Go G20, and Brisbane

Well, it's a public holiday in Brisbane, as they wanted world leaders to see Brisbane city as some sort of ghost town, I presume.   I haven't been into the city centre all week, but with all the barricades set up everywhere I am seeing on TV, it has the distinct look of overkill.*  Still, having a dozen world leaders killed due to a ramming Commodore would be a bad look, I suppose.   Someone on local ABC radio yesterday rang up with a bit of alleged insider gossip, saying that his very reliable medical practitioner's daughter had told him that 2,000 body bags had been procured to be on standby.  Given that it would just about take a jumbo jet crashing into the convention centre to cause that much need for them, I somehow have my doubts about the figure cited by this "friend of a friend" source.

Speaking of the convention centre - that's were it's happening, and as I'm sure I've said before, I am inordinately fond of that gigantic venue.   It is, I was told by my own friend of a friend who works there, a very successful centre for attracting international conventions, but it also does mid sized concerts very well, in addition to the massive Lifeline second hand book sales twice a year.   If nothing else, I trust everyone visiting Brisbane says they like that building.   I did, however, just hear on breakfast TV that some foreign journalists go food poisoning last night - I hope the Convention Centre doesn't wear the blame.

As for publicity for Brisbane,  The Guardian is the wrong paper to be running a sardonic column on "what you need to know" about the place, given the number of wanky comments we all knew it would attract about what an uncultured and bor-ing city it is.   It did attract one comment which I can endorse, though, and I am pleased to see that it has now been pushed to the top:


Personally, I recommend Hoo Ha Bar over the Scratch, and the biggest craft beer outlet that I know of - Archive at West End always has a good, if slightly expensive, range.  (It actually is in handy walking distance to the convention centre.  I hope it does well with the foreign correspondents.)

As for Brisbane culture generally - I am reliably informed (by listening to ageing but well connected and cool dudes like Richard Fidler on ABC, now a Brisbane resident) that the city has a lively music and arts culture, even if I don't personally partake of it.   I was even pleased to see a new mid sized live music venue open last weekend in an old hangar building in the Valley, although I am not sure I am ever likely to get there.   Maybe when I hit my late mid-life crisis, or something.

In any event, even without seeking out performances while here, any visitor to the city must surely be impressed with the arts precinct at South Bank.   They are great and very active galleries, with lots of parking and a good outlook over the city.  I am not completely convinced, to put it mildly, about some of the aesthetic decisions the city centre has taken over the past decade (the new, plastic looking City Council building is an eyesore, if you ask me, although not as spectacularly as  bad as Federation Square in Melbourne), but other parts of the city are developing very well.   Teneriffe is perhaps already the coolest area for rich urbanites, and it is only going to get better.

So, anyway, I like the city and excitement of all these foreign aircraft coming here so much that I'm heading down the coast, to watch it on TV from there, as well as fish, swim and use a Sevylor inflatable canoe that I purchased in about 1986 by my reckoning.  Who knew that they would last so long?  It only has the smallest of holes that need patching.   That boat deserves a post all of its own.


*  [I thought Brisbane was not the sort of city to be home to many anarchists - any who were alive during the Joh reign left for Southern cities decades ago.   Would many travel back here to protest?  We'll see.] 

Down the road

I recently suggested that Pope Francis, if driven out of Rome as an Antipope , should take his seat of power down to Copacabana.   (An aging Barry Manilow can write the music for his arrival.)  

But now I see that there is perhaps reason to move a bit further down the road:  to Abrico.   A nudist Antipope on the beach at a rave - that's the sort of speculation you are only likely to read on this blog....

Niki and Andrew sitting in a tree...

Niki Savva,  one of the slightly less annoying conservative commentators, heaps praise on Andrew Robb in The Australian today.   In real life, he must present as something different than he did on Kitchen Cabinet:

Robb, personable and good humoured, has been on 22 overseas visits in the portfolio (13 to Japan, South Korea or China) and is a firm believer in personal contact.

Personable and good humoured?   Pity his face never seems to match his alleged temperament.

Surely the public realises that free trade agreements aren't forged in one year by one new Minister?  One would hope that they appreciate Labor's lead up work.  Unless of course there are bad aspects to the agreements, then the Coalition deserves all the blame.  (Heh)

Why do they still exist?

I can sort of see some the reasoning behind the world revolutionary zeal behind anarchism when it started a couple of centuries ago - I mean, there was an awful lot wrong with an awful lot about how the world was operating at the time, and hey, any dramatic change may have seemed like a probable improvement.

But come any G20 meeting, and we get the gormless anarchist "movement" back in the news:

Meanwhile, police have said they are not aware of a group of activists on social media calling on lone wolves to infiltrate G20 protest groups to 'fight and destroy governments'.

Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart has told The Courier-Mail that police are aware of a number of anarchist organisations active on social media.

I mean, seriously guys and girls, have a look at the most anarchic countries around the world at the moment.  Permanent revolution still looks like a good idea, does it? 

Why not put your signs down and your silly masks and grow up by getting involved with genuine political parties?  

Smart drug not so smart

'Smart' drugs won't make smart people smarter

Apparently, there's a drug around called Modafinil (used for promoting wakefulness) which students think will help them with exams.  But research by a Dr Ahmed Mohamed at the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (?!) begs to differ.

Unfortunately, given the photo of the shirt the good doctor is wearing, I'm not entirely sure I should trust him.  It would put me off performing well in a laboratory setting.

Fessing up

It's an interesting story, this one about the Mormon leaders coming clean about Joseph Smith having up to 40 wives.   Still, he only did it reluctantly, we are re-assured:

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives.

The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

Bit hard to see why he thought God wanted him to take his pal's wives too.   But all's fair when you've got a hotline to the Almighty, I guess.

I see that even modern Mormon women have something to worry about:  being given a wife number on entering Heaven:

There remains one way in which polygamy is still a part of Mormon belief: The church teaches that a man who was “sealed” in marriage to his wife in a temple ritual, then loses his wife to death or divorce, can be sealed to a second wife and would be married to both wives in the afterlife. However, women who have been divorced or widowed cannot be sealed to more than one man.

Kristine Haglund, the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, said that while she found the church’s new transparency “really hopeful,” she and other women she had talked with were disturbed that the essays do not address the painful teaching about polygamy in eternity.

“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Ms. Haglund said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t be practiced in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are really troubled by it.”

Update:    William Salatan says the Mormons will have a revelation about "accepting homosexuality" eventually.  

Live coverage excitement

OK, I know it must be hard to have someone talking to camera for the whole 6 or 7 hours or something that it going to take the Rosetta lander to descend to the comet, but as I write this, it is on its way down and this is the exciting scene (with no audio) from the ESA live feed:

Keane on The Australian

I like the opening description of The Australian in Bernard Keane's column today:

The Australian’s smear campaign against the Prime Minister hasn’t had a lot of new material lately. Having devoted months and acres of newsprint to investigating the minutiae of what Julia Gillard did in the 1990s and not turned up a single actual claim of wrongdoing, the brains trust at Holt St must be ruing that after such a big investment of resources in smearing her, all they got for their troubles was a few points’ fall in her approval rating.

Still, The Oz didn’t get where it is today — a dying paper for angry old conservative men — without a willingness to flog a dead horse. So today, it carried over 1000 words on the AWU matter about how there’s “a prima facie case that she could have been charged”, by one Terry O’Connor.

Big Piketty vindication for the US?

An astonishing graph at The Economist, in an important article about a new study suggesting Piketty was certainly right about the US, at least:



Gee, that "trickle down" idea from the 1980's has worked out a treat.

Go ahead and shrug your shoulders, libertarians.

Update:  from the blog post at the LSE by Saez and Zucman on their work:

The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of families. Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before. For a time, rising indebtedness was compensated by the increase in the market value of the assets of middle-class families. The average wealth of bottom 90 percent of families jumped during the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But it then collapsed during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  (See Figure 2.) Since then, there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012—the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1 percent more than tripled between 1980 and 2012.

How can we explain the growing disparity in American wealth? The answer is that the combination of higher income inequality alongside a growing disparity in the ability to save for most Americans is fuelling the explosion in wealth inequality. For the bottom 90 percent of families, real wage gains (after factoring in inflation) were very limited over the past three decades, but for the top 1 percent real wages grew fast. In addition, the saving rate of middle class and lower class families collapsed over the same period while it remained substantial at the top. Today, the top 1 percent families save about 35 percent of their income, while bottom 90 percent families save about zero.

If income inequality stays high and if the saving rate of the bottom 90 percent of families remains low then wealth disparity will keep increasing. Ten or twenty years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.

What should be done to avoid this dystopian future? We need policies that reduce the concentration of wealth, prevent the transformation of self-made wealth into inherited fortunes, and encourage savings among the middle class. First, current preferential tax rates on capital income compared to wage income are hard to defend in light of the rise of wealth inequality and the very high savings rate of the wealthy. Second, estate taxation is the most direct tool to prevent self-made fortunes from becoming inherited wealth—the least justifiable form of inequality in the American meritocratic ideal. Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression. The same proven tools are needed again today.

 Update 2:   ah, I see it was Saez & Zucman who Cato and the WSJ were attacking mid year about their figures for calculating wealth.  This working paper release presumably gives the details of what was in the powerpoint presentation Piketty was referring people to. 

A libertarian makeover

Well, I used to assume on appearance alone that Julie Novak of the IPA was a lesbian (come on, I surely wasn't alone); and maybe she is, I'm not sure, but it turns out that she is also a former he.  Didn't see that coming.

So this is the second transgender libertarian-ish economist that we know of - Diedre McCloskey being the other.  I think it is well known that men who go transgender often chose quite macho careers - the military, mountain climbers, engineering - the theory being that it is an over reaction in compensation to their inner desire to be feminine.   As I think it would be fair to say that aggressively free market, libertarian ideas are the most "macho" form of economics there is (and God knows, its followers at Catallaxy routinely question the masculinity of males who they perceive as being of the Left), I think we can likely expect most transgender economists to come from that side of the fence.   Davidson does seem to really like kilts;  I'm now suspecting it's part of the softening up process for an announcement...

In any event, it changes nothing about my attitude towards Novak's work and her opinions:  they're routinely doctrinaire, predictable, full of fetishistic adoration of free markets and complete disdain of government. Best ignored, as a male or female.

Update:  I see McCloskey was saying much the same in 1999:

''There is this romantic idea among men that they are free agents in the marketplace, without any ties except to their individual selves,'' Ms. McCloskey said. ''While men think of themselves in metaphors of competition, there is an assumption among women that we are together, helping each other survive.'' She added: ''I was an aggressive, assertive male, and I felt comfortable. Now I am ashamed because that was so very macho.''

All Putin-ed out

Gee, I bet Abbott regrets the "shirtfront" line, given the way it has absolutely dominated everything in the media about the meeting.  If someone doesn't come out of it with a bloody nose, it'll feel like such an anti climate.

Oh no - Bourne again?

Look, Matt Damon seems a nice enough guy on TV chat shows and what not, but I can't say that I have ever been completely convinced that he is that good an actor, and I don't care much for the type of material he seems to chose.

It was for that reason that I never went out of my way to see any of the Bourne movies, but they were on free to air TV here recently, and my original decision was retrospectively justified.  Sadly, Bourne is set to return, with Damon and (for me) the largely unwatchable Greengrass.

Honestly, how were these movies so popular?  Let's go through some that I saw:

Bourne Identity:   Geez, just how much amnesia do you have to suffer to go into a Swiss bank, find your security box with a hoard of cash, a half dozen fake passports (and a gun?  I forget) and still not realise what kind of work you must be in?   He goes back to the girl and asks "what sort of man has all this stuff?", or something like that.   The audience, having seen spy movies over the last 60 years, has a good idea; it seems to be pushing things to suggest that our hero cannot come to a similar conclusion.

What's more, he then goes back to the Paris apartment one of his identities lived in (and, oh yeah, everyone who drives into Paris ends up parking in the morning on the embankment over the Seine with Notre Dame in the background) and makes a phone call from there.   Leading, of course, to killers turning up pronto.   Again, just how dumb does Bourne have to be?

Pushing credibility just too far, if you ask me, even allowing for its genre.  I was underwhelmed.

Bourne Supremacy:   I remember David Stratton, I think, saying that he found Paul Greengrass' intense use of "shaky cam" throughout this film made him (literally) sick, and I simply couldn't watch much of it on a big screen TV for the same reason.   Honestly, my TV has never made me feel queasy before.

 And the rapid fire editing that is part of Greengrass' style - man, I thought Quantum of Solace was the height of that*, but no, this should be like a masterclass in how not to attempt to create fake excitement by not letting the audience see anything for more than 1 to 1.5 seconds, tops.  It's a really awful technique.  The movie is literally unwatchable.

OK, missed Bourne Ultimatum.

Bourne Legacy:   a sort of spinoff/reboot with a different actor.  Strangely, he's also one who I would not associate with muscle action heroics.   Look, I wasn't watching as closely as I could, and maybe that's why I never really understood what was going on with the blue pills and why our hero was suddenly a rogue who had to be killed.   Wolves, drones, guns and lots and lots and lots of chasing through the streets of Manila.   As I have never seen much of Manila before, I did watch that sequence closely, and given that it went on for a good 25 minutes or so, I now feel I have seen much more of that city than I ever really needed to see.

Maybe the next in this off shoot (is there going to be one?) will make me understand what was going on.

*  (I know he didn't direct it - but did they share the same editor?)

A musical interlude

I saw this on Rage on the weekend, and immediately liked its cute, quirky but slightly creepy vibe.  It's been around since 2009, I see:

Bursting through the advanced age reliability threshold

An aging scientist makes what I think a very unlikely prediction:

SEX will be entirely recreational by 2050, with all reproduction achieved in the laboratory, the inventor of the contraceptive Pill has predicted.
Us chemist Carl Djerassi says sex and reproduction will soon be separated in the Western world and that men and women will freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised. By mid-century, most couples will have IVF through choice, not necessity, he believes.
“The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be _fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,” he told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph.

His age:  91.

Sorry, but this bears all the hallmarks of a person who has exceeded the age related unreliability threshold.  Basically, the great majority of people, even when formerly sensible in their field of expertise, become an unreliable source of opinion by about the age of 80.   Maybe 85, max...

Seems sound advice

For a Lasting Marriage, Marry Someone Your Own Age - The Atlantic

Seriously?

Cuts to jobless benefits will boost economic growth, Australia tells G20: The Australian government has cited controversial cuts to unemployment benefits as one of the key structural reforms that will increase economic activity by 2 per cent, according to a draft of its growth strategy to be submitted to the G20 leaders' summit.

The reference to the jobless reforms – which include a measure preventing unemployed people under 30 from accessing welfare payments for up to six months – comes even though the changes have been blocked in the Senate.

The objective of boosting economic growth by 2 per cent "above what is currently expected" during the next five years is the main goal of the G20 meeting, to be held in Brisbane at the weekend.

Andrew Leigh is quoted further down in the article:

However, Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said cuts to
welfare payments such as   the unemployment benefit, family tax
benefits and the pension would act to suppress economic growth.

"If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor,
it has an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything
they've got," he said.

"That will detract from economic growth."

When even Judith Sloan was suggesting a few years ago that there was a good case for increasing unemployment benefits (even though I think she doesn't like to repeat this moment of Lefty madness), I think I know which side of the argument has more credibility.   

Sad news

Wayne Goss, former Queensland premier, dies at 63 | Australia news | theguardian.com

I think Wayne Goss is widely regarded as an unworthy victim of the weird local politics of Queensland, having lost the premiership prematurely for no good reason at all.  Even my late, permanently rusted on Coalition supporting mother never bore him ill will, as I recall.  The only downside that I know of is that he did help bring on the rise of Kevin Rudd in politics.   No one's perfect...

Interstellar noted by Mr Soon

I'm never sure lately if some tweets by Jason Soon are out to deliberately goad me, even though I trust he knows that some of my posts are written knowing they will annoy him.   (Yes, my readership is so small, I can write posts with one person in mind!)

This latest one, on his reaction to Interstellar, seems designed to annoy:

Saw Interstellar on Sun – unapologetic celebration of exploration & progress, vs the ‘caretaker’ spirit of the new Green religion.

"New Green religion" - the line beloved of climate change denying, Andrew Bolt readers and Catallaxy??  Bah, humbug.

I note that one of the more improbable things that Phil Plait (I think) found about the movie was that NASA survives as some secret underground organisation capable of mounting interstellar exploration while the world crumbles around it in environmental catastrophe.

I would have thought that the long term interest in having a global economy strong enough to fund humanity eventually moving off planet actually points to serious action now to limit the potential effects of global warming by urgently reducing CO2.  This would help reduce the chance of environmental catastrophe that, unlike in Hollywood, I would not be surprised may prove dire enough economically to delay human expansion indefinitely.

But of course, I haven't seen the movie....

Update:   family friendly animation wins at the box office.  (And Nolan's movie opens worse than Inception.)  

Taking the Right personally

I like watching Kitchen Cabinet for the opportunity it gives to view politicians in what is meant to be a more relaxed atmosphere, talking to the very congenial Annabel Crabbe over a meal.

I know that people will say that it is simply a part of my complaint that the Right side of politics has been badly damaged here due to the poisonous influence to the ideologically motivated side of the American Right that has lost interest in both evidence based science and economics, but I have to say, I now find that nearly all Coalition politicians compare very poorly to Labor ones, even at a personality level.

Coalition politicians nearly always come across as being nervous ninnies.  Tony Abbott and his "ha...ha...ha;"  Christopher Pyne and his career mother Amanda Vanstone didn't impress me (even though Vanstone is from the moderate wing of the spectrum); and while Andrew Robb might be admired for his gumption despite suffering long term depression, he does appear to now be a permanently glum robot incapable of pleasure (perhaps?) because of medication, and I was dismayed to be reminded that it was a man suffering long term mental illness who roused himself out of his sick bed to convince his fellow politicians to dump support for an ETS, leading to the current hopeless Prime Minister we endure.   I don't remember much about Joe Hockey's episode, except that he was another male politician who has an almost child like inability to cook anything other than a steak.  Yet he has so comprehensively stuffed up the Budget, and come out as an obsessive about wind power to the extent that a wind mill on the horizon 15 km away upsets him, he's turned out to be a pretty comprehensive embarrassment to the party.

There are exceptions, I suppose:  I certainly don't consider Barnaby Joyce to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can see why people like him anyway.   Nigel Scullion from the Northern Territory also has a certain pleasant air of frankness about him.

But in comparison, I usually find myself pleasantly surprised by the relaxed air of intelligence of your average Labor politician on the show.

I know Bill Shorten was just a bit too lovely dovey on screen with his wife for comfort, but I still felt better about him after the show than before.  (I have always felt relatively neutral towards him.  I think it was painful watching him suffer by the way he was caught up in the Rudd/Gillard battles.)   I am strongly against lesbian couples using some donor semen to make their own baby, but again, after watching Penny Wong I found myself liking her a lot more than before.   Craig Emerson presented as living in extremely modest circumstances, and really, what was he thinking with his little song and dance routine while he was still in power?   Still, I found it hard not to warm more to him as a result of Annabel's show.

And let's broaden this out a bit:  in commentary terms, Andrew Bolt has evolved into a self satisfied ugly caricature of  moderate Right wing analysis with his self pity and obsession with race and portraying Islam in the worst possible light.  As for climate change - he is a complete gullible joke, of course, never showing a scintilla of skepticism towards anything he reads from Watts Up With That or Professors Jonova and  Monckton.  His disingenuous enthusiasm for endorsing all of the Michael Smith sliming of Gillard (while always adding the disclaimer that "Gillard denies ever having knowledge of the matters") was really appalling.

Tim Blair doesn't seem to realise that the "frightbat" thing just carried too much Young Liberal style undergraduate sexism to be funny, and while he doesn't put the same enthusiasm into climate change denial as does Bolt, his reading list on the topic is clearly limited to denial sites.  It's hard to stay enthusiastic for his brand of lightweight critique of the silly elements of Left wing culture and attitudes when he so proudly wears his intellectual laziness on the key environmental issue of our day on his sleeve.

They both like Mark Steyn, of course, who thinks he can call a scientist a fraud, despite no support amongst other scientist in the field for such a view, and then defend it as free speech, while using his corner of the climate change culture war to get more money from his deluded readers.   

And as for News Corp Right wing female commentators and their attitude towards "feminism" (Miranda Devine, Albrechtsen, Sloan) gee, its got pretty ugly when they spent all their time criticising Gillard for "playing the feminism card" instead of  noting the appalling treatment she got from Right wing broadcasters and the patronising and offensive lines Abbott used.  

So it's remarkable how unlikeable I find so many on the Right have become.   And while I have been saying for a long time that attitude to climate change seems to have become an incredibly good bellwether on political judgement generally, it seems to give a good indication of  unpleasant aspects of personality too.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, even on the Left.   Step up, K Rudd, and take a bow...

About those old temperatures

I meant to link last week to a good explanation at The Conversation about the problem with old Australian temperature records from before 1910.   There, done.

Phil says sorry

Interstellar follow-up: Movie science mistake was mine.

Phil Plait at Slate says he got some of his science critique of Interstellar wrong, and apologises.   He still thinks it was a crook movie, though.   

Review of a show I don't watch anymore

OK, so the post title is not quite right.   You see, after giving Dr Who a big miss this season (and even my 14 yr old son agreed after the season opener that it is now unwatchable) I did, out of idle curiosity,  happen to see most of the two part season end.  Promising premise - Steven Moffat deals with "heaven" and the afterlife.  The result:  the show is now just incredibly awful.   Not so awful that it is worth watching, like some shows are.  Just mind numbingly, self referentially, spectacularly poorly written and unengaging dross.

The number of people agreeing with me at the obsessive fanboy comments threads at The Guardian is on the rise, too, I reckon.

Surely its ratings must be suffering?  I think a strong case could be made out that thinking the show is still quality story telling is a sign of some form of brain damage.

The show badly needs to go away for 5 years or so.  And don't let Moffat anywhere near its return.

Ideological triumph? Yeah, sure...

I see that Sinclair Davidson goes with the "Americans finally coming to their senses" interpretation of the Republican wins, as he quotes an over the top column by bow tied cultural warrior Roger Kimball with evident approval:

Over the past six years, the American people have watched as Obama swept nearly 20 per cent of the nation’s economy under the arm of the federal government in the name of “reforming” healthcare. Obamacare, which passed into law without a single Republican vote, is the most unpopular piece of legislation since Prohibition. In a moment of quiet candour, candidate Obama noted that, under his plan, the price of energy would “necessarily skyrocket”, while the coal industry would be regulated out of existence. How’s that working out? About as well as things on our southern border. The United States already spends more on education per pupil than any other country, but we get far worse results because “investing in education” for Democrats means shovelling money into the troughs of teachers’ unions, diminishing parental authority and forcing a politically correct, multicultural agenda on schools.

The truth is that Obama is merely the latest spokesman for the Democrats’ agenda of dependency, the big-government, socialistically inclined welfare establishment that, since the 1960s, has colluded with public sector unions to substitute tax-funded entitlements for individual initiative and personal responsibility. More and more people have come to understand that the “fundamental transformation” that Obama promised was not the path to Shangri-La, but a new road to serfdom. At issue is the relationship between the individual and the coercive power of the state, economic freedom and, ultimately, our national security.

Never mind the fact that wins by the other side during Presidencies on the way out are not unusual, or that several commentators noted that quite a few Republicans were giving out a more moderate position, and I can find no one who claims that it is any sort of emphatic win for the Tea Party wing. 

Oddly enough, more reasonable commentary from a Right wing perspective can sometimes be found at American Conservative, which Jason Soon links to sometimes.  This article, for example:  Obama is a Republican made many valid points, including one about the nuttiness of the Republicans carrying on in such an ideological sense about "Obamacare" when it was modelled on what was formerly a Republican idea.

I see that there is also a very good cautionary post up at the site about why the Republican win means exactly not what Professor Stagflation thinks it does:

Here are six reasons for caution:

1. The president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections.
2. Obama’s approval, while low, is higher than Bush’s at the same point in his presidency.
3. We’ve seen this movie before. Remember the “permanent majority” of 2004? How about the “thumping” of 2006? Then there was the “new majority” of 2008. Of course, that was followed by the “Tea Party wave” of 2010. Which didn’t stop Obama from becoming the first president since Eisenhower to win a majority of the vote for a second time in 2012.
4. The midterm electorate skews older, whiter, and richer than in presidential years. These are Republican demographics, so Republicans tend to do better. The 2016 electorate, on the other hand, will probably look more like 2008 than 2010. Republicans probably won’t ever win many votes from blacks or single women, but they need to continue doing better among the young and Hispanics (as several candidates did last night).
5. The standard explanation of the results is that the election was a referendum on Obama’s policies. That’s not true for the simple reason that most voters have only the foggiest notion of what Obama’s policies are. (Polls on these matters can be misleading because they often ask respondents to choose from a predetermined set of responses to a leading question, which encourages unrepresentative, off-the-cuff answers.) Rather than voting on the success or failure of specific programs, many voters rely on a vague sense that things are going well or badly for the country.
6. The biggest factor in voters’ assessment of the direction of the country is the condition of the economy. Right now it’s pretty lousy, despite relatively favorable growth and employment trends. But if these trends continue over the next two years—and they’re far less dependent on Washington that either party likes to admit—they may start to pay off for ordinary people. Should that occur, many will discover that they liked Democrats more than they thought.

Krugman looks at the Republican win, and grinds his teeth

Triumph of the Wrong - NYTimes.com

Lots of good links in his column to back up his claims, too.

Animation wins

I see that Big Hero 6, the new Disney animated film with some Marvel roots, has scored a high 90% at Rottentomatoes, compared to 72% for Interstellar.   Certainly, the trailers for Big Hero indicated the film has considerable charm.  

Meanwhile on At the Movies, David loved Interstellar, Margaret didn't.   I never find myself agreeing consistently with either of them, so I don't know what that means.   Oh that's right - probably that I'll dislike it. 

I certainly hope that my prejudgement is irritating some reader out there.  :)

  

El nino confusion, again

I see that Eric Holthaus is waving the white flag about the prediction earlier this year that we were likely looking at a strong El Nino.   He now says it looks like we'll get a very weak one, if any.

Yet he notes that parts of the world's weather have been looking El Nino like for a while:

In essence, a gradually warming Pacific Ocean is at once be reducing our ability to predict Earth’s single most important seasonal climate phenomenon, and tampering with it as well. For forecasters, that means this year’s El Niño tease has been “rather frustrating.” It mirrors another flash-in-the-pan-and-fizzle just two years ago.

Still, that doesn’t mean El Niño-like changes haven’t happened. “Borderline” El Niño conditions, depending on your definition, have persisted for months now. El Niño-like effects have already been felt around the globe—including the ongoing mega-drought in Brazil, a lackluster monsoon season in India, a whimper of an Atlantic hurricane season, and the opposing tropical storm fest in Hawaii. Oh, and the world is also on track for its warmest year on record, boosted by near-El Niño.

There were studies (including a recent one) indicating that global warming may result in more, damaging, strong El Nino's.   (And this year's failure does nothing to disprove that.)  But a strong El Nino right now would have been a handy thing to help convince politicians in 2015 to start talking CO2 reduction seriously.   Once again Nature is not working to a convenient timetable for convincing stupid politicians.   I suggest throwing a few libertarians and at least a couple of News Corp columnists into a volcano to get things back on track again.

Phil didn't like Interstellar

Interstellar science review: The movie’s black holes, wormholes, relativity, and special effects.

The Slate main page headline for this Phil Plait article is actually worse:

Interstellar is a bad movie.  Its science is even worse.

Well, I think this is getting me all prepared to really dislike it. 

Update:  I wrote the post without reading the review, for fear of spoilers. Well, now that I have read it, I must say it is absolutely chock full of spoiler, and the odds of my disliking it on similar grounds to Plait appear astronomically high.  (Heh)

Ghosts in the news

So there's a lot of publicity in the news today about a pretty simple experimental set up which seems to give at least some (actually, I am not sure how many of the 12 subjects) the impression of having one or more invisible presences in the room.   Some subjects found it very disturbing.

It's sort of hard to believe that this set up had that strong an effect.   It's also hard to believe that it has much relevance to visual ghosts, although it is probably more relevant to the "third man" factor that is commonly reported by people who are in isolation, especially at times of crisis.

As for visual ghosts, there was an article in the New York Times about the suggestion that ghosts have changed from solid to semi transparent over history.  Here are some extracts:

We think of ghosts as wispy and translucent — a vaporous woman, perhaps, who floats down the stairs, her dress trailing in the languid air behind her. But in early modern Europe, ghosts were often perceived as solid persons. The viewer discovered that they weren’t when they did something that ordinary humans could not, like bypassing a locked door to enter a room.

By the 19th century, people had begun to think of ghosts predominantly as spectral forms — ephemeral, elusive, evanescent. When the ghost of Marley appeared to Scrooge in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), and Scrooge looked his transparent body “through and through,” he illustrated a shift in the ways ghosts became real to people, how ghosts were seen and remembered.

In “Spectres of the Self,” the cultural historian Shane McCorristine points to two reasons for this transmutation. The first was skepticism about the supernatural, generated by the new developments in science. The concept of hallucination emerged to explain experiences like seeing an apparition. As the seeing of ghosts became a psychological phenomenon, it also became a pathological one. In 1848, the British skeptic Charles Ollier spoke for many when he wrote that “anyone who thinks he has seen a ghost, may take the vision as a symptom that his bodily health is deranged.” As a result, Dr. McCorristine writes, the ghost was gradually relocated “from the external, objective and theological structured world to the internal, subjective and psychological haunted world of personal experience.”

That's interesting, except that I thought that when the Society for Psychical Research did an extensive survey of ghost experiences back in the 1880s, one of the surprise findings was that ghosts often did appear solid.  (Especially, if I recall correctly, the "crisis apparition"  style of incident, where someone who had died miles away makes an unexpected appearance before loved ones or others at about the time of death.)

I'd certainly be checking the floorboards for weight bearing ability...

So Brisbane seems popular as a home for overweight mining billionaires?   OK, well we will have two now, it seems, at least, with a big splurge of publicity given to Gina Rinehart buying these fancy digs:

and The Australian writing:

GINA Rinehart has wasted no time making her new multi-­million dollar Brisbane house her home, applying to renovate the riverside property with more ­verandas and a lift.

To be honest, if I were a billionaire with vast coal interests, I'm not at all sure that I would be pleased with the media publicity about the location of my new mansion just before an event well known for its street demonstrations against capitalism.   I don't think she's living there, yet, though. 

The ridiculous Republicans

They weren't always the party of science nonsense, but they are now.  Talking about climate change, and the recent IPCC report:

So, if there’s one issue that should not be a partisan issue, this is it. After all, we’re talking about saving the planet. Surely Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on that. John McCain and Barack Obama did in 2008. But, sadly, that’s not the case today. Congress remains hopelessly deadlocked on climate change because Republicans, for whatever strange reason — be it ignorance or campaign contributions — either deny it’s happening, deny human activity is responsible or deny it’s serious enough to worry about.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, in fact, stirred up a little trouble back in May when he asserted there was “virtually no Republican” in Washington who accepted the science about climate change. As it turns out, he was right on target. Politifact tested his claim and rated it “Mostly True.” Out of 278 Republicans currently in Congress, they found only eight — or 3 percent — who believe in climate change. For the record, they are Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mark Kirk (Ill.), John Thune (S.D.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Reps. Chris Smith (N.J.), Michael Grimm (N.Y.) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (N.J.). 

Sadly, the other 270 Republicans follow the lead of know-nothing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who denies any link between human activity and climate change. On May 11, Rubio told ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

The extraordinary pizza price of England

The preferred weekend takeaway evening meal for our family for the last year or so has been Domino's pizza.   They've improved their product and gone somewhat upmarket with the range of toppings, and although they are starting to share the McDonalds annoying habit of changing the menu a bit too often, they are usually of remarkably good value.  Last Sunday, for example, we had two of the rectangular "Chef's Best" ( I can recommend the chilli lime pulled pork) and one simple pepperoni.   Total cost, from memory, with an on line deal, was about $22 - $24.  There are always on line deals.

But the basic menu price ranges from $4.95 (value pizza) to $7.95 (value plus) to $11.95 (traditional pizza) to $10.95 (chef's best) and top of the range are those with prawns for $14.95.

Last night, I was talking to a friend who has moved to England, and somehow the topic of pizza cost came up.   Extraordinarily, these are examples of the cost of Domino's in that country:

The cheapest, with nothing on it bar cheese and sauce - is £13.50!!   A Hawaiian is £17!!!!   That's $31.70 in Australian!!!!! - for a Hawaiian pizza!!!!!!!.

I remember thinking back in about 1989 that the cost of pizza in London in £ was about the same as the price in AUD, and how expensive that was.  If anything, the British pizza price has worsened.

What is wrong with that country?

Update:   petrol I see is currently 125p per litre.    That's $2.27.   Australians freak out if petrol breaks over the $1.60 mark. 

So what about salaries?   Let's pick something easy to compare - a new teacher outside of London can expect to earn £22,000 as a minimum.   $40,000 here, roughly.   Looks like our starting salary is the same.

It's just a jump to the left...?

I think I have seen headlines around the net to similar effect:  the claim that that the Republicans succeeded in this mid term election by playing up to "lefty" issues.   William Salatan writes:

Republicans won big in the 2014 elections. They captured the Senate and gained seats in the House. But they didn’t do it by running to the right. They did it, to a surprising extent, by embracing ideas and standards that came from the left. I’m not talking about gay marriage, on which Republicans have caved, or birth control, on which they’ve made over-the-counter access a national talking point. I’m talking about the core of the liberal agenda: economic equality.

I'm not sure that how correct this is, but as I wrote earlier today, I certainly didn't have the impression that it was Tea Party ascendancy that had helped the Republicans this election.   Which means a particularly interesting time for fights within the GOP as to how far they use their congressional control.

And to be snide for a moment:  it's many a year since I can remember a less physically impressive politician than the turtle-like Mitch McConnell.

Update:  Someone in The Atlantic agrees with Salatan, so it must be right:

This year has been different: GOP activists have given their candidates more space to craft the centrist personas they need to win. First, in senate races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alaska, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas and Texas, comparatively moderate Republicans triumphed over Tea Party-backed challengers. Then many of those Republicans downplayed their opposition to gay marriage and highlighted their support for greater access to contraception in an effort to win over the young and women voters who in past elections spurned the GOP as too extreme. “On social issues,” wrote Slate’s Will Saletan, “Republicans are mumbling, cringing, and ducking. They don’t want the election to be about these issues, even in red states.”

What are the research benefits of Virgin Galactic?

Those who are against criticisms of Virgin Galactic - you know I'm looking at you, JTFS, but you have a lot of friends out there - seem to have accepted some vague claims by Branson that his project is not just about making the world's longest rollercoaster ride, but involves doing research which will be generally helpful to humanity and transport in the future.

Now, while I accept that rich men are free to spend their money on vanity projects if they want, I detect a distinct lack of skepticism about Branson's claims.

Here, in this 2011 interview, he says that he hopes it will lead to very cheap small satellite launches, and superfast intercontinental airline travel.

Yet, as I've learnt from Googling after this crash, the height the SpaceShipTwo could reach has been downgraded somewhat because of engine issues (and the weight, I think, of carrying additional passengers compared to Rutan's SpaceShipOne.)  I know there was a new engine being tested, but it seems very unclear if it will get to the old, advertised height, too.

It might be that an unmanned future version of the SpaceshipTwo may truly be able to launch small satelittes into orbit, but has anyone looked at its likely cost compared to more regular rockets?   In fact, we already have an air launched small satellite system, and if you wanted to build an alternative one, surely you can get to that end a lot faster than via  mucking around with designing a spaceplane for passengers.   

And as for superfast intercontinental flight - as far as I'm aware, no one has ever seriously considered that rocket engines would be practical for that.  Scramjets, yes.   Does Branson's project have any relevance at all to scramjet research?  I doubt it.  

Being skeptical of Branson seems well worth the effort...

American politics is complicated and weird

That's really all you can say about it.  Well, no, there is a bit more you can add...

The amount of effort needed to just get people to vote; the mid week timing of voting; the staggeringly enormous amount of money put into advertising; the racial divide in those who actually vote and the effort put into limiting the number who can vote; the routine claims of fraud in voting, particularly electronic voting:  to an outsider, these all appear as signs of a pretty damn dysfunctional system.   Yet, in the name of "freedom", the Right in particular seems to put much effort into preserving the aspects which make the rest of the world say "Jeez, can't you run a political system  better than that, America?"

The only potential up side to large wins (as seems to be expected) by Republicans is that I haven't noticed that the Tea Party side of the Right as being particularly prominent in the lead up to the election.  But I could be wrong on that...

Certainly, Phil Plait fears that a Republican win in the Senate will result in some ludicrous appointments which may affect climate change policy:

Nowhere is this more important than the Environment and Public Works Committee. A Republican win will almost certainly make James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, chairman. This committee controls the Environmental Protection Agency, which is charged with addressing climate change and what to do about it. Inhofe is probably the most ludicrously adamant global warming denier in the Senate; he has called it a hoax and denies it to levels that would make the frothiest conspiracy theorists shake their heads in wonder.

Inhofe has indicated he will attack greenhouse gas regulators, so giving him control of this committee puts the "fox in charge of the henhouse" simile to shame.

Other committees will fare no better; as just one example Ted Cruz, R-Texas, could be chairman of the committee on science and space, and he also denies global warming. The irony is as excruciating as it is familiar.

What nauseating results they would be.

But on the upside, conservative over reach may well work in favour of the Democrats next time around:

Republican control of Congress could provide the stage for the next phase of the civil war in the GOP, with both wings jockeying for position ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Establishment and moderate figures like Senator Rob Portman want to improve the party's image—which, despite their projected success, remains awful—through constructive work. Hardliners like Representative Steve King and Senator Ted Cruz want to lay down a marker for an uncompromising conservatism, which they think will set the party up for victory in the presidential race, by obstructing any progress and investigating the administration. Many Democrats, as it happens, hope for the same thing. As their chances to hold on in the Senate have dimmed, many liberals' new fond hope is that Republicans will overreach and turn off voters, setting up a Democrat sweep of the White House, Senate, and perhaps even the House—an echo of what happened in 2012, following the GOP victories in 2010.

Coq au vin (future reference)

I usually do these recipe posts on a weekend, but as I'm heating up leftovers for lunch today, here we go:

There are few things more fun and satisfying to cook than coq au vin, given that nearly all recipes involve burning brandy on the stove top, and well as using copious amounts of red wine which (of course) you can also enjoy directly while cooking.

But there are quite a few variations on how to do the dish; some involving soaking the chicken in wine first, others with different components cooked separately and joined at the end.

Here's the simple recipe which I've settled on, recorded here in case I ever lose the book:

For four:

One chicken cut up however you like (but 8 pieces makes it easy)
about 6 bacon rashers
1/4 cup well seasoned flour (about a teaspoon of salt, and fair bit of pepper)
100 ml brandy (the book actually called for more, but that is plenty, I think)
2 cups red wine
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
small mushrooms in whatever quantity you like
dozen or so small onions

In the cast iron casserole thing, cut up and fry the bacon in a tablespoon or so of olive oil.   Til it's nearly crispy is OK.  Remove and drain

Using the flour in a bag method, coat all chicken pieces well and brown on all sides in two batches.

Put all chicken pieces back in, and turn the heat off while you get the brandy ready.  Pour brandy all over the pieces, turn heat on low and ignite.    Watch blue flames with pleasure.

When all burnt off, add the garlic, two cups of red wine and tomato paste.   If the flour was seasoned strongly, no need for more salt.

I also added the bacon back at that time, but the recipe didn't actually mention if that was the right time to do so.  It works OK doing it as I did. 

Stir well and cover and cook on low heat for 50 minutes in total.

In a fry pan, with a bit of oil, fry off the peeled whole onions til they start to caramelise on the outside.  Take them out and fry the mushrooms.

As the whole onions are tricky to cook the whole way through in a fry pan, I added them in to the casserole about half into the 50 minute cooking time.  Added the mushrooms a bit later, so they still have some texture in the final meal too.

You can add peas in to cook with it in the last ten minutes too, but I just went with beans as a side, with mashed potato too.   (Incidentally, I do better mashed potato than my wife.  This is a truth widely acknowledged - by the kids.)

The ingredients are pretty simple, but the sauce works out fine.

Future may be worse than thought for coral reefs

Well, what a depressing abstract in Nature Climate Change about the way scientists have been thinking about how acidification may affect coral reefs:

Changes in CaCO3 dissolution due to ocean acidification are potentially more important than changes in calcification to the future accretion and survival of coral reef ecosystems. As most CaCO3 in coral reefs is stored in old permeable sediments, increasing sediment dissolution due to ocean acidification will result in reef loss even if calcification remains unchanged. Previous studies indicate that CaCO3 dissolution could be more sensitive to ocean acidification than calcification by reef organisms. Observed changes in net ecosystem calcification owing to ocean acidification could therefore be due mainly to increased dissolution rather than decreased calcification. In addition, biologically mediated calcification could potentially adapt, at least partially, to future ocean acidification, while dissolution, which is mostly a geochemical response to changes in seawater chemistry, will not adapt. Here, we review the current knowledge of shallow-water CaCO3 dissolution and demonstrate that dissolution in the context of ocean acidification has been largely overlooked compared with calcification.

Aerodynamic prescience noted

Hey, what was I writing on Sunday (when everyone - including me - first thought that the Virgin spaceplane rocket engine had exploded?)  See update 3 in the post below.

(I also opined about this in a time stamped comment at Club Troppo,  just for anyone who doubts.)

And today:

Virgin Galactic’s space plane broke apart in mid-air seconds after its re-entry system deployed prematurely in an accident on Friday that killed one of its pilots and left another seriously injured, US crash investigators have said.

Christopher Hart, the acting chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, told a press conference on Sunday night that the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, had unlocked the feathering system, but that the second stage of the process, which moves the wings into the feathering position, happened “without being commanded”. 

OK, I'll admit, I was thinking more along the lines that the first accident would be caused by the wings not locking back into place properly after the "feathering" process.  But hey, I was close enough.

For once, I prefer The Australian over Fairfax...

Goodness me.   Newspoll has Labor at 54% TPP over the Coalition.  That's quite a welcome corrective to the gushing coverage over the new Fairfax poll saying Abbott has become vastly more popular, and giving a "only just ahead" TPP of 51% to Labor.

The best thing about the poll is the drop in the primary vote for the Coalition:  down from 45.6 at the election to 38% now.  Labor's primary is also showing a bit of a jump from the figure its been stuck on for some time (up to 36 from 34%.)  

Other welcome poll news this week:  the unpopularity of the Coalition's deregulation of Uni fees.  As I expected, this seems to be unpopular widely, probably because not just uni students don't like the idea, but nor do their parents.

Sensitive about their beards...

Another gob smacking story of life in Saudi Arabia from Gulf News:

A Saudi activist who has been reportedly arrested for a tweet she posted last year told investigators her words should be understood within their context and not misinterpreted.

Squad Al Shammari was apprehended on Tuesday in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah following formal complaints by religious figures over a tweet they found offensive to Islam and Prophet Mohammad (PBuH).

However, Suad said she was not targeting Islam claiming earlier tweets supported her argument, local daily Makkah reported on Sunday, citing ‘a well-informed’ source.

The activist waded into controversy last year when she said on the microblog that the Islamic saying that men should have beards to distinguish them from non-believers did not make sense.

“Several atheists, Jews and Communists in the past had, and in the present have, beards, and even Abu Jahl [a polytheist pagan leader] had a beard that was longer than that of Prophet Mohammad (PBuH),” she reportedly said.

Several senior religious figures in the Saudi kingdom condemned her tweet, accusing her of denigrating Islam and targeting the Prophet, and calling for severe action against her, including putting her on trial.

According to local news site Sabq, a commission to support Prophet Mohammad (PBuH) had repeatedly requested Suad to put an end to her ‘misleading and misinformed’ tweets that were offensive to Islam. The commission had also called the telecommunication authorities in the Saudi kingdom to shut down her accounts on social networks.

Richard's rocket problems

As I have written before, it will likely only take one fatal crash (perhaps of a passenger, if not a test pilot) of Richard Branson's rocket planes and that will be it for his business model.  

I had forgotten until I was searching for my past posts about this that I had written in 2007:  How to Make Space Tourists Nervous.    The late pilot is not the first person to die in Branson's project:

Three people have been killed in an explosion, during a test of rocket systems to be used in Richard Branson's proposed space tourism ventures. 

I remain of the view that this is a vanity project that is not worth the effort.

If tourists want to see the edge of space, a high altitude balloon would surely be a safer way of achieving it (see the first link above).   And a "vomit comet" can give a good enough sensation of weightlessness.

Update:   seems to me it is starting to look like this fatality may indeed kill off Virgin Galactic.  The British press is full of bad PR:

Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic has been accused of ignoring a series of warnings that its $500 million rocket was unsafe for flight.

A number of senior aerospace engineers repeatedly voiced fears over the design of Sir Richard’s SpaceShipTwo and the safety protocols surrounding its testing.

The Telegraph has seen emails and other documents in the public domain — dating back several years, and as recently as last year — in which the engineers warned of the dangers of Virgin Galactic’s rocket engine system.

It also emerged on Saturday that three senior Virgin Galactic executives — the vice-president in charge of propulsion, the vice-president in charge of safety, and the chief aerodynamics engineer — had all quit the company in recent months.

Update 2:  David Walker at Club Troppo has a rather good post about the problem of getting into space.   (Very, very rarely does science of this kind get a run there, but it sure beats the chess posts!)

Update 3:  apart from the rocket engines, the thing about the Virgin rocket that I always thought looked ridiculously dangerous was the "feathering" wing.   (See how it moves on this video.)   As a design, my common sense suggested that this looked like an accident waiting to happen, and I was expecting that this would be the cause of the first crash. But I have never noticed any expert make this comment, so what do I know?  (Apart from the fact that I wouldn't fly in it.)

Update 4:   Oh look, maybe my common sense was not far off the mark after all:

In September 2011, the safety of SpaceShipTwo's feathered reentry system was tested when the crew briefly lost control of the craft during a gliding test flight. Control was reestablished after the spaceplane entered its feathered configuration, and it landed safely after a 7-minute flight.^[24]

I don't recall hearing about that at the time.  

Update 5:  cynicism from earlier this year on the poor performance of Spaceship Two.

Update 6:   I am reminded by this accident that Burt Rutan was the designer of SpaceShipTwo, and although he is now retired, he is notable for being a climate change denier.  He writes:

 Specifically, the theory of CAGW is not supported by any of the climate data and none of the predictions of IPCC since their first report in 1991 have been supported by measured data. The scare is merely a computer modeled theory that has been flawed from the beginning, and in spite of its failure to predict, many of the climate scientists cling to it.

My rule of thumb for trusting experts in any field still applies:   if they don't believe in CO2 causing potentially dangerous climate change, be very careful of  what they say or do on any topic. 

Romanticising the microbiome

There's a really good Ed Yong piece at the New York Times which argues convincingly that there is a lot of premature excitement about the possibilities of influencing health by deliberately altering the gut microbiome.  Sure, fecal transplants work for one particular problem, but the fact that  gut bacteria are changing rapidly all the time anyway means it's no simple task to fix other problems.

You should read the whole thing, but I found this section particularly interesting:

Take the Hadza. Their microbial roll call is longer than a Western one, with both omissions and additions. They are the only adult humans thus far sequenced who are devoid of Bifidobacteria — a supposedly “healthy” group that accounts for up to 10 percent of the microbes in Western guts. But they do carry unexpectedly high levels of Treponema, a group that includes the cause of syphilis.

Is this menagerie worse than a Western one? Better? I suspect the answer is neither. It is simply theirs. It is adapted to the food they eat, the dirt they walk upon, the parasites that plague them. Our lifestyles are very different, and our microbes have probably adapted accordingly. Generations of bacteria can be measured in minutes; our genomes have had little time to adapt to modern life, but our microbiomes have had plenty.

It may be that a Hadza microbiome would work equally well in an American gut, but incompatibilities are also possible. The conquistadors proved as much. As they colonized South America, they brought with them European strains of Helicobacter pylori, a stomach bacterium that infrequently causes ulcers and stomach cancer, and these European strains also displaced native American ones. This legacy persists in Colombia, where some communities face a 25-fold higher risk of stomach cancer, most likely due to mismatches between their ancestral genomes and their H. pylori strains.

 Yong mentions earlier in the article who the Hadza are:

In September, the archaeology writer Jeff Leach used a turkey baster to infuse his guts with the feces of a Hadza tribesman from Tanzania.....

 He experimented on himself because he views the Western microbiome as “a hot microbial mess,” he wrote on his blog. Poor diets, antibiotics and overly sanitized environments have gentrified the Western gut, he wrote, “potentially dragging us closer to ill health.” The Hadza, with their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, carry diverse microbial communities that are presumably closer to a healthier and disappearing ideal. Hence the stunt with the turkey baster. Mr. Leach billed it as “(re)becoming human.”

This reasoning is faulty. It romanticizes our relationships with our microbes, painting them as happy partnerships that were better off in the good old days.

Yong's a fine science writer.

The Seat of the Antipope to come

Andrew Brown wrote in the Guardian this week:

Until this weekend, I had largely believed in the liberal narrative which holds that Pope Francis’s reforms of the Catholic church are unstoppable. But the conservative backlash has been so fierce and so far-reaching that for the first time a split looks a real, if distant, possibility.

One leading conservative, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, published over the weekend a homily he had prepared for the traditional Latin mass at which he started ruminating on papal authority. Pope Francis, he said, was the 266th pope, “and history has seen 37 false or antipopes”.
 
Why mention them, except to raise the possibility that Francis might turn out to be the 38th false pope, rather than the 266th real one?

Wow.  I only read that after I made my comment in my previous post about the coming schism, and Tim mentioned his desire to be an Antipope in comments.   I didn't realise Pell had been "thinking out loud" about it.

Brown's column continues:

This is a fascinating nudge in the direction of an established strain of conservative fringe belief: that liberalising popes are not in fact real popes, but imposters, sent by the devil. The explanation has an attractively deranged logic: if the pope is always right, as traditionalists would like to believe, and if this particular pope is clearly wrong, as traditionalists also believe, then obviously this pope is not the real pope. Splinter groups have held this view ever since the liberalising papacy of Pope John XXIII at the start of the 1960s. I don’t think that’s what Pell meant, but it was odd and threatening to bring the subject up at all.

You should go read the rest of Brown, too, where he attacks Douthat's take on Henry VIII.

So, all this Antipopery is something I have to start paying attention to.  

I haven't read anything about them for a long time, and the Wikipedia entry indicates that there have been a lot more Antipopes than I remembered.   In fact, about the only thing about Antipopery that had stuck in my mind was how Avignon was the centre of it for quite some time. 

This always sounded like a lovely place for an Antipope.  I've never been there (sadly, only ever Paris, for me) but my goodness, it does look lovely:

Anyhow, it's far too Eurocentric for a new Antipope to take up as his (or her) seat of power.  Given Pope Francis' concern about poverty and social justice (and the conservatives' embrace of cut throat free markets, destroying the planet, bugger the poor, they've always been with us, and as long as the divorced can't take communion everything will OK), clearly the new Antipope will need a location that reflects the First World/Third World divide.

After giving it much thought last night, in the shower, I think the obvious answer is:

Copacabana!