As noted at Catallaxy

Sinclair Davidson actually thinks Bronwyn Bishop is doing a good job as speaker. Simply astonishing, as he likes to say.  He likes how Scott Morrison handles himself too, as do many of the commenters at the site.  [Update:  see what Sinclair says himself in clarification in comments below.]   I'm always amused about how much some libertarian/conservative types like "hard men" (and hard haired women) who they think are successfully putting the boot into their political opponents.  (To be fair, we saw the same thing from Labor followers with Paul Keating; but I always disagreed with them too that the aggro was a good look.  Also - Morrison is making politics out of a secret government operation on the high seas - that is something to deplore, not celebrate.) 

Judith Sloan, in thinking about the Medicare co-payment, again gets the opportunity to express annoyance that other people (medical researchers) might get to fly business class.  (Last time it was those mooching pilots, remember?)

Update:  re Morrison and secrecy on ocean:

Immigration officials faced a grilling at a Senate estimates hearing on Monday night about unconfirmed reports an asylum seeker boat was intercepted off Christmas Island in mid-May and its passengers are in custody on the Customs Ocean Protector ship.

Customs chief executive Michael Pezzullo maintained that only an illegal foreign fishing boat had been intercepted near Christmas Island recently.

Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young referred to reports Christmas Islanders saw clothing packs being taken out to the Ocean Protector.

But Mr Pezzullo refused to comment on logistics, operational matters or any legal advice about holding people in custody.

He rejected Labor senator Kim Carr's description that asylum seekers were being detained on a ''prison ship''.

''People are being held in secure circumstances and subject to operational orders,'' he said, adding they were appropriately cared for with adequate food and water.

Senator Carr asked how many people were in custody on the Ocean Protector and other vessels.

''I'm not going to discuss that,'' Mr Pezzullo said.

On Monday, Senator Hanson-Young told Fairfax Media that the Abbott government's '' obsession with secrecy means that we are hearing eye-witness reports of refugee boats from Christmas Island locals, while Customs and Immigration officials remain tight-lipped''.

''The government is refusing to answer even the most basic questions about the health and safety of people who may be locked up inside a customs vessel right now,'' Senator Hanson-Young said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/border-protection-deny-running-prison-ship-for-asylum-seekers-20140527-38zpy.html#ixzz32s2AgYC1

The Greens are not realistic in how they would respond to the problem - yet they are still on the money when it comes to the appalling secrecy that the government is putting over this; and it is something of a scandal that there isn't a public scandal about it.

Not sure what is going on in Spain and Luxembourg

Found it at Business Insider, which notes:

The divorce rate is still high in the U.S. at 53%. But Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are worse off with divorce rates higher than 60%.
Australia fares a little better but had a rate of 43% in 2010.
Belgium has the highest rate of divorce in this data set at a staggering 70%.
The lowest official rate is in Chile with 3%.

About the Piketty claims

A good commentary piece, I think, on Piketty is here in The Guardian.

Fantasy crime and consequences

Mob kills man for 'stealing genitals' in Burkina Faso | The FRANCE 24 Observers

I had assumed that "penis stealing" was something that was done as a revenge curse against someone who had done you wrong.  But according to this report, it is used as a scam:

There are usually two or three accomplices who carry out this scam
in three parts: first, someone who claims to have magical powers touches
a victim and persuades him that they’ve stolen his genitals. Then,
another accomplice approaches the victim and drives home the point by
saying that if the victim doesn’t buy a specific product, he’ll lose his
ability to reproduce. Finally, the victim pays a hefty sum [Editor’s
note: around 30,000 CFA Francs, or 45 euros] for a Viagra-like medicine
that is supposed to make his genitals work again.

It had been several years since I had heard of any such cases in
Koudougou. There were a few isolated cases in nearby areas about 10
years ago, but they quickly stopped. This time, though, the first cases
in the beginning of May were handled very badly: local authorities
didn’t intervene immediately to calm the crowds, and a lot of people
were caught up in the hysteria. I don’t think the lynching of this man
has calmed tensions.

Just too many guns

Even in a State With Restrictive Laws, Gunman Amassed Weapons and Ammunition - NYTimes.com

Mass murderer  Elliott Rodger was able to acquire 3 handguns in California easily and legally, despite the State being considered to have some of the toughest gun laws in America.

There are two ways of looking at this:   the American gun lobby will be arguing that it demonstrates that restrictive  gun laws don't stop really determined killers (and it's true, he killed 3 by stabbing - although I still haven't read exactly how that happened) and so why bother with such laws?  In fact, no matter how a mass killing happens, there is a powerful fantasy amongst gun lovers that if only there were more guns around, more mass killings would be prevented.   An obscenely nutty ex Republican executive is said to have tweeted this:  "No idea how my son will die, but I know it won't be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back."  If the parent of one of the deceased beat this guy to within an inch of his life, no jury would convict.

The second way of looking at it is this:  you can never guarantee that mentally disturbed young men will not kill, but if you make it pretty hard for anyone in society to get guns (and handguns in particular), you are going to have very few mass shootings involving handguns.  Evidence for this - Australia and England.

Fortunately, Australians tend to think the second, sensible way.  American-lite, Heinlein-ian  libertarian fantasies of a society being better if everyone who wants to be armed is armed don't wash here, and may it forever remain so.

Moby Dump

Whale defecation good fertiliser for fisheries

Yet more on Frances

Frances Abbott Chosen ‘On Merit’ To Help Lobby Fed Govt Regulators | newmatilda.com

OK, so Frances may have given the same gushing review of her institution even if she didn't have a "scholarship" there which appears to have been extended to her by personal invitation that she should ask for it.

But I guess we will never know.

I explained the story to someone today (a strong anti-Labor voter) and he ended up saying - "Well, the Abbott's could end all of this just by saying they will pay the tuition fee."   Well, yes, a principled politician might do so, by way of apology for not disclosing a large and generous (effective) gift to his daughter from someone who clearly thought that Tony should help her business by seeing regulations were eased (and probably also by giving it funding previously unavailable).  But Tony Abbott's complained before about his personal finances being stretched, so I can't see it happening.

Co-payments and their raison d'etre

 If I have understood Henry Ergas in the Australian correctly this morning, the fact that the Abbott government's co-payment does not go into general revenue but rather to a special medical research fund that (according to Hockey) will cut future costs by finding a cure for cancer and dementia (honestly, this is his extremely improbable argument) means that it cannot be justified as a measure directly offsetting the cost of health care.

Instead Ergas is seeking to justify it by praising the "moderating" effect of the number of doctor visits.

But wait a minute:   what evidence is there that Australia suffers from an overuse of doctors because of the lack of such a price signal?

I have heard it said that in fact Australian rates of doctor visits is entirely within the normal range for similar countries.   Unfortunately, I don't have a link for that at the moment.

If there is no convincing evidence that Australia is suffering from a public overuse of GPs, why would you want to save money by trying to persuade them to go to the doctor less?    (The fact that the mere news of a co-payment coming has led to doctor's waiting rooms in some parts of the country being unusually empty is no good evidence of overuse - although I noticed that the likes of Andrew Bolt thought so, taking the line that if a $7 co-payment puts you off a doctors visit, you can't be so sick.  The point is, you would have to work out how many hospital admissions have been caused by delay in seeing a GP to work out whether the costs savings of reducing GP visits had really been worth it.)

As Ergas himself admits, the effect on population health is not clear, with the Rand study being of highly uncertain application to this country.   And as Peter Martin notes:

And general practitioners are cheap compared to other forms of medicine. They account for just 6 per cent of health spending. They act as gatekeepers, directing Australians to hospitals and more expensive specialists only when needed. They are not where the costs are rising. They are among the last places costs should be cut back.

Ergas makes one valid point - that countries with what we consider "socialised" medicine do sometimes impose a co-payment and do not consider it ideologically wrong.

But the rest of his contorted argument - that the Coalition plan for one is worthwhile in Australia because it will reduce the number of GP visits - is not justified at all, and is prepared to take a "lets see what happens to the poor when you impose this in Australia" that is typical of the Right at the moment.

The Coalition case for a co-payment would be at least half way plausible if they were going to use it to fund the hospital services that a visit to the GP may result in.   But to simply take the money and hide it away and hope it works by reducing the number of GP visits - no, this is just an experiment about price signals that is unwarranted.

Fear of Piketty

The fear of many Right wing, libertarian inclined economists and commentators that Piketty is right about how capitalism and the rise of inequality works has been palpable right from the start.  Any and every criticism of his book (and of him personally) has been leapt on with great enthusiasm; so much so  that was clear that they saw his argument as very threatening.   (I'm not sure whether they realised how obvious they were being.)

It's clear why they were scared:  I don't have to do more than spell out t-a-x to explain.

Anyway, this weekend's kerfuffle about Piketty's 'errors' by the Financial Times has been interesting.  In the least surprising admission from an economist this century, Sinclair Davidson today writes " I’m underwhelmed by the argument and not convinced by his thesis."  But what I am most interested in is the short video from FT that he posts that gives some examples of mistakes from graphs from the book.

Watching that, it seems pretty clear that Giles and FT are over-egging their complaints.  In a couple of the graphs, they show Piketty's originals, which pretty clearly show only a very moderate rate of growth in inequality in the recent period, and the FT corrected graph lines look insignificantly different.  If anything, the graphs gave the impression to me that Piketty was being pretty cautious on the matter of how much inequality is recently increasing.

In fact, some of the phrases about Piketty that seem to be originating from FT sound pretty much defamatory to me, and of course they are being lapped up entirely uncritically by those who fear Piketty.

Krugman was pretty restrained in his defence of Piketty over the weekend, but makes the point that is very unlikely he's off the mark on the matter of rising inequality in the US.  The Economist has done the most detailed "defence" against the FT claims so far, again showing some examples where the alleged errors seem far from important.

On the bigger scale, what I think people like me find so surprising about the whole Piketty phenomena is that we really had no idea economists do their work with such poor source material on key matters such as inequality.   It seems remarkable that they haven't put more effort into gathering the sort of information that it now appears clear has only been done in very recent years.  (And of course, even when it is collected, there is so much room for argument over its accuracy or correct way to interpret it.)

No wonder economists are so bad at prediction.  It makes the field look rather like astronomy before the telescope was invented.  (Or perhaps to be more precise, before the data from telescopes was available.  Actually, now that I think of it, the situation is more that it seems economists have been acting like astronomers who have poor quality telescopes available, but have been more interested in theorising about what they are seeing rather than in collecting, comparing and improving the data  from them.)

Seems about right

David Marr on the budget of a hidden man | The Saturday Paper

David Marr can be annoying, but his general take on Tony Abbott as summed up in this short commentary piece seems pretty right to me.  This is the core point:

The great chameleons of politics are populists. But the magical
transformations of Tony Abbott are more driven by tactics than passion:
by the need, at any particular moment, to secure advantage.

And I think this is why he will not be regarded as a good Prime Minister.

Paris envy

Over the past couple of months, there seem to have been a multitude of cooking shows about Paris or France, and I'm getting sick of it because it's such a ridiculously attractive country with food I want to eat.  (My wife feels the same way.)

My France with Manu was enjoyable - Manu from My Kitchen Rules turned out to be a likeable host showing us around the part of France where he grew up.  (I wish they hadn't cut short the scene where he tried to eat a tough old oyster about as big as his fist, though.  One strongly suspects something unpleasant but probably amusing followed.)   SBS has been replaying French Food Safari, which provided a lot of information about French food culture, even if the recipes (usually done in Australia) didn't do that much for me.  Luke Nguyen has also been swanning around Paris and France, and whilw I don't find him a particularly engaging TV chef, as always, the locale and scenery is impressive.

Today in the New York Times, the torment continues, with a lengthy article about five signature dishes from different parts of France.  I didn't know that good cassoulet took quite this long:

That long-simmering is key. “All the components must harmonize,” Mr. Malé said. “Nothing is more catastrophic than a cassoulet made at the last minute.” Indeed, the best versions are cooked and cooled — preferably overnight — at least three times, a slow process that yields beans redolent with the deep flavors of the confit and pork sausage, topped by a thin layer of the dish’s natural juice and starches sealed in the oven. (Though cassoulet recipes often call for a topping of breadcrumbs, they are “never found on the authentic version,” Mr. Malé said.)

 I have only been to France once - about a three or four day side trip to Paris from England in the 1980's.   It remains the most beautiful city I have been to, and while at that age I was not overly concerned about food (and remember no real memorable meals there) I have always wanted to return, and to travel through the countryside. 

Speaking of food, even if not exactly French, we bought a ceramic tagine a year or more ago (one made in France, so there's a connection), but only recently started using it.  I thought it rather unlikely that it would give results significantly different from using normal lidded saucepans, but somehow, it does seem to make a difference, and it is in fact a real pleasure to cook in.   Last night, I basically followed this fish tagine recipe from Jamie Oliver, and it was good.

Northern beauty

I was very taken with this photo of Alesund, Norway, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald last week in a travel story about the increasing popularity of the Scandinavian countries for Australian tourists:



Yes, I would like to go.

Parts of Africa still pretty dark

Witch doctors arrested after albino woman murdered 'for potions' in Tanzania - Africa - World - The Independent

Police in the Simiyu region said the 40-year-old victim was murdered
overnight earlier this month and the attackers had hacked off her left
leg, the index and middle fingers of her left hand and part of her left
thumb.

Photographs of the murder scene outside her home were too graphic to publish.

People with albinism are often subjected to violent attacks in the country, where they are known as the “zeru zeru” or ghosts.

The condition is heavily stigmatised and families who see it as a curse have known to kick relatives out of their homes.

But sufferers are also a target for traditional healers, who harvest body parts to make potions for wealth, success and even election victories.

Kind of blackly ironic that they are killed for potions for success, isn't it?

I also note this oddity in the report:

Under the Same Sun is campaigning for better protection for people with
albinism in Africa and wants to see witch doctors banned as they claim
current regulation is not working.

 Current regulation for witchdoctors?  The Witchdoctor Registration Board, or something?

And then this sad note:

The group is concerned that attacks will increase in the run-up to
elections in October, when the demand for potions made from albino body
parts is expected to increase.

New Matilda expands the Frances Abbott story yet again

Some terrific journalism being done by New Matilda that shows exactly why Abbott should have disclosed the "scholarship" that his daughter received from Whitehouse.

Of course, it doesn't take much to convince me that Tony is a fool; but honestly, given that he was being publicly courted to makes changes favourable to the College, there is an overwhelmingly clear case that the onus is on him to plausibly explain why he did not disclose the valuable gift to his daughter.  Trying to brazen it out as an attack on her is not going to work.

At best, he should admit it was a mistake (with appropriate weasel words like "in hindsight", "now that I realise the full extent of generosity in how Frances was approached for this scholarship") but his current tactic earns him no credit at all.

Go Tom

Gee, when I recently complained the lack of promising (US) summer films this years, I had forgotten about the new Tom Cruise science fiction outing Edge of Tomorrow.

An early (sort of) review for it on io9 reckons it's terrific, and it has good reviews on Rottentomatoes too.

Cruise always impresses with how much he throws himself physically into his science fiction/action films.  His Spielberg movies were great, Mission Impossible 1 and 4 were very enjoyable, and I even liked Oblivion quite a bit last year.   So I will be very pleased if this one is also good, if it encourages him to continue to pick intelligent and entertaining science fiction that is not a frickin' superhero/comic book movie.   

No showers - but lots of bacteria

I can't see it ever becoming popular, but it's interesting to read of this woman's account of her month long experiment of just using a spray on skin bacteria in lieu of showering and shampooing.  

She indicates that the worst effect was on her hair, even though I thought it was reliably said that if you stop shampooing and removing oils from your hair, it eventually stops producing much in the way of replacement oil and becomes (more or less) clean looking again.  I didn't think it would take more than a month to achieve that, though.

Some of the men in the company that is investigating this idea have taken things to quite an extreme:

AOBiome does not market its product as an alternative to conventional cleansers, but it notes that some regular users may find themselves less reliant on soaps, moisturizers and deodorants after as little as a month. Jamas, a quiet, serial entrepreneur with a doctorate in biotechnology, incorporated N. eutropha into his hygiene routine years ago; today he uses soap just twice a week. The chairman of the company’s board of directors, Jamie Heywood, lathers up once or twice a month and shampoos just three times a year. The most extreme case is David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years. He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest. I met these men. I got close enough to shake their hands, engage in casual conversation and note that they in no way conveyed a sense of being “unclean” in either the visual or olfactory sense.

Thanks, but no thanks.

At least, I suppose, it indicates that the historical periods where fear of regular bathing was rampant were not as smelly as we might expect.

Aren't there any cranky critics who have just had enough with superhero movies?

Is it just me, or a sign of old age, that I really, really care not a hoot how good an X Men movie is reviewed - I still won't be seeing it.

From what bits of X Men past that I have seen on TV, I have no interest at all its whole, silly scenario.

Superhero/comic book movies have been done to death and the effect on creativity in the industry is much, much more dire than the much maligned "blockbuster" effect of the Spielberg/Lucas era of the late 70's to 1980's.

As spotted on twitter:

Tingle on the Budget

Coalition gets a brutal lesson in policy on the run

Interesting to note a few things from Laura Tingle's article:

Who is responsible for the debacle?

It is interesting that when The Australian Financial Review
was preparing a piece ahead of the budget on how it was put together,
people involved all described it as an Abbott budget, not a Hockey one.
There were lots of impressed references to the PM’s decisiveness in
meetings of the expenditure review committee.

This was despite the fact it was Joe Hockey who did all the footwork on the whole “age of entitlement” argument.

 Good to know that I can blame our not very bright PM, then.

Sympathy misplaced

Graham Richardson  this morning in the Oz:

I should also make it clear that I am appalled that the media in this country should give publicity to stories about a scholarship ­obtained by one of the PM’s daughters. The children of the famous can never win. Their achievements are too often belittled as if they would never get anywhere without the name and the good graces of the powerful mum or dad. I don’t know the young woman in question but I can imagine how she feels at the moment. The PM’s family should be off ­limits. They are not fair game.

A few corrections:

1.  Frances did actually win:  apparently a "scholarship" for which (it would appear - we are all awaiting any statement to the contrary)  she was contacted by the College to come and apply for, and with no other "applicants" competing.

2.  I don't think any of her classmates are actually criticising her achievements.  They're just annoyed that their College didn't give them any opportunity to compete for free money on offer.

3.  The story is about her father - a Prime Minister who has abruptly adopted a policy that will massively increase the cost of University courses, and give government support to the type of college his daughter attended, not declaring that his daughter's college seems to have gone out of its way to save him or her $70,000.   $60,000.

There is even evidence to suggest (see New Matilda - which also challenges in detail Abbott's understanding of the disclosure rules) that the money was thrown at Frances to curry favour with her father.

This is a matter that should be pursued.

PS:  we all know that the children of politicians and the famous will often be offered jobs through their family connections.  Nothing's ever going to stop that.   But there is a difference between being offered a position whereby you earn remuneration, and being actually given a gift, which is what this "scholarship" effectively appears to have been.  Frances was entitled to accept it, although if she is smarter than her father, she should also have realised that if word of this ever got out, it may well annoy the other students.  More importantly, her father should have disclosed it.

PPS:   further to my last point - the New Matilda article up today (saying Frances appears to have "no role" despite being on the Whitehouse payroll) is pretty irrelevant, and kind of petty, and came out after I made my last comment.    As I said, you are always going to have the "well connected" getting cushy jobs; maybe even positions created just for them.   Can't see that anyone can expect that to change...

Bacteria everywhere

Yet another case of bacteria turning up somewhere rather unexpected in the body:

The placenta, long thought to be sterile, is home to a bacterial community similar to the one found in the mouth, researchers report today. The microbes are generally non-pathogenic, but according to the authors of the study, variations in their composition could be at the root of common but poorly understood pregnancy disorders such as preterm birth, which occurs in one out of every ten pregnancies.....

The researchers also compared the placental microbiomes to those found in the vagina, gut, mouth and on the skin of non-pregnant women. They found that the placental microbiome was most similar to that of the mouth. The authors speculate that the microbes travel to the placenta from the mouth via the blood. The results reinforce data suggesting a link between periodontal disease in the mother and the risk of preterm birth, says Aagaard.

The scholarship story in more (anonymous) detail

New Matilda has more detail on the Frances Abbott scholarship story, and (as I expected) it has leaked from a college staff member who wasn't very impressed:

An account of how Frances Abbott came to be a student at Whitehouse, provided to New Matilda by a staff member, casts further doubt on the claims by the Prime Minister that her appointment was based entirely on merit.

The source told New Matilda that Frances Abbott was approached by Whitehouse Chairman of the Board - and friend of the Abbott family - Les Taylor, after Taylor became aware that Frances was looking to complete a degree with a competing design school.

“Les Taylor knew the Abbott family. [Frances] wanted to do something related to creativity and styling. She was going to go to one of our competitors. I think it was Billy Blue [a design school in North Sydney],” the source told NM.

“Leanne got the Chairman of the Board [Taylor] to tell [Frances] she had the offer of a scholarship.”
A few years later, in the run-up to the 2013 federal election, Ms Whitehouse became increasingly excited at the prospect of a Liberal win, the staffer said.

“She said to me something like, ‘Do you know what this could mean to Whitehouse if [Abbott] gets in?’

 The ambiguity in that last sentence could do with some clarifying.   If it means "this College stands to benefit heaps if Tony Abbott wins by virtue of changes to government policy" it is much more important than "this College will have a higher profile if Tony Abbott gets in and her daughter as a graduate."

In any event, if, as looks increasingly likely, this indeed was a special, one off invitation to come to the College for (virtually) free, of course it should have sent off Abbott's political antenna that it would look like a College seeking out political favours.  But it is hard to know how smart Abbott truly is.  Not very, has long been my judgement.

Yoo - hoo, Andrew Bolt, won't you do a post on this?

Update:   the story continues to develop:

Classmates express fury over Tony Abbott’s daughter Frances being awarded $60,000 scholarship to Whitehouse Institute of Design

Interestingly, it now sounds like Leanne Whitehouse personally funds and selects:

“The scholarship that Frances received was a direct scholarship from the founder and owner Leanne Whitehouse. As a private company, Leanne has from time to time awarded it,” Mr Tudor said.

“Originally it was called the MD’s scholarship and subsequently the chairs scholarship. It is a discretionary award made and funded by Leanne Whitehouse.”

The optics of this is so bad.  The "best" that Abbott can hope from this is (assuming that Frances was competing with no one to get her scholarship) is if he can claim that he didn't know she was getting such favoured treatment.   Because if he did - it is obvious that it would look like political favour being sought, and he should have declared it.

And remember - unlike poor old O'Farell - Abbott's government actually did change policy in a way which helped this College (and others.)

UPDATE:  As Junkee says, this shouldn't be about the results Frances got as a student.   (And, I would add, her current employment with Whitehouse.)  It is, however, all about Tony Abbott and the reasons he has not disclosed it (assuming it is the situation that the reporting is indicating - a specific invitation to Frances to apply for a scholarship that she got with no competition from anyone else).   The final paragraphs about his appalling hypocrisy (I hated the way he was always parading with his daughters during election campaign) are spot on:

Tone’s hypocrisy and cynical opportunism does, however, explain the particularly virulent strain of schadenfreude at play. Only this morning, Tone told Karl Stefanovic that “families should be kept out of the front line. That’s the way I’ve always tried to run my political operation – that we play hard but fair. Families should be [left] out of it.”

Given this principled stance, it’s weird how Abbott’s ‘not bad-looking daughters’ keep bobbing at politically expedient moments and for photo-ops. It seems inevitable that this habit would bite him on the arse at some point, and it looks like that point has arrived.

UPDATE 2:  I'm rather intrigued by the media outlets that are (and aren't) running with the story.   It's been the top one on The Guardian's website all day, but Fairfax seemed to quickly let it drop away in prominence.   And then News.com.au, from an article on The Courier Mail website, has been featuring it top of the page since (I think) around lunch time.  The Daily Mail on line is running with it too, but is giving more prominence to the stupid "wink" story.

The ABC is not running it at all, but is still talking about winkgate.

One might wonder whether the ABC is feeling a bit worried about further government attack if it is being seen to "go after" a politicians daughter - but surely this is a very newsworthy story about the PM, and can be run without pillorying the daughter.     

UPDATE 3:  Ha!  Karl Stefanovic smooches up to Tony Abbott when he asks him how Frances Abbott is coping with all the questions being asked about the "scholarship she deserved".  (He repeats that line twice, in fact.)  Abbott confirms she won it on her "academic potential".

Tony, the question is more about whether anyone else got a chance to put their "academic potential"  to the College.  And stop crapping on about how you "leave your family out of it".  Frances couldn't be pried off your side during the last election campaign, you user.

Rupert's excited

I've been curious to see if any words of wisdom would fall out of Rupert Murdoch's twitter account on the budget, or how Tony and Joe were doing.   Yet all I have today is this:  "Excited by X Men!". 

I'd be excited if we had an X Prime Minister.  (Come on, there wasn't much to work with.)

Sounds interesting

The abstract of a paper by Gerard 't Hooft which I haven't read yet, but must come back to:

When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, "quantum logic" is taking over from "classical logic" in the minds of almost all researchers today. Dissatisfied, the author investigated how one can look at things differently. This report is an overview of older material, but also contains many new observations and calculations. Quantum mechanics is looked upon as a tool, not as a theory. Examples are displayed of models that are classical in essence, but can be analysed by the use of quantum techniques, and we argue that even the Standard Model, together with gravitational interactions, may be viewed as a quantum mechanical approach to analyse a system that could be classical at its core. We then explain how these apparently heretic thoughts can be reconciled with Bell's theorem and the usual objections voiced against the notion of 'super determinism'. Our proposal would eradicate the collapse problem and the measurement problem.

Dispute over scientists creating deadly diseases continues

Scientists Are Creating New, Incurable Diseases in Labs - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
From the article:

That worries people like Marc Lipsitch and Alison P. Galvani, two epidemiologists who write in a PLoS Medicine editorial today that creating these types of new infectious agents puts human life at risk. They estimate that if 10 American laboratories ran these types of experiments for a decade, there would be a 20 percent chance that a lab worker would become infected with one of these new super-flus and potentially pass it on to others.

“The concern is that you're making something that doesn't exist in nature and combines high virulence for people with the ability to transmit efficiently,” Lipsitch told me.

I can't say that it sounds like a good idea to me.   Scientists don't always show a big enough interest in considering the worst case scenarios of their work, as I used to argue about the safety assessments done for large particle colliders. 

But long enough to send back Lotto numbers?

Physicist suggests some types of wormholes may stay open long enough to send a photon through

A charming bit of research

Wild mice actually enjoy running on exercise wheels | @GrrlScientist | Science | theguardian.com

The real problem: he doesn't wink enough

See, the problem isn't that Abbott winked for unclear purpose while taking a call from a woman with a surprising occupation for her age, it's that he didn't wink when he should have during the election campaign:

"There will be no new taxes"   Wink

"There will be no changes to pensions"  Wink

Etcetera

A friend on the board

Liberal donor personally recommended Tony Abbott's daughter for scholarship | World | The Guardian

It's not exactly a good look, is it?   A private  college which has been around for 25 years and has given out 2 "Chairman scholarships" in that time, and one of them happens to be for the daughter of a supported political friend who looks to be on track to become Prime Minister.

I wonder who the first recipient was?  And was there any other applicant other than Miss/Ms F Abbott in the year she applied?   The absence of answers to these questions give rise to suspicion that the Chairman scholarship applications might be made after personal invitation, and to very few people.  (Perhaps one?)   If this suspicion is wrong - why won't the Institute simply disclose how many applicants were competing for the scholarship that year?   A simple number would breach no confidentiality, surely.

And the reason why this is indeed a matter of public interest is really set out in the very last paragraph of the Fairfax report:

In the federal budget, the government announced that from 2016 it
would for the first time extend direct government funding to private
colleges.

The changes, which also extend support for TAFEs, and diploma
and associate degree courses, will cost $820 million over three years.
They follow a recommendation from a review of university funding by
David Kemp, who was education minister in the Howard government, and Dr
Kemp’s former advisor Andrew Norton.

If the delivery of a $3000 bottle of wine to a new Premier is a matter which should have been disclosed on a public register, then a direct $60,000 benefit received by a major politician's daughter should also have been disclosed unless it was clearly made on a competitive basis from a reasonable field of applicants (including some without obvious political connections.) 

Update:   I was most amused while watching The Drum last night to hear the media editor for The Australian ask whether The Guardian had been sitting on this outrageously unfair story for some time.   "Why would that matter?"  she was asked.  "It would tell us a lot about their agenda" she said.

Yes - a person who works at The Oz complaining about another paper having "an agenda"!   Hilarious.

Update 2:   Curious that Andrew Bolt has not had a post about this, despite his knowing that close Catallaxy buddy Sinclair Davidson (wrongly) thinks it's a case of "Lefties going after Lib family members", which would normally be right up Andrew's alley.   In fact, Catallaxy readers have lost interest in the thread already too.  How convenient.

Andrew Bolt does not like being in open disagreement with anything at Catallaxy.   He also will never call them out for offensive and highly sexist language in it's threads, even though he has now quoted directly a thread comment.

He's a massive hypocrite.

Update 3:  see new post above.

Rice is nice

Another China post.

According to a study which may not be convincing all that many people, rice farmers are nicer than wheat farmers.  More detail:

Researchers led by Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, found that people from rice-growing regions think in more interdependent and holistic ways than do those from wheat-growing areas.

Talhelm thinks these differences arose because it takes much more cooperation and overall effort to grow rice than wheat. To successfully plant and harvest rice, farmers must work together to build complex irrigation systems and set up labor exchanges. Over time, this need for teamwork fosters an interdependent and collectivist psychology. Wheat, however, can be grown independently, so wheat farmers become more individualistic.

Talhelm found that even people from adjacent counties on either side of the Yangtze River think differently if they grow different crops. "I don't see any other theory that explains why you find these differences between people in neighboring counties," he says....

Talhelm came up with his "rice theory" after spending a few years as a teacher in China and noticing cultural differences between the north and south. "People in the north seemed more direct, while people in the south were more concerned about harmony and avoiding conflict," he says.

Bazinga in China

Well, I didn't know this:  The Big Bang Theory is popular in China.  According to the New Yorker:

After seven seasons, the subtitled Chinese version of the show had achieved iconic status—all without the remotest involvement of the government’s vast media apparatus. By the time the show was banned, Chinese episodes had been watched online no fewer than 1.4 billion times. When the actors, such as Johnny Galecki, visit China, they are mobbed by fans. In Beijing, any tall, slim, dark-haired American male is likely to have been told once or twice that he looks a bit like Sheldon, the most Spock-like character on the show.

The article goes on to note the following:

Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way. When the government, for instance, breaks up demonstrations in the name of defending China’s stability, or blocks Web sites to protect China’s honor in the long-running divide with Japan, it is often the self-described “angry youth” who rise in defense of the flag. But in this case, the ban hit a nerve. In the city of Wuhan, in central China, student members of the Center for Protection for the Rights of Disadvantaged Citizens of Wuhan University issued the rough Chinese equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding to know why they had been deprived of their favorite show. 

And it then reaches this interesting conclusion:

It is a remarkable state of affairs: at the very moment when the U.S. and Chinese governments are moving in a direction of greater conflict, the slow, steady accretion of foreign pop culture on the Chinese Web has given people on both sides of the Pacific more in common than ever before. 

Let me be clear: sitcoms are not policy. The point is that the U.S. and China are in the curious position of facing a deepening rivalry at the very moment when their own citizens are sharing ever more of the same tastes, jokes, preoccupations, anxieties, and pleasures. The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)

[As an aside, I had not watched the show for a year or so, as the last time I had seen it I thought it showed signs of a sitcom in terminal decline.  But I recently did watch a couple of new season episodes, after reading about its extraordinarily high ratings in the States, and I did feel it had improved.]

I get to post about Spielberg two days in a row...

Godzilla and Spielberg: What Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot draws from Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters.

I'm not sure I want to see the new Godzilla movie.  It is, basically, a silly monster, and I don't understand the continual interest in reviving it.

More fun and games in "Defend the Budget"

Lenore Taylor writes that Prime Minister Credlin Abbott has ordered the troops into "attack" mode.

She writes amusingly of the desperate and clueless Alan Jones defensive line:

Radio announcer Alan Jones was truly bewildered while interviewing Christopher Pyne on Wednesday, astounded that despite the education minister’s “brilliant” advocacy skills the “blockheads” running state governments could not understand that the allegation of an $80bn cut was totally wrong. In fact, Jones said, “there hasn't been a more monstrous lie perpetrated since Julia Gillard said there'd be no carbon tax”.

Pyne somehow neglected to refer Jones to page 7 of the government’s glossy budget overview which clearly states that the government is changing indexation of state grants and “removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80bn by 20024-25.”

In other "Attack!" news,  Andrew Bolt (of course) is calling protesting students "totalitarians", following the Pyne line that they are out to "shut down democracy in Australia".  Actually, I think they would be quite happy to see democracy re-exercised within the next 6 months.

Look, student demonstrations are what they are - always chanting slogans and shouty and (usually) vulgar and self indulgent.   I have never liked or approved of demonstrations that unexpectedly block peak hour traffic, damage property, or push people around. 

But seriously, the scale and vigour of what has happened (so far) looks so mild compared to previous Lefty demonstrations.  The high water mark of violent and ugly (and spectacularly self defeating) protests was the union led attack on Parliament House in 1996.   Ten years later, and there were the intensely stupid G20 protests. What has happened with student protests since the budget just doesn't bear comparison, and going on about how "totalitarian" they are acting is just gilding the lily a bit too obviously, fellas.

And besides, what did Abbott and Pyne expect with the timing of these dramatic changes within 6 months of an election that was all about reassuring the people that no great shake up was on the cards?  Of course there were going to be protests.

Now I don't deny that there is a risk that there may yet be large protests that get out of hand and start eroding into any public sympathy, and although the students probably don't realise it, Abbott and Pyne pulling out of a university visit due to security concerns may well be helping their (the students') cause.   Abbott and Pyne have a fine line to walk here - going into the lion's den may well end up looking unnecessarily provocative, but not going to any university short of via roof top helicopter does make them look a bit weak.   I'm sorry, but given that I already have an intense dislike of this government on many grounds, it's the kind of dilemma that I take some pleasure in.

And as for Abbott's understanding of his own government's announcements:  ninemsn is reporting that he appears to not even know the date for changes set out in the budget:

Mr Abbott told ABC radio that only students who start studying in 2016 would face potentially higher fees when universities can charge what they like.

"If you start next year, your conditions of study won't change," he said.

But the budget papers clearly state that anyone who enrols after May 14 will face deregulated fees in 2016.

Peta, Peta, Peta.   All your effort into training him is not paying off, it seems.

UPDATE:  More errors, and quite large ones, by Joe Hockey and the PM in trying to sell the Medicare co-payment.

Is Peta crying into a martini somewhere tonight?  Her troops are letting her down something chronic.

First Dog recommended

First Dog on the Moon doesn't always get my approval, but with the target rich environment of a very unpopular budget made by a cigar smoking millionaire Treasurer (well, I assume he's worth millions - doesn't his wife make more than him, indicating a combined salary well over $600,000?), he's been pretty funny lately.

Anyway, here's today's cartoon that I find particularly amusing.

Also:   I suspect Hockey will not win his defamation case (in itself a rich man's game), and in fact risks losing politically for taking on the paper on one of the least egregious bits of commentary on a politician that has been seen in the Australian media the last couple of years.

Just keep the scheme

Ross Garnaut has made the point that just keeping the carbon pricing scheme (even with moving to a floating price, I think) pretty much achieves the same in terms of budget repair that the Coalition wants to achieve with its vast number of controversial changes.

Professor Garnaut, the architect of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ climate policies, argues that keeping carbon pricing and abandoning the $2.55 billion emissions reduction fund would reduce the budget deficit by between $12 billion and $19 billion over the next four years, depending on the European carbon price.

On Tuesday night, he told an audience at the University of Melbourne that is about the same as the $12 billion to $18 billion in budgetary savings that the Greens and Labor have pledged to oppose in Parliament.

“Retention of carbon pricing would more or less precisely fill the gap from Senate rejection of some budget measures,” Professor Garnaut said.

“To put it another way, Australia can stay within the boundaries of fiscal responsibility defined by the government in this year’s budget by retaining carbon pricing, rather than the array of changes that are at risk in the Senate.”

But of course, because the Coalition fed the public the line that the Labor carbon scheme would be an economic disaster (based on the support of the handful of economists associated with the IPA, pretty much) for so long, they cannot back down on that now, despite the lack of evidence that it is actually causing any great economic mayhem.

As everyone says, the problem with the budget is with its priorities as to how to go about the "repair" it wants to achieve.  And the problem comes back to the Coalition running policies on ideologically justified lines, regardless of evidence.

A premature declaration if ever I saw one

I see via Jason's twitter feed* that libertarian types are giving themselves high fives about legalisation of marijuana in some US States because it is said to be "hurting Mexican drug cartels".

The Lions of Liberty (wanky name: typical) cite this article in Vice (?) which quotes a Washington Post article that says Mexican marijuana prices have dropped far enough to make it not worthwhile for some farmers to grow it.

Amusingly, though, Vice does not repeat the other element in the WP report:  that the concern is that the recent increase in heroin in the US (about which I have posted before) is coming via Mexico, and in fact it seems Mexican marijuana growers are now switching to poppies.

It's pretty remarkable that the Vice article should not mention that, given that the headline to the WP article is: 
Tracing the U.S. heroin surge back south of the border as Mexican cannabis output falls

A more detailed look at how legalising marijuana would affect the Mexican cartels can be read in this WP article from 2012.  It shows that (although no one knows for sure) marijuana was perhaps only accounting for 17% of their revenue anyway.

Libertarians, who are supposed to be big on free markets, didn't think that there would be a substitution to the cartel's operations to make up for loss of marijuana profitability by beefing up their heroin, cocaine and meth production/trafficking?    While too early to tell the extent to which this unintended consequence may affect America, it is not really a surprise that it would happen, and taking into account the extra number of people with really serious drug addictions in the big decision matrix of legalising marijuana is probably something libertarians don't want to talk about much.  Of course, some of them will probably argue that this is a reason for legalising all drugs. 

And PS:  I condemn Mel Gibson and every movie he has ever appeared in or made.  He is not worthy to touch the sandals of the Spielberg.   [ ;) ] 

*Source disclosed as I don't want people thinking I regularly read American libertarian sites 

A must watch Foreign Correspondent

What a fantastic Foreign Correspondent show tonight, about the disputed Spratly Islands which have been causing grief between Vietnam, the Philippines and China for 25 years or so. 

I felt very sorry for some Filipino Marines, that's for sure.  And it makes one think how difficult it will be to maintain long term cordial relationships with China given their rapacious acts of self interest.

An irresistible topic for a post here

Here's why Steven Spielberg is such a great director.

No, honestly, it's informative and interesting.  (And yes, I agree, Always is easily the worst Spielberg movie.)  Here's the video:


The Spielberg Oner - One Scene, One Shot
from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

Harry does not like Henry

I'd back Harry Clarke over Groucho any day.  

By the way, if Ergas has spent much of his career on infrastructure economics, how come I hardly ever notice him writing about it in the Oz?   Does he have any concerns about how Abbott is just going hard on roads with (as I understand it) little in the way of assessment of their economic value?

And can Ergas allay my concerns that economic analysis of all but certain "obvious" infrastructure might not be that credible an exercise anyway?   As I have said before, I presume it's easy to work out some benefits of a port or railway that allows a new mining area to export efficiently.    But cutting down the time to travel across town by car by 10 minutes?  I have my doubts about the rigorousness of how you economically model that.

This is a topic Ergas could perhaps usefully enlighten me.  Instead, he just craps on with his political biases. 

Send Tony Abbott there instead

Of course, you can blame Kevin Rudd for the idea of shoving off genuine refugees to New Guinea.

But go back a step earlier, and even worse for its appalling hypocrisy is the Coalition for opposing sending boat arrivals to Malaysia (even when the deal proposed involved them having the right to work and would have UNHRC supervision to ensure they were not abused) but now happily sending them to Cambodia. 

Virak Ou, chairman of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, accused Australia of irresponsibly exporting its own problem.

“We mistreated our own people and have failed to protect the human rights of our own people … we don’t have the capacity or the will,” he said.

“There’s no reason for Australia to believe that Cambodia will protect the rights of refugees, which to me is very irresponsible of Australia.”

Cambodia’s opposition leader Sam Rainsy described the deal as a “disgrace,” saying Australian money will be diverted into the pockets of Cambodia’s corrupt leaders.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has condemned the agreement, saying Cambodia is a vulnerable nation still recovering for years of civil war and is still unable to provide for its own people.

However, the UN’s Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Flavia Pansieri said the UN would be willing to provide “support to ensure that standards are met.”

The UNHCR has only a two-person office in Phnom Penh.

Of 68 asylum seekers or refugees already living in Cambodia most are desperate to be relocated to another country, welfare groups say.

Tony Abbott simply played politics on refugees at their expense, escalating matters to a much worse position for them.  What's more, he is playing politics by not disclosing what is happening on the high seas so that the public is left in the dark as to whether his government is acting like a pirate or not.  

It is truly remarkable how, so early in a Prime Ministership, he has painted himself into a position where he has no chance of redeeming himself as a moral or popular Prime Minister.

Cynical political exercises resulting in nothing

Royal Commission fails to deliver Coalition the expected political advantage

Exactly.  As it says in the article:

''This was supposed to distract from what they were doing in budget
week,'' a senior Labor source said. ''There was a clear political ploy
to drag this stuff out to remind people how much they disliked the last
government but people seem to have moved on. People are more interested
in what this government is doing.''

Coverage of Mr Rudd's and Mr Combet's appearances, as well as
former Labor ministers Peter Garrett and Mark Arbib, was swamped by
reaction to the first Coalition budget and its lead up.

Watchers at the inquiry, headed by Ian Hanger, QC, said it
had unearthed no ''smoking gun'' despite speculation before the
hearings that a trail of warnings over the lethal scheme could lead
right to the top of the Rudd government.

This enquiry, together with the union royal commission giving creep Blewitt a venue to mutter about Gillard, have been examples of very nasty political fixes attempted by a petty and pretty much morally bankrupt government.   (See next post.)

Tony talks to Insiders this year...

Tony talks to Insiders last year

I was Googling to find a photo of Abbott on Insiders yesterday, and turned up the transcript from his pre election interview with Barrie Cassidy last year.  Some notable extracts (my bold):

BARRIE CASSIDY: Let's talk about some of the policies. We will start with the cuts to come. How severe will they be?

TONY ABBOTT: There will be no surprises and no excuses from a Coalition government Barrie. We've already put out a lot of the savings that we think are necessary. Joe Hockey outlined $31 billion worth of savings this week. There will be some additional savings to be announced later this week…

BARRIE CASSIDY: That is what I as asking about. How severe will they be?

TONY ABBOTT: Nothing like Labor's scare campaign. All eminently defensible because, let's face it Barrie, our first priority here is to build a stronger economy. And that means reinvesting taxpayers' dollars in things that will actually strengthen our economy rather than just build bureaucracies.

BARRIE CASSIDY: But you now know the size of these cuts, how significant, how big?

TONY ABBOTT: Look, there will be some further, relatively modest savings announced later in the week. But I don't think anyone is going to think at the end of this week 'my God there is this massive fiscal squeeze coming.' If anything, what they will think is that there has been a massive scare campaign, a massive campaign of exaggerations and even lies from the Labor Party.

BARRIE CASSIDY: Well put it this way, will the cuts impact on ordinary Australians?

TONY ABBOTT: Inevitably there will be some changes that people won't like, for instance the …

BARRIE CASSIDY: Ordinary Australians will feel it?

TONY ABBOTT: Ending the so-called School Kids Bonus.

BARRIE CASSIDY: We know about that one.

TONY ABBOTT: I don't believe the additional savings to be announced later in this week, will impact on ordinary Australians. And I want to give people this absolute assurance, no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to pensions, and no changes to the GST (Goods and Services Tax).

OK, so no surprises, other than an abrupt plan to deregulate university fees and make many of them much more expensive, require repayments of HECS faster, introduce co-payment for Medicare, increase the cost of medicines, lengthen age pension eligibility by 3 years, treat anyone under 30 punitively if they can't get a job, cut funding to the States on health both immediately and in the future, etcetera, etcetera...

Tony Abbott doesn't even remember his own political history correctly

I must admit, I didn't mentally question this when I heard Abbott claim it in trying to explain off the post budget polling drop.  Lucky someone did:

John Howard 'took a big hit in the polls too' after first budget? Er, no Mr Abbott: The first post-budget Newspoll in 1996 showed a three percentage point increase in the Coalition's primary vote, to 50; a lift in Howard's approval rating, from 47 to 51; and an increase in his lead over Kim Beazley as preferred prime minister to a score of 53 per cent against Beazley's 24.

How embarrassing for our PM.

What a dilema for anti-Labor

I can't be the only person who's enjoying the obvious schizophrenia (in the common, useful, albeit mistaken sense of the word) that is happening to Andrew Bolt and the other anti-Labor columnists re the Abbott government.

One minute, he is taking the small government, anti tax, IPA line that the budget is a problem because it doesn't really cut spending at all;  next he's going with the line that "the Liberal's cure hurts" but is warranted.

Can someone give him a nudge and tell him that these aren't exactly consistent positions?  Or does he take the line that cutting down on welfare benefits is always warranted, regardless of it not having an effect on the budget bottom line? 

The funniest thing of all, though, was in Annabel Crabb's column on the obvious casting about for something positive to say that about a budget that's gone over about as well as the plague.   She noted this about Alan Jones:

Increased petrol taxes? And no tub-thumpers angry? Surely Alan Jones would stay strong. If Julia Gillard had hiked fuel excise, Alan Jones would instantly have recommended firing her into space, and hang the expense.

But on budget morning, when the Prime Minister reported for his Jonesian rub-down, he received nothing but approval for pricier fuel.

''There are legitimate reasons around the world for this,'' avowed Jones sternly. ''One is to stop the guzzling of a scarce resource.''

Hilarious.

More science - consider the Muon

My favourite particle: the muon | Mark Lancaster | Science | theguardian.com

 Most cloud chamber trails are caused by muons, a particle about which I had stored next to nothing in the cranial memory banks.

The article linked above is a really good summary of the history of their discovery, along with some background as to what they are.  Well worth reading.  A sample:

There are several hundred muons going through your head every second
minute. Fortunately, their low energies (and high mass) mean they are
harmless. These muons originate from the collisions of cosmic-rays
(primarily protons spewed out by stars) with the atoms in our upper
atmosphere. After their discovery it was observed that the number of
these muons decreased as you got closer to the earth and the natural
(and correct) conclusion was that they were not stable particles like
the electron but a bit fly-by-night (and day), and they decayed to other
more familiar particles (electrons and neutrinos) in about 2 millionths
of a second. At this point it was known what the mass of the electron
was and neutrinos were assumed massless, so by looking at the trajectory
and energy of the electron from the muon decay (or measuring the time
it took for the muon to decay) it became clear the the muon was a bit of
a porker. It weighed in at about 200 times the mass of the electron.

If you want maths with that, you can have a look at this article, which works through the question of why we see so many on Earth's surface if they decay so fast.  The answer is relativity:

The measurement of the flux of muons at the Earth's surface produced an early dilemma because many more are detected than would be expected, based on their short half-life of 1.56 microseconds. This is a good example of the application of relativistic time dilation to explain the increased particle range for high-speed particles.

Fascinating, hey?

Budget chickens home to roost

Some of the more interesting points from recent budget stories:

*  Lenore Taylor makes it clear that Tony Abbott does not understand his own budget.  Peta Credlin's crib sheet must have been a bit too simplified for its own good.

*  Pollbludger does a good summary of the dire polling for Abbott today in Newspoll and Nielsen.  I was particularly interested to note this (from Nielsen):

The deficit levy finds support, with 50% in favour and 37% against, but there’s a surprisingly narrow majority of 49% to 46% in favour of abolishing the carbon tax. The poll finds predictably strong opposition to the notion of increasing the GST, with 30% for and 66% against.

I think this indicates that it's plausible for Labor to argue that it is better to keep its carbon pricing scheme than to kick lower income people in the shins.  They should push this line hard.

As for the "deficit levy":   I think it would be more popular if it kicked in at a lower level.

*  Andrew Bolt has been frequently criticising the media for its "spiteful" attacks on Joe Hockey (he smokes cigars; his wife wears expenses dresses) but I do believe he was unable to bring himself to criticise Sinclair Davidson for running a "smoking Joe" banner at Catallaxy for a few days.   The handholding power of the IPA has created a strong bond, obviously.

*  Tony Windsor tweeted yesterday:

If you watched #insiders today you would have received a sense of why it would have been difficult to choose him as PM in Hung Parliament

Yes, hard to argue that Windsor's sense of not being able to trust Abbott is vindicated.

* There has been little attention given to this appalling example of twisted priorities - a Human Rights Commissioner is to be dropped, following the appointment of a new one (the "photograph me, please!" boy, Tim Wilson) as some sort of sop to the Andrew Bolt Right wing fanclub.  The problem is, the next Commissioner due to expire is the one for Disability, meaning that this role will be shared by someone else there.

Adam Creighton, the small government, anti tax favoured journalist of the Australian, got hit about the head something severe when trying to argue this was "no big deal" on The Drum last week.  Here it is, from the 15 minute mark. 

*  Speaking of Creighton, he's an utter lightweight, ideologically driven twit, as far as I'm concerned.  Here's how he ended his first column on the budget last week:

The Coalition’s budgets will only prove profound to the extent they kindle a conversation about the dysfunctional federation that leads to serious reform. It is, as Tony Abbott has written, the biggest problem facing Australia, not only because of the duplication in costs but the damage it does to political incentives.

The political benefit from spending more taxpayers’ money must be offset by the political pain of lifting taxes.

The states could, for instance, levy a uniform tax on land to raise whatever amount they wanted to spend on hospitals or schools. Of course, the more palatable option might be to run their own creaking, Soviet-style health and education systems more efficiently.

Yeah, Adam: it's like no one has been talking about maximising efficiencies in the State systems for the last 30 years, hey?  What evidence you got, mate, that the States are running "Soviet style"  health and education systems?  Idiot.