The very dubious Bentham

The last time I mentioned Bentham, it was about his underpants.

It's not a stretch from there to note his libertine views on sex, which get a description in this recent review of a book on the subject.  

Jeremy, I take it from the (sometimes) reliable source of Horrible Histories*, was very eccentric in his personal conduct (and not just because of what he had done to his body after death,) but the review does point out that the permanent bachelor did fall in love with women, and seemingly slept with them.  But he does come across as something of a naive Jim Cairns "free love" type:

Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious – nothing was more conducive to happiness. An "all-comprehensive liberty for all modes of sexual gratification" would therefore be a huge, permanent benefit to humankind: if consenting adults were freed to do whatever they liked with their own bodies, "what calculation shall compute the aggregate mass of pleasure that may be brought into existence?"

As someone says in comments following the review:

The article criticises Mill but actually supports his idea that Bentham did not really understand human feelings. Anyone who thinks sex=pleasure, pleasure=happiness and therefore more sex = more happiness doesn't understand human emotion.

On Bentham more generally, while Googling around I found this article from earlier this year, and I was somewhat surprised to read that Jeremy was an early proponent of the "Jesus had male lovers" idea which would re-appear again in 1970's gay rights activism.  (I remember some gay rights guy on the old Mike Walsh Midday show, probably in that decade, causing gasps in the largely female audience by making that claim.  I don't know if it was widely rumoured at the time, or later, that Walsh himself was gay.)

But I was more intrigued by this part of the article, showing that Jeremy was a radical in other ways which should cause people hesitation, at the least, about his judgement generally, and utilitarianism:

Bentham also took up the theme of infanticide. He had considerable sympathy for unmarried mothers who, because of social attitudes, were ostracized and had little choice but to become prostitutes, with the inevitable descent into drink, disease, and premature death. It would be far better, argued Bentham, to destroy the child, rather than the woman. Moreover, it was kinder to kill an infant at birth than allow it to live a life of pain and suffering. 

Well, we don't hear about that view of his so often, do we?

Update:  I see that the topic of Bentham and his justification of infanticide was dealt with at First Things last year.  It's a good article that concludes:

 Bentham has here laid out, quite clearly, a fundamental dispute of the modern age: the good life understood as the satisfaction of preferences and unfoiled desires on the one hand and the Platonic idea that justice is found only through the kind of self-restraint that looks beyond pleasure and pain on the other. There is, as Bentham was well aware, no middle ground. Not Paul, but Jesus excels in making this crystal clear.

* as confirmed with this paper, which notes he was extremely eccentric, and concludes he probably had Asperger's.  Bentham as Sheldon:  it does make sense.

This is getting confusing

Saudi Arabia sends 30,000 troops to Iraq border | GulfNews.com

Seems to be a case of Saudi Arabia getting ready to fight a monster of its (or its citizen's money) own creation.  

Well, that's depressing...

BBC News - Decline in trials for Alzheimer's disease

There is an urgent need to increase the number of potential therapies being investigated, say US scientists.

Only one new medicine has been approved since 2004, they report in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy.

The drug failure rate is troubling and higher than for other diseases such as cancer, says Alzheimer's Research UK.

Dr Jeffrey Cummings, of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, in Las Vegas, and colleagues, examined a public website that records clinical trials.

Between 2002 and 2012, they found 99.6% of trials of drugs aimed at preventing, curing or improving the symptoms of Alzheimer's had failed or been discontinued.  This compares with a failure rate of 81% for cancer drugs.

The failure rate was "especially troubling" given the rising numbers of people with dementia, said Dr Simon Ridley, of Alzheimer's Research UK.

"The authors of the study highlight a worrying decline in the number of clinical trials for Alzheimer's treatments in more recent years," he said.

"There is a danger that the high failure rates of trials in the past will discourage pharmaceutical companies from investing in dementia research.

A sure way to increase teenage use

Maureen Dowd's Marijuana Edibles Problem -- And Mine

This article in Forbes goes into a lot of detail about the "edibles" containing cannabis in Colorado, and my conclusion is:  why did they legalise this form at all if they have any interest in limiting teenage use and experimentation?

It's just nuts - no teen need ever worry about being found out via smell or smoking paraphernalia  - there appear to be hundreds of candies and chocolates (often containing multiple doses) on sale.   And you have gooses like libertarian Gary Johnson praising them as even better than smoking!

I can't imagine a surer way to make it easier for a teenager to try it, and keep using it, as long as an adult friend goes and buys multiple dose candy bars for them.

My prediction remains - give this a couple of years, maybe three.  See what has happened to education and rates of teenage use in the State and in nearby States.  Look at the rate of adult use, and the effect on the economy.   Then tell us whether it has been a success or not.  I expect that there will be at least some degree of walking back from this experiment.

Good writing

American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning : The New Yorker

This article by Arthur Miller, apparently from 1998, paints an evocative picture of hot New York summers of the depression era in particular.   He also reflects on hard work in those days:

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse
than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect,
and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood
why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from
a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow
would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until
midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and
Jersey, and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique, a
very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks.
He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his
patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late
afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he
held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical,
razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through
his index finger at the second joint. Angrily refusing to go to the
hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel,
and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking. When the blood began
to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on
the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work
the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening,
as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

 Wow.

Moore missed

There's much Monty Python talk in the British media due to the remaining team members doing their "last reunion" shows to massive crowds in London, but to rather mixed reviews. 

The Guardian had a column in which various famous-ish people nominated their favourite sketches.  I don't believe anyone mentioned good old Dennis Moore.

I have posted before about this very silly series of sketches, and re-watching it, I have to say it is undeservedly overlooked and, unusually, sort of subtly funny for Python.  (The way Dennis digresses continuously, in particular.)

My previous post was of pretty poor video quality, though.  I have found these versions, with czech subtitles, are much clearer:

Another surprising dog story

Man's best friend linked to lower diabetes risk in infants

The study from Finland investigated whether microbial exposures from animal contact during infancy are associated with the development of diabetes. The researchers studied 3,143 children at two Finnish hospitals between 1996 and 2004.

Of nine early microbial exposures studied – including farm animals, day care and exposure to antibiotics – only indoor dog exposure was inversely associated with subsequent development of preclinical type 1 diabetes.

“Dog contact may affect the human immune system in many ways”, the researchers wrote.

In the benevolent dictatorship of Steveworld, all prospective parents have to have a puppy first.  [But parents found with marijuana will have their houses bulldozed, Israeli style.  A yurt will be supplied in compensation.]  Birth will be celebrated with a government supplied gift basket including a $10 bottle of Australian chardonnay pinot noir, several parsnips, and a chorizo*.

Update:  * and a big brie with a box of water crackers, of course.

Comedy improvement

I opined a few weeks ago that, after viewing a couple of recent-ish episodes of Big Bang Theory, it appeared to have improved considerably from a previous season in which I thought it showed signs of being in terminal decline.

After seeing a few more episodes since then, I think I was right:  it has definitely improved.

The episode watched last night in which Sheldon gets accused of workplace sexual harassment was, I thought, very funny; and showed sharp writing all around.

A sitcom that recovers like this is a rarity.

However, reading elsewhere, it would appear that the episodes I have seen recently are perhaps all season 6 (last night's episode definitely was), and season 7 has just finished in the US, with at least one person on the net thinking it's bad again   Also, it has been renewed for 3 seasons!  That's stretching the abilities of the writers to breaking point, I'm sure.

Hippy libertarians with guns

Ha.  Via Jason Soon, I see an entertaining article that reports on the anti-social, nutty, self-absorbed wankerdom of (at least one part of) the American libertarian movement. 

I was saying this from the start...

In-vitro meat unlikely to become reliable food source

Yes, you could feed the world with microbial protein grown in vast factory vats and processed into something vaguely resembling soft meat (see "Quorn").  But growing actual muscle cells into something with the texture, taste and appearance of meat is always going to rely on much, much more complicated and energy intensive techniques, and putting an animal in the field to eat grass is always going to be more reliable and cheaper.

Come back in 50 years and tell me I'm wrong.

[It occurs to me that this is the same stupid use of technology that you see in fertility treatments.   If you have ethical doubts about eating meat, there is already a huge range of other tasty protein options to avoid doing so, or doing it less often than you currently do.   In fertility treatment, we see the desire to experiment with the life of children with "3 parent" embryos so that the incredibly tiny number of mothers with mitochondrial disease can have "their own" baby instead of adopting one.   These are both rich persons' vanity projects.]

Quite right

Silence on missing asylum seeker boat a disgrace to the nation

Julian Burnside ends his column with this:

And whatever the facts turn out to be, Morrison has treated theAustralian public with contempt. The public have a legitimate interest in knowing what is being done, in our name, to people who have done nothing worse than ask for our help. Morrison either knows the fate of the refugees or he does not.  If he does, he should tell us: either that
they have been rescued or helped, or that they have been sent to Sri Lanka.  The alternative is that he does not know, in which case he should be sacked for incompetence.

We should no longer be treated as if we do not care about the fate of other human beings.

I maintain my opinion that the media as a profession is not reacting strongly enough to the military junta-like behaviour  of this government.  It's not just wrong or annoying that Morrison and Abbott keeps secrets on this from the Australian public; it's positively outrageous.

Stop shrugging your shoulders, newspaper editors and columnists, and saying "we don't like this, but we can see that the Coalition does not fear public backlash against them as long as boats don't arrive."  You need to complain that you and the public are being treated as children in a way previous "tough" Coalition governments dealing with the boats have not, and that the reasons given are patent crap.  

Update:  I was reminded of this in a comment at The Guardian.  Tony Abbott during last year's election campaign:

QUESTION:
Will you commit to putting out an alert when every boat comes through?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, I absolutely accept that you need to know how we're going. You absolutely need to know how we are going, and if we have a good week, a bad week, an in-between week, you will know all about it. One way or another, we will get full disclosure to the Australian people. The only point that Scott was making is that in the end, there are some bits of information which are operationally sensitive and that particular judgment has to be left to the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders.

The word you're looking for is "flake"

Annabel Crabb writes about Tony Abbott's complete backflip on the matter of federalism:

Of all the reversals and surprises for which the Prime Minister has been reproached over his political career, his change of heart on federalism must be the largest and most striking.

In 2009, when he wrote Battlelines, Tony Abbott was so convinced that the Commonwealth should be given more power to override state governments that he wrote his own Constitutional amendment to that effect and pasted it in the back of the book.

The failure of federalism, he wrote, was the key to many of Australia's worst problems. And people expected their national government to fix things, so the Constitution's fiendish section 51, with its pernickety and much-mulled-over list of things the Commonwealth is allowed to interfere with, should be simplified to give the Feds power to overrule the states on pretty much anything.

"Giving more authority and commensurate revenue powers back to the states is an option, but it is not a real one," Mr Abbott argued in a speech to a 2008 conference, Australian Federalism: Rescue and Reform.

"It is an implausible one in the modern era. The only real option I suggest is to give the national government the power to match people's expectations about who should really be in charge."

She then writes:

 One of the most mystifying yet persistent characterisations currently abroad in the Australian political arena is that the Prime Minister is some kind of obsessive ideologue.

Well, I agree.  He's not an ideologue:  he's a flake who is currently under the influence of obsessive ideologues. 

Some of the definitions of flake from Urban Dictionary:

 An unreliable person

A useless, shady, deceitful person who is so unreliable and selfish they cause you much anger and frustration. A Flake's only agenda is what they want to do.

A Frequently unreliable person who says that they will do somthing or attend somthing, but never shows.

About that new Caliphate

A very good backgrounder here about the head dude of ISIS, or whatever it calls itself today, and his grandiose claims of a new caliphate. 

One thing for sure:  there's a drone with his name on it. 

One other thing:  I think it rather lucky we don't have a gun toting Republican (probably like Romney, since he was big on decrying weakness in foreign policy and spending bazillions on defence) as US president at the moment.

"And may I add my sincere congratulations on how you've managed to suppress your moral doubts about what you're doing."

Scott Morrison revs up border officials while continuing his silence on Tamil asylum seekers
It is somewhat outrageous that there is not more general outrage about the veil of secrecy this government has cast over acts of highly dubious legality in the Indian Ocean.

And Scott Morrison's pep talk to Customs about doing a good job - the heading to this post indicates how I view the implied message.

Update:  The Guardian lists what we think we know about operations over the last 8 months.  

Looking into parsnips

I cooked and enjoyed quite a nice meal on Saturday night involving equal quantities of pumpkin and parsnips.  (Don't worry, it wasn't purely vego - I added a smallish sized chorizo to it too.  I find it hard to avoid cooking without chorizo lately.)

The issue of parsnips was a subject of much discussion at the dinner table (their expense, their taste, whether you can just substitute carrots*, how Uncle Scrooge was attacked with them in a comic I remembered from childhood* ) but they seem a subject worthy of further investigation.  

I will report further soon....

* clearly, no

*The Golden Fleecing

Awesome cold photos

How to survive a winter in Antarctica – in pictures | Art and design | theguardian.com

There's a fantastic group of photos at the link taken around the futuristic looking Condordia station in Antarctica.

Krugman on Kansas

Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman really puts the boot into Laffer and supply side economics in this column.  I assume Ms Sloan doesn't care much for him (Krugman), either.

Renewables doing better than expected

How Tony Abbott made the carbon tax work

There are some really remarkable figures quoted by Peter Martin indicating the success of renewable energy already in Australia.  I hope they stand up to scrutiny.

His point that Abbott's made up "crisis" narrative if the carbon tax was introduced actually pushed people hard into solar is pretty convincing too.

Given that electricity pricing is expected to drop slightly, but (I think) gas is likely to be going up in price, I have my doubts that Abbott is going to win the kudos he thinks he will from the public for the dropping the carbon "tax".  People are not good at remembering their previous bills - and if yearly prices still creep up, the effect of one significant drop is going to be quickly forgotten.

I think it is disappointing that business generally has not been more prominent in being clear that if you are going to do something about reducing carbon dioxide, the Labor policy was pretty good, and more effective than anything the Coalition is thinking about.  And surely there is considerable disruption from these swings in government policy that has costs too?

It's a big drop

I'm heartened to see my dislike of the Abbott Federal government (and Abbott personally) continues to be reflected in polling.   Newpoll and Morgan both indicate that on primary votes, the Coalition has dropped a full 10 per cent since the election.   That's pretty massive in such a short space of time, isn't it?  Details (including a link to today's Newspoll) are at Pollbludger.

(Pollbludger also notes that the TPP for Labor is even stronger if you believe the polls that include respondent allocated preferences, rather than the "last election" preferences.   Sweet.)

In other political news - Treasury head Martin Parkinson was a target of the Right when he was working under Labor.  Now that he is seen as giving a warning to Labor to not reflexively oppose all savings measures, it makes the Right's dark mutterings about his partisanship look flimsy and ill founded, does it not?

And yes, Labor does have to tread carefully here.  Especially if there is a real chance of a double dissolution election, Labor does have to be able to show that they appreciate that there does need to be some serious re-jigging of finances going into the future.  Unfortunately, accepting what most people will take as pretty obvious - that a relatively small increase in GST will cover a fair bit of the problem - is probably something Labor is not inclined to do.  They have to come up with something else, then.

The exact opposite

Joe Stiglitz is in Australia and did an interview on Lateline last night, which was rather entertaining because of the way in which he came across as the exact, perfect opposite of the right wing, nuttily anti-Keynesian economists who infect The Australian and post at Catallaxy.

I don't know if an anti Stiglitz column has appeared yet in the Australian, but at least one, if not six if their pro-smoking jihad is anything to go by, is surely on the way.  We can tell because Judith Sloan has already indicated her disdain for the man, but seems to be holding back for some reason (at the moment at least.) 

And then we have Julie Novak, tweeting:

Want to observe what is wrong with the economics profession? Watch the Stiglitz lateline interview. Keynesianism recklessness writ large.

Julie, of course, was sucked in by some Right wing conspiracy guff about the Fabian society, and as with Sloan's continual attitude that climate change is to be dismissed, and insistence that the ABC is Out of Control, as is the Fair Work Commission, and don't get her started on the Productivity Commission:  well, I find Joe runs a much more convincing narrative, to put it mildly.

Something's wrong...

...with the Hollywood machine, and the entire planet of under 30 year old movie goers (because surely that is the only possible market for this series) when the woefully reviewed Transformers 4 makes $300 million globally on its first weekend. 

I thought I read recently that the Chinese market didn't like the sameness of some Hollywood series (was it Marvel movies they were talking about?), yet here we have them going strong to one of most tedious noise machine series ever made.

But it is actually interesting to see how important the Chinese market now is - look at Edge of Tomorrow, for example, which which will not go too far over $100 million in the US but is getting - as with Transformers 4 - about double that take from the overseas market, which is dominated by China and Korea.  In fact, those two countries combined, count for more than the US for both movies.

You have to wonder what this will mean for the types of movies coming our way in the next decade.

UN talks pot

Marijuana: Pot use declines worldwide, but not in the US ( video) - CSMonitor.com

The UN reports that world wide, marijuana use is going down, except in the US.   Given the capitalistic excitement that is underway in that country over legal marijuana (the report opens with this:

 In Seattle this weekend, a school bus rigged up as a food truck will start selling
items infused with marijuana. The menu includes truffle popcorn, peanut
butter and jelly, and a Vietnamese pork banh mi, reports the Los Angeles Times.)

we can be sure that use will increase.

Increased use has been leading to increased treatment being sought.  I also note this:

According to the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), about 9 percent of people who use marijuana become dependent on
it – a number that increases to about one in six among those who start
using it at a young age, and to 25 to 50 percent among daily users.

The UN report notes (wisely):

“Based on assumptions regarding the size of the consumer market, it
is unclear how legalization will affect public budgets in the short or
long term, but expected revenue will need to be cautiously balanced
against the costs of prevention and health care,” the report states.

“In addition to the impact on health, criminal justice, and the economy, a
series of other effects such as consequences related to security, health
care, family problems, low performance, absenteeism, car and workplace
accidents and insurance could create significant costs for the state,”
the UN report cautions. “It is also important to note that legalization
does not eliminate trafficking in that drug. Although decriminalized,
its use and personal possession will be restricted by age. Therefore,
the gaps that traffickers can exploit, although reduced, will remain.”

Founding deists

'Nature's God' explores 'heretical origins' of religion in U.S.A.

Here's a review of an interesting sounding book on the deism of those who were prominent at the founding of the USA.

Sunday physics

I haven't noticed this Youtube channel before, but I assume he knows what he's talking about, and he does a pretty awesome job of communicating complicated ideas:

An odd idea

'The Youngness Paradox' --"Why SETI has Not Found Any Signals from Extraterrestrial Civilizations” 

According to MIT's  Alan Guth , originator of the inflationary universe theory, our Universe is a product of eternal inflation --eternal into the future, but not into the past. An eternally inflating Universe produces an infinite number of pocket universes , which in turn are producing more new universes.  The old, mature universes are vastly outnumbered by universes that have just barely begun to evolve. Guth called it the "Youngness Paradox."

Guth says that "the synchronous gauge probability distribution strongly implies that there is no civilization in the visible Universe more advanced than us. We would conclude, therefore, that it is extraordinarily improbable that there is a civilization in our pocket Universe that is at least one second more advanced than we are. Perhaps this argument explains why SETI has not found any signals from alien civilizations.”

I'm not sure what it means for the number of civilisations that might be one second behind us.   But if it  means there may be many of them around at the moment, and if within the next (say) 300 years that a significant proportion of them start to explore the stars, what does the maths suggest as to how long it may take before we are likely to bump into one?    A lot depends on whether faster than light travel is possible, I guess.

He's never been the same since he couldn't pat his AR-15

By way of understatement, I would say that David Leyonhjelm doesn't exactly come up smelling of roses from his Good Weekend profile today.  He has apparently upset many people involved in small party politics over the years, and some of their comments make him sound rather like Kevin Rudd in terms of control freakery.

And I haven't even touched yet on the parts that make him like a nut who we should rejoice lost his gun collection after the Howard government reforms:

What personally outraged Leyonhjelm was having to surrender much of his private collection, at first rifles and later some pistols, when the bans were extended. "I had lots of semi-automatic rifles," he says. "I had an M1 Garand, M1 Carbine, the AR-15, the FN FAL, a Rasheed semi-auto and a Norinco ... I had to relinquish them all.”

Prior to the compulsory federal buyback, he'd kept the cherished weapons in his attic and "every now and then I would take them out and pat them ... It was a big thing not being allowed to have them any more. It was no solace to know I was getting paid money [to hand them back]. It was an insult. There I was, being presumed to be unsafe because some nutter had got himself hold of a semi-auto in Tasmania.”

To this day, he won't attend a function if Howard is going to be in the room.

And does he not have enough sense to not talk about John Howard "deserving" to be shot? :

"All the people at [Sale that day] were the same as me," Leyonhjelm tells me, his light-blue eyes blazing. "Everyone of those people in that audience hated [Howard's] guts. Every one of them would have agreed he deserved to be shot. But not one of them would have shot him. Not one." He found it offensive, he adds, that Howard "genuinely thought he couldn't tell the difference between people who use guns for criminal purposes, and people like me".

He seems such a fool that he thinks the AFP should be able to tell when chatter about a PM "deserving to be shot" is serious, and when it's not.

Of course, for those Libertarian/Boltian fans of the LDP who comment at Catallaxy, if a Muslim migrant had said this, they would be demanding he be deported back to his country.   

There is little doubt that Libertarianism attracts the immature and selfish,  and these are qualities that appear to be on plentiful display in our Senator elect. 

Update:   let's add to the list of qualities that Libertarianism attracts: fantasies about the how the world could be and should be which ignore history and common sense.   For example, from this article -

His conviction that government should get out of our lives makes him ultra-dry on economic matters - arguing, for instance, that the state should not employ teachers, doctors or nurses, as these services can be privately delivered.

In the Financial Review this week, he went on a Right wing populist ramble about how the public service wastes money and has grown too big, and making reference to the state of Federal politics in 1927.

The fact is, we do not have a huge or inefficient public service by international standards, and while it is certainly possible that government is sometimes capable of doing things inefficiently and we can be vigilant about that, don't the 19th to 20th centuries gives us a good lesson in how social welfare and other services can be better run by government than by charity or private companies?   Don't they show that the welfare state grew because of the failure of the previous system?

The great improvement in global wealth over those centuries has been accompanied by the increase in the welfare State; Libertarians would have you think that it's what's holding the world back because they live in a fantasy land that everything is better if unregulated.   (It's like they all have a yearning to live either in the US or England in about 1830, as far as I can tell.)

It's interesting to note how the initial movement towards it was - apparently - at the instigation of conservatives who wanted to undermine socialists.   Current libertarian/small government ideologues seek to cut off conservatives from what good, common sense they used to exercise.   Of course, we see this in climate change too - where the truly devastating environmental vandals used to be the communist countries where economic theory overrode everything else.  Now it's the Libertarian extremists who encourage governments to do nothing and trust that everything will turn out OK.

Origins of WW1

This ABC discussion of the various factors behind WW1 is a pretty good read.  I hadn't heard much about this before:

"War by Timetable" was the provocative title of a 1969 book by one of the most acclaimed historians of the 20th century, AJP Taylor, who theorised that the cause of World War I could be traced back to an unexpectedly efficient transport system.

Taylor said none of the major powers actively sought a conflict prior to 1914, but depended on deterrence, through an ability to mobilise their armies faster than their rivals.

He argued that in the decade leading up to war, the generals of all the great powers had developed elaborate plans to move vast numbers of men by rail to confront any threat; a strategy intended to intimidate any potential aggressor while also serving as a useful extension of foreign policy.

The problem, according to Taylor, came following the 'July Crisis' of 1914, when the strategy, which was intended to prevent a war, had precisely the opposite effect.

All across Europe hundreds of trains and millions of soldiers were set in motion, swiftly and inexorably towards conflict.

Mass troop mobilisation had effectively become a declaration of war as politicians and diplomats were shunted aside by generals and station-masters.

"The First World War had begun - imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age," wrote Taylor.

I've also been watching 37 Days, the dramatisation of the political lead up to the war (being shown Friday nights on SBS), and the way the movement of German troops sort of committed the country to starting was dealt with to some extent on this week's episode.

All rather interesting, even if I still can't  hold in my head for long information regarding the part of Europe between Germany and Russia - it's ridiculously complicated.

Update:  in defence of my abandonment of even hoping to understand what was going on in a large slab of Europe, I offer this map, from a post of 40 maps (!) which "explain" World War 1:

Been busy with the photos today..

It's sort of like if Hollywood was doing scenes from last year's IPA 70th anniversary dinner.   

Dumbest government in decades

As seen in the IPA's magazine

We all know it happened like this..

As inspired by the heading spotted at Fairfax "Decoding PUP's Jedi mind trick".

Teen talk time

If you ask me, the chorus of Don't Stop by that Australian boy band sounds too much like parts of Everybody Talks. 

And I have to agree with my daughter that Que Sera is a good song.  And sometimes, the simplicity of a video and the image it manufactures is impressive marketing all by itself:



(It reminds me a bit of Fry at the Beastie Boys concert, though.  Pity it appears Youtube is thoroughly cleaned of Futurama clips.)

Questionable

I see that Tim Wilson uses not only his private twitter account to go on about how we don't need s18C RDA, he also tweets using the Human Rights Commission account too, promoting his column in The Australian against s18C, and by reprinting it on the HRC website:




I didn't think his view on this was the Commission's collective view, and doubt that it is appropriate for him to be promoting his own views in this fashion.

And I have to repeat - isn't it stupid of the Commission to give this particular commissioner the title of "Human Rights Commissioner".   They should all be Human Rights Commissioners, with their subcategory following.   (His being "Preening Lightweight Showpony for Selfie Rights"*.)

* have I mentioned before that I don't like him? 

Predisposition and causation

Study finds genetic links between schizophrenia and cannabis use | Reuters

Some pro-legalisation people will probably think this study helps throw doubt on cannabis as a cause of schizophrenia:

 The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where
cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk.Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use ishigher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population.

"We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as well – that a pre-disposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use," said Robert Power, who led the study at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

But isn't the point this:  even if you are genetically predisposed to both use cannabis and get schizophrenia, does actually using cannabis help bring on the schizophrenia you're genetically predisposed to get?  

And as for the finding itself, I think it's hardly surprising.

Harry Clarke comments

From his blog, talking about the suggestion that ABC iView move to a user pays model:

The Australian might argue that the ABC gets unfair public funding which disadvantages those private media suppliers who must make a buck.  There is some truth to this but The Australian anyway services a different market to the ABC. The Australian services primarily  - the right-wing loony market of cretinous IPA/libertarian types.  The ABC has a more balanced view of the world.

Heh.  

An assessment of the IPA hard to disagree with

Detritus — Thankyou note to John Roskam
(OK, maybe a couple of lines are too harsh, but I'm right up there with the general sentiment.)

Folks are dumb where I come from

Look, it's a clear as anything that Clive Palmer gets votes by being the anti-politician politician, and as such his support is from the politically un-engaged.   We seem to have a lot of those in Queensland, where Palmer polls an extraordinary 14%.

Still, as with Pauline Hanson, it can't last.   The flakiness and insubstantiality eventually seeps through into enough of the electorate, although with Hanson it was perhaps the impression that she was a mere dumb puppet for the men around her who wanted to get ahead that caused her downfall. 

The problem is Clive is the opposite - he uses others as puppets, up to and including visiting US (former) Vice Presidents, and we have to wait for the breakup of his Senators into a fractious disunity, with inside stories of Clive behind the scenes, to see his downfall. 

Well, that's how I think it will go.   Labor doesn't seem quite up to raising money to fund the jailing of a political opponent, as Tony Abbott did.

Salt on Piketty

What a lightweight and snide discussion of Piketty by Bernard Salt in The Australian today.   I've never read Salt's column's much - I found most of them boring - but I didn't really know his political leanings til now.

Also on Piketty, I was interested to read this blog entry on debate now going on about inheritance and wealth taxes.   As I have written before, I had not even realised that the US had such a tax, but the blog entry explains why that may be - very few people pay it.  The British inheritance tax is much larger (I think), but how many people may escape it by positioning money in off shore accounts is something I don't know.

I presume there has been a lot of economic work done on inheritance tax (in fact, I see there was a 2013 paper co-authored by Piketty with the alluring title "A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Tax") , but it's something we never hear about as a prospect for Australia. 

Perhaps that should change?

Bell's theorem confusion

I'm pretty sure that the interpretation of Bell's Theorem in the popular physics books I read in the 1980's (written after the Alain Aspect experiments) was pretty consistent - that it showed reality was "non local".

But this article in Nature, which is not easy to follow but worth reading to get an idea of the continuing debate amongst physicists about some very fundamental concepts, goes into the alternative interpretation, and how the experiments still have unresolved "loopholes".   (Interesting, the suggestion at the end is that the loopholes may be experimentally covered by putting one end of the set up with a human on the Moon!)

Progress in this matter of resolving the very meaning of basic concepts in physics does seem very slow.

Yet another remarkable Jewish story from WW2

Surviving the Black Sea: An appreciation of David Stoliar, the sole survivor of the 1942 Struma disaster | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Read this lengthy review that tells the tragic story of the sinking of a ship in the Black Sea, full of Jews trying to get to Palestine, in 1942.

Suggestions for replacing the "honour killings are morally justified" talk

I don't know:  the Festival of Dangerous Ideas might have got away with a talk by a Caliphate favouring Islamist if they had called it "Understanding honour killings from within the culture," or some such;  but going with "Honour Killings are Morally Justified" was an absurd and offensive bit of trolling for attention. 

Now that the Festival has a gap in the program, I've been trying to think of alternative "dangerous" talk titles:

"Between Clive and the Buffet Table - a caterer reminisces"

"A Rinehart Family Christmas"

"The case for compulsory circumcision"

"The Phil Neitszke Guided Tour of Switzerland"

I'll keep working on it....

Mercury in fish, revisited

The Mercury-Laden Fish Floated for School Lunches | DiscoverMagazine.com

I've posted quite a few times over the years about mercury in fish, mainly because it seems to be a topic they follow closely in the US, but less so here.

At the link is a lengthy article looking at the issue with regard to the dogfish, a type of shark that the US government is looking at using in school lunches and prisons, but not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

Interestingly, I see that the article indicates that Spanish mackerel is pretty high on the list of mercury affected fish too, above tuna, which I don't think I realised before.  I don't mind a bit of mackerel every now and again.  Certainly, our more premium white fish have now become ridiculously expensive. 

Higgs causes confusion

Should the Higgs boson have caused our Universe to collapse?

British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Robert Hogan of King's College London (KCL) will present the new research on 24 June at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth.

Andrew Bolt: tired and emotional

Most fair minded people will be rather surprised at the jury verdict in favour of Rebekah Brooks, given that it was looking pretty obvious to readers, let alone the papers' editors, that the London tabloid staff must have been illegally hacking into private phones.     (Also, her sometimes lover was convicted, as well as 3 senior journalists who already pleaded guilty, and another 15 journalists apparently yet to go to trial.)  

Yet an apparently tired and emotional Andrew Bolt's reaction?:

May the Murdoch haters choke on their vomit at this result. 

Ha!  Yes, Andrew, it's like a complete vindication of everything good and noble about Murdochworld.

Oh - and who should join in - the hive mind of Catallaxy.  Sinclair Davidson thinks Andrew "sums it up nicely."

Look, fellas, I know you were at that big IPA shindig with Rupert as Guest of Honour last year, but wipe that gold dust from your eyes and get a grip, will you?  

*  If I were on the jury, I would have been tempted to convict her just for having such an annoyingly wild and woolly hair do.

More conscious coupling needed

For millennials, out-of-wedlock childbirth is the norm. Now what?

Interesting story at Slate at the strange state of US society regarding "out-of-wedlock" childbirth (and especially single motherhood.)  Although the outcome is not good from a poverty/social point of view, the suggestion is that no one knows what to do about it anyway:

The conservative response to this web of issues is to say we need to encourage more marriages. But evidence suggests that single mothers who later wed usually end up divorced and worse off financially than before. And as I’ve written, even if marriage promotion is a generally worthwhile goal, the government still has no real idea how to achieve it.
So far, federally funded programs designed to encourage matrimony have delivered weak results, and even where they’ve had a positive impact, the change hasn’t been nearly enough to make a significant dent in poverty. Meanwhile, cutting back on welfare for single mothers doesn’t shrink their numbers.

News spreads slow in the denier community

It seems like Andrew Bolt's climate denier reading is very limited.  He's relying on a Christopher Booker column which in turn is relying on Steven Goddard analysis of temperature adjustments.

I would say it's pretty clear that Bolt does not know that Steven Goddard made so many mistakes and refused to acknowledge them that Anthony Watts will not run any of his material at Watts Up With That.  Furthermore, a recent specific series of Goddard posts on the US temperature record was taken apart as being plainly in error at Lucia's Blackboard.  (In fact, it was there that Watts dropped by to confirm he would have nothing of Goddard's on his blog, and this has been the case for a year or two now.)

Bolt also quotes from Jennifer Marohasy - the Australia scientist whose credibility seems to have dwindled away, more due to her work on the Murray Darling, as far as I can tell.

Here's a hint Andrew:  if a pretend scientist has made so many wrong claims that even Anthony Watts stops using his material, he is not to be trusted on anything.

Do try to keep up to date on the current state of denialism, won't you?

I must be Swedish

Given that many people in the West are busy promoting the idea of drug law liberalisation, I had been meaning to look at the matter of one European nation which has, pretty much, had a very successful war on illicit drugs, but it seems to be pretty rarely spoken about.   (Instead, both Libertarians and Lefties like to talk about Portugal, which has seen drug use and harm reduce by way of de-criminalising personal use combined with a very un-Libertarian system of tribunals which deal with users.)  

I'm talking Sweden: the rich, successful little nation of pop, IKEA and blond women which has an attitude towards illicit drugs that makes me wonder if somewhere on my father's side some Swedish blood has crept into my genetic profile.  A recent article which appears to be from that country sums it up:

Cocaine, ecstasy and even cannabis are rarely seen in streets and clubs in line with Sweden's official "zero tolerance" approach. The ambitious target is clear.

"The overarching goal: a society free from illegal drugs," it states.

Sweden criminalized illicit drug use in 1988, thanks in large part to a two-decade campaign by a group called the Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society (RNS). It followed a two-year attempt to introduce a more tolerant approach that was considered a failure by authorities.

"The most important link in the chain when it comes to the drug problem is the use of drugs, the demand that comes from the individual user," said RNS secretary general Per Johansson.

"If you don't focus on the demand you will never be effective combatting the supply of drugs." 

Sweden also puts strong emphasis on prevention, with extensive drug awareness programmes in schools and even preschools. The country now has some of the continent's lowest rates of drug consumption among students aged 15 and 16.

According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), only nine percent of the Swedish school population had tried cannabis, compared to 39 percent in France, 42 percent in the Czech Republic and around 25 percent in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

'Something not Swedish'

A survey by the Swedish Drug Users Union in 2008 showed that a majority of the population supports the strict policy. Every other Swede said that possession or cultivation of cannabis for personal use should be punished with prison, and six in 10 believed that a "total war" on cannabis  -- which the survey defined as arresting and jailing all dealers and users -- was the best tactic.

"Drugs have always been seen as something not Swedish, like something foreign," said Börje Olsson, a sociology professor at Stockholm University.

"They are not part of the Swedish morals. People think 'this has nothing to do with us'." 

The latest EMCDDA data shows that the number of Swedish adults between 15 and 64 who had consumed cocaine during the last year was almost five times smaller than the biggest consumer, Spain.

For ecstasy, consumption figures in Britain and the Netherlands were 14 times higher than in Sweden.

Police play a key role in enforcement. Anyone even suspected of being "high" can be detained and given a compulsory urine test. If positive, they are slapped with a criminal charge and must stand trial. 

 It shows a few thing, I think.   Firstly, it appears that a key thing as to how seriously and successfully a nation takes on their "drug war" is cultural, and the cultural attitude does not uniformly run along the Left/Right divide.   (Compare other successful drug fighting nations such as Japan and Singapore.) 

Secondly, I think I have read that in Australia, at least, there is concern that drug education in high school may have the unintended effect of increasing curiosity and experimentation for those inclined to do so.   That doesn't seem to be the case in Sweden.

Thirdly, I am curious as to how drug use is co-related across Europe in terms of economic success.

I also note that drug use follows weird patterns across various nations.  Form the BBC report I just linked to, on why the UK doesn't have a crystal meth problem:

New figures from the Home Office estimate that in the past year about 17,000 people aged 16-59 in England and Wales took methamphetamine - fewer than for any other drug recorded. About 27,000 people had used heroin, 47,000 crack cocaine, 120,000 ketamine and two million cannabis. 

"The prevalence has been pretty much confined to the male gay scene and even within that what you might call the heavy-end party scene of injecting crystal meth and promiscuous sexual activity," says Harry Shapiro of the charity Drugscope. 

In the UK the drug is often used at sex parties and combined with others like Viagra and GBL, says Dr Owen Bowden-Jones, consultant psychiatrist at the Club Drug Clinic in central London. 

Most of its 300 or so referrals for using crystal meth are from London, but some are starting to come from other cities like Manchester. A small number are from the straight clubbing community, but they remain the exception, says Bowden-Jones.

"On the West Coast of America it's a drug of deprivation, in London it seems to be a drug of affluent gay men and in Eastern Europe it's associated with prostitution."

And yet in Australia, it is thought to be particularly popular in rural area.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, the alliance of Left and Libertarianism which is promoting a softening of cultural attitudes towards drug use in the US and Australia is not good for the countries in the long run.

Japan on ice

A few years ago, devoted readers would have seen my post showing photos of various Antarctic national stations. (Quite a good post for its combination of curiosity, education and entertainment, if I do say so myself.)

Today, I read that Japan is thinking of building a new Antarctic station to continue its work of drilling into deep, deep ice, for the purpose of investigating the ancient atmosphere for climate research.

The article doesn't say exactly where the new station would be, but notes that if you're really desperate for a place to sleep, you may find an empty Japanese building in Antarctica:

Tokyo already has four stations on the frozen continent, two of which are currently in use—the Syowa Station on the coast and the Dome Fuji Station inland.

Japanese research teams at Dome Fuji Station have sampled air captured in ice as long ago as 720,000 years, after drilling down 3,000 metres (1.86 miles).

At the proposed new base, scientists would be able to drill down to reach ice that formed 1 million years ago, beating the current sampling record held by a European team, which has looked at 800,000-year-old ice.

So, what does the Dome Fuji Station look like?  It didn't feature in my previous post, probably because it's rather dull:

  

In fact, the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research website that that photo came from indicates nothing much is going on right now at the station:

Dome-Fuji Station was established in January, 1995 to conduct deep ice-core drilling at the highest dome of Dronning Maud Land, some 1000 km away from Syowa Station. After completing 3035 m deep drilling, the station is being closed temporarily.

But there is a more entertaining photo to be found about it, on what appears to be a Japanese guy's  Flickr feed:

That's an amusingly Japanese photo, even if I have no idea exactly what they are doing.   (I also wonder if the middle two guys are from that country.)  The caption beside the photo notes this:

Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition 35th members welcomed the arrival of those of 36th after 4 months construction work for Dome Fuji Station. The station became famous later thanks to a popular cinema movie "南極料理人 (Antarctic Chef)" and we are happy if you recall the station was constructed by us in such a harsh environment (altitude 3820 m; max air temperature -29 degree C; atmospheric pressure around 750 hPa) without taking a bath for 4 months.

 Well, it sounds like the movie might be worth tracking down.

By the way, I have no clear  idea what the Japanese man on whose flickr account this appears does for a living.  He certainly takes a heck of a lot of photos of what looks like cycling races, interspersed with graphs, and the occasional photo of him doing something science-y looking. 

Where's a lorry full of gravy when you need it?

Mashed potato spillage closes Yorkshire road for five hours

The fickle public on side again?

I've long thought it likely that public sentiment towards climate change varies with the weather, and as this poll was apparently taken recently, this may well explain the apparent increased public approval of carbon pricing and belief in climate change.

Certainly, in the last couple of months, the Australian public must be noticing the remarkable warmth for the time of year.

In Brisbane, where roses only lie dormant for a relatively short time anyway, they are really very confused about the warm autumn and winter.   But it's not only them - I'm sure lots of other plants are flowering when they wouldn't normally.  It is very noticeable.

But this poll was an on line one - which I never take all that seriously. 

Still any move in the public sentiment towards accepting reality and approving carbon pricing is welcome.

Poor misunderstood tobacco company

Is this the end of the tobacco war?

Peter Martin notes:

Added to the Health Department's website quietly last week amid debate over the effectiveness of plain packaging, the Treasury data shows 3.4 per cent fewer cigarettes were sold in 2013 than 2012. Plain packaging became mandatory on December 1, 2012.

The Treasury data is consistent with national accounts data that shows a decline of 0.9 per cent in the amount of tobacco and cigarettes sold between 2012 and 2013. The national accounts show a further slide of 7.6 per cent in the three months to March after the first of a number of big increases in tobacco excise announced late last year.

The Bureau of Statistics bases the national accounts measure on a survey of households, whereas the Treasury collects information on every stick and pouch of tobacco sold.

The Treasury data suggests that, adjusted for population growth of 1.7 per cent, the number of sticks sold per person slid about 5 per cent between 2012 and 2013.

Gee, no wonder Sinclair Davidson did some backtracking at Catallaxy when posting on the topic.  Will he still defend the "it's a disaster!" line he took at the first tobacco company suggestion that they were selling more?   (By the way, the three year anniversary of his "stagflation" warning is fast approaching.   I'm planning a party.)

And what will the economist wonder woman Judith Sloan say about it?  Attack the Treasury figures?  Who knows.  I see that Henry Ergas' Saturday position was that it "may" increase smoking:  I think of the three, it was probably Sloan who nailed her credibility highest to the mast on it clearly increasing tobacco consumption.

About the only tactic they have left to argue that smoking has not gone down is to say that illegal tobacco has replaced legal sales.   I think anyone sensible would allow that there may be some substitution going on, at least amongst well established smokers.   But I think it unlikely that new, teenage smokers would be seeking out the illegal product, and as such, the amount of substitution may well diminish within a relatively short time.

But the funniest thing in Martin's report is this comment at the end:

British American Tobacco spokesman Scott McIntyre said: "Smoking rates have been declining in Australia for a very very long time but since plain packaging the rate of decline has halved. That's what we are arguing." he said.

Have we all been misreading the tobacco companies?   I now understand their position to be that they would like the previous (alleged) higher rate of smoking decline to be reinstated by removing plain packaging.

They're a noble industry after all.   Or liars.  One or the other.

Don't mention the potty training

This article in the Atlantic on the (modern) history of potty training notes that Freud's elaborate theorising on the "anal phase" led to some fairly unusual wartime theories:

American anthropologists turned to potty training in the early 1940s, while studying what they believed to be the particular aggressiveness of Japanese soldiers. Could this aggression, asked noted scholars like Margaret Mead, be caused by premature toilet training? Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer thought so. He argued (as it turns out, falsely) that Japanese parents potty train their babies earlier than Western parents do—and that this accounted for “the overwhelming brutality and sadism of the Japanese at war.” Gorer’s reasoning was that premature toilet training forced Japanese babies to control their sphincters before important muscular development had taken place. This caused intense rage, which the infants soon repressed. This repression, in turn, gave rise to severe and compulsive personalities.

Some of this psychoanalysis was done in the service of the American war effort. In the early 40’s, Geoffrey Gorer and some of his like-minded colleagues were hired as analysts by the U.S. Office of War Information’s Foreign Morale Analysis Division. There, they attempted to build basic personality profiles of foreign nation-states. (In a related project, Gorer linked infant swaddling in Russia to manic-depressive personality disorders.) Gorer’s research on Japan would expand, but he always insisted: “Early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character.”

This raises the crucial question:  at what age would Hitler have been potty trained?

A Pope on my side

Pope Francis warns on 'evil' of drugs, opposes legalization | Reuters

Yay.

I was thinking while watching Four Corners last week (about the prostitution, drug use and poverty in Brazil in close proximity to the World Cup) that the drug dealers who trade with the poor in such countries are utterly despicable.   I wouldn't mind betting that this Pope's strong views on the matter are due to his familiarity with the society wide problems caused by illicit drug use in his home continent, particularly amongst the poor.  Popes from Europe would not have had the same exposure to the issue, and maybe that's why I cannot recall it being mentioned much by them.

Hot dongle

I bought a Google Chromecast yesterday.  I got it after being reminded by Download This Show (the enjoyable Radio National show on technology and the internet) that it had recently been released in Australia, and they seemed to like it quite a lot.

It is good, and promises to get better as more apps come out incorporating it.  (ABC's iView apparently is doing so.)

One thing I wasn't expecting was that my daughter's iPod would work with it straight away, leading to fights between us (me armed with the Samsung, she with the Pod) for control of the TV.

(By the way, the thing does get pretty warm to the touch after its been used for a while - hence "hot" in the title.  I was thinking of entitling this post "Been Playing with My Hot Dongle", but decided against it.)

Groucho does smoking

Henry Ergas confirms himself as a complete tosser in his Saturday column, which comprises part of The Australian's nutty jihad against people who doubt their position that plain packaging is a FAILURE and WRONG!

He deploys all the tactics we've seen before - the straw man about how plain packaging should have had an immediate drop in smokers, and that it would result in smokers moving to cheaper brands so why do it? - both of which I showed had already been considered by the likes of strongly anti-smoking economists such as Harry Clarke.

Ergas notes the difficulty of working out the effects of different measures taken over a same period - typically increases in excise happening along with increasing restrictions on advertising.  But then (of course) he's happy to cite tobacco industry econometrics study which "indicate" it's all in the excise, and attacks Labor for not doing "Regulation Impact Statement" before introducing the policy.   He thinks this:

Roxon’s failure to undertake a RIS means the Abbott government must complete a post-implementation review of the plain packaging legislation by December. It should seize that opportunity to carry out an independent, rigorous review of policies towards the tobacco industry. The unfortunate reality is that this area has become a policy trapdoor: once a policy is implemented, there is no way out, no matter how costly and ineffective it may be.

Yeah, well, we kind of like of that way, because tobacco has been losing big time, and who cares whether it's (say) 10% advertising restrictions and 90% excise, or vice versa, or any combination in between?   The combination of policies has clearly been working.   And doesn't common sense suggest you're never going to be able to completely be sure of the precise weighting of the different factors?

Sinclair Davidson has taken up a similar line - arguing that you must be able to a cost benefit analysis of tobacco policy.   Of course, this fits hand in glove with the line he and fellow climate change "skeptics" have long taken - you can wait to decide on reducing CO2 until you know exactly what the climate sensitivity figure is.  Both are disingenuous ways of arguing to do nothing (including, with climate change, up to the point where you can't do anything effective anyway),  because your ideological starting point is that you don't want businesses interfered with. 

Amusingly, Davidson has also been running the line that we are being just too mean to smokers and making them feel bad:

The anti-smoking lobby has done an magnificent job of stigmatising and denormalising smokers and smoking. 

Oh diddums. 

Back to Ergas:  what about this section (with my comments in brackets):

After all, that policy imposes significant costs. Consumers are harmed, as the quality of a product they value is forcibly degraded [only if you count an ugly packet as degrading what's inside it - a smoker can still buy a premium brand if they want to]; producers’ profits are reduced and their trademarks destroyed [oh boo hoo - the industry which sickens and kills a large proportion of its addicted customers is going to lose money - that's a feature, not a problem]; and if consumption rises as plain packaging causes prices to fall (relative to the levels they would otherwise have achieved), the community’s health suffers [we already thought about that - so we brought in excise increase too].

What's the bet that Ergas used to be a smoker, by the way?

Update:   incidentally, this "we are too mean to smokers now" palaver - the fact is that something 3/4 of smokers want to quit anyway.   Encouraging youth never to start is a good way to ensure they're not going to regret their addiction in the future - and  we can promise with pretty high certainty they will.

Factor that into your cost benefit analysis, can you?