The way ahead for Tasmania (seriously?)

Noted towards the bottom of a Phil Coorey piece about the talking going on between Hockey and the Senators to try and salvage some part of the budget:

In Tasmania, Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie hit the Treasurer for more funds for Tasmania, funds for mushroom growers and bumble bee farmers, while refusing to reverse opposition to budget cuts. Instead, she said the government should cut deeper into foreign aid.

Actually, I was a bit disturbed on the weekend to see on Insiders that Hockey and her had a two hour meeting (after which he came out gushing about her "big heart" - it was nauseating).   I certainly hope there was someone else in the room, so that the topic of the Treasurer's "package" was kept on track.

Why I haven't blogged about the reactionless drive

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine

I had a hunch that the write ups of the NASA apparent confirmation of a reactionless drive were being a bit too enthusiastic.  This article indicates my skepticism may be well founded.

And one other point:  the thrust the test measured was absolutely tiny.  Even if a totally new effect is at play, I wouldn't get too excited unless it was clearly scale-able to something useful.   Weird (but tiny) force effects of the quantum world already exist - see the Casimir effect - but as far as I know there is no proposal to ever make use of that for colonising the universe.

About time the doctors started talking

Australia's detention regime sets out to make asylum seekers suffer, says chief immigration psychiatrist | World | The Guardian

Good, detailed report by David Marr [and some other journalist who hasn't been on Insiders so I don't know him] on the harm indefinite detention in offshore camps is causing.

The situation is clearly much worse in a humanitarian sense than it was under Howard - where a considerable number of the detained at least had a fair hope of ending up in Australia (or New Zealand, if I recall correctly) if they waited long enough.

The current people there can see no resolution on the horizon at all.

I still believe that the public is simply "living with" this because the government has kept details of conditions under such tight wraps.  There needs to be more exposure and humanising of the detainees.

A mile wide but an inch deep

Noted from The Australian today:

ACCORDING to Gina Rinehart, most journalists have room to improve. Australia’s richest person has nominated Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones as two of the finest journalists in the country.

In an interview with The Australian’s editor Clive Mathieson on the state of the mining industry and her own plans in the sector, Rinehart was less forthcoming about her investments in the media industry, where she is the biggest individual shareholders of Ten and Fairfax Media.

She did say she has an issue with the quality of journalism in Australia, telling Mathieson: “I would like to see journalism restore itself to take more pride in ­accuracy and fairness.”

The exception to the miserable media standards are Bolt and Jones. “I’m a great admirer of both Andrew and Alan,” she said. “They are courageous individuals and great patriots, genuinely concerned for Australia’s future.”

What a laugh.

Evil comet cat detected

We've all become rather blasé about photos of moons and planets and stuff, I think, reflecting little on the remarkably successful extent of the unmanned exploration of the solar system.

Even so, the Rosetta mission, designed to orbit and plant a probe on a comet is one of the more remarkable missions of recent years.   I know there have been photos taken of comet cores before, but I don't think anything as interesting as this:

And here's another to give the scale:

And by the way, did you notice the clear-ish alien grinning cat artifact in the first picture?   I'll highlight it here:

 

 

Actually, it might be Yoda, but he didn't smile that much.  But now that it's been pointed out to you, you will find it hard to un-see.

[This post strikes me as good geeky Reddit fodder, but while I read it sometimes, I don't post anything there.  Then again, it wouldn't be surprising if something similar has not already appeared.  Anyway, anyone who posts there, feel free to link here...]

A First World War human interest story

Inside the brothels that served the Western Front: How one First World War soldier found love in the arms of a French sweetheart - The Independent

I see that officers tended to visit their own, somewhat higher class, brothels when in France during the First World War.  I thought two things were of particular note in this article:

1.  Mirrored ceilings in bedrooms expecting a lot of "action" have been around for longer than I imagined. I would have guessed they were only thought of in the 1970's, but no.  In fact, this room sounds altogether over-mirrored:

Of the brothels themselves, another British officer recalled: "The
Madame took me to an eight-sided room, the walls and ceilings of which
were entirely covered with mirrors. The only furniture in it was a low
divan on which a pretty little blonde was displaying her charms. She
welcomed me most pleasantly and later we breakfasted off an omelette,
melon and champagne."

2.   Some avoided returning to England on leave because of the jarring attitude to the war:

Captain Harry Siepmann, writing in the 1950s, offered another reason why
he and his fellow officers had chosen to visit the brothels of Paris
rather than spend a few days of precious leave in Blighty: by the end of
the war, he said, the "out-of-touch atmosphere" of jingoism and
unthinking patriotism in Britain "jarred badly with the grim realities
of France".

 It's a good article worth reading in full.

A blood test with big implications

A blood test for suicide?

A fascinating article here on the apparent success of a study looking into a blood test for detecting those who have been feeling suicidal, although if I understand it right, only amongst those people who have a "common" genetic mutation in the first place:

In another part of the study, the researchers tested three different sets of blood samples, the largest one involving 325 participants in the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention Research Study found similar methylation increases at SKA2 in individuals with suicidal thoughts or
attempts. They then designed a model analysis that predicted which of the participants were experiencing suicidal thoughts or had attempted suicide with 80 percent certainty. Those with more severe risk of suicide were predicted with 90 percent accuracy. In the youngest data
set, they were able to identify with 96 percent accuracy whether or not a participant had attempted suicide, based on blood test results. 

The implications sound a little bit like science fiction:

Kaminsky says a test based on these findings might best be used to predict future suicide attempts in those who are ill, to restrict lethal means or methods among those a risk, or to make decisions regarding the intensity of intervention approaches.

He says that it might make sense for use in the military to test whether members have the gene mutation that makes them more vulnerable. Those at risk could be more closely monitored when they returned home after deployment. A test could also be useful in a psychiatric emergency room, he says, as part of a suicide risk assessment when doctors try to assess level of suicide risk.

The test could be used in all sorts of safety assessment decisions like the need for hospitalization and closeness of monitoring. Kaminsky says another possible use that needs more study could be to inform treatment decisions, such as whether or not to give certain medications that have been linked with suicidal thoughts.

The meth puzzle

Of all the dangerous drugs that people try, I've always had the greatest difficulty in understanding why they would use crystal meth.  Surely there has been enough media exposure about the psychosis and vile bodily effects an addiction to it can have.

In the Saturday Paper, there's one guy's story of how he started using it, starting getting psychotic, but managed to get out of the scene.  The details are very common to what we've seen on current affairs programs over the years, and this was an apparently smart enough guy who thought he could try it safely.

I would assume there is research on the topic, and perhaps I should go looking for it.  But my guess would be that two factors are probably important:  first, he "gateway effect" of using other drugs such as marijuana and (I would guess) ecstasy, for which there is much less risk of addiction but pleasant enough experiences which lead people to believe they can upgrade to the next experience and also deal with it safely.  (I find articles such as this one which dismiss a gateway effect as illusory to be unconvincing and too pedantic.  To say a drug is a "gateway" is not necessarily an argument that is directly causative of further drug experimentation, but rather that its use sets the scene for experimentation with reputedly dangerous drugs by encouraging the rationalisation of their potential for safe use  I guess that the illegal status of the softer drug may help that rationalisation - by developing skepticism that illegality is motivated by the dangerous effect of drugs.)

Secondly, the social encouragement of other experimenters that they have not been hurt by its casual use, and can control how often they use it, must surely be important.  But given the clear, dire effects that it does have on so many people, how do so many first timers manage to not know of people in the same circles who have been sent over the edge by it?  As the author of the Saturday Paper article writes:

I was plainly ignorant about the drug before I succumbed. I’d considered myself a drug-savvy streetwise person before the autumn of 2014. However, my quick and doe-eyed plunge into addiction suggested otherwise. I had a number of key misconceptions about the drug: that meth didn’t kill you, that there was a safe level of use, and that meth didn’t do permanent damage.

What I find hard to credit is that any half reasonably educated person doesn't know of its dangers.  (Or can still rationalise experimentation despite knowing of them, I guess.)

Update:  OK, there have been a series of articles at The Conversation about meth use, and one claims this:

However, the majority of people who use illicit drugs do not use regularly or in large quantities. A relatively small proportion (for methamphetamine, around 10-15%) of users go on to become dependent and need treatment.

On the other hand, another article by the same author links to this study, which notes:

The estimated number of regular methamphetamine users in Australia was 102,600, or 10.3 per 1000 persons aged 15 to 49 years. Of these regular methamphetamine users, it was estimated that there were 72,700 dependent methamphetamine users, or 7.3 per 1000 population aged 15-49 years. The bulk of regular and dependent methamphetamine users were located outside of Sydney (83% and 80% respectively).

So that indicates that about 70% of "regular" users are dependent?

That puts the addiction picture in a much stronger light than saying that "a relatively small proportion" of meth users go on to be dependent*, but I suppose it could also means that relatively large number of people could only try it once or twice and not get further into its use?

*  can you imagine the situation if the number of regular alcohol users said to be dependent on it was 70%?

An Asperger story

It was particularly interesting to read the "Two of Us" section in the SMH this morning, about Kathy Lette (Mrs Geoffrey Robertson) and their 23 year old son Julian, who has Asperger syndrome.  (Given that one half of it is written by him, you'll see what I mean...)

I only like my own apocalypse

Snowpiercer and These Final Hours continue apocalyptic film tradition - The Final Cut - ABC Radio National 

 I've noticed some ad or something for These Final Hours, which is an Australian "we've only got hours til the end of the world" film, but I knew nothing of its story.  In the article above, we get a description, and the mechanism for the end of the world sounds unscientific.  (The film sounds violent and unpleasant too.)

Why can't global disaster movies get the disaster scientifically plausible?   The only one which I think really did try fairly hard in that respect was Deep Impact (and I thought it a pretty good film generally.)

But so many are just utter rubbish with the science - that shlock German director's The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (hey, we're still here),  the (awful other) "asteroid hits Earth" movie Armageddon; even World War Z, although I was surprised to enjoy its video game similarities, had a ridiculously brief viral zombification scenario.  [And, I might add, it annoyed me continually that the wife kept making satellite phone calls from the inside of the navy ship she was on.  Surely you'd have to be near or on the deck for that?]

In fact, generally speaking, I can't say I like apocalypse films as a genre much at all.  I'm not sure why I'm supposed to enjoy ones with bleak, hopeless endings, even if they do manage to get the science vaguely right.

Which is all a bit odd, perhaps, given that I was recently talking about my own apocalyptic thoughts whenever I'm driving out in the Lockyer Valley.  (And, incidentally, I wrote that post before hearing about These Final Hours.) The thing is, I like my own apocalypses, but rarely anyone else's.

Damn it - I missed the "stagflation" birthday

I see I just missed the 3 year anniversary of Sinclair Davidson appearing in The Drum (and on Andrew Bolt's show) warning that Australia  had a "looming" stagflation problem.  

It is (stagflation), after all, "the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy."   And this was "an economy facing a stagflation problem."

Yet this utterly failed prediction (and despite his likely hedging that he used the word "could" once or twice, I'm calling this out as a predication based on his wrong headed, ideologically driven theory that low taxes and low government spending is always the cure for what ails an economy), he has the hide to claim US economists are wrong in their view that the Obama stimulus helped reduced joblessness.

The graph he uses to support the argument can, of course, simply be said to show that the effects of the GFC on unemployment in the country was worse than initially expected.   What matters on the question of whether the stimulus helped is the question of where the actual unemployment graph line would be running if the stimulus had not happened.   Merely showing that the initial predictions of where unemployment would go with and without stimulus doesn't answer that. 

Of course, in the fixed ideology of "low government spending at any cost", they will argue that any worsing in an economy is the result of higher government spending. 

Starting from a fixed ideological position is no way to argue economics with any credibility.

Jericho making sense, again

Business leaders should stop whingeing about Australia’s competitiveness | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho is in fine form having a go at big business and its complaints, particularly the odious way Gina Rinehart pines for low wages for her mines and funds climate change disbelief.

Speaking of miners, what's with the ridiculous excuse for a newspaper The Australian and its thorough tongue bathing of Andrew Forrest and his welfare ideas this week?   Sure, Forrest has a  reputation for being genuinely concerned about poverty (unlike Rinehart, who gives the impression she's been envious since childhood of Uncle Scrooge being able to actually swim in his money,) but even so, why has the paper been so busy promoting his welfare report?   And then, it seems today that Shanahan's job has become to explain to the public why the Abbott government won't adopt it.

It would be intriguing indeed to see the emails (or listen in to telephone calls) that go into and out of the head office of The Australian at the moment.  

Update:   I see that Andrew Bolt tries to be helpful [/sarc] today, by criticising Forrest for saying aborigines are "economically jailed" (an oversimplification, I would agree), but then goes on to say it's not the fault of white people - it's the entire dysfunctional aboriginal culture that's at fault.  (!)

Well, that'll earn him points in the aboriginal reconciliation stakes.   It's entirely their fault they're stuck in poverty and a cycle of drug dependence, hey?

And here I thought my take on the matter (that in large part it is to do with aboriginal communities being often stuck in areas with extremely limited opportunities to do anything of economic value, and a reluctance to have policies encouraging them to move to areas where their children may have a future job) was an oversimplication.

Stimulus and austerity

I've been reading a few things on the matter of great economic debate of stimulus versus austerity.

First, Justin Wolfers says that survey results show that top flying American economists are nutty outliers (my wording, not Wolfer's) if they hold the position that the Obama stimulus of 2009 didn't help the economy.  They are more divided on whether it was worth the cost, but even then it runs more than two to one in favour of "yes, it was worth it."

Secondly, I stumbled across this article by Florian Schui which I thought gives a nice succinct summary of the intersection of politics and economics on this issue:

This is an evolutionary argument familiar from radical liberal thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Hayek. Crucially, their perspective does not give great prominence to questions of economic efficiency. Indeed, free societies a likely to experience periods of economic waste: periods of low growth may leave labour, capital and other resources underused. But free societies do better in the long run because they are better at evolving and adapting. The political aim must therefore be to contain the size of the state in order to leave space for the creative forces of society. That remains true even if cutting back the state hurts growth and economic efficiency in the short term. If you accept this view, it makes no sense to adapt the size of the state to the cyclical fluctuations of the economy. Rather, what is needed is a permanently smaller state to unleash the creative powers of society.

This argument has its merits but from an economic perspective there are some substantial problems associated with the Olympian perspective adopted by thinkers like Humboldt and Hayek. Mainly, they do not say how long the long run is. Other approaches to economic policy allow the public to verify concrete results after a few quarters or after a couple of years at the latest and decide whether to continue with a specific set of policies or not. But it is not clear when we can undertake a similar evaluation of the results of this kind of radical laissez faire. Every crisis no matter how long or deep may be interpreted as an unpleasant but necessary stretch on a superior evolutionary path. In practice, this means that economic results become irrelevant as a yardstick against which to judge economic policy. This is exactly what is happening in the case of austerity. There simply is no economic outcome that can convince proponents of austerity that they are on the wrong track. Their cause is not about economic efficiency but about a political goal: the preservation of liberty.

There are also social problems associated with the Olympian perspective of the likes of Humboldt and Hayek. Prussian aristocrats and tenured professors are in a position to look at economic crises, even if they lasts a decade or longer, as a mere transitory phase of hardship that is part of a superior evolutionary trajectory. More ordinary citizens may not be able to afford this kind of detached perspective on the economy. A longer crisis can ruin the life plans of individuals and lead to the collapse of social and political systems. That is why Keynes warned that the ‘long run is a misleading guide to current affairs’.

One may object that there is nothing wrong with giving priority to political values over the pursuit of economic maximisation and social welfare. Why should the defence of freedom not trump economic and social considerations? After all maximising growth and maximising human happiness can be two rather different things and most people would agree that the latter is more important. The preservation of liberty may very well warrant austerity policies that cut the state to size, even if they hurt economically.

While this is a valid argument it is questionable whether the trade-off between the size of the state and individual liberty really exists. The historical experience of Humboldt and Hayek certainly gave them reason to think of states as the enemies of individual freedom. In Humboldt’s time, towards the end of the 18^th century, absolutist states such as his native Prussia and republican states such as France were extremely ambitious in expanding their sphere of action, often at the expense of individual liberty. The same is true of the authoritarian states in Europe that Hayek witnessed in the 1920s and 30s.

However, a more complete vision of history also reveals the shortcomings of the simple equation of a larger state with greater oppression. Hayek predicted in the 1940s that planned economies would set mankind on a road to serfdom. In actual fact, the vast expansion of states across the western world in the post war decades coincided with an equally substantial increase of liberty for many contemporaries. Women and black people acquired more freedom than ever before and despite evident lapses western countries did rather well at protecting the individual rights of their citizens.

I think this sounds quite convincing, and goes along with my increasing feeling over the last few years that it is the small government ideologues who are truly ignoring history.   

And finally, this article in The Economist, which I've possibly linked to before, seems to give a very fair and balanced take on the matter.

History repeats - kinda

Why Did ISIS Destroy the Tomb of Jonah? | Mark Movsesian | First Things

From the post, a brief summary of the branch of Islam that ISIS represents:

ISIS is part of the Salafi movement, a branch of Sunni Islam that seeks to return to the practices of the earliest Muslims – the salaf—who lived at the time of the Prophet Mohammed and just after. The movement rejects the centuries of subsequent developments in Islam as
unjustified innovations–pagan accretions that adulterated the faith. In particular, the movement opposes the veneration of the graves of Islamic prophets and holy men. Salafis see this practice, which is associated most frequently with Sufi Islam, as a kind of idolatry, or shirk, that detracts from the absolute transcendence of God.

Salafi Islam prevails in Saudi Arabia, where it enjoys the patronage of the royal family. On the Arabian Peninsula, as now in Iraq, Salafis have destroyed the tombs of Islamic holy men. Indeed, when the Saudi royal family captured the city of Medina in the 19th century, Salafis
systematically destroyed the tombs of several of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions and family members, leaving only the Prophet’s tomb itself unmolested. There is some thought that the Saudi government plans on dismantling even that tomb, but hesitates to do so because of the uproar that would result in other Muslim communities.

In short, one should see ISIS’s destruction of the tomb of Jonah as an act principally directed at other Muslims, not Christians.

As someone says in comments following:

Can we just get this over with and acknowledge that ISIS is a 21st century version of Cromwell's army?

I initially thought that, given the images of heads on stakes in the media today, this may be being a bit harsh on Cromwell.  But I see that he was in fact ruthless, particularly in Ireland:

The first major town Cromwell and his army encountered when they landed in Ireland was Drogheda. He summoned the royalist commander and invited him to surrender. When he refused, Cromwell's model army seized the town and put the entire garrison of 2,500 officers and men to the sword. It was an act of ruthlessness which sent shockwaves of fear through the rest of Ireland. Other towns surrendered as soon as Cromwell's army approached, and their inmates were spared.

Only Wexford refused. During the siege there Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople and burning much of the town.

 If one is desperate to find an optimistic take on this, I can try this:   Cromwell was operating pretty close to 1,600 years after the death of the founder of his religion.  ISIS is operating 1,400 years after the death of their's.   On this trajectory, Islam is perhaps 200 years ahead of Christianity's timetable towards becoming "mostly harmless", and everything should be looking good by 2200*.

*  Climate change will have given the world something else to fight over by then, anyway.

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it...

I really think the sub editor coming up with the headlines at Slate is just trolling its readership with a title like this: 

Look Out Democrats.  The GOP's 2016 presidential hopefuls may be the best field in generations

I'll link to the article itself, not the headline.  The article seems to talk only about possible candidates we already know.  The headline is completely misleading...

Cell work not as careful as it should be

Contamination hits cell work

The article is all about the problem of mycoplasma contamination in laboratory cell cultures.

In fact, the problem is widespread. Hogenesch, a genome biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleague Anthony Olarerin-George have found that more than one-tenth of gene-expression studies, many published in leading journals, show evidence of Mycoplasma contamination¹. The infestations are undermining research findings and wasting huge amounts of money, Hogenesch says.

He should know. His lab quickly overcame an infestation last year, but a previous plague cost it some US$100,000 and a year of research. Mycoplasma takes hold quickly, he says. “All it takes is one person not to check, and — bam — you have it.” The bacterium often comes from lab workers, and is not killed by the antibiotics typically used to rid cell cultures of  contaminants. And unlike many other microorganisms, which turn the growth medium turbid, Mycoplasma leaves no visible signs of its presence.

I somehow thought they would already be more careful than this, but bacteria are hard to see, I guess.

Movie industry news, continued

I've had a few posts lately about how the international (especially Chinese) market is affecting Hollywood.

I'm surprised to read this morning that, within America itself, which is having a rather glum summer season in box office terms, the Hispanic market is really strong for cinema attendance.

You'd never know it from their presence in films, would you? 

For what it's worth, I'll repeat my criticisms of where the movie industry is at the moment:

*  Way too many comic derived superhero films.  Far, far too many.

*  A lack of particularly appealing young actors with clear star quality.

*  Comedy which has become too crude, made by men in permanent adolescent mode.

*  Too many sequels for films which barely deserve it.  More originality, please.

Why fly a stupid idea?

I heard Tony Abbott on the radio this morning saying that the "dole bludgers will have to apply for 40 jobs a month" was not firm policy - it was just a proposal and a "consultative" government does this to take on board public input before it decides, etc etc.

Oh sure.  This was the "consultative government" that gave us an enormous change in tertiary education, Medicare co-payments, and told the States that they're on their own to cover the increasing costs of health care, all without any consultation that I noticed.

This policy was a silly, over the top idea from the start, and it was stupid tactics of someone in this inept government to fly the kite just to watch it being shot down.

It again shows that the Coalition is, in large part, in a time warp when it comes to policy prescriptions.  (Mind you, any new ideas they do have are not that good either.)

What's the free marketeers' answer to this?

One problem with the world economy as noted by one Australian born OECD economist:

Another factor which Dr Blundell-Wignall says is holding back the recovery from the GFC is bank earnings.

"If you go back to 1980 the earnings of the financial sector of the S&P 500 companies was less than 10 per cent."

He says the proportion of Wall Street earnings by finance stocks is now more than 30 per cent, having risen above its share when the GFC hit.

"The financial sector is supposed to be the sector that intermediates between real savers and real investors. That's what greases the wheels of capitalism," he said.

"Where do we get of thinking that the financial sector can just rip one third of the earnings for themselves?

That does sound like a legitimate concern, and apart from letting banks and financial institutions fall when a crisis happens (and impoverishing millions of their customers in the process), I wonder what the small government, let business work itself out, types think about this.... 

An odd duck

Hans Christian Andersen’s painful fairy-tale life | TLS

I've never read much about HCA, but this review of a new biography of him is interesting.  I think I have heard of his disastrous meeting with Charles Dickens before, probably when reading a review of one of the latter's biographies:

Charles Dickens provides the best-known example of Andersen’s startling
capacity to misread the rules of social engagement (Sebastian Barry made the
awkwardness between the two men the subject of a thoughtful play in 2010).
Dickens and Andersen had much in common, both having worked their way from
unpromising beginnings to immense literary success. Dickens’s sympathy with
the underdog made him a natural ally for Andersen, and at first all went
well between them. But in 1857 Andersen went to stay with the Dickens
family, and failed to notice polite hints when several weeks passed, and it
was time to leave. Dickens was exasperated, while Kate Dickens called him a
“bony bore”. Binding passes over the embarrassment hastily, but he does
point out that Andersen must have found Dickens’s boisterous heartiness
baffling. Perhaps he was simply incapable of extricating himself from the
difficulties of the situation. He was an experienced house guest – in fact,
he never had a home of his own – but he was new to the rituals of
middle-class domesticity in England, and his grasp of English was never
strong. Andersen’s visit coincided with the final stages of Dickens’s dying
marriage, and Binding notes that Andersen’s unwelcome presence in the tense
household at Gad’s Hill may have influenced the preoccupations with class
and concealment in Great Expectations (1860), a novel crowded with
examples of people who can never quite fit in.

About the New York Times legalisation stance

The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests - NYTimes.com

This editorial piece in the New York Times promoting marijuana legalisation indicates what I have long thought is right - the overkill in drug criminalisation in that country (with severe compulsory sentences being one of the big culprits) is what is giving weight to the overly simplistic counter swing to the other "extreme" of complete legalisation.

The odd thing is, it seems that both of these two extremes spring from the two strands of the political Right - the conservatives are fond of the severe and disproportionate sentencing legislation, and the libertarian wing is only too happy to promote legalisation.

I remain highly skeptical that either of these approaches is right, and in particular, given the cultural climate in the country, find it hard to believe that legalisation will be good for the nation socially or economically in the long run.

Moving the sun

Cosmic Megastructures - The Shkadov Thruster or How to Move an Entire Solar System - Popular Mechanics

Just in case you want to leave the neighbourhood:

"Shkadov Thrusters are kind of awesome," says Anders Sandberg, a
research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute who
has studied Shkadov Thrusters amongst other megastructure concepts. "You
can use it to move the whole solar system."

The Shkadov Thruster setup is simple (in theory): It's just a colossal,
arc-shaped mirror, with the concave side facing the sun. Builders would
place the mirror at an arbitrary distance where gravitational attraction
from the sun is balanced out by the outward pressure of its radiation.
The mirror thus becomes a stable, static satellite in equilibrium
between gravity's tug and sunlight's push.

Solar radiation reflects off the mirror's inner, curved surface back
toward the sun, effectively pushing our star with its own sunlight—the
reflected energy produces a tiny net thrust. Voilà, a Shkadov Thruster,
and humanity is ready to hit the galactic trail.

Odd but interesting

ANZ: Consumer Confidence Has Fully Recovered From Its Budget Crash | Business Insider

Why would Australian consumer confidence be up, but voters are apparently not returning to the Coalition?

I'm guessing the explanation is that consumers are satisfied Abbott won't get much of his budget through the Senate; and they still want to punish him for coming up with the budget in the first place.

If that's correct - it wouldn't inspire confidence in Abbott to run a double dissolution.   Which is a pity, in a way.

The Right - for old, white men, and stupid younger people

Just as the US Republican Party has become the party for old white folk, and silly younger people who can't believe in climate change and think Ayn Rand had something useful to say about economics, the same dynamic is clearly operating here.

Adam Creighton writes today about some speech 84 year old Geoffrey Blainey gave:

AUSTRALIA’S greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has called for swaths of the Canberra bureaucracy to be farmed out to India or Hong Kong. 
 
“While protectionism has died in primary and secondary industries, it is still very powerful in tertiary,” Professor Blainey said in a wide-ranging interview that canvassed a socialist revival in ­advanced countries.

“There’s a lot of protectionism still in the professions: Canberra naturally is a protectionist city; there are so many tasks that ­Canberra could farm out to India or Hong Kong — but not for your life. They say if you can’t compete in manufacturing … you must close down, but if you can’t compete in Canberra you’re all right.”

 Well, isn't that weird.  Small government types usually go on a lot about privacy too, but governments shipping private information off shore to India is going to be AOK, is it?  Not to mention wildly popular with the public, who just love to deal with call centres when they are querying their phone/electricity/credit card account.  Getting government functions shipped even further offshore is going to be fantastic.

Julie Novak thinks it's a great idea too, I see from a tweet.  No common sense operating there:  just "if it means smaller government spending, it's great" as per usual.

The report of the Blainey speech indicates he went on about socialism being revived internationally, risks of war, and new States being deserved in Northern Australia.  (Funny, that; given that a new State would involve a new level of that dreaded bureaucracy that should be shipped off shore.)

Either the speech itself, or Creighton's reporting of it, seems to be a complete ramble with hardly any overarching theme.   

I haven't read him, but assume that Blainey's history work was good in its day.   

But it's a sad indictment of the current intellectual decline of the Right in the US, and probably everywhere, that their heroes are all well past their intellectual peak. 
 

Still learning about Kubrick

Well, I learnt quite a bit about how Kubrick operated by reading this post (which, despite its title, does not concentrate all that much on his last, kinda oddball, movie.)   It really paints a completely different picture of how one imagines a control freak must have worked.  Well worth reading.

The Australian and the magnificent Tony Abbott

How do the writers at The Australian maintain any shred of pride in their work in light of the way they (have to?) spin Tony Abbott?

Case in point:  Dennis Shanahan rotating faster than a neutron star this morning over Newspoll results which show absolutely no change in a  bad TPP vote for the Coalition, but nonetheless (apparently)  it represents a magnificent turning point for Abbott because his negative approval rate has dropped to only -17%!

It's absurd, and undignified in the extreme.   

More realistic take:  "If this is as good as it gets, Tony, you should be worried."

The stunning screen of Samsung

I was in a shopping centre on Saturday and surprised to see that the new Samsung Tab S model tablet is already here.  This is the one that has been getting pretty rave reviews, and being called the possible iPad killer.

And honestly, if you love ogling tablets in the shops like I do, you really must go and see one of these.  The screen is absolutely beautiful, being based on organic  LED's, and you can't help but be impressed.  As one review notes:

Once we switched to viewing photos, the Tab S's screen wiped the floor with both of its rivals. There is just no comparison in terms of shadow detail and richness of colour - the same applies to other graphics heavy content such as games. Backlit LCD displays, with their lower contrast ratios, just can’t compete with AMOLED for sheer visual punch. The iPad and Xperia Z2 Tablet have, by all accounts, excellent screens, so for Samsung's tablet to be so much more impressive is quite an achievement.

My daughter said the screen was hurting her eyes with its awesome ability to stop her looking away, and I know what she means.

Apart from the screen, the tablet has good battery life, plenty of memory and is very thin.

I would like one.  Negotiations with my wife have not yet started, but I hope they go well...

Premature positioning

I'm a bit surprised that political commentators are still staying united on the "Tony Abbott has been impressive in his response to MH17" line, when it is looking increasingly obvious that the number of people he has been sending to Europe (I'm not sure of the total figure now - at least 50 AFP, but seemingly 200 in other reports) to cool their heels while waiting to see if they can ever get to the crash site has been over the top and rather wasteful. 

Surely there are others who have been skeptical of his judgement in this matter, right from the start?

Pot calls out kettle

Judith Sloan, of all people, hates it when someone seems to have a one track mind on matters economic:

Thank God that Joe Stiglitz has left our fair shores: all that ill-informed, gratuitous advice was really getting out of hand.  And all complete tosh: Stiglitz has never come across a problem which is not solved by more government spending or regulation.

I assume it's a matter of great distress to her, then, that her fellow economic commentators at Catallaxy have never met a problem which is not solved by less government spending or regulation?

(To be fair - which is something she rarely is - there was that brief episode a few years ago where Sloan herself did promote the idea of increasing unemployment benefits.  I still don't think it was ever repeated at Catallaxy, as such a radical proposal would upset the small government luvvies no end.)

More significantly, Judith is promoting at that post some research that indicates income inequality in Australia is not increasing (at least if you look at the top 1%.)

Ha!  She says - take that in your pipe and smoke it, Joe.

Of course, what she fails to comment on is the rest of the graph indicating the trend is way different in most other countries, and the fact is, (if these numbers are right) it is something which the Abbott welfare changes look designed to change for the worse.

I don't see that citing this is any reason to ignore Stiglitz's warning that it is not a good idea to move in policy ideas towards the USA.

UPDATE:  

In the thread, I see that Sinclair Davidson comes on out and proud that income distribution counts for naught:

Can someone of more economic understanding than me explain why income inequality matters so much?

It doesn’t. Neoclassical theory has no view on income distribution. It will follow marginal productivity, so whenever you hear a neoclassical economist crapping about inequality they’re imposing their own preferences or a bolt-on to the theory.

Individuals with low marginal productivity impose costs on the economy through various other correlations with drug abuse and crime and so on. But it isn’t clear that inequality is the cause of those problems.

This is a case of devotion to economic ideology overwhelming common sense.

In anti tattoo news

I missed a piece in The Guardian last week by someone who notes reluctantly that "even nice people" are getting tattoos.  

As with any article that indicates a skerrick of disdain for the all encompassing trend for tattooing, there follows several thousand comments on the subject:  the "inked" complaining about people who criticise their fashion decisions, but a fair few people who seem to be relieved to be expressing their dislike of tattoos generally and their hope that this long lived fad will finally start to fade.

Of course it is true that "nice" people are getting many tattoos.  I think it is also beyond doubt that the artistic merit of what a huge number they choose to have (more or less) permanently inscribed on their bodies fits within the definition of kitsch.   As far as I'm concerned, kitsch is of interest in small doses - it's the ubiquity of it in the form of tattooing that is off putting, as well as the insistence now that it be on parts of the body which are pretty much on permanent display in a warm climate.

I don't quite understand why no one would have a problem with a column in which the number of (say) "dogs playing poker" prints being sold (I assume they hit some peak a few decades ago?) was ridiculed; but write about the number of skulls turning up on "normal" - and yes, quite nice - people's forearms these days and it's now considered somewhat off limits by many. 

In other anti tattoo stories from last week, Catalyst had an interesting one about how it, and laser removal,  works scientifically. 

The sensible Gittins

The "I'm an economist and you're not" folk of Catallaxy hate him, which is a pretty decent sign that he's probably right most of the time.

Ross Gittin's column this morning makes common sense on the budget.  For example:

There are many ways to skin the budget cat – some fairer or more sensible than others – and it's absurd for the government and its barrackers to pretend, Maggie Thatcher-like, that the measures proposed in the budget are the only alternative to irresponsible populism.

Anyone who knows anything about successful "fiscal consolidation" knows it invariably involves a combination of spending cuts and tax increases (including reductions in tax concessions – "tax expenditures").

And anyone who knows much about economics knows there's little empirical evidence to support the ideology that economies with high levels of government spending and taxation don't perform as well as those with low levels.

Yet Hockey and Abbott thought it sensible to propose a 10-year budget plan that relied almost exclusively on cuts in government spending – apart from the temporary deficit levy and much-unacknowledged bracket creep.

Keating points out that, combining all levels of government as a percentage of gross domestic product, Australia already has the lowest budget deficit and public debt compared with Canada, Japan, Britain, the US and the OECD average.

At 26.5 per cent, our level of total taxation seems higher than the Americans' 24 per cent, until you remember their budget deficit is 5 percentage points higher than ours. So the claim that we have a bloated, "unsustainable" level of government spending is itself unsustainable.

The parsnip post

Wikipedia gives a good background to the parsnip, and there are many things about this vegetable which make it rather intriguing:

1.  Cold ground improves it.   Every article I have read about them refers to their sweetness, but this apparently is mainly brought on by their going through frosts before being pulled out of the ground.  This may well explain why I have never considered them particularly sweet - I assume there are few grown in Australia that are held in the ground until a frost has sweetened them up.   I like their flavour in any case:  they have a spicier, earthier vibe compared to the fairly bland carrot (which, in Australia, I would generally consider sweeter than any parsnip I've eaten.)

This ability to winter over in the ground appears to have been a positive for their cultivation.  See this from a column in the Washington Post:

Nevertheless, nothing else does what the parsnip does: rest in the ground all winter with no need for root cellar storage. After a few fall frosts it develops a sweetness that no carrot has ever bested, and it sustains that all the way into mid-spring. You can dig it any time the ground is not frozen, but it is most treasured as the earliest fresh harvest of the year.

2.  Food of the Emperor - we think.   Emperor Tiberius, according to Pliny, took annual tribute from a part of Germany in parsnips.  The only confusion appears to be whether Pliny really meant parsnips, as the carrot of the day could be pretty pale too, and there seems to still be much uncertainly about which of these vegetables any writer of that era was referring to.

There was a detailed article on the philology of the parsnip written in 1958 which you can see in preview.   It appears certain that Pliny was at least sometimes referring to parsnips specifically, but whether the author throws doubt on the Tiberius story remains unknown to me.   Maybe some reader will pay the $4 for the full article and let me know.

In any event, this short explanation (from this book) of the expansion of the parsnip from ancient Roman times into the rest of Europe seems good:

3.  They are unduly expensive everywhere.   Parsnips cost about $10 a kilo in Brisbane at the moment, but if you Google the topic "Why are parsnips so expensive", you'll find that their high cost has been mentioned on the internet in many countries, including England, France and America.  As far as I can make out, they are a finicky vegetable to grow, with low and slow germination rates from seed, and perhaps slow growing generally.   I also guess that if people know them for their sweetness, they may not bother growing them if they can't be sure they will get a frost before harvest.

It's no wonder carrots are the ubiquitous root vegetable - they are frequently so incredibly cheap in the supermarket, I am often surprised that farmers make any profit from them.  I know from childhood that they are dead easy to grow at home too.   

4.  Parsnips lost out to the potato.   The parsnip made a successful journey across to North America, but you can Google up a chapter in a book Disappearing Foods that is called Parsnips - now you see them, now you don't, which talks about how the vegetable slipped out of popular use from perhaps the 18th century particularly in Italy and the Netherlands.  Much of the blame apparently goes to the potato, being a more reliable and easily grown crop.  Apart from this, the book does make this observation about the parsnip in Dutch art:

5.  In art, when is a parsnip just a parsnip?   In my previous post, I have examples of parsnips in various European paintings (although, to be honest, I haven't even looked up yet where the last two oddball paintings come from.)

But one of the more enjoyable posts about parsnips I have read was this one, which speculates whether parsnips were (at least sometimes) deliberately put in paintings to represent sex or lust.  As the writer notes, the carrot and parsnips both had developed a reputation as an aphrodisiac, one suspects for no other reason than their vaguely phallic shape:

In 1563 Culpeper states: "The garden Parsnip nourishes much, and is good and wholesome nournishment,but a little windy, whereby it is thought to procure bodily lust" which is pretty close to similar quotes I found on the net. Of course there are many earlier references, such as in the widely known "Tacuinum Sanitatis" of the 14th century where it attributes the stimulation of sexual intercourse to the Pastinace, a word sometimes used to describe both carrot and parsnip. An other reference I found from the materia medica (the Taylor-Schechter Genizah collection) dating to 11th to 14th century Cairo, depicted the parsnip as an aphrodisiac. What is amusing, as pointed out in much of the above references, is that it was also a wind producing food (it was said to make you fart), this apparently was connected to the excitement (blood flow) of certain areas.

Of course, there is more here at play than just medicinal qualities, it also had a phallic property which pops up in Florio's Italian/English dictionary, 1598, (cited in the OED) as the "pastinaca muranese", "a dildoe of glasse" ... or at least this is what I was able to gather from various sources. This is also brought to light in "Picturing women in late Medieval and Renaissance art" (Grössinger) where she describes parsnips and cabbages representative of male and female genitalia, and given much of what I have read today, am inclined to agree.

The post gives a couple of examples of paintings where the parsnip on the table does seem to fit in with the general lusty context.

She also wonders why they would turn up on the table at the Last Supper, but I guess I've solved that one already in my research - presumably, they are taken to be a symbol of the nails of the cross in that case.  (Either that or else Dan Brown will have some explanation involving sex.)

6.  Eat, but don't touch.   One of the stranger things about the parsnip as a plant is that its sap, on skin contact, can sometimes cause a serious "burn" reaction in sunlight.   Have a look at this woman from England who got bad blisters from her garden parsnips.

Articles from North America talk about the same problem with respect to wild parsnips.  The way the sap hurts sounds complicated:

Wild parsnip is of concern because humans develop a severe skin irritation from contact with sap from the plant. Wild Parsnip plants have chemicals called psoralens (more precisely, furocoumarins) that cause phyto-photodermatitis: an interaction between plants (phyto) and light (photo) that induce skin (derm) inflammation (itis).  Once the furocoumarins are absorbed by the skin, they are energized by UV light on both sunny and cloudy days. They then bind to DNA and cell membranes, destroying cells and skin.

Wild Parsnip burns usually occur in streaks and elongated spots, reflecting where a damaged leaf or stem moved across the skin before exposure to sunlight. If the sap gets into the eyes, it may cause temporary or permanent blindness.

 No wonder they don't seem to be all that popular in the home garden, although Wikipedia does say that this reaction does not happen to all that many people who grow them.

7.   That is all.

Update:   Actually, there was another parsnip story I read some weeks ago about a farmer (English, I think) who made a killing on the sales of parsnips from his field one winter, as they were one of the few crops still available due to their ability to "over winter".  I can't find the source for that now, but will keep looking.   Any story of a person who got rich from parsnips seems noteworthy.

The evolution of the parsnip in Art

Parsnips, continued

The impasse continues....

More root vegetable research needed

My brain has reminded me that I promised a post about parsnips.

I have neglected the research for that - I did download a book (or was it a long article?) about Roman gardens on the tablet that seemed promising, but I forgot to go back to it.

I must stop posting until that task is compete.

I see that First Dog on the Moon has a root vegetable related cartoon up, though.

Past mistakes remembered

The Vincennes’ downing of Iran Air Flight 655: The United States tried to cover up its own destruction of a passenger plane.

I had completely forgotten about this...

Doubts about productivity

John Quiggin � Productivity yet again

My comment the other day about not understanding what calls for increased productivity today really mean seems to get some justification from JQ's cynicism about the issue, too.

Voucher wars, continued

I see that there has been push back against the article in Slate that claimed the education voucher system had turned into a failure in Sweden.

True, I would have assumed that there were more private schools there than is apparently the case, but the argument put forward that it is really due to "radically new pedagogical methods" cops a bit of a pasting in one of the comments (by Damien) that follow the post:

Pedagogical innovation was specifically mentioned as a great feature brought about by school choice. E.g.: - http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2012/07 /free_school_reforms_in_sweden_boost_quality_innovation_and_choice.html : Swedish schools free to adopt innovative pedagogical methods. - http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/03/school-choice-in-sweden-an-interview-with-thomas-idergard-of-timbro : “The lack of choice created a lack of innovation regarding pedagogical concept and ways of learning adapted to different students’ needs”, “almost half of the independent schools differ more or less radically from public schools regarding pedagogical concept and methods to fulfill the curriculum.”, “The educational results data speak for themselves.” - http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=20288 : “The variety of independent schools is large in both ownership and in innovative pedagogy and practice” - http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/140383-sweden-a-model-for-american-school-choice-options- : “The variety of independent schools is large in both ownership – from parental cooperatives to corporate chains — and in innovative pedagogy and practice”

But, now that it seems that there are problems in Sweden, it turns out that it was all an illusion and that schools really don’t have that much autonomy. And that new pedagogical ideas are harmful anyway. So you can use the pedagogical innovation in Sweden to sell school choice, but, if it turns out that test scores are not so good, you can *also* blame pedagogical innovation. That’s a bit too convenient. Heads I win, tails you lose.

 As the person who comments next says:

But, of course, that kind of analysis is no fun for internet commenters.

I don't think anyone in comments addresses the point I made in my original post:  from what little I have heard, the system in Finland is the complete opposite of a voucher system.  Are free marketeers just hoping that its example of success is ignored? 

Update:  I see another post critical of the Slate article mentions Finland.  But the article is from Cato, and I would want someone who knows the issue well to go through it with a fine tooth comb before trusting anything it claims.  For one thing - he claims Finland is not doing all that well.   Yet, surely the point is the improvements the country has made over time, and the philosophy they followed to get there.  
 

How about "Operation 'Stop Calling Non Military Actions "Operations" - it's Annoying This Blogger' "

I've complained before about the Abbott's government attempts to appear all gung-ho and full of  military-like action in matters that are not actually security threatening.  (See "Operation Sovereign Borders" and the information refusenik LtGen Campbell running it to the government's tune.) 

It's continuing with this fanciful nomenclature "Operation Bring Them Home" coined by Abbott (or his office, more likely) which does not seem to have exactly caught on in the media much yet. 

Sport ghosts noted

Sure, I hate cricket, but I still take an interest in ghostly experiences which cricketers say happened to them.

In particular, the story of the taps turning on and off by themselves in the hotel room would be very freaky if  experienced.   Ghosts aren't normally so...mechanical.   Although I suppose poltergeists are.

Here's an earlier Guardian post after various sports related ghost stories.

Wait a minute - even Kant had it in for bastards?

Good grief.*  I recently had a go at Bentham for his utilitarianism inspired suggestion that women may well be justified in killing their new born illegitimate babies to save themselves the societal problems of being a single mother.

But, just looking around now at some posts about Kant's loopier suggestions (which, with respect to sex and masturbation I have noted here a few times before,) I have turned up this apparent quote:

A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of the law. It has, as it were, stolen into the commonwealth (like contraband merchandise), so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation (p. 336).

I see in the comments following that it has been speculated that his lack of empathy might have been caused by a tumour (seeing we are talking Kant, you should pronounce it in your mind like Arnie does in Kindergarten Cop):

This reminds me of Gazzaniga's take on Kant in The Mind's Past, page 121-1, where he speculates that Kant developed a massive left prefrontal tumor and then began writing his major works. This might begin to explain the lack of empathy concerning bastards, women and servants etc. Gazzaniga: "Is it possible that all those Kantians have saluted a man who was writing nonsense - a philosophy for those who do not have a normal cognitive and emotional system?". 

The attitude to children born out of wedlock has certainly improved since those centuries, even though just about everyone thinks it has gone way too far in the other direction now.   Can't we just settle somewhere in the middle that we seem to have missed? 

*  More good grief!:   I blogged about this exact linked post in 2010, even noting the brain tumour theory!   I had a vague feeling I had read it before, but certainly had forgotten the bastards bit.

Can I be excused, with the wealth of material posted here, for forgetting what I have previously written sometimes?

If only Kantian jokes survived

What's So Funny? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Here's a good article by Mary Beard looking at the various theories of laughter that people have come up with over the years.   It would seem fair to say that the theories are not mutually exclusive, and we all know of some instances where one theory fits, and others were it doesn't.

I lean towards preferring the "incongruity" theory, and the type of humour which is clearly based on it:

The second theory, known as the incongruity theory, sees laughter as a response to the illogical or the unexpected. A big team of philosophers and critics can be marshaled as supporters of this idea, if with a wide range of nuances and emphases. Kant argued that "laughter is an
affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing," another of the better-known sayings in the study of laughter. Henri Bergson argued that laughter is provoked by living beings acting as if they were machines—mechanically, repetitively, stiffly. More
recently the linguistic theories of Salvatore Attardo, of Texas University, and Victor Raskin, of Purdue University, have set the resolution of incongruity at the heart of verbal jokes—as in "When is a door not a door? When it’s a jar."

There, my favourite philosopher pops up again.   I thought I had read before that he was considered good dinner table company, and a Guardian article in 2004 indicated this was certainly true when he was a young man:

He has been famously portrayed as a bore, a man whose habits were so regular that housewives could set their watches by his legendary afternoon walk.

But according to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes.

He had a sense of humour, and there were women in his life, although he never married. On
occasion, Kant drank so much red wine he was unable to find his way home, the books claim.

The biographies - which shed fresh light on the party-loving behaviour of the young Kant before his fame - have appeared in Germany ahead of the 200th anniversary of his death today....

"He had a sense of humour. Not a German sense of humour where you have to spell out that you are telling a joke but a dry Anglo-Saxon wit."

According to Kühn, whose acclaimed biography of the philosopher has just been published in Germany, Kant also had "amorous interests" in two women - though there is no evidence these were consummated.

It was only at the age of 57, after Kant had published his most famous work, his Critique of Pure Reason, that he was in a position to support a wife. "By this time it was too late," Kühn
said.

Last night Professor Volker Gerhardt - a leading member of Germany's Kant Society, who travelled to Kaliningrad for today's celebrations - said he endorsed Kühn's view of Kant.

Kant socialised extensively with Joseph Green, an English merchant who taught him about British culture, Prof Gerhardt said. His great achievement was to develop a philosophical system that separated morality from religion, as well as a liberal political theory which anticipated both the UN and modern human rights.

Material for my Kant as proto-Bond may be easier to find than I expected...

Bugs against obesity

New study shows therapeutic bacteria prevent obesity in mice

It would explain a lot....

Inspired, of course, by Ms Lambie's radio appearance yesterday, which international readers can google for themselves.   

Another Abbott weathervane moment

From The Age, in 2010:

Australia's bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council will be dumped if the federal opposition wins government.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was the driving force behind the bid for a temporary seat in 2013/14, although his successor Julia Gillard is continuing the campaign.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said it was not a good use of taxpayers' money in tough economic times.

"There are vastly higher priorities for Australia right now than pursuing a seat on the security council," he told reporters in Melbourne, adding that dropping the bid would save $5.7 million this financial year.

Two years later:

Opposition leader Tony Abbott said he was pleased with the win, but wanted to ensure Australia did not squander the opportunity.

He indicated the millions spent to secure the position could potentially have been better resourced.
"I welcome the win, it was an expensive win and I think it probably owes at least as much to Kevin Rudd as Julia Gillard," Mr Abbott told the Nine Network.

"A win's a win, I welcome it. Let's hope we put the next two years on the Security Council to good use."

Today:

The Abbott government's push for a full independent investigation into the downing of MH17 over Ukraine has been backed by a unanimous vote UN Security Council, increasing pressure on Russia to facilitate access to the crash site.

In a joint statement with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop released on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Tony Abbott hailed the result saying that the resolution lent the Security Council's ''full weight'' in condemning the attack.

His inconsistencies on all manner of policy issues show his judgement is hopeless.  

Then as now?

Asia today echoes divided Europe of 1914

A somewhat interesting comparison by Hugh White of the geopolitics of the world at the start of the 20th century, and those that exist today.

Krugman being optimistic

An Imaginary Budget and Debt Crisis - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman argues that there is reason to be optimistic about America's long term debt position, and notes that budgetary changes would not need to be all that great to make it even better.

I get the feeling that a similar column could be written about Australia.   And the first two points would be -

1.  don't give up revenue that you don't need to (carbon prices and mining tax.)

2.  don't start spending money on one man's pet idea that hardly anyone actually supports.

I might also add (and the same in the US):  don't increase defence spending beyond your means.

As for Australian pessimists, I see that Garnaut has that title currently.   I don't really understand the proposal though - how does a dramatic increase in productivity really happen these days?   He does mention the Australian dollar needing to come down (and even Judith Sloan mentioned that in her eye rolling performance with Joe Stiglitz a couple of weeks ago.   As I complained some time ago - right wing debt obsessed economists complained bitterly about Labor government spending and wages during the Gillard reign but barely mentioned the high Australian dollar which soared during her Prime Ministership.  Now that it's a Coalition government, have they decided it's the right time to acknowledge the problem?) 

No substitution effect

Does marijuana affect sales of alcohol in legal states?

Early figures from Colorado indicate that legal marijuana has coincided with an increase in sales of alcohol.

The suggestion is that this is caused by marijuana tourism.  Either that, or all the discussion of drugs makes all legal drugs look good?

Yet another potential cosmic worry?

Quantum bounce could make black holes explode : Nature News & Comment

So, Nature has a story up about the suggestion that black holes could become "white holes".  The story is more intriguing that I thought:

The theory suggests that the transition from black hole to white hole
would take place right after the initial formation of the black hole,
but because gravity dilates time, outside observers would see the black
hole lasting billions or trillions of years or more, depending on its
size. If the authors are correct, tiny black holes that formed during
the very early history of the Universe would now be ready to pop off
like firecrackers and might be detected as high-energy cosmic rays or
other radiation. In fact, they say, their work could imply that some of
the dramatic flares commonly considered to be supernova explosions could
in fact be the dying throes of tiny black holes that formed shortly
after the Big Bang.

Given that small black holes from the start of the universe might be everywhere, it would seem any planet could be in for a surprise at anytime.  At least, if this idea is right.

The glum world, and the 30 minute survivalist

Gee, it's hard to be cheery about the state of the world at the moment, isn't it?

Israel, Iraq, Ukraine, Syria:  all a mess with no obvious resolutions in sight.   China has had a strong typhoon that has killed 18; barely noticed amidst all the other death and mayhem.

All we need now is for Tokyo or LA to have their long awaited earthquake disasters and people will stop getting out of bed. 

Speaking of which, as a depressing distraction, does anyone else ever think about what they would do if they knew they had to clear out of home due to earth shattering disaster that may mean living off the land for a protracted time?   Being a cheery soul who likes science fiction-y scenarios, I often think of this while driving between Brisbane and Toowoomba, because the geography of that area makes it clear that if one knew that a mini asteroid had hit the middle of the Pacific, and a gigantic tsunami was on the way,  collecting the family and heading up to Toowoomba at the top of the Great Dividing Range would be one of the safest things you could do.  (Or if aliens had started picking off capital cities one by one, War of the Worlds style, getting up to the vast and relatively sparsely populated area west of the range would be a good idea too.) 

But if I only had 30 minutes or so to pack the car with gear that might best equip my family for the end of civilisation for a time, what household items should be given the highest priority?   I keep thinking of steak knives, or any good kitchen knive really;  any axe or shovel lying around; any rechargeable batteries in the house and a radio to go with them; tarpaulins; ropes; sleeping bags; warm clothes (no matter what time of year);  a few substantial saucepans; a magnifying glass (for both starting fires and reading in my old age); and any medicine in the cabinet.   Oh, and water containers.  Buckets and any water container.  And any spare sets of prescription glasses, even if out of date.   Dry food from the cupboard too (pasta and rice especially - perhaps?), but I think I would still have room in the car.  I don't think I would take the family tent - it takes up a lot of space, and long term, you would probably be better off building a shelter.

Beyond those, I have trouble deciding what household items are really going to be valuable, either for direct use, or trade.  I can imagine soap, shampoo and toothpaste being in high demand, but would I be better off taking whatever of that I have in the bathroom, or my binoculars instead?   How much modern stuff would be adequately circulating from ransacked stores amongst survivors?

I wonder if Douglas Adams advice about the importance of towels is really worth paying attention to?

I've been meaning to post about this for some time - the glum state of the world seems to make it an appropriate time to write it.

Update:  as an addendum, you can add the speculation "if you live within five minutes of a supermarket [I do, as it happens], and could get into it, what further items would you take from there before heading off to the mountains?"  

A few things immediately spring to my mind - any vegetable seeds if they stock any, and a range of vitamins.  Also, bandages, razor blades, disinfectant in large quantities.  And more tarps, if they have any.  Matches - but no need to go overboard - you just never let the fire die once it's going.

Tony's mixed bag

Interesting poll results out in Fairfax today show that people still believe Tony Abbott can get things done; it's just that they don't like the things he achieves and don't trust him to do what he said he would.

I can't see his response to the MH17 tragedy helping much here with his popularity - unlike John Howard and his action on guns after one mass shooting too many, it's not as if there is much Tone can directly do. (Beyond, perhaps, agitating to get an uncooperative Putin out of the G20 meeting, but would that count for much in public opinion?)

Tough talk still off putting

Phil Coorey says in AFR this morning:

Tony Abbott’s handling of the MH17 atrocity is being universally admired.

Not by me, or at least in one respect.  I thought his reference to lives being "snuffed out" yesterday on Insiders was a case of him wanting to sound Clint Eastwood style tough, but I doubt it had the right sort of sensitivity to use for relatives of the deceased who may be watching. 

That is my opinion.      

A foolish thing

He's mildly offended by the title of the post, but my son has been learning saxophone for a year or two now, and here he was recently, doing pretty good once he gets going...



(You have to add something visual to post a file on youtube, and that was just at hand.)