Watchable zombies

I'm not a fan of the zombie genre in movies, due to their routine gruesomeness.   In gaming, so far as I can tell from previews I have seen on TV, I object to their use as a "legitimate" target for headshots and bloodletting on an enormous scale.   That said, I did get the DayZ mod for my son on the basis that it looked like it was not too gruesome in its graphics, and besides,  the point of the game was mostly to simply sneak around and avoid getting chased by zombies.   (On most servers, you had to spend a fair bit of time simply trying to find weapons before you could risk being spotted by a zombie.)   The best thing about it was the empty creepiness, and enjoyed playing some sessions with my son.  Now that it is being developed into a proper stand alone game, it looks like it is being made more gruesome.  Annoying.

This is all by way of background to explaining that I was not at all sure about my son seeing World War Z last year.  (I am, it seems at times, about the only father in Australia who actually takes care as to the level of violence in movies or games a son is being exposed to.)

But he's turned 14, and I took a punt and bought the DVD and we watched it last night.

It is surprisingly good.

As with all zombie movies, it has a silly premise (10 seconds for a virus or whatever it is to zombie-fy a bitten person?  come on..) but the best thing about it is that it is probably the least gruesomely violent zombie movie ever made.

It is, in many respects, a lot like the old DayZ - a zombie experience that is more defined by the creepiness, the chase, and the sudden surprise, rather than being a gore-fest.  Of course there is shooting and bodies hurling all over the place, but virtually no blood.  A lot of significant violence acts are not directly shown on screen at all.

The end sequence also features perhaps the best zombie acting I have ever seen.

Brad Pitt is fine, and he also was one of the producers.   I assume he has to be given credit for deciding that a zombie movie could be good without the gore.

Given that I liked him in The Tree of Life recently too, I am having to reconsider his contribution to movies.

A technical argument

Why the Official Explanation of MH370’s Demise Doesn’t Hold Up - Ari N. Schulman - The Atlantic


This long, technical and somewhat skeptical look at the analysis done to work out the likely flight path of MH370 doesn't seem to answer one question:  what were the apparent black box pings from underwater if they weren't from a black box?

Giving credit (and will slap myself in the face later)

Good Lord!   I find myself having to endorse a post by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy for once.

The story this morning run hard by News Corp (in fact they commissioned the new "research") struck me as an immediate furphy, and just all part of Rupert's minions' active role in softening up the electorate for a "it's the welfare cuts we had to have" spin that the Abbott government so dearly needs in pushing  for this budget. 

Awkward, but nice

This was an awkward photo, featuring my favourite Hollywood identity, ever*:

But all in a good cause:

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and philanthropist Steven Spielberg presented President Barack Obama with the USC Shoah Foundation's Ambassador for Humanity Award at a glittering Beverly Hills gala that included guests Barbra Streisand, Samuel L. Jackson and Kim Kardashian.

Kim Kardashian?  Let's roll our eyes and move on - 

Wednesday's evening event, which was hosted by Conan O’Brien and featured a performance by Bruce Springsteen, marked the 20th anniversary for the foundation that Spielberg founded after making Schindler’s List, for which he was honored with a best director Oscar.

Initially conceived as a repository for the oral and filmed personal histories of Shoah survivors, the center's archives have come to house nearly 52,000 first-person histories in 58 countries -- not only of Jewish Holocaust survivors but of gays, Jehovah's Witnesses and Roma persecuted by the Nazis.

And according to the Hollywood Reporter, Obama did well:

In arguably one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency on Israel and genocide, Obama then told the crowd that because of Schindler's List "we were reminded that the Holocaust was not a matter of distant history. The voices, the memories of survivors became a part of us. It entered into our DNA. That's what stories do. That's what Steven does. That's what Bruce (Springsteen) does. They tell a story that stitches up our fates with the fates of theirs. That film gave us a stake in that history and a stake in insuring autocracies like that don't happen again.

"Now, if the story had ended there, it would have been enough. But Steven didn’t stop with Schindler’s List, because there were too many other stories to tell. So he created this foundation to undertake what he called 'a rescue mission' -- preserving the memories that would otherwise be lost to time," he explained.

Let's end with a joke from Conan O'Brien:

From their seats at the head table, the president, Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen were regaled by the night’s host, comedian Conan O’Brien, who joked that the foundation  had been “recording evidence of intolerance long before Donald Sterling’s girlfriend.”

And if I want to play a game of "my favourite director blows your crass favourite director out of the water with important cultural and humanitarian works" with anyone who likes Quentin Tarantino or Clint Eastwood, I see there is a website devoted to listing what charities celebrities support.  (Yeah, so sorry, I think Spielberg wins easily.)

* and Steven Spielberg.   (Ha - a joke)

Eastern Europe - still a worry

In parts of Europe, the far right rises again

Last month, I traveled to Hungary and Greece, where the neo-fascist movements are strongest. In Hungary, the extreme-right Jobbik party won 1 in 5 votes in last month's parliamentary election. In Greece, even as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is being prosecuted by the government as a criminal organization, it remains the fourth-largest political party in the country. Golden Dawn lawmaker Ilias Kasidiaris, who sports a
swastika tattoo and once read from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on the floor of Parliament, is running for mayor of Athens.

Both parties deny being inherently anti-Semitic or anti-Roma, but their
symbols and rhetoric suggest otherwise. Party leaders are unapologetically hostile to LGBT rights, and Golden Dawn is vehemently anti-immigrant. And in both Greece and Hungary, many voters appear to be either overlooking the neo-fascist message or embracing it.

Not even popular in the business world?

Back in the second half of 2013, just after the Abbott Government took office, almost 70 per cent of company directors expected the new administration to have a positive impact on their business decision making. 

In the latest Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) survey, this figure has slumped to just 30 per cent.

This loss of confidence has also translated into a fall in the proportion of directors who believe the Federal Government understands business - from 55 per cent last year to 48 per cent now.

Onya, Tone.

No emergency, cont..

Koukoulas has been pushing hard his take that by putting only mildly more optimistic figures into forecasts you get a budget surplus within a few years without any massive mucking about that Abbott is planning.

He may be right, but this is his other point that Labor would be wise to push hard:

What most if not all commentators have missed in addition to the rubbish forecasts underpinning the MYEFO and Commission of Audit snake oil, is that the cuts in spending and hikes in taxes are largely to cover the pet projects of the Coalition and not reduce the deficit.

Getting rid of the mining tax and carbon price, the paid parental leave scheme and increasing defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP are costing the budget bottom line at least $10 billion a year and this is growing into the years of the forward estimates.

Abandoning this set of priorities and using realistic forecasts for the economy would all of the sudden not only see large budget surplus in place, but would mean net government debt is eliminated by about 2020. The deficit 'crisis' is of the Coalition's making.

Here is the emergency and it is in half baked policy priorities and dodgy economic parameters.

A tale of budgetary misunderstandings

I said to a couple of people at my office this morning, putting the argument I posted this morning, "if the petrol prices go up because of the budget to any significant extent, that will go over like a lead balloon regardless of richer people also having a tax increase."

No, I was assured:  the only budget thing about fuel is to with the diesel fuel rebate, which would only affect miners and farmers.  There is no petrol fuel excise.

Not keeping up with such matters very closely myself, I had to double check and was able to confirm that, indeed, there is a 38c per litre petrol excise, and rumours are around that it will indeed change in the budget.  (In all likelihood, to try to make up for lost money from raising the threshold on the "deficit levy" to something well over $100,000.)

So there you go - it would seem some people have forgotten that there is a petrol excise at all, given that it hasn't changed since Howard decided not to index it back in 2001.

But this matter has raised one other issue I don't understand.

The diesel fuel rebate is argued as justified because of the principle that you shouldn't tax an input cost to a business.   But what about petrol using business and their input?

I see the other argument is that it is for diesel used for off road purposes,  and as the excise was at least nominally is to pay for road construction and maintenance for those who use roads, this is another reason to exempt heavy off road users from it. 

That has a certain logic about it, but as this detailed look at the matter that appeared in the Australian Conservation Foundation notes, it can have perverse results from an energy use point of view, such as miners deciding to use trucks to move mountains of dirt instead of conveyor belts.  Also, it seems that the money raised by road users paying excises far exceeds what the Commonwealth returns in road spending.   If that's right, it is one class of fuel users who pay what has become something like a general tax, versus another (gigantic) class of fuel users who don't.

Changes to the scheme, the article argues, are affordable by Australian mining companies. 

It seems to me that, giving the miners were able to con the Labor government into a mining tax scheme that minimised the cost to them, a re-jig of the diesel tax rebate as it applies to them that brings in a lazy billion or so should be quite do-able. 

What a country

BBC News - Malaysian politician's video leads to sedition charge

Keep up the good work, Niki

Niki Savva is keeping up the leaks on how Peta Credlin is unpopular with many in the government.  She (Savva) also makes the PM's office sound remarkably like the protective circle that existed around the Rudd Prime Ministership, version 1:

Another story confirming why I'd rather not live in the US

Montana killing: Deadly clash of teenage mischief, pot, and self-defense? - CSMonitor.com

Early signs of a one term PM, if not government

OK, OK, it is (to be honest) way too early to making any call on the fate of the Abbott government at the next election (there is, for one thing, the completely unpredictable role mad Clive Palmer and his Senators may play in what can be done with the budget anyway), but apart from the general appallingly ham fisted way he has handled the kite flying exercise of possible budget measures, there are a couple of things which I expect really would kill Abbott's prospects:

a.  any significant increase in fuel excise will be wildly unpopular with the middle class, and the argument that the "rich" are also contributing by facing a tax levy will not work if it kicks in at too high a level (say $150,000).

b.  Christopher Pyne's sudden enthusiasm for deregulating university fees, if enacted, will guarantee no one under 35 will vote the Coalition for the next decade.   A fair few parents of high school students will also be upset, if not parents of those already at university.

The Abbott program never made sense - that his revenue measures (no new taxes except for the one needed for his parental leave plan which is only supported by a handful of voters; giving up revenue from the carbon "tax" and mining tax) and his savings measures (to come from spending cuts, but won't cut pensions, defence - in fact will increase defence spending, Gonski or disability spending, and will deal with carbon dioxide by spending rather than collecting money) would succeed in a budget surplus.

It is only now that voters are realising it.

The tragedy is that the internal Labor war over its disastrous appointment of Kevin Rudd into the leadership (back in 2007, I mean) prevented it from being able to sell the message.

PS:   I think Mumbles is probably right when he says this:

Latest reports suggest the “deficit levy” will cut in at salaries over $100 thousand a year, perhaps as high as $150 thousand. Anyone who believes this will infuriate most Australians, either because they instinctively loathe taxes or because they are shocked at the broken promise, needs to get out from behind their desk a bit more.

Mosey out of the think tank, take a walk in the park.

In other words, the government can probably successfully argue for it on equity grounds, at least if it were being argued in isolation.  (And Labor has to be careful here that they do not appear to be defending the rich when they oppose it.)

What I think Mumbles is overlooking is that it is not in isolation;  it has to be sold in the context of how much pain is coming to the middle income earners.   If they are hit too hard, they will not care much that a group of people who can afford a tax levy are also paying more.  And the higher you set the cut off for it, the less relevant it becomes on equity grounds, from a middle class point of view.

This is where Labor will need to be careful with its messaging - it needs to make it clear that they are opposing the Budget approach looking at it as a whole. 

More intense rains noted, again

Climate Change Study Finds U.S. Is Already Widely Affected - NYTimes.com

I see from this US report that changes in rainfall intensity seem to be already clear in parts of the US:

One of the report’s most striking findings concerned the rising frequency
of torrential rains. Scientists have expected this effect for decades
because more water is evaporating from a warming ocean surface, and the
warmer atmosphere can hold the excess vapor, which then falls as rain or
snow. But even the leading experts have been surprised by the extent of
the changes.

The report found that the eastern half of the country is receiving more
precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion
of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped
by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27
percent in the Southeast, the report found.

“It’s a big change,” said Radley M. Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia
University who helped write the report. He added that scientists do not
fully understand the regional variations.

In recent years, sudden, intense rains have caused extensive damage.

Not quite as bad as it sounds

'Exploding head syndrome'—a real but overlooked sleep disorder

A very, very hopeless place

If you missed it, and want to feel deeply pessimistic about Afghanistan, watch last night's Foreign Correspondent.  

It remains, as it seems to have always been, an awful, hopeless country.

How I have come to view economists, by reference to the cultural greats....

PS:  if anyone thinks I am being unfair, this is Curly on TV last night:

Politicians, who are the people who got us into this budget problem in the first place, should have the kind of incentives to get us out of this problem.

And, for example, you could have a rule whereby while the budget is in deficit that their salaries get cut by 50 per cent and they remain at that level until the budget is back into surplus.

I might go along with it if it was also the rule that economics professors who warn that stagflation is a real and present danger take a 50% drop in income (til it does arrive) if it hasn't yet arrived within 3 years of the warning.

Interdimensional tales

The tales are not particularly "creepy", but they are new and somewhat interesting, if one has an interest in science fiction ideas for stories.

It does make me think that the genre of interdimensional travel has been little explored in science fiction movies.  (It has had a much better run in books.) 

Sure, time travel has been done to death, and sometimes that has a "many worlds element", but just straightforward stories of movement between parallel worlds - can't think of many.  Possible exception - sorta - Source Code (which I liked), but it only becomes clearly an element towards the end.  The only other one coming to mind is, of course, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but it was not a major element, if I recall correctly.  

(Oh - I should say that I was pleased that Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - about the most unduly over-derided movie of the last decade - had aliens as interdimensional travellers, as that is pretty much the preferred way that Fortean types like to think of UFO's now.   Spielberg had updated his view of UFOs appropriately.)

The proposition: glass being half empty means it is not half full

I see that Sinclair Davidson has been graphing again, this time showing Commonwealth spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP.

I would have thought most people looking at the graph would say that it shows revenue and spending over the last 40 years bounces around between a pretty narrow range of about 22 to 27%.  Periods under both Labor and Liberal governments have seen revenues below spending, and spending below revenues (when measured this way).

The period post the GFC, shows the government spending increasing, and the dramatic drop below the decade of high revenue enjoyed by the Howard government.   It seems a pretty fair guess that if Rudd did not make the GFC stimulus spending (as widely supported by most economists and supported up to a point by the Coalition), and if Howard era revenues had continued (or even decreased more moderately) there would have not have been any budgetary problem at all.

Yet Davidson insists that the only way to interpret this is that spending is the problem.   His attitude seems to be "no, if I say a glass is half empty, it is impossible to assert that it is half full."   The large drop in revenue to far below a decade long average is supposed to be something to be ignored, presumably.  

He also gives the impression that he thinks turning government spending on or off is a simple thing, like turning on or off a tap - ignoring that people and companies make plans around government spending programs, and suffer disruption if they are too abruptly changed.  It further seems a feature of Right wing criticisms of Labor that they (and Treasury) are supposed to foresee sudden international financial crises and have a good idea of how much they may abruptly affect revenue.

On a related matter, Koukoulus has been running an interesting argument that if you add both government spending and revenue, it gives you a reasonable metric by which to judge "size of government":

one way is to look at the sum of Commonwealth revenue and spending as a share of GDP. This means that the more the government raises in tax and then recycles into the economy via spending, the bigger the footprint of government on the economy, and vice versa.

Makes sense?

A quick look at the size of government, on this measure, reveals some startling facts. I repeat facts based on data in Mr Hockey's Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook document.

Under the Rudd and Gillard governments, the average size of government was 47.4% of GDP.

The Howard government size of government was 49.2% of GDP.

Seems a not unreasonable way of looking at it.

But let's face it, if your libertarian inspired ideological approach is that government should be small, and increased taxes are always bad, and that Keynesian policies are mistaken, you're never going to have anything much new to say about Australian government policy other than "spending is the problem."

Update:  I see that Greg Jericho tweeted today a graph that shows in a clearer way the drop in revenue:
 

All the more to show the ludicrousness of insisting that spending is the only problem. 

Now they decide it's a bad idea

What do you know - there are two men with experience in the field who now have some regrets about where the "anything goes" approach to modern reproduction leads us:

Exhibit A:  not so well known actor Jason Patric, who is having a court brawl (and waging a PR campaign) regarding his rights to have a relationship with his biological son.  Yeah, he was happy enough to give a long term on again, off again girlfriend a sperm donation (delivered via artificial insemination, though - really, why did they bother with that if they had been long term lovers before - oh that's right, that would be too much like how babies are made by nature) and all was well for the first couple of years when he did see his son.  Then they stopped being friends and he was told to shove off.   It seems the laws designed to stop genuine anonymous sperm donors from interfering with parental "rights" are being used against Mr Patric.   This probably seems unfair to most people - when what they should be objecting to is people making babies in such a manner way in the first place.

Exhibit B:  reproductive technology cheer leader Robert Winston now is having misgivings about rich people soon making "designer babies".   What, he's only got around to watching Gattaca now?  Bit slow on the uptake, you "lesbians using reproductive technology is fine because they'll probably make fantastic mothers" claiming populariser of making babies in a way none at all would have existed before.

I didn't know that Cardwell grows nuts

So I'm being disparaging of people who claim UFO encounters, and who had a meeting up in Cardwell, North Queensland, last weekend.

But honestly, when you read their stories and look at the photos, I'm not convinced there will be a second Cardwell UFO Festival any time soon.

Space bugs

Space Station research shows that hardy little space travelers could colonize Mars

They've been exposing various microscopic lifeforms to the space environment at the ISS for some time now, and yes, some bugs have survived and are obviously very hard to kill.

I was wondering yesterday, on a related topic, as I made my first batch of "no knead" bread, about how much research has gone into the possibility that space radiation may make a normally mild natured (so to speak) microscopic lifeform into one that was dangerous.   As I was dealing with yeast, which is pretty much wandering all about the place all the time, that was the microscopic life that I was thinking about in particular.

Remember the story about the Texan man who by some fluke had a permanent colony of yeast in his gut that was brewing alcohol inside of him?   Well, you would hope that no future Moon or Mars colony ended up with at souped up yeast version which could take up home in everyone's gut and prove very difficult to remove.   It would be a particularly ignoble way for a colony to collapse (pretty much from unintentional alcoholic poisoning), wouldn't it?

OK, so maybe it's not a big enough premise for a science fiction blockbuster, but a short story at least...

Commission of Audit examined

What a great knock down of several of the Commission of Audit's key proposals by Greg Jericho.   His final paragraphs I would count as "tough but fair":

It would be nice to think this dopey regurgitation of libertarian masturbatory fantasy will be put to one side.

In the past, sensible heads would have prevailed. Many of the recommendations are similar to those in the 1996 commission of audit. A report John Howard largely ignored, and yet bizarrely Australia was able to continue to grow for another 18 years straight. But this government is too full of those who actually believe in this idiotic ideological view of the world – where “reform” is a synonym for “cut”, and ideology trumps evidence. And for them, the budget is just a first step to achieving it.

Nauseating idiots

Death threats stop gun store from selling 'smart' gun. Why? - CSMonitor.com

Read with amazement how the nauseating gun lobby in the US (or a large part of it) opposes the sale of "smart" guns that have the potential to reduce accidental gun deaths and injury, as well as their use when stolen.

Religion reconsidering that topic, continued

I've been doing posts about the religious reconsideration of homosexuality for a while now, and here's another report directly on the topic by Slate's William Saletan.   Slate also has up the story that (retired) bishop Gene Robinson is getting divorced from his gay partner.  (I half suspect that when there are some high profile, and bitterly contested, gay divorces, this will have an effect on the number of people taking it up - not that there are that many getting married anyway, I think.)

Someone at First Things blog seems to have an interest in the topic too, as they have a link up to a blog run by a couple of Christian women who are a some sort of relationship, describing themselves as:  "a celibate, LGBT couple with a queer calling."    Odd.

Giant statues photographed

Fabrice Fouillet photographs giant monuments in his series, “Colosses.” (PHOTOS.)

Giant statues are nearly always very impressive and awesome, if you ask me, and this series of photos shows one or two from around the world that I haven't seen before.   (I've also been inside the very first one in the series in Japan!)  

TIAs discussed

My husband Andrew Marr missed the warning signs of his stroke. Don't let it happen to you | Life | The Guardian

This is quite a good article warning people not to miss the signs of a TIA (or mini stroke.)

My Mum had some many years ago - perhaps 15 to 20 years - but I think they mainly manifested as a funny  sensation on her lip and/or the end of her tongue.  She went on medication and was fine for many years afterwards.

Spending and revenue

It's the debt, not the spending: why the budget is bleeding

Peter Martin's column above contains these useful figures:

Two years beforehand in 2010-11, Treasury forecast revenue equal to 24.1 per cent
of gross domestic product by 2012-13. It was a low forecast by the standards of the previous Howard government. But what the Gillard government got was 23.1 per cent of GDP, billions of dollars less.

By a staggering coincidence, government spending that year amounted to exactly 24.1 per cent of GDP, precisely the same figure as the revenue it had expected to get.

If revenue had rolled in as expected, the past financial year’s budget wouldn’t be in deficit in all. Wayne Swan would be crowing about his success in eliminating the deficit on time, as promised.

No one is too sure where the revenue has gone. It’s a murder mystery with multiple suspects.

Small government ideologues, who have been entertaining themselves at some "We Hate Tax" love in this weekend*, like to concentrate on absolute figures for spending and revenue rather than "relative to GDP" figures.  Unless someone cares to correct me, I take it that this is done as spin to try to portray spending as being out of control by ignoring factors that indicate why government spending would have some "natural" growth over the years.

With respect to looking at it compared to GDP,  I see that even last week's National Commission of Audit report - with as fine a Right wing pedigree as one could expect when appointed by a Coalition government - contains the graphs which put in clear perspective the "it's all Labor's overspending" line.

First:  Chart 4.1 in the report - Commonwealth spending as a share of GDP

Second:  Chart 4.2 - Commonwealth taxes as a share of GDP

Labor governments that spend and tax like there is no tomorrow?  Hardly.

*  I note a guest speaker was notorious climate change denying Patrick Michaels - anti tax libertarians (with few exceptions) must attack climate change as not really being a problem because the most sensible policy to address is a tax.  Eek - a tax!  

Was never at risk of participating

Another Solid Reason Not to Do a Mud-Obstacle Run - James Hamblin - The Atlantic

 Oh.

Apparently, there's been a growing fad for people to do staged, obstacle littered, endurance runs in America and elsewhere, involving things like mud courses,  frigid water swims, etc.

This trend had escaped my attention.  The article notes that doing the mud courses is a pretty good way to get diarrhoea.

I've never been sure why people can't enough satisfaction from merely sharing things like a long bushwalk, a bottle of wine with some cheese and bread, and a nice bed.

PS:    my challenge for the weekend is making my own bread.  A "no knead" recipe published a few years ago in the US seems to have been very popular there, and recently came to my attention via my Zite account.  The dough is made, and will be baked tomorrow.

Not impressed

Svengali of spin

Interesting profile of Mark Textor that, to my mind, paints a picture of a political jerk.

An amusing review

There's a review of a memoir about Jorges Luis Borges in this month's Literary Review that begins:

For rather a short book (259 pages of large print and generous spacing), Norman Thomas di Giovanni's odd memoir of Jorge Luis Borges includes a surprisingly large number of pages devoted to urination.

It made me laugh quite a bit...

Industrial scale blackmail

I'm not surprised it happens (Filipinos attempting blackmail of cyber "boyfriends" by recording some embarrassing on line video), but I am surprised at the apparent scale of it:

Operating on an almost industrial scale from call centre-style offices, such cyber-blackmail agents are provided with training and offered bonus incentives such as holidays, cash or mobile phones for reaching their financial targets.

Bad.  

First Dog noted

I quite like today's First Dog on the Moon cartoon re the Commission of Audit.   (As it happens, it's the first one since he moved his kennel to The Guardian that I thought was up to standard.)

Does he care if it is copied here, I wonder?

Attempted indoctrination fail

Interesting article at the Atlantic about how children who are brought up in very politically doctrinaire homes often rebel and adopt the opposite position as adults:

It’s understandable that parents with strong beliefs would feel it is their duty to see their children adopt those beliefs. But, however well-meaning these efforts are, they may be in vain. A study recently published in the British Journal of Political Science, based on data from the U.S. and U.K., found that parents who are insistent that their children adopt their political views inadvertently influence their children to abandon the belief once they become adults. The mechanism is perhaps surprising: Children who come from homes where politics is a frequent topic of discussion are more likely to talk about politics once they leave home, exposing them to new viewpoints—which they then adopt with surprising frequency.

The study, led by researcher Elias Dinas, also shows that these changes are especially likely to happen during the college years. Conservative culture warriors have warned for years that universities are outposts of liberal indoctrination—and the study seems to confirm at least some of that warning.

“Extreme parental views of the world give children a clear choice for being with the parents through agreement, or against parents through disagreement,” says Carl Pickhardt, an author and child psychologist. “Thus extremely rigid views of right/wrong, trust/distrust, love/hate can be embraced by children who want to stay connected to parents, and can be cast off by children who, for their own independence, are willing to place the parental relationship at risk.”

Another potential holiday destination to give a miss

Brunei introduces Islamic sharia penalties, including death by stoning for adultery

Not that I would be expecting to break the law if I went there, mind you. But no one should reward such a place with tourism.

Competition isn't everything

Why the Audit Commission is wrong on its biggest call

Michael Pascoe's column on the Right wing's obsession with going back to the future regarding the Federal system in Australia sounds right to me.  (And I say that as someone who grew up in Brisbane who can remember sewerage only being installed in the family home about 8 km from the city in the mid 1960's.)  Here's the relevant section:

The idea is that, if the states are given more responsibility and control of their own revenue and expenditure without federal interference, they will compete to offer the best services most
efficiently, thereby achieving improved outcomes at a lower cost. Market forces to the rescue and, praise the Lord, smaller Federal Government.

The real world is different. There are some practical problems for a start. Peter Hartcher reports that, according the report itself, the proposed reform of federation would increase overall government spending and the tax burden by $5 billion a year. Tasmanian and Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist, Saul Eslake, has explained that the poorest states with the lowest incomes would have to have the highest rates of tax to deliver comparable services. Neither are desirable outcomes.

Worse is the reality of what happens when our states compete: it tends to be a race to the bottom.

If you're ideologically driven by a dislike of taxes and government, Joh Bjelke-Petersen could well be your hero. He abolished death duties in Australia by dropping them in Queensland and boasting about running the lowest-taxing state. That may have been an incentive for a temporary rise in the number of people who thought Queensland was a good place to die, but the other states soon copied the move.

And while Queensland claimed the "lowest taxing" title, it also provided the worst or near-worst services, especially in education.  Queenslanders ended up getting what they paid for - a backward state with a diminished long-term future - until other premiers brought it up
to the national speed....

This is not just an Australian phenomenon. The United States, spiritual home of the ideologically-driven right, is the model of competitive federalism. The result is a sadly divergent society suffering growing inequality – and that's before getting into the issue of rising education costs and debts. To be born in Mississippi means, on average, that you're a loser in the American lottery. Competitive federalism tends to keep the poor poor and the rich richer.

Putting the boot into the IPA

Propagandists masquerade as think tanks to push spurious science

What a good way to start the morning - some serious kicking of the Institute of Paid Advocacy (and to a lesser extent, the CIS).

Just your average ideologically driven Coalition wish list

Lateline - 01/05/2014: Audit Commission report

Like most other people, I'm sure, I had forgotten completely until I was watching Lateline last night that the incoming Howard government had a similar "Commission of Audit" back in 1996.  Amusingly, many of the things recommended in that report have turned up again in this new one.

These reports can, to large extent, be ignored as being just a part of Coalition government tactics.  Have a read of this part of the transcript from last night, and snigger away at how things haven't changed much over 20 years:

(1996)

BOB OFFICER, ARCHIVE: It's my pleasure to present this report.

TOM IGGULDEN: ...came not long after the last Coalition government was sworn in, the last Liberal treasurer took the same approach to the recommendations.

PETER COSTELLO, FORMER LIBERAL TREASURER, ARCHIVE: This is not a statement of government policy.

TOM IGGULDEN: The recommendations in 1996 were also broadly similar to today's...

(Excerpt from 1996 National Commission of Audit 1996)

VOICEOVER:  A Medicare upfront payment for each visit to the doctor. The total replacement of university funding with scholarships, student fees and bequests. And a tougher approach to adjusting pensions.

TOM IGGULDEN: ...few were ultimately taken up...

(Excerpt from 1996 National Commission of Audit 1996)

VOICEOVER: Means testing nursing home care and the handing over to the states of key areas such as health and education.

TOM IGGULDEN: ...despite the warnings of a budget crisis to come, especially in health.

BOB OFFICER, ARCHIVE: That program is not sustainable in its current form.

Creepy stories

I've read of the "phone call from the dead" genre of (alleged) true life ghost stories before, but never found any examples particularly convincing.   However the three listed in this post, (including one I missed recently in the Sydney Morning Herald!) give me the creeps, somewhat.

Complaining again about a show I won't watch? Hey, it's my blog...

I am no fan of the fantasy genre, so there was never much chance I would want to watch Game of Thrones.  When I heard that it was relentlessly violent (especially with beheadings - I've always felt queasy contemplating those), had a fair bit of swearing, and was full of gratuitously explicit porn-like sex scenes, the chances of my watching it, ever, even if someone sent me a set of boxed DVDs, approached zero.  Call me old fashioned (I do point out a conservative inclination in the title, you know) but the dark moral atmosphere which some fiction generates is a matter of concern to me, and I think it is problematic that it is not a matter of concern for so many people in Western society now.

Hence, it is with a sense of some schadenfreude that I read about the controversy that a recent rape scene had swept through the show's fans.

There seems to be a bit of a push back over the initial outrage many felt at a scene which involves (as I understand) the incredibly-dangerous-for-men-to-really-believe old trope of a rape that starts as a rape but is supposed to not be rape by the end.* It's not real life, complains the (routinely sweary herself) Helen Razer:  stop talking about it.  Oddly, she does acknowledge that the controversy was really kicked along by the director's attempt to justify the scene as not really being rape, yet she still thinks it is not worth talking about.  And what's more, since Razer wrote her post, the actress involved has also made comments indicating that she agrees with the director.  I really don't agree with Razor's argument that incredibly popular fiction that deals with rape in a highly dubious moral manner doesn't matter. 

It has always seemed to me to be a "traditionally" Left wing thing to downplay the influence of fiction on real life, and hence not to care, or really think about, the message either consciously or subliminally conveyed by a story.  These days, after much reading of a certain blog over the years, it seems to me that the libertarian right has adopted much the same attitude.  Come to think of it, the cultural grandmother of much of what passes for  libertarianism in the US, Ayn Rand, had a recurring thing about forced sex in her novels which makes most modern women feel queasy.  George RR Martin, on the other hand, is a life long Democrat, supporting my initial claim.

In any event, I was happy enough with this post about the issue of depictions of rape in fiction by a male author and blogger unknown to me, and whose work I may not even like:

The discussion then must be: well, why is this a problem? Rape exists in fiction. And it has to be allowed to exist in fiction. It’s a rough, tough, terrible topic, but to ignore it is all the more sickening — to sweep it under the rug and not shine a line in that dark space is basically to deny it in reality, as well. One of fiction’s chiefmost strengths is that it allows us to bring up these things  and make us feel something about them — it’s addressing them, making us deal with it, and it’s being real about it.

That said, as storytellers, it’s vital to think about what we’re putting out there. There exists a mode of thought that says authors have zero social responsibility, and I’d argue that’s technically true in the same way that nobody anywhere has any social responsibility to anyone. We’re all basically just animals in a zoo, but what makes us human is thinking about the ramifications of our actions. And what makes us smart storytellers and capable authors is thinking about the ramifications of our stories. That doesn’t necessarily mean not putting scary stuff on the page (or on the screen). It just means being mindful of consequence.

He then makes it clear that the main consequence he is concerned about is how women who have been victims of rape or sexual assault will feel when they watch the show.   Well, that's a valid enough point, although I would have thought that (as he makes clear in a paragraph I quote below) as the show features an awful lot of rape, women who have a problem with that would probably have given up watching long ago.

But his point becomes more general about the use of rape in fiction and in the show more generally:

The problem, as I see it, with the rape scene in GoT, is many-fold.

First, it’s done in a world where rape is basically as common as horses. It’s referenced damn near every episode. Women are victims. Men are rapists. It’s practically becoming a thesis of the world. The worst thing done to women is rape. Rape, rape, rape. The show is getting rapey as shit. (More notable perhaps because the books aren’t quite so?) At this point, that’s drifting toward fetishistic and gratuitous — in part because it seems to revel in its statement.

Second, it’s more a trope than it is an actual thing. It’s lazy, cheap, short-shrifted. It’s code meant to again invoke that grayness of the characters — “Oh, look, even the most powerful can be laid low, and even those characters you like are basically pieces of shit.” The rapist-and-victim message, again. Really, we can’t do any better?

Third, it feels out of character and is a change from the book — a change that makes these characters worse and weaker than they have demonstrated in the past (at least, I’d argue).

Fourth, the rape was soft, weak, almost as ineluctable as gravity — the strong woman just sort of gives into it (and here you’ll want to discuss the was she really raped? question again but once more please be aware of the persistent lack of consent given) and makes rape look less like a violent act and more like a fact-of-life. (And it really is a fact-of-life in the GoT world, which is troubling in how it reinforces that “women = victims, men = rapists” vibe.)

The point I’m making is, if you’re going to deal with rape in your fiction, please give it weight and consequence. Do not let it drift toward being a lazy, cheap trope.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me, and one not based on what people will call my nanny-ish inclination to tell people to stop watching dark stories on TV or movies, or an excessively feminist viewpoint.

Its not as if I suspect that the show is going to lead to incestuous rapes that would otherwise not have happened; but it does sound awfully like it is yet another modern, much praised show, in which main protagonists act very badly indeed, and yet they are played as engaging characters.  And not just for 2 hours of moral bleakness in the cinema, but for scores of hours to dwell with them.

I don't see that as something to celebrate.   If the rape scene has led to people dropping the show, that a happy consequence, I reckon.

Update:   good to see a story in the New York Times that notes that many people are starting to make the same disgruntled observations about the use of rape in the show and books as outlined by Chuck Wendig above.  I expect nothing much will be done, however, as long as people keep watching it in large numbers.


* I am reminded of the controversy a few decades back that Robert Heinlein, who got more and more eccentric in his fictional dealings with sexuality, faced when a female character in one of his books (if I remember it correctly) dealt with rape by deciding to get what enjoyment out of it she could, while simultaneously vowing to kill the rapist.  

My $3 clean skin shopping appears safe (and a fast food complaint)

Minimum alcohol price not in the public interest, says health agency | World news | theguardian.com

By the way, according to one calculation, Australia is the fourth most expensive country to live in.  It would seem to me they are giving inadequate weighting to the cost of cheap wine. 

But, by way of cost of living related complaint:   I have become unhappy with McDonalds.

A price increase at my local one maybe 6 months ago seems to have made it significantly more expensive, and I have become really tired of the stuffing around with the menu.   The higher quality items taken as a meal now are all over $10, even for the "small" version.   The price differential between a small meal set and a medium one is tiny (about 50c?) which is typical of the obesity inducing pricing structure of fast food outlets generally, I guess.

The only "good" value there now is in the cruddy end of the menu - "burgers" which are only meat, bacon and sauce, for example.

Sure, they have introduced chicken salads which are better than they were before, but after their introductory lower price, their regular price just doesn't seem particularly good value. 

And basically, they just keep moving menu items around too fast.   The burger with beetroot, for example, will reappear for a mere 6 weeks (or so it seems) and disappear again.   And some items appear once and never re-appear again.  (My wife and I both liked a "mexican" burger on a corn bun with avocado some years ago - it has never come back to my knowledge.)

I admired the way the company re-branded itself a good few years ago now with the store upgrades to include the coffee shop sections, but with the main menu being mucked around the way it is, and the expense that now makes it hard to get away with an under $10 meal, it has lost its appeal.

I suspect I can't be the only person feeling this way.  I would be curious to see how their profit is going.

Serious pteropod effects already found (and how Conservative American pundits don't have a clue)

It was only recently that I referred to pteropods as the "canary in the coal mine" for ocean acidification.

Well, they have started to suffer already in one part of the world's ocean:

A NOAA-led research team has found the first evidence that acidity of continental shelf waters off the West Coast is dissolving the shells of tiny free-swimming marine snails, called pteropods, which provide food for pink salmon, mackerel and herring, according to a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B 

Even though these waters are naturally more acidic from local upwelling, it does not augur well for the future: 

"We did not expect to see pteropods being affected to this extent in our coastal region for several decades," said William Peterson, Ph.D., an oceanographer at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the paper's co-authors. "This study will help us as we compare these results with future observations to analyze how the chemical and physical processes of ocean acidification are affecting marine organisms."

Richard Feely, senior scientist from NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab and co-author of the research article, said that more research is needed to study how corrosive waters may be affecting other species in the ecosystem. "We do know that organisms like oyster larvae and pteropods are affected by water enriched with CO2. The impacts on other species, such as other shellfish and larval or juvenile fish that have economic significance, are not yet fully understood."

 While we're speaking ocean acidification, I was surprised to read recently that conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg had said Republicans should take some environmental issues more seriously, such as ocean acidification.   Many people pointed out that you address both climate change and acidification the same way - by tough action to cut back on fossil fuels - but that is something  about which he is not keen.

Goldberg has had to clarify that he was talking more about geoengineering - such as grinding up mountains of limestone and throwing into the ocean.

Of course, Goldberg has probably not read this recent paper which did not dismiss entirely the possibility of geoengineering, but noted:

The use of ocean-based enhanced weathering [128] could more directly counter ocean acidification, increasing atmospheric CO₂ drawdown through the addition to the ocean of either bicarbonate [129], carbonate minerals [130], calcium hydroxide [131] or combining the addition of liquid CO₂ to the ocean with pulverized limestone [154]. All these approaches, however, involve the transport and processing of considerable bulk of materials, with associated energy costs, in order to achieve globally significant climate benefits. The land-based production of Ca(OH)₂ would also require additional CO₂ sequestration effort (to avoid additional CO₂ release), while the various processes proposed for ‘liming the ocean’ could themselves cause large-scale ecosystem damage, by locally raising pH beyond organisms’ tolerance limits and/or decreasing light penetration, through precipitation effects. 

They also consider ocean fertilization and note its likely problems and limited prospect of large scale CO2 sequestration.

Their conclusion:

The potential for some CDR techniques would seem to warrant further consideration. Nevertheless, strong and rapid mitigation measures, to stabilize atmospheric CO₂ at near-current levels, would provide the policy action most likely to limit ocean acidification and its associated impacts.

The lesson:  even when Republican pundits start trying to sound more open to environmentally friendly policies, they actually have no idea.

Floods increasing, at least in some places

Analysis of the recent rainfall and floods in England indicate that increased warming has increased flooding risk there somewhat.   (A one in a 100 year flood down to one in 80 years, but that's only with .8 of a degree rise and likely at least another 1.2 degrees to go - if not more.) 

As I have noted before, this attribution work is really difficult, and takes a lot of computer crunching, but I don't see much reason to doubt its conclusions.

The other caution in the article is this:

Dr Schaller notes that the results must be understood in context, and are specific to the UK in winter. "It all depends on the region and season considered. Climate change might increase, decrease or have no effect at all on flood events," she told the BBC.

"Hirabayashi and co-workers, for example, showed that floods are expected to decrease with climate change in Central Europe. So our results are only valid for the southern UK and for winter months."