German prominence

A story in the (UK) Telegraph recently about the increasing popularity of male, um, member enhancement, brought to my attention something I had previously overlooked:  Germany appears to be the European centre for surgical penile enlargement.

Now that I Google the topic, I see that earlier this year, the same paper had asked the hard question (*snigger*):  why is this operation so popular in Germany?   It involves a ligament snip (which I had heard of before) but also this:

Next, fat harvested from elsewhere on the recipient’s body is injected into the penis shaft so it “grows” (by a modest 2-3 cm girth).

Gee.  I'm a little surprised that the injected fat stays in situ, so to speak.   I mean, to use German engineering speak for a moment, it's going to be subject to some mechanical compression of some vigour, no?   But I assume it doesn't all get relocated at the base, or other end, or we would have seen an example on Embarrassing Bodies by now.

As for the reasons why Germans are into it to such a degree, the Tele does mention an apparent national fondness for pornography (I had thought the Scandinavians might hold the European title for that, but this is based on impressions formed in the early 1970's and may require revision.)   They don't mention the national fondness for bratwurst, but I wouldn't be surprised if that has something to do with it, in some subliminal sort of way.

Those readers who want to know more about the matter can visit this site from the German Centre for Urology and Phalloplasty Surgery - a very fancy name, hey?   But it does some unusual plain talking, for a medical centre:

When we ask patients who have had a failed penis operation somewhere else before coming to us for corrective surgery why they underwent surgery somewhere else in the first place, the answers are always the same:

• '...because it was so cheap there...'
• '...a plastic surgeon even performed the surgery...'
• '...but they promised that it would work...'

We are astonished at all of these answers. Please excuse us for being direct, but is very unfortunate to hear these types of childish answers from grown adults when it is a matter of their health, particularly when it involves the primary male organ.

 I wonder if all German doctors have such a bedside manner...

And thus ends the post with possibly the biggest use of the "p" word in this blog's history.

Update:  it appears some cosmetic surgeons don't think much of the procedure:

Fat grafting is the most common, and the most notorious, of the penile augmentation procedures. It can result in disasters such as loss of the penis if fat is injected into blood vessels or if infection occurs. When the augmentation does work, the result is temporary. Complications such as nodules in the penis, skin deformity, and scarring and loss of normal contour are common. The injected fat is extremely fragile and needs to remain fairly motionless in order for blood vessels to grow into the tissue. If they don't grow in three days, the fat will die and be absorbed by the body. If the fat is disturbed during the first three weeks, it will lose its new blood supply and be resorbed. The penis cannot stay motionless when urinating and when erections develop. Virtually by definition, fat grafting into the penis is doomed to fail.

 Update 2:  on the Australian scene, here's the Australian Centre for Penile Surgery describing the recovery process for the procedure it uses:

You will need to spend two weeks lying flat in bed in order to minimise any swelling. Excessive swelling strains the blood supply of the penile skin and may cause it to die, resulting in loss of shaft skin. This is almost entirely avoided by lying flat.
During this time, you will also need to take a combination of three drugs to prevent you having erections. As a side effect of these drugs, you will feel very drowsy.

 Gee.  Men really put themselves through that for cosmetic purposes?

The technique for this are different from mere injection, too:

The Australian Centre for Penile Surgery does not recommend penile widening by fat injection because of the risk of fat necrosis. Dr Moore uses dermal fat grafting which is long-lasting in 98 percent of cases, and produces excellent results.

 So, sounds like there might be genuine dispute about technique that is apparently popular in Germany.

But here's another good bit from the Australian site:

What are the chances of retraction?

During follow-up, you'll be taught how to stretch your scar. If you fail to perform this exercise properly, some or all of the length gained through surgery might be lost.
Retraction may also result from the patient's own excessive production of adrenaline, which causes the penis to shrink. This is extremely rare.

A trilogy of wrong, illustrated

Laffer Curve: Napkin Doodle Launched Supply-Side Economics - Businessweek

What a remarkable idea - bringing together three Republican stars, all of whom have been shown to be involved in decisions that went badly wrong:

That's Laffer, in the middle.

(OK, Laffer may not be completely wrong; but his idea gave rise to tax cutting exercises that simply did not work, and tax cut worship that persists to this day on the Right.)

Real Climate is hot

While watching the Abbott government implode is getting a bit dull, Real Climate has couple of posts well worth reading about "the pause", and deceptive graphing by Anthony Watts.

Apparently, this graph is consistent with not taking any action on climate change, according to more than half of the Coalition, nearly all libertarians,  and Andrew Bolt:

 Scientists like Andrew Bolt and Monckton (and an aging chemist from Newcastle, who the incredibly easily self deluded at Catallaxy treat as having disproved global warming) all prefer to use graphs from the RSS satellite, because it has been the outlier on the cool side for some years now (not even agreeing with UAH's numbers.)

A hot and stormy start to summer, meantime, makes people think about climate change and how the Abbott government doesn't really believe in it.  That's good.

Update:  I see that Sinclair Davidson recently tweeted a link to Jo Nova (another reliable climate scientist) who plotted UAH figures to "disprove" BOM's claim that Australia has had its hottest Spring on record.

Rather than believe thermometers on the ground, they now rush to believe the rather more complicated methods used by satellites to measure the temperature of the atmosphere above the ground.  Because, of course, the BOM can't be trusted to do analysis of ground temperatures: they are corruptly out to prove global warming by hook or by crook.

Sinclair, haven't you got some more mathturbation to do on tobacco and plain packing, rather than reading Jonova?

I also see that Jonova and the IPA are both making end of year plea for donations.   A bigger bunch of  moochers I have never seen.  Can't you just write begging letters to Gina and Rupert and be done with, instead of begging on street corners?

Continuing

I cannot resist

Pretty disastrous interview with Sunrise for Abbott this morning, I reckon.   Called him "Chris"; denied any apology warranted for a string of broken promises; kept running the line decided by someone in his office last week that if he keeps repeating it was a year of great achievement, people will start to believe him. 

Of course he painted himself into this corner when Opposition Leader, with so many quotes floating around about how he would not break promises, be a government of no surprise, would even let the budget suffer a bit if it meant keeping a promise.

It's impossible for him to talk his way out of this, and as such, I would have thought his best strategy would be to disappear for a month. 

What?

Intellectual powerhouse

Anything But with Tim Wilson - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I would have thought being a superhero called Selfie Man would have been more his style, but no, Tim Wilson goes with the classics:

If you were to be an action hero, which one would you like to be?

I think I'm going to have to go Batman, but not like Christian Bale,
über-cool Batman, much more 1960s, soul, Adam West Batman. You know, a
little bit camp, prepared to go out there and fight for a good cause,
and occasionally enjoy a good outfit from time to time. Though I don't
slip into the Batsuit. The equivalent I've got, you know, from looking
at today, is a grey suit with a green checked shirt and a blue and green
dot tie, but you have to take these things a little bit seriously if
you want to live your life and achieve things, so the outfit makes sense
as well. But you can't discount the campness factor behind Adam West's
Batman, because it's important to have almost a cartoonish approach
where every time you're achieving some objective it's sort of a "Pow" or
a "Gazump" as part of the process.

 Look, I already thought Timbo was an intellectual lightweight with a chronic interest in self promotion, but there are so many, many other passages in this ill considered interview that help confirm my assessment of him, I can't be bothered repeating them...

Fascist! (About that immigration bill success)

So, I gloated prematurely about how The Guardian thought that Scott Morrison was not going to get his immigration legislation through.

And, it has to be said, that there are aspects of the deal, apparently suggested by Clive Palmer of all people, as to how former detainees can get work towards getting a more secure life in Australia, that are not all bad.

And, of course, some cross benchers were motivated by the "take the least worst option" which would at least get some children out of Christmas Island detention, although  Lambie (and the Greens) did have a point that Morrison was using then as a bargaining chip, given that he had the ability to remove them from the island any time he wanted, and he was the one setting up pre-conditions on their release.

That all said, if this summary in The Guardian is right, I don't really see why people shouldn't think "fascist" when there read about his powers:

Previous immigration ministers have decried the burden and the caprice of “playing God” with asylum seekers’ lives, but the government has chosen, instead, to install even greater powers in the office of the minister.

With the Senate’s acquiescence, Scott Morrison has won untrammelled power.

No other minister, not the prime minister, not the foreign minister, not the attorney-general, has the same unchecked control over the lives of other people.

With the passage of the new law, the minister can push any asylum seeker boat back into the sea and leave it there.

The minister can block an asylum seeker from ever making a protection claim on the ill-defined grounds of “character” or “national interest”. His reasons can be secret.

He can detain people without charge, or deport them to any country he chooses even if it is known they’ll be tortured there.

Morrison’s decisions cannot be challenged.

Boat arrivals will have no access to the Refugee Review Tribunal.

Instead, they will be classed as “fast track applicants” whose only appeal is to a new agency, the Immigration Assessment Authority, but they will not get a hearing, only a paper review. “Excluded fast track applicants” will only have access to an internal review by Morrison’s own department.

The bill is a seismic piece of legislation – one that destroys more than it creates.

 And how did libertarian local hero vote on this? :

 Muir and most other crossbenchers said their support was secured by the concessions made to change the bill. The government had already secured the support of the senators Nick Xenophon, David Leyonhjelm and Bob Day. The two Palmer United party senators also eventually showed their support on Thursday after Clive Palmer held a press conference earlier in the day.

Now, as I made it clear, this was a very difficult situation for all cross benchers, yet you would have thought that the libertarian one should have been the most conflicted of all.   But, yeah nah, we heard more concern from the Palmer Party...

Update:  on The Drum last night, there was Adam Creighton, a man with small government, IPA credentials, enthusing that the government's immigration policies had been a clear "win", with no reservations expressed at all about the unbridled discretion this legislation vests in one Minister.

Yet more reason for me to hold him in contempt.

Update 2:  Greg Barnes writes today :

 The powers given to an Immigration Minister and an internal bureaucratic process to determine the claims of those persons who arrive by boat seeking protection under the Refugees Convention, a fundamental human right, are an abrogation of the principle that questions of legal right and liability should be resolved by the application of the law and not on the basis of power being exercised by government officials.

The Abbott Government's law removes the right of individuals to have their case reviewed by the Refugee Review Tribunal and the courts. This new law is frightening in a genuine sense. It shows contempt by the executive and by legislators who support the unparalleled powers given to the Immigration Minister and the bureaucracy for any check and balance in the exercise of their power.

One is tempted to observe, how dare politicians in Australia criticise Russian president Vladimir Putin for his similarly distorting of Russian democracy when Minister Morrison and his legislative supporters have taken a leaf out of the Putin handbook.

The more I think about it, the more I find it genuinely outrageous that the libertarian commentairiate lets this slide, and prefers to prattle on about too much government spending and same sex marriage.

Fracking not all that it's cracked up to be (ha..)

Natural gas: The fracking fallacy : Nature News & Comment

Here we go on one of these wild energy forecast swings again - switching from wildly optimistic to middling pessimistic.

Worth looking at, anyway.

Blob-ish 4

I have an observation: all beers which are sold as "Golden Ale" seem to be nice. It's a good rule of thumb...

And then he tied an onion to his belt...

Seriously, if you can get more than a third of the way through this rambling, cranky white man whinge about - I dunno, what is it about? - good luck.  I have a bag of onions for you - it's time that fashion came back, I'm sure you'll agree.

Is the National Library still recording that blog for posterity?  How embarrassing if it is...

The awful state of Pakistan

Blasphemy in Pakistan: Bad-mouthing | The Economist

This is so horrifying it's almost blackly funny:

The police are also prey to the radicalising forces that are eating away
at Pakistan. In November a man arrested for alleged blasphemy was
killed by an axe-wielding policeman. 

And there is more:

The country’s clerics are united in defending the existing laws. The
most vociferous opponents of reform are not the Saudi-style extremists
empowered during the Zia era, but Barelvis, a school of Islam that some
once looked to as a moderate bulwark against extremism.

Unsurprisingly, many conclude they can cry blasphemy with impunity.
In poor villages and urban slums countless vendettas can be settled in a
blasphemy allegation. Almost two years after mobs burned down 100
Christian homes in Lahore the only person behind bars is the man whose
alleged blasphemy triggered the riots.

Ouch

The Australian Ran A Photo Of Larissa Waters’ Young Daughter This Morning Because Journalism Or Something | Junkee

Christian Kerr gets thoroughly attacked for his contribution to the Australian today.  Deservedly so.

Colour me unconvinced

From The IPAustralian:

The OECD puts Australian governments’ tax take at 26.5 per cent of national income, bless than the unweighted average share of 34.1 per cent among the 34 member nations, a long-term discrepancy that has prompted trade unions, statists and welfare lobbies to argue for tax increases rather than spending cuts to fix the federal budget.
“We are constantly being told that Australia is a low-tax country, but that is a complete myth”, said Mikayla Novak, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Public ­Affairs who wrote the report.
“Adding in compulsory super and private health insurance mandates raises Australia’s effective level of tax,” she added, arguing that they added 4.7 per cent and 1 per cent of GDP respectively to Australian governments’ tax haul in 2011, lifting the total to 32.2 per cent.

Isn't it just a wee bit dishonestly inventive to call compulsory super contributions part of "the Australian government's tax haul"?   They've convinced Adam Creighton though, apparently.

I'm also looking at the graph at the article of some of those low taxing to GDP ratio nations that I'm sure we would all love to emulate - India, Peru, Russia, Philippines.   Yes, says the IPA, why can't we live in such happy and socially equitable countries like that?  

Google's balloons

Project Loon: How Google’s Internet balloons are actually working.

You have to love the way Google carries on research that may or may not work out, and this article contains some fascinating details about their wacky sounding balloon internet project.

Blob 3

Keeping prices high

High risk: drug war fought with dollars

Ross Gittins considers the "counterfactual" of drugs prohibition, something that the "war on drugs is a MASSIVE FAILURE" decriers routinely fail to do. 

I didn't want to know this...

Eating less meat essential to curb climate change, says report | Environment | The Guardian: Curbing the world’s huge and increasing appetite for meat is essential to avoid devastating climate change, according to a new report. But governments and green campaigners are doing nothing to tackle the issue due to fears of a consumer backlash, warns the analysis from the thinktank Chatham House.

The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all cars, planes, trains and ships combined, but a worldwide survey by Ipsos MORI in the report finds twice as many people think transport is the bigger contributor to global warming.

The report goes on to note that some are calling for a meat tax to curb eating it.

Gee, and the "nanny state" whiners freak out over the suggestion of a sugar tax.   They'll see a meat tax as a direct threat to their (probably unwise anyway) intensely meaty diet.

No doubt I could do with eating less meat myself.  But it is very - satisfying.

Oh dear, another bit of huffing and puffing fails to blow the Senate into line

Asylum bill to reintroduce temporary protection visas faces Senate defeat | Australia news | The Guardian

The government faces another major Senate defeat with Labor, the Greens, the Palmer United party (PUP) and other crossbench senators insisting that 30,000 asylum seekers living in limbo in Australia receive the possibility of a permanent visa.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving Minister.

The Antarctic ice that matters

West Antarctic melt rate has tripled

A comprehensive, 21-year analysis of the fastest-melting region of Antarctica has found that the melt rate of glaciers there has tripled during the last decade.

Much more important an issue than what sea ice is doing around the continent. 

They're messing with their own minds

I heard on the radio that Tony Abbott gave an end of year pep talk to the party room yesterday emphasising how great a year of achievement it had been - you know, end carbon tax, mining tax, stop the boats, etc.

I then heard Christopher Pyne run the same line - it's been a tremendous year of achievement for the government, apparently. 

This is pretty hilarious - a government trying to spin its way out of depression, in the public eye.  It is, of course, likely to have the completely opposite effect on the public, who will see a bunch of self satisfied, arrogant, dissembling twits out of touch with reality.

Blob 2

New Abbott government strategy

Update: Ha! I posted this and then saw Abbott on Sunrise this morning, again talking in front of a Christmas tree. (He was also full of hesitation, again. He needs a long holiday - like for 30 years or so, that should do it.)

Update 2:  See:

Blob

An explanation: Christmas is a busy time, and I'm feeling a bit blog exhausted lately. Seems to me I have been completely and utterly vindicated in predictions that Tone would be a bad, bad PM; I suspect that a mild El Nino is on the way that will remove all temperature hiatus talk; David Leyonhjelm keeps on giving speeches that prove he is an intellectual lightweight wannabe populist whose party will not achieve anything electorally major again; the IPA has the sulks because it can't bend the Coalition completely to its will; Catallaxy has devolved into a place only frequented by the aging, angry white male contingent (and their oddball female admirers with anti feminist obsessions); fundamental physics seems to have hit a bit an impasse now that the Higgs has been found - probably; the Catholic Church is in the final, but still decades long, throes of revising its understanding of sexuality and theology more broadly; Fairfax will make a stunning comeback in corporate fortunes. (OK, I may be exaggerating on that last point.)

So I'm feeling a bit out of fresh material. I thought maybe I should spend a month just posting unexplained and pointless blobs and doodles. But then I felt like ridiculing Tony again, and I couldn't resist. But I'm still tempted to go into blob mode...

Changing shape

[1411.7402] Global monopoles change Universe's topology

I've always had a hard time getting my head around the matter of the topography of the universe; it's not something easily visualised.   But to make matters worse, a couple of scientists here suggest that the topography of the universe might be able to change.  A big crunch may yet happen, seems to be one of the implications.

What a funny old part of the world...

Iraqi army revealed to have 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ on its roll - Middle East - World - The Independent

His spokesman Rafid Jaboori said: "The prime minister revealed the existence of 50,000 fictitious names.

“Over the past few weeks, the PM has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem.”

The announcement is an indication that he intends further action against state corruption in the military and beyond. Earlier this month he sacked 36 army commanders in a move intended to improve the efficiency of the military and to reduce graft.

Mr Jaboori added: “Haidaral-Abadi is setting integrity, efficiency and courage as the criteria to
appoint a new military leadership. This weeding out process will extend beyond the military to all state institutions.”

Fictitious soldiers, known as 'fadhaiyin', are created to provide extra income for officers and the more senior the rank the more ‘ghost’ incomes there are.

We need more ghosts in ISIS, I know that for sure...

LDP soars to 2.72%

I see that, even with David Leyonhjelm getting his distinctive head on the TV and in the papers a lot since he became a Senator, the LDP in the Victorian election managed to get 2.72% of the vote (so far), marginally ahead of the Sex Party and the Democratic Labor Party.

It's a party for an eccentric minority, like the other micro parties.

What was I saying about Scott Morrison?

Scott Morrison wants to snatch courts’ powers over immigration and citizenship | The Saturday Paper

"Quasi fascist" wasn't it?   From an article in this weekend's Saturday Paper:

Morrison is pursuing what immigration lawyers describe as a
“legislative blitzkrieg” via three bills that would dramatically extend
the minister’s powers and curtail review of his decisions.

Each piece of legislation on its own is a significant extension of
ministerial power. Taken together, they represent a tough new regime, as
the minister who credits himself with stopping the boats now applies
his unyielding approach to other facets of his portfolio.

Morrison spells out why his decisions should be beyond reproach and
exempt from the standard review processes in the explanatory memorandum
of the Australian Citizenship and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014.

“As an elected Member of Parliament, the Minister represents the
Australian community and has a particular insight into Australian
community standards and values and what is in Australia’s public
interest,” it says. “As such, it is not appropriate for an unelected
administrative tribunal to review such a personal decision of a Minister
on the basis of merit, when that decision is made in the public
interest.”

In other words: trust him, he’s the minister.

Tales from the past

A Nineteenth Century Japanese Folk Tale Still Inspires UFO-Believers

I hadn't heard this one before.  It is a bit odd.  

As featured on Insiders this week...

The always slightly disturbing political cartoons of David Rowe often feature on Insiders, and today they showed this one, which I thought a brilliant example of his work:

Of course, it will make no sense to the casual reader of this blog in 50 years time (Google is immortal, isn't it?) but then that's the case with many political cartoons.

More adventures in rooting

Gosh, it was back in May 2013 that I explained the odd bug in my relatively primitive Samsung Tab 2 tablet which required either a factory re-set, or rooting the system to be able to access system files to stop the bug.  I successfully rooted and solved that problem permanently.  (I think.)

Well, a new and completely different bug arose this weekend - the machine got stuck in a "reboot loop".

Getting to the bottom of this problem proved much harder - in fact, although there are suggested remedies out there, no one seems to really know what causes it.

The simplest remedy is to do a factory re-set; the more complicated one was to "flash" onto the machine a whole new modified operating system, of which there are many floating around out there.   Actually, I would have been perfectly happy using an official Samsung one - yet finding one for the correct region is a real pain.  Samsung Australia don't bother providing it as a download.  Samsung US seemed to, but not for this region, and I understood that it could be risky using the wrong region one.  And some websites did have the right firmware, but on one of those awful download sites that try to get to pay money instead of waiting for a painfully slow 4 hour download to finish.   Of course, the fact that this was a basic tablet that's been superceded by probably 40 Samsung models alone means that there is probably very low demand for a copy of the right firmware.

Anyway, I spent hours considered using Odin (the software, the Norse god was not available) to put on a whole new ROM, but before I did that, I tried something less than a factory reset - a wiping of the partition cache.  The only effect this had was to prevent me getting back to the system recovery screen commands - while the machine continued its reboot loop.

I then tried to follow the many guides about installing a whole new ROM, but none of them allowed for the fact that I might not be able to get to the system recovery commands.   So I used Odin to try to install a couple of recovery programs that many said were needed anyway for loading a new ROM.  Neither of these worked - well, they got onto the machine, but only the introductory screen would show up, then the tablet would start its reboot loop again.

So, out of desperation, I decided maybe it would be useful to re-root the machine using the same Odin method I had used for the previous problem last year. 

Lo and behold - re-rooting it meant the system recovery screen was back, and at that point, I hastily did the factory reset that I should have just done the first time, and saved myself 8 hours of frustrating Googling amongst the world of Android nerds.

And so the tablet is back - admitted with all photos and videos lost (not that there were that many, and I think some are backed up on the PC) and apps to re-install.   But - it is not a brick.  Yay.

(And actually it gets limited use now by my wife mainly - I spend all my time with my beloved Samsung Tab S 7 inch.  A fantastic machine that even Samsung's poor support for its earlier, crappier models does not detract from.)

Update:  Is this the most boring post ever on this blog?  Don't get me started on recent precipitation patterns in South East Queensland, though....   

Fred Flintstone not a reliable guide (and - let's learn about beef)

The palaeolithic diet and the unprovable links to our past

Quite an interesting article here looking at the "palaeolithic diet" idea and why it's a bit of a crock.

I forgot to previously mention - there was a Michael Mosley documentary recently on SBS that looked at the issue of meat in the diet.  His final position f tended to be not very surprising - on health grounds he admits the evidence is not 100% clear, but he leans towards most people eating less meat, especially beef, and certainly not much processed meat.  (I think the evidence against processed meat is pretty strong, not matter who you ask.)

The second part of the documentary was a bit more interesting, looking at the type of meat which is most environmentally friendly.  A bit surprisingly, industrially raised chicken meat came out on top.  Yes,  chickens living all of their short lives in an electronically lit and heated English shed are much better for the planet that a lot fed cow.  But, he did have a bit of a hippie looking farmer scientist who argued cows raised in the old way - on small farms with plenty of grass - were not particularly bad for the environment, given their fertilizing effect and the handy thing they do by making milk as well.

Now, this raises a question that I don't know the answer to - what's the inter-relationship between dairy and meat?  Do we eat dairy cows, or do they end up somewhere else?

Here's a post from an American blog that starts to shed some light:

Dairy cattle are unique in the fact that they can produce high
amounts of milk without significant emphasis on muscle mass.  Muscle
mass is an important trait that is sought after in modern beef
production.  Holstein cattle are a breed of dairy cattle and are the
typical black and white spotted cow that is routinely seen through
today’s popular media when references to cattle and beef are made.

So do we eat dairy cattle?

According to the USDA’s cattle inventory for 2012 there were
approximately 39 million head of beef cows in the US and 9 million dairy
cows. (These numbers reflect cows that have calved)  The inventory for
steers over 500 lbs (steers are castrated males) was an astounding 15
million with heifers (young female cows that have not had a calf) a bit
further behind at around 10 million.  Of this 25 million only 13% are
typically of dairy influence.

Though dairy cattle are the “minority” of the cattle industry (from a
total number standpoint) a portion of them do indeed make it into our
food chain.  Since only cows can produce milk, the male dairy calves are
typically castrated and placed on feed after weaning (weaning is a term
that is used when calves are weaned off of milk) and fed to about 1250
lbs to be harvested for our consumption.

As I mentioned before, the dairy breeds don’t typically exhibit the
muscle mass as typical beef breeds however, they do in fact have a
tendency to show evidence of higher quality grades on average.  Quality
grades are how the industry grades beef cuts, you will see them
displayed as; prime, which is the highest, followed by choice, select
and standard.  Quality grades are based on a combination of age and
marbling (the fat that is deposited within the muscle, it can typically
be seen best on fresh ribeye steaks).  On the other hand, dairy cattle
that enter the food chain typically have much smaller muscle surface
area.  This means, your typical ribeye in square inches is much smaller
than those produced from a beef type animal.

When older dairy type cattle enter the food chain the beef derived
from them usually ends up as “ground beef” used for burgers and patties.

 As far as what happens to male calves of dairy cows - they have a short life and end up as veal.  A lengthy article in last year's Age describes the process, and the controversy.

And let's not forget that male chicks in the chicken industry face an industrial grinder!

By all rights, more men should be vegetarians than women, given the way our gender is generally treated in farming!

New stuff still being learnt about Van Allen radiation belts

An "Impenetrable Barrier" Protects The Earth From Killer Electrons

You would have thought they would know all that there is to know about the near Earth radiation environment, but apparently not.

Moving right along...

Andrew Bolt is now giving detailed suggestions for an Abbott government reshuffle?   How amusing. 

It's all rather hopeless, though.  Malcolm Turnbull has had to trash his reputation to try to show loyalty; if he was honest about how crook he really thinks several government policies are, he'll be chased out of the party room with pitchforks.   I rank everyone else in this way:

Hockey:  who knew he was a man with fear of windmills from 10 km away, who is such a numbskull on climate change that he denies it could ever have an adverse economic impact?  He (like the whole government really) is caught legs astride the barbed wire fence of agreeing with sensible economists that it's not a great idea to kill government spending too quickly, while simultaneously trying to run the "but government spending is going to kill us!" line.  The same fence straddling attempt on climate change is also clear - it's killing the government's credibility.

Hunt:  hopeless, unappealing defender of a bad policy for purely political reasons.

Morrison:  arrogant, quasi-fascist supported by an aggro ugly team of public servants who should be the first to go when Labor regains government.

Johnston:  Angry man prone to saying stupid things under pressure.  Fits in perfectly with this government!

Dutton:  barely appears alive.

Robb:  apparently an engaging character in person; not a glum robot as he appears on the media.    Despite rising above his health issues, not to be forgiven for killing off Malcom Turnbull and giving us this hopeless Prime Minister.

Bishop, B:  the most embarrassing Speaker I can ever recall, with no authority and the nation can see it.  Also unable to be replaced without massive embarrassment to Abbott.  A continuing sore that will last until she decides to go. Stick in there, Bronnie!

Bishop, J:  a relative success at Foreign Affairs, but if Alexander Downer can be, it can't be that hard for any rich lawyer used to schmoozing with people over cocktails, can it?  Likely to be a failure in any other role.

Brandis:  a man long unpopular with many in his own party, is what I heard years and years ago.  A particularly unappealing demeanour to the public.   Must be retained.

Abetz:   unappealing, arrogant, goose like presentation to the public.  Must be retained.

Further assessments as they come to mind.

Let's be unpopular

At the risk of provoking a lynch mob that will burn down my house (which, incidentally, missed the worst of yesterday's intense hail and wind storm, thanks for asking), may I be possibly the first to say that I am finding the amount of media time devoted to Phillip Hughes's death via cricket accident is just a little bit over the top?

Obviously it's sad, and has drama, and was rare, and he apparently had a grand future ahead  of him, etc.  And of course, fame at a national sport means more public interest than, say, when a jockey dies from a horse fall, as seems to have been happening a lot lately.

Despite acknowledging all of that, I still think it's been a bit OTT, the coverage and reaction.

There, it's said.    The 2.5 other people in the nation who share this view now know they are not alone.

The butthurt* is strong in Sheridan (and Abbott?)

We're coming up to a fortnight since Obama gave a speech in Brisbane which apparently led to a lot of behind the scenes yelling by offended government staffers, and Greg Sheridan is still carping on about it:

BARACK Obama’s implicit attack on the Abbott government over climate change will do more long-term damage to the US-­Australia alliance than is commonly thought. There is no need to rehearse the gratuitous nature of the speech, Obama’s failure to tell his Australian hosts what he was going to say in advance — as the most elementary courtesy, much less alliance solidarity, would require — the bad manners of not acknowledging the Governor-General, and the determined effort to embarrass his hosts by referring so crudely to the Australian debate and using, and misusing, iconic elements in that debate.

As Sheridan seems to have the equivalent of a Batphone to the PM's office, I can only assume that they are still fuming.  Which seems a bit of a waste of effort as government credibility collapses on all fronts, not just that one.

*  On the matter of butthurt:  it is not a term I normally use, as I have never been sure whether it derives from a reference to homosexual activity.  I see from Gawker that this remains a matter of much contention - butts can be hurt in many ways, after all.  In any event, I don't particularly want to be associated with Catallaxy reader style hysteria about why homosexuality is repulsive, so I would happily substitute another term, if I could think of one.  Suggestions are welcome...

Origin of multi-limbed Gods?

Baby in India born with four arms and legs dubbed God Boy by parents | Daily Mail Online

These disturbing deformity cases of fused twins, resulting in multi-limbed children/adults, do make you wonder whether the phenomena has anything to do with Hindu origins of representations of their Gods.  I've never read anything much about the origin of the odd looks of Indian deities before...(Well, not that I can recall.)

Leyonhjelm tackles the big issues

Cut ciggie tax, Leyonhjelm urges govt

THE federal government must slash the tobacco excise to crack down on sales of blackmarket cigarettes, independent senator David Leyonhjelm says.

AUSTRALIA'S major tobacco companies have released a report into illicit tobacco products which claims their share of consumption has increased from 13.5 per cent to 14.3 per cent in 12 months.

First, one would have to be very suspicious about the precision with which that estimate has been reached.

Second, Leyonhjelm goes on to show again that you don't have to be immature to be a libertarian, but it certainly doesn't hurt:

The trio called on the federal government to better resource law enforcement agencies to combat the problem - which they say is the equivalent of 156 million packets of 20 cigarettes a year.

But Senator Leyonhjelm says law enforcement isn't the answer. Instead, tobacco excise should be slashed. The government had created a "magnet" for organised criminals, he said.

"The best way to deal with them is not by law enforcement because all we end up with is more police running around in black pyjamas and guns and jumping out of helicopters," the libertarian senator said.

 Says the man who liked to stroke his guns....

He's also trying to stir up gay marriage.   Yeah, majorly important stuff, from a man unhappy with using the word "liberty" in his party name to prevent voter confusion.

Bound to go viral amongst those who follow Australian politics...

Should I know who Hugh Atkin is?

A spectacular urban market

MVRDV's Markthal Rotterdam photographed by Hufton Crow

There are many more photos at the link, but just look at this gaudily decorated, but very spectacular, food market building in Rotterdam:

Probably much to dispute, but right on some key points

30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer | Vanity Fair

The post heading gives my take on this article.  I don't know enough about some of the topics to have a firm  opinion, but on the matters of economic policy, I reckon the article is pretty correct.   

The still complaining Bolt

Isn't it getting ridiculous the preciousness of Andrew Bolt -  his view that every journalist or commentator in the land who is not reflexively anti-Labor is a "Leftist."

Maaate:  your credibility is shot. 

Update:  Bolt goes all Fox News creep on race in America:  blames blacks for being upset when an unarmed petty thief is shot multiple times in the street.   

The facts of the Wilson killing were always obviously going to have conflicting versions, and from this distance it would be foolish to say which was obviously "right".  But its also pretty ridiculous to blame blacks for their upset with no indictment at all.

On watching the brain make decisions

Do Rats Have Free Will? - Neuroskeptic | DiscoverMagazine.com

A fascinating report here on a new study relevant to the interpretation of the famous Libet experiments.

And it combines two things I like - rats and pop philosophy.

Oh. What we missed about the Brisbane speech...

Abbott clueless on how to handle US and China

Gee, it took a long time for anyone to explain this in the media.   Hugh White explaining that Obama's Brisbane speech contained a lot of warnings about accepting China as the regional leader, which Abbott promptly ignored.

An important article.

Important free movie alert! (not really)

I mentioned here months ago that I had bought the Chromecast dongle, but after an initial burst of trying it out, I hadn't gone back to it until last Sunday.  Here's what I discovered:

*  ABC's iview service does hook up to it, as they said it would.  But picture quality on a large screen TV, as you might have suspected from watching it on a tablet, is not good.  (I didn't experiment with the screen format size though - that may make it better.)

*   I don't think the SBS on demand service works with it yet.

*   Movies and shows from the Crackle app seem to play extremely well through it, with good quality.  It's a pity that new material seems to get added there very rarely.

And now for the really important news:

Mothra is available through Crackle!!

Yes, the movie I will always remember as the anti-exploitation exploitation film looks great.  I didn't realise it was in colour and wide screen - I had only ever seen it on a black and white TV in the 1960's.   It actually looks relatively expensive for its day, and Japanese movie production values in 1962 were much higher than I realised.  

I haven't finished watching it yet, but just knowing it's there gives pleases me.

Cat; pigeons

The ABC has flab to be cut

I don't keep up with Australian media intrigue much, so it is curious to read a strong critique of ABC management from one Louise Evans, who appears to have had a very shortlived job as manager of Radio National last year.  Now, her criticisms may well have some element of truth in them, but it would be good to know more about her background (such as when she was managing editor at The Australian) and what went wrong in the ABC job so quickly.

Henry's rubbery figure?

Henry Ergas lines up for duty for some Obama /clean energy bashing in today's Australian, but what caught my eye was this line:

But it works a treat with the billionaires Obama courts, who helped the Democrats outspend the Republicans by some 35 per cent in last month’s elections.

Really?  When I Google the question (with, for example:  "did Republicans outspend Democrats in midterm elections" - because, I guess, most people would assume Republicans did)  I can't see any article that talks about a 35% outspend by Democrats.  In fact, nearly every article quotes the Centre for Responsive Politic's estimates that Republicans slightly outspent Democrats.   Even the Washington Times, a paper with (I think) even less credibility for objectivity than the Australian, if that's possible.

Even Googling using the 35% figure, I can't find any reference quickly.

It's clear that "dark money" donations in the US are hard to track, but even so, I just can't see anyone estimating that 35% Democrat outspend figure.

So it would good to know where Ergas gets this figure from.   Fox News?  Breitbart?  You know, the reliable sources...

We're unpopular - who can we blame?

Gee, now that everyone across the political spectrum is acknowledging that Tony Abbott is proving to be the hopeless Prime Minister that I always said he would be (did you see his closest buddy Greg Sheridan on Lateline last night suggesting he stop the stupid repetition of what he just said?) it's getting a bit boring coming up with yet more examples of his bad political judgement.

But I will.   Everyone needs a hobby.  (Heh).

While everyone - again, really, across the spectrum - has acknowledged that his opening remarks at the G20 about his own political problems were weirdly inappropriate for the occasion, I was reminded while Googling around this morning that he has precedent for not understanding when not to try to score points.   In this paper, someone from ANU back in 2011 noted that Abbott was routinely using addresses in Parliament to visiting foreign leaders to try to score points again the then Labor government.

As for the government generally, I see that the Australian today (in an article by Chris Kenny, of all people) is talking up some bashing of HRC head Gillian Triggs by Scott Morrison over her revising explanations at a Senate estimates hearing about why she didn't enquire into children in detention while Labor was in power.

Now I don't hold any particular card for Triggs - she seems to have decided to deal with her politically appointed Human Rights Commissioner for Selfies, Gays and Transgendered (but mainly selfies) by giving him unlimited travel and accommodation allowances and sending him on his way on a never ending tour of the nation - but this kerfuffle is pretty small change.   The blindingly obvious point about children in detention that arrogant wannabe fascist Morrison overlooks is that while a lot went through it under Labor,  the ones there now have absolutely no idea what the future holds for them. They have been left in a protracted, hopeless situation in hot, isolated, inadequate facilities in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe some of them will end up - one day, no one has any idea when - in poverty stricken Cambodia, because the Coalition decided Malaysia was not up to it when Labor wanted to send some there.

And did anyone see the appearance of ABC head Mark Scott at the Government dominated Senate estimates hearing this week?   The hate against him was strong, for his making the entirely justifiable claim that the budget cuts were quite large that would lead to hard decisions that would have some effects on what they can do and where.  There was a bit of back and forth over whether he had really sent a letter to Christopher Pyne (Pyne rang into the hearing to say he never got a letter, Scott said it was sent.  How petty.  The Chair at one point angrily reminded Scott he was "under oath".  He said something like "am I?")

The political optics of the hearing was terrible - it was like they thought they could cut  the ABC's budget and then blame Scott for any blowback.   "If you cut anything you're making us look bad!"  seemed to be their theme, but Scott is such a smooth performer who is so obviously on top of his game, there was no way that was going to work.   And do Coalition politicians only get their views on the ABC by reading Bolt, the IPA and the Murdoch press?   How do they not notice the consistency high approval of the ABC in seemingly every poll that has ever been held?  If they had any sense at all, their approach would be a sympathetic one, not trying to angrily pass the buck.

So suck it up, Coalition Senators and Members.   You're a bunch of thin skinned cry babies whose own incompetent policies, politicians and Prime Minister have got you to where you are.  And there is no sign  of when a turnaround in popularity is going to arrive.  

Lenore on the "deeper" Abbott government

Tony Abbott keeps digging himself in deeper, and it makes no sense | Australia news | theguardian.com

What a great column by Lenore Taylor, which contains this interesting detail:

Tony Abbott and senior ministers were deeply angry at Barack Obama’s show-stealing climate change speech during the G20. We know because they have been briefing News Ltd columnists to that effect all week – including graphic accounts of how they rang up afterwards and yelled at state department officials for failing to give a “heads up” that the president was going to “dump on” the PM.

Putting aside for one second the extraordinary position we are in when a speech that calls for an ambitious global climate deal and points out Australia has a lot to lose from a warming climate is seen as “dumping” on our prime minister, let’s think about how government
ministers could have responded.

Read the whole thing if you haven't already...

Something in the water at RMIT?

I see that RMIT has on staff yet another economist with ties to the IPA, who has written an economic analysis of cuts to the ABC which is rather pointless, fanciful and will convince no one other than Rupert Murdoch. 

Along with Sinclair Davidson ("inequality? - Ha! you'd have to be a communist to be against it"*) and the absolutely rabidly Obama hating, climate change is just a Leftie religion, Say's Law obsessive, author of the only economics book that gets things right, Steve Kates, RMIT seems to be the Australian centre of Right wing economic extremism and eccentricity.   Doesn't that have an effect on the number of students who want to go there?

* only a slight paraphrase of what I take his attitude to be.

Why semi-historical films can annoy

The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult Alan Turing | Film | theguardian.com

It's a real problem when films based on recent history don't make it clear which bits are real and which are completely invented.   This film about Turing gets a pasting in this review for some inventions which seek to further hurt the reputation of a man with a pretty tragic life.

I missed that one

ABC, climate change: the Coalition is drowning us in nonsense | Australia news | theguardian.com

Kathrine Murphy makes the point everyone understands, whether they be on the Left or Right:

This morning, on the wireless, I heard the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, say the government wasn’t making cuts to the ABC.

The day before, I heard the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, say Tony Abbott hadn’t actually promised before last September’s election not to cut the budgets of the ABC and SBS. If Abbott had said something like that, then he didn’t mean it; and more
likely, we’d all just misunderstood what the prime minister had said.

Also on Wednesday, I heard the prime minister tell the French president, Francois Hollande, that part of the Australian government’s policy arsenal to combat the risks associated with climate change involved funding an agency called the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

What he didn’t tell the French president was the government intends to abolish the CEFC.

In politics at the present time, we are drowning in nonsense. The nonsense waves are not only lapping, elegantly, at our ankles, they are picking us all up and dumping us head first into the sand.

The Abbott government is performing so many contortions, and running so rhetorically ragged, it’s hard to see if anything coherent is actually going on.

I had missed the  bit where Abbott now claimed the Clean Energy Finance Corporation as his own.   Has he changed policy on that?  Or is it just another example where he tells whichever audience before him what he thinks they want to hear?   I think we all can guess which is most likely, can't we? 

Odd cosmic alignments

Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years

It would be funny if, after looking long enough, for the right sort of thing, astronomers eventually find a message written in the sky.    Something more profound than a big smiley face, I hope; although that would be cool too.

Not that Andrew Bolt will comprehend this

Lake-effect snow in Buffalo: Climate change is making snowstorms more extreme.

A pretty convincing explanation here at Slate, with graphs and all.   Snow is a form of precipitation.  More intense bursts of heavy precipitation were always expected to increase under global warming.  

On the downside

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change - IEEE Spectrum

What did I just write the other day about the wild swings from optimism to pessimism you tend to see in prognostications about the future of energy?

Here we have a somewhat interesting, if not particularly well written, article by a couple of Google engineers who explain why Google pulled the plug in 2011 on trying to come up with an entire clean energy solution.  (I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one who didn't even realise Google had such a broad program in the first place.)

The argument they use seems flawed in a couple of respects:  an apparent insistence that a 350 ppm level of CO2 is key (when it has already been well exceeded), and a large downplaying of any possibility of future international co-operation for pricing carbon.

It's ridiculously easy, I'm sure, to find any number of other engineers/economists/scientists who will strongly disagree with these two.

But such widespread diversity of opinion certainly doesn't help guide politicians.

 

More than you probably needed to know about speculums

Here's a novel topic:  the somewhat controversial history of the development of the speculum, as used for pelvic examinations in women. 

While part of the story is merely unpleasant (its inventor using black slaves for experimental surgery), this part, about the then cultural anxiety of the effect inserting anything, um, down there, is amusing for its oddness from the modern perspective:

Prostitutes were often hired as model patients for doctors to practice on. “There’s this really interesting line between torture device, disciplinary device, sexual device,” says Terri Kapsalis, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the author of the book Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Police officers would even leverage pelvic exams as threats against sex workers when they were arrested. Some doctors worried that using the speculum even on proper women might somehow make them sex-crazed.

In 1850, the Royal Medicine and Chirurgical Society of London held a standing-room-only meeting in which the community heard arguments for and against the speculum. These doctors worried that women would mistake the exam for a sexual experience. The British physician Robert Brudenell Carter reinforced this fear in his 1853 book, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria, writing that he had “seen young unmarried women, of the middle class of society, reduced by constant use of the speculum to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner ... to institute an examination of the sexual organs.”

Simplistic rubbish from Leyonhjelm

In his piece about metadata today, David Leyonhjelm makes this claim:

When governments get involved in regulating things they don't understand, things tend to go terribly wrong. Getting into the insulation business, for instance, resulted in installers dying and houses burning down. This proposal has the potential to have equally significant consequences.

Mmmm yes;  the politician most against government regulation of businesses now tries to make an example of a problem that occurred because of inadequate regulation, or enforcement thereof, in a business.

Shameless inconsistency by a gun stroking numbskull.

As for metadata:  if some ISPs are already storing it for a year or two (as the government has said), then who are libertarians to stop them running their business as they see fit? Sure, privacy concerns are raised by the practice, and that is conceded below. 

Common sense suggests that there is no reason to doubt that metadata could be very useful for some very serious criminal investigations and anti terrorist intelligence operations.

The issue with metadata should not be about storage per se, but about who, and the basis on which, access can be given.

If the argument was restricted to that, I don't see a problem.

But the argument that metadata should not be kept or accessible by anyone at all - that doesn't pass the common sense test.

Update:  I see from this Gizmodo article, that the intention of the government legislation is to actually reduce the number of authorities who can access it:

 Currently any authority or body that enforces a criminal law, a law imposing a pecuniary penalty or a law that protects the public revenue is an ‘enforcement agency’ under the TIA Act and can seek telecommunications data where that access complies with the requirements set out in Chapter 4 of the TIA Act. In 2012-2013 data was accessed by around 80 Commonwealth, State and Territory agencies with criminal law or revenue protection functions.

The Bill will require that bodies who are not a ‘criminal law enforcement agency’ for the purposes of the TIA Act must be declared by the Minister to be an ‘enforcement agency’ before they can authorise the disclosure of telecommunications data. These amendments will ensure that only authorities and bodies with a demonstrated need to have telecommunications information can authorise the disclosure of this information. These amendments are consistent with Recommendation 5 of the PJCIS Report that the number of agencies able to access telecommunications data be reduced.

 This is the type of detail that should be being discussed.

World Toilet Day noted

The BBC notes that it's World Toilet Day with a set of international photos of "My Toilet". 

Perhaps I shouldn't be mentioning this in the context of India while their rock star PM is here, a country strangely motivated to fly space missions while having trouble getting toilets to a huge proportion of their population.   (By the way, I had not realised how nationalistic expat Indians could be until now.) 

But it is true, Modi does recognize his national toilet problem, even though the issue there involves more than just building them. According to a recent report, even if villages have toilets available, a lot of people just still like doing it in the field:

The study found open defecation is very common, even in households with toilets. Toilet use did not necessarily increase with prosperity: in Haryana, one of India's richest states, most people in the villages continue to defecate in the open. Also, men living in households with toilets are more likely to defecate in the open than women.

Why do so many Indians still prefer not to use toilets, even if they are available?

The survey found a range of replies - most said they found it "pleasurable, comfortable, or convenient". Others said it "provides them an opportunity to take a morning walk, see their fields and take in the fresh air". Still others regarded open defecation as "part of a wholesome, healthy virtuous life".

It's a bit hard from a Western perspective to see the "virtue" in poo-ing in the open.   Even Greenies who might yearn for recycling their own will at least use a composting toilet.

The other recent story about Indian toilets was about a study indicating that having them available did not obviously improve local health.   Men doing it in the field despite a toilet being handy may well account for part of that.

Ray on that climate deal

Obama’s U.S.-China climate agreement: Carbon budget and exponential curves show why this is a fair deal.

Ray Pierrehumbert, who has posted a lot at Real Climate, explains why he is cautiously optimistic about China reducing its emissions in a helpful way.

I would make the observation that it seems that energy forecasting is always subject to a hell of a lot of guesswork and ideological motivation.   The great pessimism of the 1970's in terms of oil has been completely replaced by great optimism; the enormous influence of fracking technological change seems to have gone more or less unexplained until it was actually happening; solar and energy efficiency seems to have become cheaper faster than was expected.

What I'm hoping for is that the ability to increasingly incorporate renewables in the energy mix in a reliable way has been underestimated by the pessimists.

Senator dependent on voter confusion wants to keep it that way

Crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm threatens to oppose key Government legislation over legal action
Oh, very funny David L:

"They are claiming that in essence I was elected in NSW with [about] 9
per cent of the vote because of a mistake, because of confusion,"
Senator Leyonhjelm said.

And they would be 100% correct.  Even after months of getting your head on TV and interviews in the press as the first libertarian Senator, your party scored a vote of 1.82% in the WA Senate re-run.

Which is nothing compared to how minuscule your and your party's vote was in NSW before it changed its name:

In 2007, David Leyonhjelm, an agricultural consultant with a love of
guns and finely hewn libertarian views, stood for Bennelong against then
prime minister John Howard. As the candidate of the Liberty and
Democracy Party (LDP), he came 12th in a field of 13. He won just 89
votes.

The LDP's Senate team in NSW had won just 7772 votes, 0.19
per cent. But a few months later, the party applied to change its name
to the Liberal Democratic Party. The Liberal party objected strongly,
warning that the new name could confuse intending Liberal voters. But on
legal advice, the Australian Electoral Commission allowed the change.

In 2013, the Liberal Democrats, headed by Leyonhjelm, drew
first place in the 45 columns on the NSW ballot paper. Hundreds of
thousands of voters saw the size of the ballot paper, saw the word
''Liberal'' in the first box, and just put a 1 against it. The LDP won
434,002 votes, or 9.5 per cent - 50 times the vote it won in 2007 before
it adopted the name ''Liberal Democrats''.

What a complete and utter unprincipled shonk David Leyonhelm is for resisting going back to a name that incorporates "liberty", because it suits him and his party to confuse voters.

And Leyonhjelm staffer Helen Dale is apparently on board with her boss's political bribery attempt, tweeting today "Well, the cat is out of the bag, now. Leave our name alone, or say goodbye to TPVs".   Gee, a nastier person than me might make a wisecrack along the lines of "who'd have expected she would be comfortable with deliberate deception?" 

Let's hope for their personal end of the world soon

BBC News - Islamic State: What the Kassig murder video tells us

There's a good piece of analysis here about the recent IS video which (I didn't realise 'til today) showed 19 men being beheaded, most of them Syrian prisoners.

And again, this branch of Islam's grandiose beliefs are important to understanding what is going on:

Unlike previous videos which are believed to have been filmed in Raqqah, a Syrian city which serves as Islamic State's stronghold, this one is shot in Dabiq.

The city features in a recorded statement attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, known as hadith. The hadith are very important to Muslims and are regarded as providing another source of law alongside the Koran.

Dabiq features strongly in the eschatological aspects of normative Islamic belief.

Based on Prophetic sayings, IS believes the town will take centre stage in a cosmic battle between East and West. The armies of Islam will triumph and the West will crumble.

IS will have chosen the town for their latest video quite deliberately as Western leaders are taunted to send ground troops. "We will break this last and final crusade," says "Jihadi John".

If ever a bunch of killers deserved to be blown up pronto by a drone, it would be the group of men who participated in this cold blooded, religiously motivated, mass murder.

A very good Krugman

When Government Succeeds - NYTimes.com

This column adds further justification to my view that libertarianism is nonsense (and dangerous):   it reflexively dislikes government (save for its barest functions) and hence encourages the policy cynicism that Krugman notes at the end:

The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right
and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs.
But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism
about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to
improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified.
It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their
predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders
want to make government work, they can.

Oh, and by the way, the most important part of the column as an example for Australia was about the actual success of the US government's clean energy funding program.  Here's from the link to Bloomberg:

The U.S. government expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from the renewable-energy loan program that funded flops including Solyndra LLC, supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.

The Department of Energy has disbursed about half of $32.4 billion allocated to spur innovation, and the expected return will be detailed in a report due to be released as soon as
tomorrow, according to an official who helped put together the data.

The results contradict the widely held view that the U.S. has wasted taxpayer money funding failures including Solyndra, which closed its doors in 2011 after receiving $528 million in
government backing. That adds to Obama’s credibility as he seeks to make climate change a bigger priority after announcing a historic emissions deal with China.

A $5 billion return to taxpayers exceeds the returns from many venture capital and private equity investments in clean energy, said Michael Morosi, an analyst at Jetstream Capital
LLC, which invests in renewable energy.

Why the British rush?

Exclusive: The three-parent baby trap - is new IVF technique safe? - Science - News - The Independent

It's truly puzzling, the British rush to endorse experimentation with a method of "three parent" IVF that bears no resemblance to  anything that happens in nature for a tiny number of mothers who would use it to bear their "own" baby in lieu of adopting a genetically healthy child.

I was also interested to read, in Wired, of all places, an article that noted freezing eggs is certainly not the fertility panacea that fertility clinics would like young women to think it is.

It's hard to see reproductive technology as not being driven more by money making potential and a modern sense of entitlement over well reasoned ethics and caution as to what is appropriate or not in assisting reproduction.

We don't do "looters and moochers" in Australia

Once again, I see that Sinclair Davidson makes a reference to the Randian term "moochers and looters", and a sweeping and unjustified categorisation of the modern "Left".

Even in America, it didn't do Romney any favours to sound like he was adopting a Randian approach; in Australia, Joe Hockey went Randian-lite with "lifters and leaners", and hasn't it served him a treat?  

So it's puzzling in a way that an economics Professor who is a member of a think tank that would like to have some influence on a "liberal" party's policy should so openly display his own tin ear for political terminology that, quite rightly, does not work in Australia.   The country has long positioned itself as interested in social fairness and eschewing the extremes of both free market capitalism and socialism; what's more, Randian libertarianism doesn't work here either - Australians like gun control and don't have a fetish about rich business men and women being exemplars of all that is fine and noble. 

But seeing I think this is a hopeless Prime Minister of a bad government (something on which the Professor and I might agree on) I should encourage Abbott and his team to ramp up the Randian phraseology.  There would be no surer way of helping them lose the next election.

Yet another visiting world leader making a "shirtfront" joke - Andrew, they're OUT OF CONTROL

Indian PM Modi does a Cameron, and makes a jokey "shirtfront" reference to Parliament.   Do they have no sensitivity at all, Andrew Bolt?   They are OUT OF CONTROL.

Ex-cellent

So far, Tony Abbott's efforts at schmoozing with the big boys (and girls) has helped his popularity, and that of his government's, not one iota.

Delightfully, Newspoll today has two party preferred up to 55/45 in favour of Labor.

While it is not true that the public is always right, it seems pretty clear that this government's unpopularity is due to:

a.  a whole string of broken promises within 12 months of gaining office, and no compelling justification for any of them;
b.  the introduction of one completely un-foreshadowed policy with massive implications for a large section of the population (university fee deregulation);
c.  budget ideas with attempted justifications that anyone can see are nonsense ($7 co-payment that does not pay for the government's health budget, but is going to help reduce health costs in future by funding a cure for cancer?  Yeah, sure.)
d.  Tony Abbott becoming a victim of his own rampant and unprincipled opportunism that gave him leadership of his party, because he can't please everyone on climate change, and is discovering that the noisy, nutty Right's view on the matter really isn't as widely held as he thought. 
e.   A party that does look fossilised and nastily partisan where it should not be - Bronwyn Bishop as speaker will long be remembered as an embarrassment.   And the culture war that many are still wanting to wage is not as widely shared as the Right wing commentairiate has led them to believe.

Not missing Johnno

Seeing Brisbane's been in the news, it seems an appropriate time to note that I finished reading David Malouf's "Johnno" on the weekend, which many regard as the quintessential literary novel about my home town.

I can see why people like the book's atmospheric description of Brisbane of the 40's and 50's. (Actually, it perhaps ends in the early to mid 60's - it's not made clear.)   It certainly paints a picture of a city that has quite a bit of "Southern Gothic" about it, which is not exactly how I remember it as a child.  But then again, the city did take a long time to start developing strongly - I remember sewerage  being installed at home in about '65, and we were only about 9 km or so from the the GPO.   So perhaps his description is accurate, just that I never experienced it.

One small point I did note with particular interest was Malouf's description of Brisbane's icy, cutting winter winds.   In fact, I am pretty sure that global warming has taken care of that, as I do remember  August winds as a child being much colder than I have experienced in the last decade or two.

But as for the story more broadly, I have to say I was very underwhelmed.   The main problem is that I think the book fails completely to explain why Dante (the semi-fictional Malouf) continues into adulthood to be bothered sharing time with Johnno.   I mean, the titular character is really painted as quite a dangerous, permanently immature loon, without any particular redeeming features that I could detect.  Dante is a thoughtful loner, and while you can understand why as a child he might be attracted to Johnno's inordinate self confidence, it really doesn't wash when they become adults and Johnno's thoughts and behaviour become more boorish and self destructive.   [Spoilers ahead] The ultimate revelation  (which I knew was coming, thanks to a review of the book)  of his unresolved feelings towards Dante gives a partial psychological explanation of some of the earlier episodes in the book, and explains why Johnno kept wanting Dante to see him, but it does nothing to explain why Dante would indulge him.   There seems to be no sense of fun for Dante in anything they do together.

According to Wikipedia, Malouf really doesn't like it when people call it a "gay" novel, and I can understand why, as it handles ambiguity of the narrator's sexuality in a pretty mature, matter of fact way that appeals a lot more than the intense identity politics of sexuality that has developed since the novel was written in the mid 70's.   Yet there is little doubt that Johnno's character shows elements of game playing (with women and prostitutes especially) which is hard to see other than as arising from internal conflict about sexuality.   To the extent that it seems to suggest that Johnno not facing up to his true desires is what drove him nuts, yes, it is a "gay" novel.   Sorry, David.

The book also reminded me a bit uncomfortably of "My Brother Jack", a vastly overrated Australian novel about which I can remember very little, except for one evocative passage near the beginning, and the fact that it also dealt with an outgoing character who is ultimately revealed as not the success he thinks he is.    

I can't say I have ever read an Australian novel that I have considered a complete success.  But then again, it's not that I've gone looking very hard.   I've only tried one Tim Winton and was unimpressed.   I think I started something by Peter Carey once - I can't remember what now.   As with Australian film, I just don't find our home grown material terribly interesting or convincing.

The anti intellectual Right

Pope Francis and the G.O.P.’s Bad Science - The New Yorker

... They have Inhofe, who, beginning in January, will possess the authority to interfere with nearly any scientific initiative that the Obama Administration introduces.  You can find the particulars of  his position on climate change, and scientific research generally, in his 2012 book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” Inhofe frequently invokes Genesis in his battle against science because, well, he is a humble man: “My point is, God’s still up there,’’ he has said. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”

So a man who believes that the international scientific consensus is a “hoax” will be in charge of the committee that approves funding for scientific programs in a nation desperately in need of  improving its scientific literacy. If anything, the appalling Cruz is worse; he won’t address evolution directly, but he is an energetic climate skeptic, an opponent of NASA funding, and, of course, the man who, last year, almost single-handedly shut down the government of the United States, which, as Scientific American has pointed out, caused serious and permanent damage to American science.

The article goes on to illustrate that this is a modern sickness of the Right of American politics:

Political leaders never used to care who scientists voted for or whether they believed in God. Scientists were not seen as Democrats or Republicans. (This change did not begin with Cruz and his Luddite colleagues.) In 2006, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker on the Bush Administration’s war on science. It noted that “Vannevar Bush was a conservative who opposed the New Deal, and not quietly. Yet President Roosevelt didn’t hesitate to appoint him, or to take his advice. In 1959, after Dwight Eisenhower created the position of science adviser, in the wake of Sputnik, the Harvard chemist George B. Kistiakowsky assumed the post. Jerome Wiesner, a Democrat who subsequently became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sat on the Science Advisory Committee—which met each month with Kistiakowsky and often with the President. When John F. Kennedy took office, Kistiakowsky and Wiesner simply switched roles.” None of that would be conceivable today.