Why Saudi ridicule deserves to be ramped up

Readers may rightly note that I'm feeling particularly down on Saudi Arabia at the moment, and John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning helps explain why:

Where, then, are the battalions of those who should be concerned? The Saudi King warns that IS will be in Europe and America within months. The Saudi King, the closest thing we have to an absolute monarch outside of North Korea these days, has at his convenience an army of 75,000 men, including a 1000-strong tank armada which might even give Vladimir Putin a moment's pause if he found them sitting astride some patch of turf he might like to place within his possession. The Royal Saudi Air Force, deploying from bases somewhat closer to the Islamic State than Williamstown, boasts more than 300 combat aircraft, including F15E Strike Eagles and shiny new Eurofighter Typhoons, barely out of their bubblewrap.

And yet, in spite of King Saud's fit of the vapours about the threat of IS, there is no suggestion that these formidable war machines might do anything like deploy from those conveniently located Saudi air fields. No. His oil slaves will do that work. And many in his Kingdom will go on quietly supporting their Sunni brethren in IS.

So why are we going to another war? Surely not because the last one went so well?

What a country - again

I was Googling around looking for photos of the shopping mall at the Riyadh Kingdom Centre which featured in a post a couple of days ago [checking out the similarity of shopping malls in wildly disparate parts of the globe is an interest of mine - so sue me] when I stumbled across some 2012 news from Saudi Arabia   which I had missed:

I didn't realise that not only women suffer from not being to do things they've done in the West for, oh, like forever (such as being able to travel alone without being presumed to be a prostitute), but that the society also had such an intensely infantilising attitude towards single men too.   "No no no, you may be an adult but we know we cannot trust you to control your sexual urges when you are confronted with the alluring sight of a mall full of scenes like this:"

And yet, even the married men had gone all Stockholm Syndrome with talk like this:

So this is a society where young men cannot drink, cannot go to a cinema (apparently, they get one movie every 30 years, but there is a rumour that the government might be about to allow cinemas to be built).  Cannot (until recently) go to a mall because there might be a lot of women there. So what does the young man of Saudi Arabia do for entertainment?   Well, by the looks of this photo from the NYT in 2008 - go on a desert picnic with his best (male, of course) friend:

A thrilling day was had by all.

That NYT article's actually pretty interesting, by which I mean appalling, in the attitudes quoted by one of the young male subjects:

“One of the most important Arab traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to protect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational. With one or two or three words, a man can get what he wants from a woman. If I call someone and a girl answers, I have to apologize. It’s a huge deal. It is a violation of the house.”

Enad is the alpha male, a 20-year-old police officer with an explosive temper and a fondness for teasing. Nader, 22, is soft-spoken, with a gentle smile and an inclination to follow rather than lead.

They are more than cousins; they are lifelong friends and confidants. That is often the case in Saudi Arabia, where families are frequently large and insular.

OK, so how do you sum up gender politics in this society:   women don't trust men; men don't trust men; men don't trust women; all men think women are stupidly pliable;  but - I don't know, I'm looking for an upside here - everyone likes camels?

Good to see someone keeping tally

From the Australian Financial Review today:

The Abbott government has broken more key promises than it has kept during the Coalition’s first year of power, an analysis by The Australian Financial Review has found.

The government has delivered on 13 promises and is making progress on 11 others – but has broken its word on 14 pre-election pledges.

Tony Abbott promised on the eve of last year’s election that there would be “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.

The Abbott government has since proposed changes in all of these areas – except the GST.

 And the reason why the government is on the nose - it breaks promises to everyone, on both the Left and Right, meaning that it keeps no one happy. 

Update:  Lenore Taylor's summary was longer than mine, but pretty good too.

Quite a serious First Dog today...

First Dog on the Moon on ... hierarchies of oppression - cartoon | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Et tu, Barrie

Report card: strong ambassador, dud budget - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


Barrie Cassidy on Tony Abbott today:

Whether it be repairing a damaged relationship with Indonesia,
responding to the Malaysian air crashes, standing up to Russia, or
confronting the brutality of the Islamic State, Abbott has been
exemplary.

Nothing impresses me about Tony Abbott, including his rush to embrace security issues as something that might be his saving grace in the public eye (as he thinks happened to Howard.)

And let's be honest - there has been nothing particularly brave about any of his responses to security issues - not like Howard and his gun law reform.  Rather, they been boiler plate responses, and not always hitting the right mark, but sounding just a bit too incautious and hairy chested.  Also, his personal popularity rating has not increased since these events happened, so it seems to me the public is not entirely convinced as well.  (Although, I suspect, the more dangerous international situation may account for some votes going back to the Coalition in polling, regardless of its leader.)

So I beg to differ with Barrie, and the only good thing about his column is it again makes a mockery of Andrew Bolt's moronic repetition "the ABC is out of control" (because they don't agree with him on politics.)

Poor old Ludwig, revisited; and the lives of the artistic, generally

A couple of months back, I posted some extracts from a review of a biography of Beethoven about his often unhappy life.

There's another review out on a different biography, and this paragraph is blogworthy:

This physical suffering was intensified by his inability to find the partner he craved so fervently. Beethoven kept on falling in love with women whose higher social status placed them out of reach. After the final collapse of his relationship with Josephine, Countess von Deym, he fled to the country estate of another aristocratic lady, Countess Erdödy, and promptly disappeared. It was assumed that he had returned to Vienna, but after three days a servant found him hiding in a remote part of the palace gardens, apparently trying to starve himself to death. Prudish in his attitude to the sexual behaviour of others - he even disapproved of the 'lascivious' subject matter of Mozart's Don Giovanni - he resorted increasingly to prostitutes for his own gratification. 'I am always ready for it,' he told his friend Baron Zmeskall, 'the time I prefer most of all is at about half past three or four o'clock in the afternoon.' His attempt to express his need for a lasting human relationship by adopting and then micro-managing his nephew Karl ended in disaster, when the object of his affection first ran away and then tried to shoot himself.

So, there you have it:  you now know the timing of Beethoven's sexual appetite down to the half hour.

I have to also say that it surprises me, this frequency with which the use of prostitutes (or at least mistresses) features in the lives of the artistically successful.  I've said it before, but if you're married by age 30 and have a long and happy marriage in which you never sleep with anyone else, it seems you can just about guarantee that you will not be a literary or artistic success.    I'm trying to think of a possible exception to this rule:  the 20th century's most famous Catholic writers certainly don't fit the bill - Graham Greene particularly, but I think Evelyn Waugh is thought to have been a frequent customer of brothels during his overseas travels.  CS Lewis is thought by most to have had a weird mummy thing going on with his deceased mate's mother.   Possibly GK Chesterton (although he's not considered exactly top of the range in the artistic ranks)?

A quick check of some biographic details indicate he did enjoy happy domesticity,  and this (rather interesting) essay about him generally argues with direct autobiographical quotes that whatever temptations he considered himself prone to, he specifically denied they were homosexual.   But really - with his rotundity, you would not expect him to have easy access to sexual liaisons of any kind - prostitutes would have feared for their lives, most likely.

So there you go - maybe I have found a famous-ish author who didn't seem to do anything too untoward in his sex life, although his physical characteristics make it questionable whether it was even possible.   Further examples from readers are most welcome.

Update:  from an essay about attitudes to prostitution generally:   

Many great writers, composers and playwrights have regularly indulged, patronised, and befriended prostitutes, including Franz Kafka, Guy de Mauppausant, Georges Rouault, Toulouse Lautrec, Dennis Potter, Picasso, Paul Verlaine. 

 Dennis Potter seems a bit out of place in that list!

Hope it's not a fizzer

It's a James Ashby interview that looks like it will shed further light on who in the Liberals helped him bring his case, and who lied about it.

Update:  what a tease the 60 Minutes trailer for the interview is.    Another allegation of sexual harassment (but not by who - if it's poor old Slipper, people will probably say "old news, can't he be left alone?");  someone called a liar;  a claim that is "dynamite".    Twitter is full of rumour that Pyne ought to be worried, but we shall see.

Update 2:  fizzer.  Although I did miss, while going downstairs to see where X Factor was up to, the bit that was "dynamite".

Look, anyone with any sense knows Pyne has been deceptive about this from the get go, and that Abbott has lied in the past about his role in political intrigue (Hanson), and almost certainly knew more about the Slipper/Ashby matter than he will admit.   Brough comes across as a complete sleazebag.  Yet   Ashby also remains a person impossible to sympathise with because of the way he played politics too.  

It was all a nasty bit of political dirty work from a Coalition that was desperate to seize power if they could.   [And now that they have it, they're still failing to win hearts and minds.]

But we knew all of this already.

Everyone needs a hobby...

These Two Guys Studied Their Feces for a Year - The Atlantic

(Actually, it's quite an interesting science story about gut biome again.)  

Fast food every night, then?

In what's probably just another bit of Slate click baiting, this article with the heading Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner is still a profoundly silly piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Yes, let's accept that working mothers can have a hard time juggling work and getting dinner ready every night.

But honest to God, the range of easily prepared meal components (by which I mean things like pasta or curry sauces in jars, meal "kits" in a box, pre-sliced or diced meats, even frozen vegetables) which, served up with a pile of steamed vegetables (just how hard is it to steam vegetables?) makes the modern cooking task for relatively healthy meals about twice as easy as it was 40 years ago.

And what does Marcotte or her quoted sociologists expect as an alternative?

Utopia

I've been watching most of Working Dog's new show Utopia on the ABC, and I have to say it has grown on me.

As a satire of how the public service works (well, perhaps the semi corporatised version of the public service?)  I think it does very well.  

Last night's "job performance review" co-plot rang very many bells with I saw in my exposure to the PS, although that was a couple of decades ago now.  (I doubt that it has changed much, though.)

I thought the episode on the Very Fast Train was also pretty good, in terms of how economically unjustifiable ideas can refuse to die.

But I did miss the first episode - and I am bit puzzled as to how the Rob Sitch character has ended up as the boss of an outfit in which he is perpetually unhappy and never gets his way....

A problem easily fixed?

Seeing Adam Creighton is against an increase in compulsory superannuation, I now feel pretty confident that some increase was in fact warranted.  And let's face it, the Coalition is not saying they are against an increase happening eventually, they've just delayed it.

But what I wanted to note was Creighton's argument in the Australian this morning that compulsory superannuation is a "failure" because it is failing to reduce dependency on the pension to a large enough degree.

Yet the reason he gives for this - the pension assets and income test being too generous - is surely one of the economically easiest things to change in future.   And what's more, isn't ensuring that more money is in super in the first place one of the key ways of ensuring that the tightening of the test is easier to politically and economically justify?

Surely you would have more chance of arguing for phased in reduction of government contribution to pension support if you can point to the increase in superannuation income that you're also ensuring for the future?

Update:   just wanted to make it clear again that I was saying that changing the assets/income test is economically easy - in the sense that it can be relatively clear where to set the line and what effect it will have on future government outlays - but not that it was necessarily politically easy.    However, it becomes politically easier if you can tell people their superannuation will be larger too.

And here's another thing - I've noticed small government types are pretty hot for the Singaporean system of health care which works to a large extent on forced contributions to health savings accounts.   (Someone on boring old Amanda Vanstone's Radio National show was talking up something similar the other day.)  

So why are they so against compulsory super savings in Australia?  Is it just because of Union involvement in industry super?

And really, whatever arguments are against compulsory superannuation (due to fees and questionable tax treatment for those who need it least), do small government economists really think people left alone make adequate savings for retirement? 

I hear a lot of whining, but don't hear much about alternatives....

The old Michael Ware is back on my TV

Seven years ago I noted how annoying I found former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware, an Australian given to talking in perpetual hyperventilating Steve Irwin style.

And he's on my TV right now, on The Drum, with Brisbane's Story Bridge in the background (he lives here?) and he's still the same, and still really irritating.

In other Arab news

While admitting that I like the idea of being in charge of an Australian version of the Saudi Arabian institution known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, I would have to run it better than this:

Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on Tuesday removed four of its staff from the Riyadh office after it found them guilty of assaulting a British national and his Saudi wife....

Reports late on Friday said that the Briton was approached by the members of the Commission when he took a check-out at a supermarket reserved for women and families.

When they asked him about his presence in the special lane, he answered that he was with his wife and had the right to use it.

However, the Commission members felt frustrated by the answer and followed the couple until they reached their car outside the mall where they had a physical altercation.

Update:  a little bit of video of the guy being jumped on for being in the women's checkout lane can be seen at the Daily Mail here.

I'd hate to see what they do to someone who goes through the "12 items or less" lane with 13 things.

And by the way, the Daily Mail site has a picture of Riyadh, a city you don't often see much of:

What's the building that looks like the eye of a needle?  I'll have to check:  I see, it's Kingdom Centre, which has a shopping mall, hotel and apartments.   [And, being Saudi Arabia, public floggings in the courtyard on the hour for men caught looking sideways at women with accidentally exposed ankles.]

You can also go up to the "skybridge" at the top.  Photos at its website here. 

Update:   looking around at other local websites reporting this widely publicised story, I have to admit that most of the 40 comments at Arab News (most of which appear to be Saudis) are critical of the Virtue Police.   One comment details another incident, which I repeat for its comedy value (as long as you're not the victim):

There have been many such instances which either go unreported or no action is taken even after a complaint is lodged. A few years ago, the religious police raided a staff house belonging to a corporate in Olaya locality of Riyadh which housed a few Keralites among which one of them happened to be a friend. The religious police searched the entire flat and found a few pornographic CD's, all the flat members were locked up in the toilet from 10 PM to 4 AM and the entire duration was spent by the religious police examining the evidence thoroughly on a flat screen television. Fortunately the flat members were let out after the call for Fajr salah and the religious police left without saying a word.

Ms Popularity

Judith Sloan is having a hot run in the unpopularity stakes at the moment.  From The Australian:

JUDITH Sloan makes some false assertions about how one of my reporters does her job (“Paper’s slant against self-managed super is just so wrong”. 2/9). Sloan suggests she’s “pretty sure” the journalist did not ferret through the Australian Taxation Office website to get figures about self-managed super funds and that she was “probably fed them” by industry super funds.

After speaking to the reporter, and backed by my knowledge of how she works, I am more than pretty sure that Sloan is wrong. My reporter got the numbers from the ATO. She was not fed them by interested parties.

It is one thing to vigorously contest issues. It is another to make false claims about the professionalism of a journalist because you disagree with the angle of a story — all without checking your assertions.
Michael Stutchbury, editor-in-chief, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, NSW

Well, this is confusing...

We seem to have a bit of a bizzaro world reversal going on in the reaction to the Abbott government putting substantial delay into an increase into compulsory superannuation contributions paid by employers.

The Australian website has been running as its headline article a David Crowe report that would not keep the Abbott government happy at all.  The subheading:

WORKERS will take a $20,000 hit to their retirement savings from a shock deal in the Senate to repeal the mining tax, with the Abbott government blaming Labor for forcing it to agree to the change. The losses could reach twice as much for young workers on high incomes, according to an exclusive analysis for The Australian that reveals the impact on millions of employees who will miss out on an increase in their superannuation over the next five years.

(Of course, the paper also contains a "You're Magnificent, Abbott!" piece by the ever obsequious Denis Shanahan about the very same deal.) 

But over at Fairfax, we have Peter Martin talking up the decision to not increase the tax contributions because it was clearly going to eat into salary growth too much.  With the headline "The Coalition helps the workers", the Martin article takes exactly the Abbott line on the issue.

It will be some time before I know what to think about this....

The El Nino that may or may not come

Stalled El Nino poised to resurge : Nature News & Comment

Certainly, no one expects a super strong El Nino now, but I am curious about what happened to the large body of subsurface warm water that they had been tracking across the Pacific earlier this year...

Just trying to be helpful

About this nude celebrity photos in the cloud being stolen business:   I think, given the ubiquity of youthful ownership of phones with cameras, that it's probably a fair assumption in the West that about 95% of males under 25 are already the subject of a nude picture (either of all of their body or part of it), and about 70% of females.   (The other gender difference being that, for men, the majority are likely self taken, but for women, more are taken by their boyfriend.)   It's become so rampant that it may as well be incorporated into some sort of coming of age ritual.  Perhaps at 21,  everyone could have a nude shot of their choice (personality dictating how rude the choice actually is) loaded up to the national  iNude service, with access available to anyone for a modest (ha! pun) fee - perhaps $1 per view, with nearly all of that going to the photo subject.  Of course, how to deal with those who then save and spread the pic to others for free is something I'm not sure how to deal with - I see that the Snapchat self erasing idea is pretty easy to evade.   But if we believe libertarians, if you make the cost of legitimate access cheap enough, people won't pirate.  (A likely story...)

Anyway, the point of the exercise is that if society is based on an assumption that everyone can or will be legitimately viewed nude, celebrities can stop fretting so much about their secret nude photos being stolen.  I guess that's assuming the photo they are worried about is a mere nude one.   If it is one involving sexual activity that they did not want taken or realised - well, the fact that you were already available nude on line might make the unfairness of further intimate releases so much clearer that they are less likely to be clicked on.  (And civil action against the person who released them more justified.) 

As the title says, just trying to be helpful...

Nuclear disasters last a long time...

Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany - Telegraph

 This rather surprising report states:

Twenty-eight years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still
being felt as far away as Germany
– in the form of radioactive wild boars.

Wild boars still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their
meat, which is sold as a delicacy.

But in recent tests by the state government of Saxony, more than one in three
boars were found to give off such high levels of radiation that they are
unfit for human consumption.

 In a single year, 297 out of 752 boar tested in Saxony have been over the
limit, and there have been cases in Germany of boar testing dozens of times
over the limit.

Germany's radioactive boar problem is not expected to go away any time soon.
With the levels of contamination still showing in tests, experts predict it
could be around for another 50 years. 

Astounding hypocrisy

There are few things more annoying than libertarians who freely admit to flaunting the property rights of American film and TV producers by downloading pirated copies of whatever fantasy gory pornquest they currently enjoy, and then deride government attempts to stop them.

And the justification that they give - well, business always knows right, according to libertarians, except when it interferes with their TV viewing habits:

The IPA believes a better way to deal with online piracy in Australia would be to introduce a "fair use exception".

Mr Breheny said he was "concerned" and "alarmed" that the government was not placing more emphasis on the importance of innovation and technological advances, such as content streaming platforms, to resolve piracy issues over ineffective regulations. He said ultimately rights holders needed to take responsiblity by ensuring their content was accessible and affordable.

Yeah, an individual's right to own and do what they want with their property is really important to libertarians, and one of the few things they want government to do is to protect such rights, but their view on TV piracy  comes down to this:  "hey, studio/government, if you don't let us watch it for free, or at least make it cheap enough, of course we'll steal it anyway.  What d'ya expect?" 

 

Gin considered

Some amusingly odd bits from a review of a book about the history of gin:

All the horrors of 18th-century Gin Lane are here, including instances of child alcoholism. In an effort to stop the entire population of London reeling with gin, successive governments tried different restrictions. But the determined always found a way. Captain Dudley Bradstreet set up a secret distillery in Holborn in 1736; in the street outside the door he placed a wooden cat, with a leaden pipe concealed under its paw. Customers would approach and whisper “puss”; if they heard a “miaow” in reply, they would then whisper their order, put coins in the cat’s mouth and the gin would be funnelled through the pipe. 

Williams lavishes loving detail on the evolution of gin’s manufacture, as well as its slow Victorian ascent of the social scale. Tonic wasn’t far behind; at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a 27ft (8.2m) fountain flowed with Schweppes. The 20th century brought glamour: the swish cocktail bars of London’s smartest hotels and the advent of James Bond’s gin/vodka martini. The publicity-loving diabolist Aleister Crowley claimed to have invented a gin cocktail called the Kubla Khan number 2, which involved the addition of laudanum.

How were the chronic alcohol problems of urban England in the 18th and 19th centuries actually overcome,  I wonder?  Can't say that I know of the answer to that.  Surely it wasn't just the moral example of Queen Victoria?

Also, I didn't recall this:

Their 16th-century predecessors in Holland – gin, or “genever” as it was called there, was thought to have been invented medicinally by one Dr Franciscus Sylvius – would recognise the process now. So how did the beery British get a taste for it? Williams blames William of Orange, noting that the phrase “Dutch courage” is thought to have originated with soldiers taking slugs of gin in the Thirty Years War.

 Sounds like an entertaining book.

Update:  OIC - the "gin epidemic" was mainly a feature of the 18th century.  Interesting article all about it here.

And as for what happened with drinking in England in the 19th century, try this:

They offer evidence of how cost and access effect consumption:

"(T)he 18th-Century gin craze was linked to the government's encouragement of gin production and restriction of brandy imports; the rise in consumption in the 19th Century was associated with rising living standards."

However, that nose-dive in alcohol consumption you can see on the graph in 1914 was the result of "the most sustained attempt to come to grips with drink in British history":

"Measures included shorter opening hours, higher duties on beer, and significant reductions in both the production and strength of beer. The amount of beer consumed in 1918 was nearly half of the pre-war total, despite rising incomes, and arrests for drunkenness in England and Wales fell from 190,000 to 29,000 between 1913 and 1918."

The historians also point to important cultural effects. One observed a decline in drinking in the late 19th Century and suggested that this was due to "many counter-attractions for working-class consumers (music halls, football, cigarettes, and holidays)".

How Islamic State happened

BBC News - Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?

Sounds like a decent explanation here of the political bungling in the Middle East led to money flowing to IS.


Incidentally - now that Saudi Arabia is scared of what they have (not entirely intentionally) helped create, when is someone in the West going to call on them to help solve the problem by putting their own military in the fight?

As if some Middle East Muslims didn't think they had enough reasons to fight already....

Saudis risk new Muslim division with proposal to move Mohamed’s tomb - Middle East - World - The Independent

The plans, brought to light by another Saudi academic who has exposed and criticised the destruction of holy places and artefacts in Mecca – the holiest site in the Muslim world – call for the destruction of chambers around the Prophet’s grave which are particularly venerated by Shia Muslims.

The 61-page document also calls for the removal of Mohamed’s remains to the nearby al-Baqi cemetery, where they would be interred anonymously.

There is no suggestion that any decision has been taken to act upon the plans. The Saudi government has in the past insisted that it treats any changes to Islam’s holiest sites with “the utmost seriousness”.

But such is the importance of the mosque to both Sunni and Shia Muslims that Dr Irfan al-Alawi warned that any attempt to carry out the work could spark unrest. It also runs the risk of inflaming sectarian tensions between the two branches of Islam, already running perilously high due to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

Hardline Saudi clerics have long preached that the country’s strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam – an offshoot of the Sunni tradition – prohibits the worship of any object or “saint”, a practice considered “shirq” or idolatrous.

Um, if no one is going to agree to a suggestion that would be like throwing a tanker full of Saudi oil  on an existing fire, why publicise it at all??

Update:   searching back on posts I made earlier on Islam, I was interested to re-read this one based on an interview in 2006 on ABC's Religion Report with a Catholic priest who had lived for decades in Pakistan.   He was warning then of a future intensification of the conflict between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East:

Robert McCulloch was back home in Australia recently for a few days break, and he agreed to come into the ABC studio to talk about what life is like for Christians in Pakistan. He arrived clutching his copy of Pope Benedict's new Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, which he'd been to busy to read prior to his holiday. He talks about being surrounded by pervasive bigotry that seeps into every aspect of Pakistani society, and living with a permanent state of threat.

Robert McCulloch: Yes I think the characteristic of the nation unfortunately is one of conflict, even though the President and Prime Minister have on occasion said that Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace, a dominant reality of the society is the conflict between the various sects or divisions or groupings of Muslims within Pakistan, in particular Sunni and Shia. And even amongst the various groupings within those two major groupings that you've got there, and the conflict, verbal, literary, even bombings which are taking place in the north of the country in Gilgit up in the northern areas, there's a warfare going on between Sunni and Shia and that's got ramifications in every aspect of the society pay-back, it seeps over into the society and makes it conflictual.

Stephen Crittenden: It's been suggested to me in fact that it might well be harder to be a Shi'ite in Pakistan perhaps than it is even to be a Christian.

Robert McCulloch: No, I wouldn't agree with that. I think Christians have their own problems, especially exacerbated by the blasphemy laws that we might want to talk about a little later, but leaving ourselves on that question of being a Shi'ite in Pakistan, or a Shia in Pakistan, I'd like to relate that a little bit to the wider global scene, at least in the Middle East, that the conflict that unfortunately has emerged between Israel and Lebanon, I believe has taken the focus off a major conflict that has been emerging in the Middle East and other areas over the past few years. And it's been the conflict between Sunni and Shia. I think it's becoming more and more evident in Iraq that it's a conflict in Islam. It's certainly an issue with the minority of Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia that are as discriminated against as Christians.

Stephen Crittenden: And you say that actually may well be emerging as the big future conflict in the Middle East, the conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis?

Robert McCulloch: I think so. Looking at the conflict that we actually have in Pakistan, that is spoken about and each year when Ramadan takes place, the celebrations or the commemorations held by the Shias, how is that going to be picked up by fundamentalist groups amongst the Sunnis? It's an area of questioning, major, major questioning. It's ultimately an issue that Muslims themselves I think need to address more carefully. We've got a major conflictual situation in Iraq, people are striving to solve it through violence, and if this is all the relationship can lead to, well there has to be a major question that a lot has to be done.

 That was 8 years ago now.  All his fears appear to have come true...

Good for the heart (but there's a catch)

Wine only protects against CVD in people who exercise

What?  You mean I can't just have a glass of wine each instead of getting exercise?  The world is so unfair...

Bad for the heart

Energy drinks cause heart problems

Really, should bars in dance clubs be allowed to serve these in alcoholic cocktails at all?  (I'm assuming they do that still, despite recent warnings about their danger if you have more than a couple in quick succession.)

Yet more need for that "How to Win Friends and Influence People" book

From the Australian's media diary:

Estranged party
IF you don’t like hearing a few home truths don’t invite this paper’s columnist Judith Sloan to your birthday party. South Australian captains of industry and business leaders were “stunned into silence” on Friday as Sloan delivered a speech at the 175th gala celebrations for Business SA. “It was akin to inviting someone to your birthday party to speak, only to have them tell everyone they’re fat and ugly,” Ish Davies, News Corporation’s regional director of South Australia, told Diary.

Guests at an event hosted by Sunrise’s David Koch were told “Australia can’t afford another Tasmania”. But the wake-up call left Davies feeling a bit uneasy. When he collected an award later that evening he used his acceptance speech to put some “clear distance between The Oz and The Advertiser”. He told the audience: “We’re from the same mothership but they’re estranged.” Our hard-hitting columnist left the venue before Davies took to the stage, but informed by Diary she was working for an “estranged” publication, Sloan said: “They just want to put their heads in the sand.”

Update:   Another report on the speech confirms it went over like a lead balloon:

Academic and media columnist Professor Judith Sloan chose one of the state’s most important occasions to deliver the worst keynote speech I’ve ever heard.

Sloan’s speech was the lowlight of an otherwise remarkable tribute to local enterprise as Business SA celebrated the 175th anniversary of the SA Chamber of Commerce and Industry – the oldest such chamber in Australia.

The business community was ready to celebrate – but the applause turned to jeers as Sloan’s long speech failed to acknowledge any positives about the state’s future.

 I wonder - maybe the woeful reception it got was behind this weekend's rumour that she was on a short list to be Treasury Secretary.   (I go with it being a joke; but with this government, anything is possible.)

About data homogenisation

Good point raised about the effect of data homogenisation that the Bureau of Meteorology undertakes to try to get a more accurate long term temperature record:

Our data on extreme temperature trends show that the warming trend across the whole of Australia looks bigger when you don’t homogenise the data than when you do. For example, the adjusted data set (the lower image below) shows a cooling trend over parts of northwest Australia, which isn’t seen in the raw data.

Anyone who has credulously believed Marohasy, Jonova and their publicity agent Grahan Lloyd are fools.

Yet another fail

Plain packs don't drive smokers to buy cheap imports

Gee.  Just how comprehensively wrong can Davidson, Ergas, Sloan and Creighton get?

Mad doctors

After the remarkable story on TV last week about the cocaine addicted neurosurgeon who left prostitutes for dead but was able to continue operating at a private Sydney hospital, there was this story in the weekend magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald about another mad hospital doctor, although this one has been dead for 26 years.

It's a really amazing story of just how mentally disturbed a hospital doctor can (or could?) be and still work.

You've come a long way, baby

So, I was looking  at that Flickr account that got publicity last week for the huge number of historic book image scans you can look up (and then, if interested, go to the scan of the full book) and stumbled across this one:

which came from this 1889 American travelogue book:    "The boy travellers in Australasia : adventures of two youths in a journey to the Sandwich, Marquesas, Society, Samoan and Feejee islands, and through the colonies of New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia".  (They really didn't believe in succinct book titles in those days, did they?)

I was curious to read about their impression of Brisbane, and while there is not much of interest to report about on that topic, in the same chapter, they did get onto the matter of race relations.  This section, for example, makes white men sound rather too delicate for Queensland:

But when we get to the quality of aborigines, who, it is acknowledged, often work on sheep and cattle stations, we get this assessment:

Well, I'm glad we have in modern Australia a more sympathetic assessment of the effect of  sudden exposure to the West had on aboriginal Australia.  Here, for example, is someone at Catallaxy yesterday talking about the PM's somewhat insensitively expressed statement that arrival of the First Fleet was the defining moment for Australia: 

Yes, we've come a long way, baby.    [For those too young to pick up on it:  ironic reference to the Virginia Slims faux feminist advertisements of the 60's and 70's.]


Update:  Oh look:  this time Henry Ergas, someone who actually posts at Catallaxy, talks about aborigines and salaries too:

Rather, the rise in imprisonment rates reflects the changes the 60s brought: the equal wage decision in 1965, which accelerated the collapse in indigenous employment in regional areas; the dismantling of laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to indigenous Australians; and the explosive increase in welfare payments.

 Now, he doesn't actually say that he thinks the equal pay decision was wrong, but given that everyone who posts there hates minimum wages, I wonder if he gives it the tick of approval....  

A weird review outcome

Success. The Renewable Energy Target's greatest failing

So, everyone (including Dick Warburton) seems to agree now that the original claim of Tony Abbott (that the RET is killing everyone with its added cost to electricity) was wrong.

No no, the real problem is that it is reducing CO2 (and at the same time driving down wholesale prices), but at a higher cost than what something else would cost - with the only "something else" that the government will allow being "direct action", which has no specifics yet, and nearly everyone can't see achieving the goal at the low cost the government thinks.

The review therefore looks a bit of an embarrassment, but once again, I expect, we will see Greg Hunt selling his soul and making directly opposite claims to what he did a mere year ago.  (Or I could be wrong, but looking at his track record so far, I doubt it.)

I do not recall ever having a government so full of political, unprincipled opportunism. 

Anyway, Peter Martin's explanation of the review seems pretty spot on to me:

It's killing the coal-fired power generation industry. The panel doesn't put it that crudely. It refers instead to a "transfer of wealth among participants in the electricity market". If by 2020
retailers are required to buy 41,000 gigawatt hours from new pollution-free suppliers, the old polluting suppliers are going to sell 41,000 gigawatt hours less.

It would have hurt in any event, but a time when electricity use is sliding (thanks largely to the carbon tax) it means what was to have been 20 per cent is on track to become 28 per cent.

The abolition of the carbon tax gave coal-fired power generators a windfall. Kneecapping the Renewable Energy Target will give  them a second helping.

Taking business away from coal-fired generators was never an unintended consequence of the Renewable Energy Target as the report seems to suggest, it was a design feature. It has helped cut pollution.

Update:   John Quiggin notes this:

I can certainly see some ways in which the RET could be improved, but I won’t canvass them here so as not to commit myself in advance. I’ll observe however, that the Abbott government itself has removed the strongest argument against the RET, namely, that it duplicates the effect of a carbon price (there were valid counterarguments, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, but it was still an important issue)

And yet, as was reported last week, there was a push from within the government to leave open the option of its complete removal.   That certainly indicates you've got complete ideologues behind the scenes who do not want to see CO2 reduced at any cost...

Silly Americans, again

Americans Clearly Don't Understand How Deadly HPV Is

I've posted about this before, but here's another detailed story about the pathetically low US rate of immunisation against HPV.

I didn't know this point (about its effectiveness):

He proceeds to debunk several common misconceptions about the HPV vaccine's effectiveness (it is virtually 100% effective at preventing the most common cancer-causing HPV infections, for at least 30 years), safety (the vaccine has been shown to cause no serious side effects), and propensity to promote promiscuity (it doesn't).  

My son had his first shots for it at school earlier this year (along with some other vaccine), and I don't think he had any idea of (or care about in the slightest) the details of the disease he was getting it for.  Sorry, but it's absurd that Americans are squeamish about it. 

Making a photo with photons that weren't there

Entangled photons make a picture from a paradox 

What a brilliant experiment, based on the entanglement of photons.

I feel sure there must be some science fiction use this technique could be put to....

The marijuana headline that will probably confuse

Marijuana compound could be used to treat psychosis in young people

I wouldn't be surprised if the headline alone, if noted by yoof interested in marijuana, made them think that smoking cannabis might actually help mental illness.

As the body of the article makes clear, this is definitely not the case.  Interestingly, the "good" compound seems to hardly be in the street cannabis at all now:

She said there was a small, but growing number of studies suggesting
CBD relieved psychosis, anxiety and insomnia, and that her team was
trialling it in about 10 people withdrawing from cannabis use to see if
it helped them through the process.

But Professor Copeland said people should not try to source
CBD in street-based cannabis because tests on seized portions of the
drug in NSW showed it contained virtually no CBD.

"It has high levels of THC, around 15 per cent now, but
almost no CBD ... so it's definitely not the same thing as smoking
cannabis," she said.  

I also note the other claim in the article relates to the relatively high number of people who may face increased risk of mental issues due to THC:

The director of Orygen Youth Health Research Centre said while
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in cannabis was widely thought to be
dangerous and increase the risk of psychosis in about 10 per cent to 20
per cent of people, another component - cannabidiol (CBD) - appeared to
relieve psychosis, depression and anxiety. 

So, if you were going to legalise marijuana, I wonder if it could be done only on the basis that the strains sold have to be bred to have a high amount of the apparently protective compound in it?

Still, as I have said before, if that product is more expensive, the black market for the normal stuff will likely continue to be strong anyway.

Palmer-ing about China

It must be a blue moon - I'm linking to an Andrew Bolt post with approval.

It's about Clive Palmer's boyhood (very young boyhood) adventures in China.

I too trust nothing that Clive claims.

Yes, you're magnificent, Sam

As a person who's really disliked Sam de Brito's writing for many years (search the blog if you don't believe me), I am amused to see this satire of him at Crikey, which is no doubt inspired by this recent column.

The truth is, I don't actually bother looking him up on Fairfax any more, so I hadn't read the tale of his fantastically orgasmic bedmates.  The puzzle remains as to why he is engaged by Fairfax at all...

Can't be too much of a ratbag for Catallaxy (and let's look at renewables again)

Well, my question earlier this week as to whether someone booted out of the IPA for being too offensive to Muslims could still post at Catallaxy has been answered in the affirmative, with Alan Moran still posting there today (about renewable energy.)

Well done, Sinclair Davidson!  Previously, extreme views of Islam were restricted to those visitors in threads; now we know they're held by (at least one) who posts there too.

Speaking of renewable energy, Moran points with approval to a Leyonjhelm piece in the Australian today, which (as usual) is big on claims but short on evidence.

The Bald One apparently accepts uncritically a Deloittes report from earlier in the year that figured the RET would "cost the economy" $29 billion.

But as this article noted, this is based on some very dubious assumptions about the ongoing cost of installing renewables, when we know that they have been becoming cheaper.   And besides, this way of modelling and adding up a cumulative amount over years of "costs to economy" exaggerates the effect for political purposes.   And even more crucially, the Deloittes report is open about not taking into account any environment benefits of renewables at all.

This last point is, of course, at the heart of nearly all criticism of the RET:  those fighting it do not really believe there is an environmental benefit to it at all, because they don't believe in climate change.

Update:   here's Leyonjhelm as apparently quoted in The Australian today:

“I have seen so much levy money being poorly spent on ridiculous fantasyland things such as climate change and sustainability; ..."

I thought he used to take a more "well I'm just being open minded" line on climate change, saying things like:

Nobody disputes the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, although there is debate about what effect this is having and whether it justifies government action. 

 So it's good to see that he has outed himself as a clear denialist, then.  

Interesting science and technology

1.   Here's a handy potential plot device if you are writing a spy or crime story:

The cold boot attack is possible because of a little-known property of the random access memories used in computers to store and read data quickly. Random access memory is volatile meaning that it has to be constantly rewritten over periods measured in milliseconds. This property means that anything stored in random access memory is temporary–when the machine switched off and the memory loses power, the date is soon lost.

At least that’s what everyone thought. In 2008, the Princeton group showed that data stored in the random access memory turns out to be preserved over a period of many seconds after it loses power. What is more, cooling the memory can extend this period to many minutes and possibly hours. (One way to cool random access memory is to spray it with an upside down can of liquid air, which releases cold liquid rather than gas.)

During this short period after power is lost, any information in the random access memory is there for the taking. And this is exactly how the cold boot attack works.

The idea is to cut the power to the device and then immediately reboot it to a USB flash drive so that the operating system does not immediately overwrite the contents of the random access memory. Next, search the random access memory for sensitive material, download it and be gone.

Speaking of USB flash drives, using one of the them with a "portable" version of a browser would have to be one of the safest ways a teenager could browse the web with no risk of browsing history being detected by parents.   Maybe even safer to boot a simple version of Linux, I guess?   I wonder how commonly this is known amongst teenagers.   (Mine doesn't read this, and working on the assumption that children don't care to read their parent's writings, it will likely be years before he does.)

2.    An interesting laser experiment that may, or may not, indicate that we are all holograms has started working.    (Actually, I think physicist Bee is skeptical that it is really relevant to the holographic idea, but she thinks it worth doing anyway.)

3.    Feynman's famous book version of his lectures is now fully available on line.

 

The case of the comedian accent

Well, this is rather odd.

Josh Thomas is appearing on TV a lot on Optus ads, and I tend to find him likeable in them.   (My daughter does too, and I think I have withheld the "gay" information from her so far.)  But then, I assumed he genuinely had an accent picked up from somewhere in England.

But reading this lengthy Guardian interview about his critically praised (but little watched) dramedy show, I learn (from comments after it) that he grew up in Brisbane.  My side of Brisbane, in fact.   Googling around, it is clear there has been chatter for years about why he sounds (by most people's reckoning) Irish.  Either that or Welsh.  And it seems a fair few people claim it is genuinely a fake (or greatly exaggerated) accent, although others say he has Irish parents and kids sometimes pick up accents that way. *  

Someone at The Guardian thread says this:

you may be right about the accent, though he himself has said that he didn't grow up with that accent, he "just woke up one morning talking like that." I don't know how to feel about that story, but it does suggest that the accent is utter affectation.

And in one interview on line Thomas himself sounds ambiguous:

You’re from Brisbane, so why do you have a Welsh-sounding accent?
I don’t know – your guess is as good as mine. I didn’t even know I had it until I started going on television and I started getting asked in interviews all the time.
Your friend Tom Ward said you sounded like a female Elmer Fudd in high school. Is that fair?
Yeah, that’s pretty good. I used to be really bad at pronouncing my words. If I was doing stand-up I’d get into trouble for it, so I had to put some effort into pronouncing my words. That’s why I got this stupid accent. There was one point where I was so sick of being asked about it every day I was going to get lessons to learn how to stop talking like this, but then I realised how contrived that would be.

 His voice and, um, comic persona, certainly grates on some people who read the Guardian:

HE's totally unbearable! His accent is Y-gen medication. Or Woolloomooloo Yank. Or ADHD teenager. Or Antonioni-ennuied young monotonal adult. Like one of those obnoxious brats on the bus going to private schools. Like, like and um like they can't stop talking, like OMG I shouldn't have said that. I just find the show and the persona the most irritating things I've ever seen on a television set. Even compared to yet another irritating, nasally whining gay performer, Adam Carr whose range at least extends beyond A to B and sometimes beyond......The endless pursuit of self-absorption through self abnegation as a performance style is cringe worthy even before he gets through the first line of dialogue. I mean monologue. And if this is "writing" I'm , um you know, err straight.
And somewhere, buried in this supposed comedy is the idea that we should be nice to him and the show because he's, um, you know gay.
So am I but I would rather go to an execution than watch him again.

Well, I can't say I feel that strongly about him, one way or the other, but I am surprised about the questionable authenticity of the accent.   It seems that it may be another case of Ben Elton-itis.  As noted in the Telegraph last year:

When it turned out that Elton wasn’t quite as seditious as the comrades had hoped, and, by his own admission, was slightly bewildered to find himself being cast as any kind of political figurehead, his reputation in right-on circles began to wither. The process was accelerated by the discovery that he came from a well-to-do family, the son of a prominent physicist, had been educated at a top Surrey grammar school, and that his street punk London accent had been adopted in the hope that comedy circuit audiences would find it funnier. 

Come to think of it, the other British person who used to "bung it on" (to use an Australian-ism, I guess) was Cilla Black.   I clearly remember her embarrassment and quick reversion to exaggerated accent in some interview or other she was giving on Australian TV way back in perhaps the late 70's or 80's, where she had to started to answer (accidentally) without accent.

But what is the truth?   Can't someone who knows Thomas let the world know whether he used to sound Australian when he was at school?

[Incidentally, I just think Please Like Me - which I've caught in bits and pieces - is not very funny.  Self involved in a very young 20's way, a bit mawkish, a bit too obvious in many respects, but not very funny.  Hence I am pleased it actually doesn't rate well.]

*  (Don't know that anyone has ever mistaken me for being from Liverpool, although the European looking man in the post office near my home in 1980 did insist that it seemed to him I was from mainland Europe.  "Where are you from" he asked when I was buying a stamp.  "Here!" I said, "Just down the road".   "No, originally, where are you from?"   And so on, until he explained he felt sure English was probably a second language for me.  (!)  He was from somewhere mid-Europe himself, I believe.   Honestly, the guy seemed quite normal despite this surprising line of interrogation.

This was when I was at university, just after I had been backpacking in New Zealand, and many fellow backpackers could not readily pick that I was Australian.   It would seem my accent is considered pretty indeterminate both within and outside of Australia, so perhaps I am not the most obvious person to be criticising other accents after all....)

Hello, Gullible Fools

What is more likely:  that the temperature at Amberley (well inland from the ocean) changed from increasing to cooling in 1980,* despite surrounding areas continuing to warm; or that an unrecorded change in how the temperature was being taken introduced a spurious cooling that should be adjusted if you wanted a true idea of the actual changes to the longer term temperature record?

What is more likely:  that climate researchers at the BOM have for years been looking at temperature records and simply saying "that one's going in the wrong direction:  let's just increase this one by 1 degree and no one will ever notice", or that they are consistently applying technical and widely accepted scientific procedures to try to make the complete record more accurate? 

What is more likely:   that idiots will claim that the BOM is "destroying" raw temperature records, even when the very story they are wetting themselves about is based on comparing raw records with adjusted records; or that they will recognise they are being inconsistent idiots?

I know what is likely, or beyond question, really:  people who are convinced by Marohasy and Jonova are fools.



* note Ken's statement in comments - "When Amberley anomalies are compared with anomalies from neighbouring sites, there is a distinct drop around 1980. Certainly it doesn’t look right. But the adjustment doesn’t look right either."   Yes folks, that is what this is all about - a bunch of politically motivated self aggrandising amateurs in the field saying "that doesn't look right - it must be wrong!"

Update:   Nick Stokes at his Moyhu blog shows why the Amberley adjustment makes sense.

The point being:  there is much less common sense in what Marohasy and Jonova want their rabid followers to believe than the obvious explanation - the 1980 change was spurious and needed adjustment.  (And the adjustment applied is nothing remarkable or dishonest.)

Update 2:   the focus has shifted to Rutherglen, with a hysterical Jennifer Marohasy wanting "heads to roll" because a retired scientist says there was a thermometer in a different location, but it wasn't used; whereas it appears the BOM believes there was a thermometer move.   Even if (and I do not concede the point at all) the retiree is correct, surely there is enough there to indicate mistake rather than fraud.  But no, the bile filled climate change denialists think every discrepancy (even apparent discrepancy) is conclusive evidence of fraud.  What a joke.  

Hotwhopper looks at Rutherglen too, and notes a big break in the raw data, which certainly indicates something amiss in that site.

And back at Moyhu, Nick Stokes shows that homogenisation does not mean all local trends only increase.

How does Greg Hunt live with himself?

Renewable energy target in the spotlight

Excellent article by Peter Martin that effectively raises the question in the title to this post, without directly asking it.

Just stop pandering to adult's sense of entitlement to make and experiment with babies

Medical dilemma of 'three-parent babies': Fertility clinic investigates health of 17 teenagers it helped to be conceived through controversial IVF technique - Science - News - The Independent


Why the hell is Britain so keen to be pressing ahead with "3 parent" embryo techniques to cater for the tiny, tiny number of women who want to be pregnant with their own genes, but should not because of mitochondrial problems?

I cannot fathom this.

As much as I dislike surrogacy, even it using a donated healthy egg from a woman with a similar genetic profile of the mother would be preferable.   Sure, surrogacy also involves the commodification of babies; it doesn't involve direct experimentation on how to make one in a completely unnatural way with completely unknown consequences for their future health.

Why are people so prepared to experiment with their own children, and why is the government prepared to facilitate the use of science in support of experiments for the tiny number of potential parents so affected?

It seems the near universal sense of entitlement to a baby has become so overpowering there is no scandal in a patent desire to experiment on human lives.   

TV comedy noted

Been meaning to say, I quite like Brooklyn Nine Nine.   It reminds of some 80's ensemble comedies, but sped up somewhat.

Do other countries have to put up with McTorment

How McDonald's conquered France.

Here's a somewhat interesting article on how McDonalds got to be a big success in France, of all culinary places.

I see that the company has recently suffered poor sales in Australia, and as I think I have said here before, I'm pretty sure it is because of both a price increase for their standard fare that pushed lunch time boundaries of what is reasonable to pay for family of four, and the ridiculous amount of changes that have been going on menu wise.

I mean, look, the McFeast must be a popular item if they chose to run a whole ad campaign about how you would travel across the world to get one while it's making one of its "limited time" appearances.   But doesn't this just reek too much of cynical marketing to keep taking it off, and putting it back on, the menu?  

I know they have done limited "special" burgers for ages, but why take off a menu item that was on for years and then start tormenting your customers by saying "you'd better come back and get it while it's here [because we believe in "treat them mean, keep them keen".]

Do they follow such marketing in other countries?  I see you can get something that looks like a McFeast in France on the permanent menu:

Why can't we get the equivalent permanently here?

And while you're at it, drop most of the "loose change" items save for the cones.  They are all low quality crap that surely don't develop brand loyalty, and I'd prefer they dropped them and made the main items just a little bit cheaper.

We now resume normal programming.  

Out of the IPA, still good enough for Catallaxy?

Ooh, that's interesting.   Professional renewable energy demoniser Alan Moran has been booted out of the IPA for being over the top in the last week or so about Islam (and on other politics too, apparently.)

Yet only a couple of days ago, he was still posting at Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy blog (where open threads are full of similar sentiments to those of Moran.) 

True, Sinclair makes the odd appearance in threads (as do a couple of the regulars) saying that people are carrying on too much about the religion,  but it's rather interesting nonetheless if Moran will continue to be able to post there if he's too extreme for the IPA!

Ideologue looks at medicine - evidence, not so much

There is so much pure ideology running through David Leyonjhelm's take on medicine, I really don't know why anyone takes him seriously.   (I'm looking at you, Jason Soon.)

His whole comparison of doctors being like car mechanics ignores things like, oh, how not everyone needs a car mechanic, but every single person needs a variety of medical services during their life; and the almost universally accepted view that the more privatised US system has helped make for an unhealthier population at greater expense.  And what's with this line?:

Opposing the Government’s proposal [for co-payments] in its entirety will only maintain a situation where the well-off and healthy receive the same level of medical support as the poor and chronically ill, a level that is inadequate for those most in need.

While I accept that some highly socialised medical systems in other countries do have co-payments, I would still like to see the evidence that a "price signal" is really needed in Australia.  As I have noted before (although I forget which expert said it), the rate of use of GPs here is not unusually high  compared to other countries, and the increasing cost in the health system is not coming from there.

Leyonjhlem goes on to have his ideological fantasies about how medicine could work:

In an ideal world we would shop for health services based on quality and price, protected from unaffordable costs by insurance. The government’s role would be limited to ensuring that the poor and chronically ill are insured, and collecting and publishing information about the providers to help us make better choices.

The bald one also seems to think that if people have too much access to doctors, they don't take responsibility for their own health via diet, exercise, etc.  Yet I'd be pretty sure that in those areas of Australia with less access to doctors do not show such an effect at all.   I imagine this is because doctors help identify health problems earlier, and thereby increase the general health of the population.   David's just off on one of his ideological day dreams again.

Libertarians never get want fully they want, because most people can readily recognise that their ideas won't and don't work.

This'll be controversial...

Some can’t be satisfied: multiple partners points to marriage misery for women, researchers say | The Australian

The Huffington Post has a lengthier article on the study, which includes some somewhat skeptical takes:

"There are a wide variety of reasons that may lead people to have multiple partners before marriage and, independent of how many partners they have, also be less satisfied in marriage," Dr. Jim McNulty, a social psychology professor from Florida State University who has published a plethora of research on the topic, wrote in an email.

"For example, people who tend to avoid commitment in general may have more
sexual partners and be less happy when they settle down. It’s not the fact that they have more sexual partners that leads them to be less happy, it’s the fact that they don’t really like commitment. I would be very surprised if having multiple sexual partners before
marriage, independent of any other factor, has a direct causal influence."

In other words, correlation should never be confused with causation.

"We cannot make any conclusions about cause-and-effect," says Justin Lehmiller,
PhD, sex educator and researcher at Purdue University, adding, "Could it be that multiple premarital partners impacts marital happiness? Maybe. But it could also be that people who have more partners have different personalities or different attitudes toward marriage or relationships."

That point about causation may well be right, but nonetheless, if the study is correct, doesn't it indicate that men should legitimately be cautious about marrying a woman who has many partners (and be increasingly cautious the more she has had?)

Thanks, Medical Board

Cocaine-addict surgeon linked to sex workers' deaths, continued to operate on patients - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Dr Yong said not every regulatory system is perfect and the NSW Medical Board acted on the information it had on Dr Nair.

"Inhindsight now we can see that he, at some stage, even under our
program, was still affected by drugs. He was able to conceal that from
us, from his colleagues, from his patients, from his supervisors," he
said.


In May 2009, a psychiatrist said in a report to the Health Care Complaints Commission:

"It is my belief that Dr Nair is in stable remission from cocaine and
alcohol abuse and that he is fully fit to practise medicine.

I further believe that matters came before the Medical Board that would
have been more suited to a casual chat between colleagues rather than a
s.66 inquiry."

At least with alcohol, you can have a simple and quick breath test  at the start of every work session to see that a suspect addict is not under the influence at that moment.

The inability to so readily test for other drugs is another reason I am leery of the "legalise it, and nearly everyone will work out their own safe level of consumption" idea.

If the electrical brain stimulation doesn't help me in old age, maybe this will

Young blood to be used in ultimate rejuvenation trial - health - 20 August 2014 - New Scientist

A stimulating future

BBC News - Warning over electrical brain stimulation

I still think that the intriguing research into brain stimulation for increased cognitive performance hasn't attracted as much general attention as it should.   But hobbyists are apparently running current through their heads with amateur equipment, and that might just not be that good an idea, yet...