remarkably little comment on the internet about it, even though it has now been in place for a few months.   I would thought that it had caused some massive log jam on the net, we would have heard already.

If it works reasonably well, it should be taken up elsewhere too.

About that Roger Pielke Jnr argument

I'm rather busy at the moment, but just wanted to note this passage from a recent Real Climate post, as it is a good, short summary of why one key Pielke Jnr argument is a complete distraction:

The cost of extreme weather events

If an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming is hard to prove by statistics amongst all the noise, how much harder is it to demonstrate an increase in damage cost due to global warming? Very much harder! A number of confounding socio-economic factors clouds this issue which are very hard to quantify and disentangle. Some factors act to increase the damage, like larger property values in harm’s way. Some act to decrease it, like more solid buildings (whether from better building codes or simply as a result of increased wealth) and better early warnings. Thus it is not surprising that the literature on this subject overall gives inconclusive results. Some studies find significant damage trends after adjusting for GDP, some don’t, tempting some pundits to play cite-what-I-like. The fact that the increase in damage cost is about as large as the increase in GDP (as recently argued at FiveThirtyEight) is certainly no strong evidence against an effect of global warming on damage cost. Like the stranger’s dozen rolls of dice in the pub, one simply cannot tell from these data.

The emphasis on questionable dollar-cost estimates distracts from the real issue of global warming’s impact on us. The European heat wave of 2003 may not have destroyed any buildings – but it is well documented that it caused about 70,000 fatalities. This is the type of event for which the probability has increased by a factor of five due to global warming – and is likely to rise to a factor twelve over the next thirty years. Poor countries, whose inhabitants hardly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, are struggling to recover from “natural” disasters, like Pakistan from the 2010 floods or the Philippines and Vietnam from tropical storm Haiyan last year. The families who lost their belongings and loved ones in such events hardly register in the global dollar-cost tally.

Tony's dream....

Yong speaks

Ed Yong, whose blog "Not Exactly Rocket Science" was recently added to my blogroll, has a TED talk on line now.  His voice is very different from what I expected, and his talk on mind controlling parasites is good:

A spectacularly bad week for Right wing figures past their "use by" date

Let's list the losers from this week, in no particular order:

1.  Bronwyn Bishop.  It doesn't matter that she was always destined to win the vote (has a government ever voted against its own speaker, rather than simply asking him or her to resign?), the grim look on her face during the detailed and fairly put argument by Tony Burke was enough to hurt her, and Tony Abbott.  Michelle Grattan, who I think is generally pretty fair in her commentary on personal performances, has labelled Bishop as not even giving the impression of trying to be fair.  Bishop ought to protect whatever frail legacy she thinks she has ("a mile wide but an inch deep" rings true to this day) by resigning in light of Labor's declaration of no confidence in her.   I am guessing she won't.

And how ludicrous was it of Christopher Pyne to say that the fact the challenge was prepared meant it was a "stunt"?  If you take on a major and serious task like this, of course it has to be backed up with evidence.

By the way, in all the commentary about it, why has no journalist followed up on Burke's claim that Bishop lied about what was on a tape?   Isn't that a very serious allegation?

2.  Tony Abbott   Knights and Dames.   Did he seriously think there would not be near uniform ridicule from politicians and the public about this?   Was he trying to distract from something else, like his poor judgement with giving Sinodinos a job when he must have know damage was coming up?  He looked genuinely upset with Bill Shorten's ridicule in the House, helping ensure his self inflicted damage from this ridiculous exercise.

And how about his claiming that Bishop had handled the challenge to her with "grace and good humour"?  There was no evidence of humour on her part whatsoever.  

3.  Arthur Sinodinos.  Well, it's more than a week since his damage was done, but since then, despite the Commission saying that it was not really going after him, it still looks very likely he is not coming back.  I didn't think he was past his use by date until this came to light, but he is.

4.  Cardinal George Pell.   By all accounts, of course including the very detailed ones by Marr, a pretty terrible performance in that he agreed that the Church had acted appallingly in a crucial child abuse court case, but to quite a large degree sought to deflect blame for that to a string of other people, and tried to make up for it by saying the Church's door was now open to making large compensation payments.   All rather too late for those who have died, George.  The physical stoop he has developed in recent years has been like a living reminder of the diminishment of his judgement and character in the eyes of most Australian Catholics, let alone amongst people who don't care for the Church.

5.  George Brandis.   What a brilliant idea, when defending laws softening steps that can be taken by individuals the victims of racism, to point out in Parliament that people have a right to be a bigot!    He was arguing with Penny Wong, and also thought it a good idea to also call her "bigoted".  She apparently went livid, but managed to control herself.

I had heard years ago that Brandis has been an unpopular, abrasive figure with a large slab of the Queensland Liberals.   He's obviously not always great at thinker on his feet, either.

Reports during the week said that his proposed amendments were softened under Cabinet influence.  God knows what they must have been like before that.

Brandis' bigot comment is going to haunt him for a long time.  No one would be disappointed to see the back of him.

Warm water problem

A couple of weeks ago, there was a guy on Landline from (I think) the Bureau of Meteorology talking about a subsurface body of very warm water being tracked West East across the Pacific.  It was thought that if it surfaced, it would be the start of a clear El Nino.  He said it was about 4-5 degrees hotter than average.  I had no idea that large warm, subsurface (about 150 m down) bodies of water were tracked like this in real time.

The subject gets a detailed explanation at this blog post.   I don't know who the author is, but he seems well versed on the subject.  He says it has the potential to be a bigger El Nino than the record setting one at the end of the 1990's.

Let's see what happens....

Winding, windy moors must be good for your health

Kate Bush tour: Extra London dates confirmed - News - Music - The Independent

PS:  she's 55.

Make up your minds

Richard III expert: The skeleton in the car park may not be the missing monarch after all - Archaeology - Science - The Independent

Not all wet after all

That's a surprise.  It seems everyone was expecting a disaster (ha! another pun) but the reviews for Noah are quite strong.

Bickmore watches Steyn dance

It's been up for a week or two, but Barry Bickmore's "Flashdance" comparison to how Mark Steyn thinks he can conduct himself in a defamation action is really hilarious.

Aly on the RDA

I quite like Waleed Aly's column on the RDA controversy.  He argues that making the standard that of "the ordinary reasonable Australian" effectively makes it a white standard:

This matters because – if I may speak freely – plenty of white people (even ordinary reasonable ones) are good at telling coloured people what they should and shouldn’t find racist, without even the slightest awareness that they might not be in prime position to make that call.

This is particularly problematic with the proposed offence of racial “intimidation”. To “intimidate” is “to cause fear of physical harm” according to the draft Act. Now our ordinary reasonable white person is being asked to tell, say, black people whether or not they are “reasonably likely” to be fearful of physical harm. Black people – reasonable ones – might actually be fearful, but ultimately a hypothetical white person will decide that for them.

Heh.  Let's not forget the most belligerent white blogging promoter of full repeal of s18C, Sinclair Davidson, claimed this in relation to an aboriginal man

Actually, no. Calling a man an 'ape' is not racist and not demeaning. Rude, yes. Unnecessary, yes. poor behaviour, yes.

He copped a lot of criticism about this, even from white right wing sympathisers; and given that he's from South Africa, it was all the more extraordinary. 

[Deletion, pending further research.]

And only yesterday, he wrote this about those annoying "community groups" who don't want the Act amended:

The elected government of the Commonwealth of Australia is the leadership of the largest community group in the country – also the only community group that actually enjoys widespread legitimacy. 

Shorter version:   "Suck it up, Jewish community groups.  You've lost."

He had already denied there could be friendship with those who support s.18C:

 This is a fork in the road. Those who choose to walk down the path of 18C must do so alone, without the comfort and friendship of those of us who choose freedom over slavery.

Which I reckon would strike most people as an extremely immature attitude.  But then again, this is a man who gets a big thrill from Judge Dredd.   Let's face it - libertarianism is a philosophy that attracts the immature, and those with limited empathy.  (On the empathy question, how else can you interpret a fondness for labelling a large section of society "moochers".)

Now, I am not arguing that he is a racist - and I haven't noticed anyone allege that against him.   What I am saying though is that his philosophy gives him a particularly acute tin ear when it comes to questions of what other people should find as racism or offensive on the grounds of race.   This is also tied up with his ironic way of seeking to deflect attacks by revelling in them (he frequently celebrates having been called an evil bald fascist gnome, for example.)   The fact that he readily bans his critics at his own blog shows that he's not as immune to attacks as he likes to pretend he is.   But his theory seems to be that everyone should take on criticism the way he does - put on a show of laughing it off (even though it does hurt or annoy you); don't think of yourself as a victim - that's a sign of weakness.   Yet, of course, he has been one of the biggest public (and private, I assume) hand holders of the most vocal "I'm a victim" claimant of all in this matter - Andrew Bolt.

Anyway, back to Aly, who ends his column this way:

I have no doubt the Abbott government doesn’t intend this. It doesn’t need to. That’s the problem. This is just the level of privilege we're dealing with. This is what happens when protection from racism becomes a gift from the majority rather than a central part of the social pact. It’s what happens when racial minorities are required to be supplicants, whose claims to social equality are subordinate to those of powerful media outlets outraged they might occasionally have to publish an apology.

And it’s what happens when lawmakers and the culturally empowered proceed as though ours is a society without a racial power hierarchy simply because they sit at the top of it.

Well said.

Update:  the Catallaxy warrior and self proclaimed former friend of Jews seems to think that by talking about a white majority often not having the best idea of what racial minorities may find insulting, Aly is acting in breach of s18C.

Pity he ignores 18D.  Or rather - typical. 

Also the irony.   As I have argued, Davidson himself gives credence to Aly's argument that white folk sometimes don't have a clue.

Krugman, Piketty, etc

What a good post from Krugman, talking about the much discussed new book by Piketty on the intensifying inequality in the US and globally, in which he notes that the history of taxation in the US is entirely different from what Tea Party drips (ha, a pun) think it is. (And incidentally, the Piketty argument as explained at that last link sounds extremely convincing.  It looks like it is being received as a death knell for the Right wing economic orthodoxy and philosophy of the last few decades.)

And here's a second Krugman post, arguing that dissing the Koch Brothers is entirely legitimate.

Amusingly, I see that Catallaxy is running one of its "Gee, aren't rich people great?" posts about the Koch Brothers at the same time.

It's a feature of the Ayn Rand shadow on libertarianism that they rarely make any differentiation  between the rich who earn it in an admirable and positive way - innovation, hard work, meeting a market for a product that genuinely benefits everyone with limited harm to society or the environment - and those who earn or use their gains in a positively harmful way, or did not actually earn it at all but simply were born into the right family.    In fact, they argue strongly against any attempt to bring morality to the issue of how money is made - Sinclair Davidson thinks campaigns against Apartheid South Africa didn't work, couldn't care less that tobacco companies sell a carcinogen when considering whether they should have unfettered marketing via trade mark, and has taken to complaining regularly about new divestment campaigns against fossil fuel mining companies.   He dismisses as essentially unworthy any attempt to remove the scandalous use of tax havens by the likes of Apple and other multinationals.   He'll soon be making a teary video "Leave Capital alone! You are lucky it even performed for you.  Leave it alone!"


But going back to Piketty:  I see that John Cassidy in the New Yorker has a series of charts that illustrate the argument.  I'll copy just this one, showing that Australia really has been better in the inequality stakes:

A new dwarf planet. Cool.

Dwarf planet stretches Solar System's edge
This Nature report doesn't say it, but another one in The Guardian ends with the possibility that a very large dark planet is way out there too:

The latest work has already thrown up an intriguing possibility. The angle of the body's orbit and that of Sedna's are strikingly similar, an effect most likely caused by the gravitational tug of another, unseen body. One possibility is a "Super Earth" that traces so large an orbit around the sun that it has never been seen.

"If you took a SuperEarth and put it a few hundred astronomical units out, the gravity could shepherd Sedna and this new object into the orbits they have," said Sheppard. An astronomical unit (AU) is around 150m kilometres, or the mean distance from Earth to the sun.

Earlier this month, Nasa'sWide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise) reported the results from its search for "Planet X", a hypothesised planet far out in the solar system. It found no evidence for a new planet larger than Saturn within 10,000 AU of the sun. But Saturn is 95 times more massive than Earth, so a smaller Super Earth could go undetected in that region.

Great news for hard science fiction writers, I am sure.

About the Racial Discrimination Act amendment...

Michelle Grattan has a column at The Conversation about the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, and I agree with it completely.

I like this analogy:

There is a respectable case to be made that the present act is too wide. If drafters were starting from scratch, with no law on the books, they would probably be better to leave out “offend” and “insult”.

But there is not a clean slate, and changing the status quo has disproportionate dangers. It’s rather like punching a hole in an asbestos shed – a stable if not ideal structure suddenly turns into a hazard, its particles scattered with unpredictable risk. It would be easier and better to leave well alone.

I think that's a brilliant summary of the attitude of Warren Mundine, and (probably) of all the ethnic bodies that have urged the government not to intervene.

She goes on to note that until the current law resulted in a friend of the PM losing a purely symbolic battle (one caused by his own poor research and failure to simply apologise and correct errors in lieu of defending a court action)  this was not an active issue for the Coalition at all.    She writes:

And, apart from keeping faith with an outraged columnist, what is this about? There have not been other troublesome cases; the law has mostly functioned well.

Brandis claims that (unnamed) journalists tell him there is this “chill” of censorship. But who precisely wants to say what that they are not saying now?

One can’t imagine that Abbott himself would want a heightened debate on race. On indigenous affairs in particular, he’d be appalled – not least because it would endanger his push for indigenous recognition in the constitution.

Yet the government’s rhetoric over 18C and related sections of the RDA suggests that free speech is being suppressed.

That highlighted line is pure right wing bulldust, talked about by the likes of the teeth grindingly annoying fake culture war commentator Nick Cater (the UK's gain, and our loss, when he migrated here.)   As is typical of the Tea Party inspired Right in Australia now, they are setting up a straw man to attack by insisting that matters that the centre Right won about 20 years ago are still alive and crushing the nation.  Look at aboriginal issues - Labor was embarrassed by being gullible on Hindmarsh Island, and Bob Hawke weeping over claimed aboriginal sites; by the end of the Howard government, they were supporting the intervention in the Northern Territory and had a tougher approach to limiting alcohol than the current Liberal government.  (In truth, both parties have moved somewhat to the centre.  The Coalition's panic about native title is now seen as greatly exaggerated, and most in the party were fairly gracious about the Rudd apology.)

Given Andrew Bolt's behaviour, I find the line taken by Tim Wilson, as repeated by Brandis and all the FOB's* actually pretty nauseating - that the way to a better society is for there to be no limit on offensive expressions and for "good" people to vigorously attack objectionable views.  As Michelle writes:

Those worrying the most about the alleged chains on free speech can be sensitive when the exchanges become too robust. Bolt was outraged when outspoken indigenous figure Marcia Langton threw around allegations about him on television. “I was so bruised … that I didn’t go into work on Tuesday. I couldn’t stand any sympathy — which you get only when you’re meant to feel hurt,” he wrote.

He pointed to inaccuracies; after Langton apologised to him he demanded the ABC apologise too (she had made the comments on Q&A).

The Langton-Bolt exchanges contributed little to the public debate, but if you are going to complain there is not enough opportunity for unfettered free speech, it seems more than a little inconsistent to be upset by someone saying offensive things about you. Isn’t the aim supposed to be a world of unrestrained biffo all round?

And, of course, "classic liberals" like Wilson, Berg, and Sinclair Davidson in particular (who seems to be trying to make up for not having lived out a boyhood dream of being a righteous Rambo, or  comic book superhero, by being really nuttily belligerent on free speech) argue for "unrestrained biffo" from a position of white, male, social success. 

If they had an actual case where they could show some important issue has not been adequately canvassed in Australian society because of the RDA, they might have a case. The fact is, they don't.  I also strongly suspect that they have run so hard on this because of media donations to their think tank, which (I would guess) may have been inspired more by the Gillard government's clumsy attempt to revise media self regulation than the Bolt case.

I know it won't be an instant social disaster if the Act is amended, but it is the matter of why and by whom this is being argued now that paints a picture of a government with completely inappropriate  priorities interested in protecting mates who least need it. 

And, as such, it is yet another example of poor judgement by Tony Abbott.



* Friends of Bolt, of course.

And further:   I see from an article that Jason Soon links to, that at least some of those who support the free speech case in principle still feel uncomfortable with the way it is being argued.  I also agree with the take on Chris Kenny:

Hypocrisy is compounded, however, even by the principled. Chris Kenny suing the ABC for defamation for showing a manipulated image of him having sex with a dog is case in point.* People look at the kind of cases that have been brought forward under 18C and have (rightly, in my opinion) determined that some of these are a case of ‘hurt feelings’, to the extent that the judgements significantly impinge upon free expression. This line of argument has since been expanded to suggest either implicitly or explicitly that all the cases of racism and racial insensitivity are simple matters of ‘hurt feelings’ - everything, from a taxi driver being racially abused to a demented columnist with an axe to grind is ‘hurt feelings’.

On the other hand, the way most people have treated the Kenny case suggests that such belittling is reserved for 18C. There are those who would defend the concept of defamation law as it protects one’s property (reputation), which is not a terrible idea in itself. The issue is that there seems to be no recognition that there are gradations. The idea that a manipulated image from a group long known for satire would actually damage Kenny’s reputation is simple nonsense. But there seems to be this desire to see cases of alleged defamation as uniformly are valid and legitimate - in other words, a valid restriction of speech - whereas all cases under 18C are equally illegitimate. One kind of complainant deserves the benefit of the doubt and another kind does not.

What is happening is that there’s a peculiar blindness about how wide a net defamation law really casts, whereas there seems to be perfect 20-20 vision on 18C.

A 1985 bargain

Gee.  Someone under 35 probably has no idea.

Have a look at this ad I just scanned from a 1985 Omni magazine which I have been hoarding all these years.

Read all about the wonders of a 10mb plug in hard drive for$695:

A co-incidence?

Well, I was previously dismissive of the dangerously unhinged pilot theory, especially when it was based on his support for Anwar Ibrahim.  But now I am not so sure.

The other thing is that the climb to higher than safe altitude always seemed very hard to explain.  As part of a plan by someone to disable the passengers, it does make some sense.  It would be a very twisted and self absorbed pilot who would do it as part of a final joy flight, though.  But if it was a hijacker, it's a bit of co-incidence that it was on a flight piloted by someone with (allegedly) a fair bit of trouble in his personal life.

Maybe the glowing digital cockpit screen in these aircraft need to flash a question to the crew before they take off  "You aren't feeling too depressed or unhappy today to fly?  Think of your passengers."   Who knows, that may be enough for some potentially suicidal pilots to reconsider.

As recorded at the Cabinet meeting where Tony Abbott decided to reintroduce dames and knights

Update:  turns out he didn't discuss it in Cabinet or the party room.   Just asked a few colleagues.  Wow.  At least he knows enough to realise when not to ask permission for a really stupid idea, but not enough to not go ahead with a really stupid idea.

Update 2: I've just realised - that stage group doesn't fairly represent the Abbott cabinet at all:  there are far too many women involved.

Queen Victoria revisited

Well, that's odd.  Julia Baird, the Australian journalist who turns up regularly hosting The Drum (she seems pretty smart, but somehow she just manages to be dull in that role) has an opinion piece in the NYT about Queen Victoria.  Julia's writing a book about her, apparently.

A couple of interesting extracts:

In the 1800s, a woman could be proud if her child reached primary school age. Out of every 1,000 born, around 150 died. Largely because of the prevalence of measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and cholera, three out of 10 children did not live to age 5. In some towns in England, the death rate was almost twice as high; some blamed the rather dubious practice of drugging babies with opium to calm them while their parents worked. (A piece published in 1850 in “Household Words,” the journal edited by Charles Dickens, blamed the “ignorant hireling nurse” who managed eight or nine babies at a time by keeping them drugged and “quiet, almost, as death.”) By the century’s end, about 80 percent of parents took out insurance against their babies. That practice was eventually frowned upon for encouraging infanticide.

Ah yes, the under regulated life of Victorian England was a fantastic place.

But as to Queen Victoria herself, Julia notes that a new book argues that our historical image of her as a lousy mother was permanently and unfairly twisted by a couple of gay men:

Ms. Ward, who wrote a dissertation on the same subject, began comparing the three official volumes of Victoria’s letters to the more than 460 volumes of correspondence in the Royal Archives in the Windsor Tower, while researching the queen as a wife and mother. She grew curious about the men who edited the letters and why they chose to obscure Victoria’s private life and motherhood.

It turned out that their mission was to protect Victoria as well as her eldest son, Edward VII, from the hint of any scandal at all; they cut out suggestions, for instance, that she was infatuated with her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne.

The man given the task was Viscount Esher, an adviser to King Edward VII; he hired the Eton housemaster Arthur Benson to edit it. Both were gay. Both found the editing experience overwhelming and onerous.

Both also, crucially, viewed Victoria as ancillary to the men around her. They wrote in their introduction: “Confident, in a sense, as she was, she had the feminine instinct strongly developed of dependence upon some manly adviser.”

Only 40 percent of the letters in the volumes of her letters are actually hers: Most of the others are written to her by prominent men, and the correspondence with female relatives and friends is scant.

“The small number of women’s letters in the published volumes,” writes Ms. Ward, “cannot be attributed to the editor’s ignorance of their existence.”

In truth, Benson was bored by correspondence between women; it was “very tiresome.” Yet the letters Victoria exchanged with the young queen of Portugal, Donna Maria, which were almost entirely excluded, reveal a great preoccupation with their young, the joys of children and the pains of giving birth.

Interesting.

Stupid Pyne

Lenore Taylor rips into Christopher Pyne for his over the top reaction to the South Australian election:

Here we go again.

Christopher Pyne – clearly deeply unhappy with independent Geoff Brock’s decision to back Labor to form a government in his home state – has declared that South Australian premier Jay Weatherill “leads an illegitimate government” and added, threateningly, “he will be treated that way”....

Weatherill – despite winning the election based on the law of the land – was in fact “illegitimate” or, according to the dictionary, "not authorised by law” or “improper”.

It is a legal interpretation the Coalition seems to apply selectively.

In 1998, for example, John Howard won 48.9% of the two-party preferred vote but won a majority of seats and formed government. There’s no record of Pyne calling him illegitimate.

And, of course, neither Tony Abbott nor South Australian Liberal leader Steven Marshall were shy in trying to form government by winning the support of independents for themselves.

Read the rest if you want.   He's an annoying disgrace.

Rupert's wonderous spin machine

Much amusement to be had today from the way The Australia attempts to spin a Newspoll that sees Bill Shorten's approval rating rise, leaving him with a net negative approval rating better than Tony Abbott's, and two party preferred vote rising to 52/48 in Labor's favour.

So, of course, the headline message is "Tony Abbott support still strong despite Arthur Sinodinos stumble: Newspoll".

So shameless it's funny.

Andrew Bolt says "Did you really have to put it that way, George?"

Headline on the ABC (and elsewhere I expect):

George Brandis defends 'right to be a bigot' amid Government plan to amend Racial Discrimination Act

Given that this bit of legislative repeal is being driven purely by the Andrew Bolt case, I'm sure Andrew would have preferred that it be explained another way.  Makes me laugh, though.

Try this technique: cooking the meat

Some observations about My Kitchen Rules:

* some of the recent shows where they have had teams cooking outdoors for groups of people (school kids, constructions workers) have featured the teams doing lengthy food preparation in the full sun.  Doesn't this seems a sort of risky undertaking when you're dealing with seafood in particular?    I mean, maybe it's not quite as bad in southern cities, but take 30 minutes to get a bucket of green prawns peeled under the Brisbane sun, and you might be making My Kitchen Risks Food Poisoning.   Or am I just being misled by editing? 

*  Further along these lines, the show does feature to an almost disturbing degree the amount of food touching that goes on in the kitchen.   Hands on pre cooked food is ok, but when they start doing things like touching the (barely) cooked meat to tell how warm is it after it is plated - well, it seems too much to me.  (Of course I realise that we are probably just all better off not knowing what goes on in restaurant kitchens, but still...)

*  A recurring theme of the show seems to be "cooking show contestants fear overcooking - but have less fear of salmonella."  I'm starting to lose count of the number of times that it's not just me saying "but that meat's barely cooked!", but the judges on the show are noting it too.  The mother and daughter team's home restaurant lamb was a big offender:  sure lamb is often served pink, but lamb rare is an unpleasant thought for many people I am sure.   (Rare beef is more acceptable.)   Last night their lamb was being returned as being too cold on the plate.  "Try cooking it more!" I exclaimed at the TV.

OK, glad I've got that off my chest.

I'll be very upset if the science-y couple lose out this week.   Even though they did undercook chicken.  (Erk).

Update:  I forgot to mention, last night, my daughter (aged 11) did not take the ad for New Idea with the story "Carly and Tresne are married" at all well.   The shock of this is, I suspect, going to be a hot topic amongst many girls in the schoolyard today.   

Update 2:  can someone please buy perpetually unhappy Irish cook "Colin" a good bottle of shampoo and conditioner?   I must admit, though, given that Pete and Manu probably give children considering a cooking career the false impression that all chefs are sophisticated and friendly, Colin rectifies this by showing a bossy, cranky chef who you really don't want to be around all day.

And speaking of hair, that style of haircut that Manu wears is trendy now - but how much work does it take to keep it in place?

The heroin resurgence

There's a very interesting article up at the Christian Science Monitor about the resurgence of heroin use in the US. 

It notes:

The rise is being driven by a large supply of cheap heroin in purer concentrations that can be inhaled or smoked, which often removes the stigma associated with injecting it with a needle. But much of the increase among suburban teens, as well as a growing number of adults, has also coincided with a sharp rise in the use of prescription painkiller pills, which medical experts say are essentially identical to heroin. These painkillers, or opioids, are prescribed for things such as sports injuries, dental procedures, or chronic back pain. Yet in a disturbing number of cases, experts say, they are leading to overdependence and often to addiction to the pills themselves, which can then lead to heroin use.

The report spends a fair bit of time on the 'gateway' pathway which it says is pretty common - alcohol, marijuana, prescription painkillers (often obtained on the street) and heroin.  (Although I guess some might suspect that this paper might be one particularly inclined to note the 'pathway' aspect of marijuana use, I don't know there is any strong reason to doubt it.  Certainly, the current experiment in legalisation in the US will be one to watch for future use of other drugs.)

Anyhow, the story puts a lot of the blame on the rise of OxyContin and its relatively liberal use by American doctors: 

The global production of oxycodone, marketed as OxyContin in the United States, increased from two tons in 1990 to 135 tons in 2009. More than two-thirds of that supply was manufactured in the US, which, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, increases the risk of its subsequent overprescription and diversion into illicit channels.

Experts trace the rise of painkiller misuse in the US to 1996. That's when the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, a narcotic and derivative of opium. Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer of Phoenix House, a national nonprofit treatment agency, describes OxyContin as essentially a "heroin pill." It was made of oxycodone, a narcotic used to treat pain at the end of life. But the new pill would allow the company to reach a much wider audience.

"[Purdue] wanted a product that would be prescribed for common, moderately painful chronic conditions," says Dr. Kolodny, who is also president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, an advocacy group.

At first, the medical community balked. Using opioids for chronic problems seemed too risky given the nature of the pills' highly addictive properties. But Purdue Pharma launched an aggressive marketing campaign arguing that it was a compassionate way to treat patients and, because of its extended-release characteristics, would be less prone to abuse.

But before long, numerous cases of addiction to the painkillers began to surface. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in federal court to misleading doctors and the public about OxyContin's risks and paid a $600 million penalty.

 And look at the number of deaths prescription painkillers cause:

•Nearly 3 out of 4 drug overdose deaths are now caused by prescription painkillers. In 2008, some 14,800 deaths were attributed to the pills – "more than cocaine and heroin combined."

•More than 475,000 emergency room visits were directly linked to prescription painkiller misuse or abuse in 2009, roughly double the number of five years earlier.

That's extraordinary.   And, I think, it is pretty strong evidence against the libertarian idea that legalising even the strongest drugs would lead to safer usage of them by those who have an addiction.  These deaths and emergency room visits are caused by "safe" (that is, not impure) drugs, and ones for which many of the users have been legitimately prescribed and so have proper information about dosage.   Doesn't help much, does it?

Zach's life

Zach Braff writes about how he got into acting in this piece in the New York Times about his current role on Broadway.   He remains one of the most likeable of American actors, if you ask me.

Teenage problems

BBC News - What medieval Europe did with its teenagers

Continuing with my recent medieval theme, this is a good read.   In the opening paragraphs:

Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels.

He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home "till the age of seven or nine at the utmost" but then"put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years". The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, "for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own".

It was for the children's own good, he was told - but he suspected the English preferred having other people's children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.

His remarks shine a light on a system of child-rearing that operated across northern Europe in the medieval and early modern period. Many parents of all classes sent their children away from home to work as servants or apprentices - only a small minority went into the church or to university. They were not quite so young as the Venetian author suggests, though. According to Barbara Hanawalt at Ohio State University, the aristocracy did occasionally dispatch their offspring at the age of seven, but most parents waved goodbye to them at about 14.

Model letters and diaries in medieval schoolbooks indicate that leaving home was traumatic. "For all that was to me a pleasure when I was a child, from three years old to 10… while I was under my father and mother's keeping, be turned now to torments and pain," complains one boy in a letter given to pupils to translate into Latin. Illiterate
servants had no means of communicating with their parents, and the  difficulties of travel meant that even if children were only sent 20 miles (32 km) away they could feel completely isolated.

Poor kids.   There's lots more detail in the article, but I'll just extract a couple of more paragraphs:

Many adolescents were contractually obliged to behave. In 1396, a contract between a young apprentice named Thomas and a Northampton brazier called John Hyndlee was witnessed by the mayor. Hyndlee took on the formal role of guardian and promised to give Thomas food, teach him his craft and not punish him too severely for mistakes. For his part, Thomas promised not to leave without permission, steal, gamble, visit prostitutes or marry. If he broke the contract, the term of his apprenticeship would be doubled to 14 years.

A decade of celibacy was too much for many young men, and  apprentices got a reputation for frequenting taverns and indulging in licentious behaviour. Perkyn, the protagonist of Chaucer's Cook's Tale, is an apprentice who is cast out after stealing from his master - he moves in with his friend and a prostitute. In 1517, the Mercers' guild complained that many of their apprentices "have greatly mysordered theymself", spending their masters' money on "harlotes… dyce, cardes and other unthrifty games".

Republican parody parodied

I see that the Republican Party has started an advertising campaign that attempts to broaden their base.

This is leading to much ridicule.  First, one of the GOP ads:



And then the parody, from the people making John Oliver's upcoming show:

Giant robot led recovery (and Giant Clive)

 

I like a country that has its own special brand of government priorities.  From the Japan Times:

With its mountains of public debt, a nuclear meltdown to mop up and the 2020 Olympics bill, you’d think the last thing the Japanese government would be spending taxpayer money on is a study on robots in science fiction.

But as the Terminator once said: “Wrong.”

From the halls of Kasumigaseki comes “Japanese Animation Guide: The History of Robot Anime,” a 90-page inquiry commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and its Manga, Animation, Games, and Media Art Information Bureau.

The bureau’s boffins seem intent on capitalizing on what remains of Japan’s gross national cool as perceived overseas. Cool Japan, a concept now more than a decade old, has been parlayed into national policy, and the agency commissioned the report as an initial framework for discussing the key pillar of anime with people overseas. The robot study could be the first of several examining different anime genres.

The report goes on to note the enduring popularity in Japan of giant robots, Gundam in particular.  Giant Gundam models get the public out, as you can see above.

I wonder if someone is working on making big Japanese robots that move.  Maybe a full size Gundam is out of the question, but even a half or third scale one might be impressive.  And maybe just wheels for the feet, instead of having to worry about the trickery of walking.  But giant robots gliding down the street on their power - yes, that would be something to see.  I think I can probably interest Clive Palmer in this as a new manufacturing enterprise for Australia.   The only thing is, the first giant robot he would make would probably be a version of himself.

And speaking of Clive, I wonder how his robot dinosaur resort is going.  Tripadviser comments make for some fun reading, although there seems to be a somewhat suspicious pushback to me.  Some of the comments which made me smile:

* Our overall experience with the staff was poor - they were either inexperienced, had a poor attitude or had too much to do to provide any real guest services.

For example, the front desk did not know which of the restaurants was licensed. When we rang Palmer Grill to find out what time it opened we were asked "Why?"...

Stay away from any room near the Palmersaurus - the constant pathetic bleating of the dinosaurs cuts through any attempt at tranquility or peace. ...

Mr Palmer has chosen to closely associate himself with the Resort - there are photos, cartoons, articles plastered on walls; the signs make it clear that the Resort, the dinosaurs, the Grill are all "Palmer"; the Clive Palmer political buses and signs sit in the carpark; there are TV channels dedicated solely to him and his business interests.

Another visitor didn't care for the Palmer TV either:

*   The three TV channels devoted to the 'resort' owner and the many photos and in-your-face signs bearing his name around the resort are straight out of a sitcom.

Other recurring themes:  hardly any staff; those remaining stressed out; eateries closed; musty smelling rooms; dinosaurs pathetic.

Hedley Thomas, while obviously reporting to do political harm to Palmer, nonetheless gave us some interesting background in February:

Executive and senior staff at the resort who have walked out in the past eight weeks include the resort's head, Bill Schoch, who made an unsuccessful tilt for the federal seat of Fisher as a PUP candidate; the general manager, John Eaton; and the directors of engineering, rooms, finance, spa, and restaurants, as well as the managers of housekeeping and engineering. 

Sounds doomed to me.  Just like Palmer's political career.   Never in the history of Australian politics has there been a personality based party more obviously destined for fractious disintegration. 

More important than bikies laws

 Doctors' contracts dispute: Queensland Premier Campbell Newman vows to fight union rabble rousing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Yes, the Campbell Newman anti bikie laws were in some respects over the top, but gee I have trouble building up much personal concern over what was essentially anti criminal gang laws, especially if (as I suspect) they will be wound back after an initial hammering.

Personally, I am more concerned about a government blundering its way through negotiations with a highly skilled group of workers who have taken substantial pay cuts compared to what they could get in the private sector to work for the public health system.

Does anyone have any idea why the government has taken this group on?   How much lower than private sector remuneration does Campbell Newman think they should work for?

The Newman government has been very unimpressive generally.  I bet Campbell himself loses his seat, and I won't be sad.