I trust Julia Gillard will send Michael Smith a sympathy card?

The Michael Smith led smearing of Julia Gillard over 20 year old matters already exposed at the start of her political career, fully endorsed and promulgated by News Corpse figures such as Hedley Thomas, his editor at the OZ, and Andrew Bolt, was in my view a real scandal of extraordinarily protracted political much racking;  and why the Victorian police even entertained Smith's complaint about the witnessing of a Power of Attorney when he was not involved, and those who were lost no money from its use, is something that has been sorely lacking a deserved investigation of its own.

As I wrote of Smith back in 2012:

He makes stupid, bush lawyer comments continually about anyone who signs a false statutory declaration "exposing themselves to perjury", as if this gives more credibility to evidence in a stat dec which is merely reporting rumour.

Smith's courting of Blewitt is ludicrously over the top - playing up to Blewitt as an ex Vietnam vet on Smith's website, etc.

This fake matey bonhomie persona of Smith annoys me no end - he's a dill and a nasty bit of work with an unhealthy obsession with a female Prime Minister.  ..

He claimed many weeks ago - possibly months ago - that he had spoken to Bruce Wilson more than once - that he considered him a "mate" I think he went so far to say.  (Everyone is a "mate" to Smith if they don't tell him he's an asshat.)

Etcetera...

Well, while Julia Gillard seems to be enjoying an early forced retirement, the Australian this weekend (presumably with Smith's co-operation - he is looking for sympathy, I expect) recount how his asshattery has ended anything resembling a career, as well as his marriage to his "Czechoslovakian Princess".

It is in fact quite peculiar:  how Michael Smith got into any of his post police force/defence jobs, or managed to marry an attractive woman:

A former police constable, army corporal, Telstra executive and symphony orchestra managing director, he got his break at another Fairfax-owned station, Brisbane’s 4BC, in 2007. 

Well, actually, to be honest, I did hear him on 4BC occasionally when he started his radio career there, and first impressions were that he was something of a "natural" for that line of work.   But his political views and personality soon enough started to grate.  I presume that it is a great talent for displaying self-confidence in interviews that has got him in executive positions in novel fields - but never for very long, it seems - as well as quickly into some women's beds, I expect.

This Crikey profile actually indicated a flighty, obsessive man with possibly quite serious "personality issues," as Jackson alleges.  (Although I had also picked her as an attention seeking prima donna early in the piece too - I'm sure she has "issues" of her own.) 

My 2012 post was titled "Prepare to backfire".  For Smith, it well and truly did.

It may not be very Christian to gloat over his current circumstances - but if ever someone's life shows evidence of karma, his seems to be it.   (At least for now.)

Update:   I had forgotten about this, but this report was about Brandis and Barnaby Joyce both attending Smith's wedding (only in 2011 I see) at the cost of the taxpayer.   Moreover, if you can believe Smith, there were some quite nausea inducing scenes at the reception:

''Fair dinkum, he was tearing up the dance floor and every young chick there wanted to dance with George,'' Smith said at the time.

Yes.  Brandis has long been known as a chick magnet.   [Insert Julie Bishop eye roll emoti here].

Speaking of Julie, wasn't she happy to talk to Blewitt when Smith would put him on the phone?  That's right, she was.

Yes, the Coalition was up to their eyeballs in giving Smith moral support in what they thought was very politically useful slime.    

I wonder if any of them are offering him a place to sleep now?   Julie's single, I think, so I presume she has a spare room for a friend in need...

 

Sunday with physics and aliens

A fun article has appeared in Physicsworld.com talking of a novel way to look for extraterrestrial intelligence:

Has an advanced alien civilization built a black-hole-powered particle accelerator to study physics at "Planck-scale" energies? And if such a cosmic collider is lurking in a corner of the universe, could we detect it here on Earth?

Brian Lacki of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, has done calculations that suggest that if such an accelerator exists, it would produce yotta electron-volt (YeV or 10²⁴ eV) neutrinos that could be detected here on Earth. As a result, Lacki is calling on astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to look for these ultra-high-energy particles. This is supported by SETI expert Paul Davies of Arizona State University, who believes that the search should be expanded beyond the traditional telescope searches.

Oddly, one possible way of detecting such high energy neutrinos would be via an array of ocean hydrophones.   But the article indicates that they might also be detectable via radio signals when they hit the moon, and that experiment is underway in the NuMoon project, although how actively I can't really tell.  Here's a .pdf list of articles about it. 

All sounds rather fanciful, and as Paul Davies says, once the aliens find what they are looking for in this high energy experiment, why would they keep it operating anyway?

But speaking of detecting aliens, it just occurred to me that another possible explanation for the odd bright lights on Ceres (instead of the current speculation that they are natural ice plumes from solar heating) might be that they are the exhaust from an alien industrial process going on inside.

We like to think big on Sunday mornings....  

John Howard

Gee, on Insiders this morning, John Howard (there to talk about about Malcolm Fraser) was looking very healthy, and sounding articulate, generous and pretty reasonable.

At least, of course, until it came to the his "loyal to the party" line that Tony Abbott has great political skills and will make a recovery in the polls.   (He's also been sucked into climate change skepticism;  but I still suspect that he is persuadable out of the Dark Side on that issue in a way about 50% of Coalition parliamentarians are not.) 

The thing is, hearing Howard talk just reminds us how pathetic Abbott is in comparison when it comes to sounding genuine and reasonable.

Malcolm Fraser

I think even hardened Laborites felt some sympathy for Malcolm Fraser when he broke up in his election concession speech in 1983. His continued active role in the matters of human rights and justice then rehabilitated him well and truly from the Left's point of view.

As for how he acquired the top job - if the Whitlam government was happening now, I would certainly  be attuned to the way the Murdoch press was campaigning against him (I was only a teenager at the time!); but despite that, nothing has come out since then to challenge the view that it was (even when viewed from the Cabinet room) a genuinely shambolic government.

While I understand why the Left was so upset with the Dismissal and Kerr's role, I still find it hard to feel that the nation was badly done by, given that it quickly got to express its views at an election.   As far as I can tell, there is little to suggest that the government could have righted itself, given just a bit more time.   And while no one wants to see Governor-General's dismissing governments as a matter of routine, once or twice a century, provided an election is promptly held, is not a great problem for democracy.   It's one of those cases where practicalities trump principles; sorry.

I know that Fraser's period in government is seen by some as a lost opportunity for economic reform and advancement, but really, my impression is that the whole world was in a confused post Vietnam War/oil shock funk.   Criticisms about Fraser based on economic grounds just seem to be made with too much benefit of hindsight.

And I was thinking that yesterday before Fred Chaney turned up on Lateline and, after praising Fraser for all the humanitarian aspects of his leadership and post political career, he said more or less the same thing:

 But, can I say something, Emma, about the economic thing, which is the great criticism that's levelled against Malcolm: he didn't undertake economic reform quickly enough. It seems to me that Malcolm governed at the most difficult time, a time of change between the Federation settlement that ran from 1910, from the time of Deakin, right through to the 1970s when we'd had high protection, we'd had centralised wage fixing, we'd had a sort of certain pillars - what have been described very well by people like Paul Kelly as the standard pillars of Federation up to that point. Malcolm was there when the big debate was on: did we need an entirely different approach to economic management? There was a huge debate in the Liberal Party under Malcolm's leadership. That debate between the wets and the dries was quite a bitterly-contested one, but by the end of Malcolm's prime ministership, the soul of the Liberal Party had moved to a more open economy, the heart and the mind of the Liberal Party had moved. And part of the success of the - the great success of the subsequent government, the Hawke Government - the Hawks and Keating Government, was that we as an opposition understood that we had to have a more open economy in Australia. So, I would say that Malcolm was there at that most awkward of periods, the period of change, he was on the cusp, and I think that his government and the party that he led at that time was an honourable part of moving into that new space.

 EMMA ALBERICI: And yet, Malcolm Fraser was more inclined to allow the budget to - the deficit to blow out, whereas his Treasurer was a much more fiscal conservative-style Liberal, wouldn't you say?

FRED CHANEY: Well I think we see this battle in every government. I went through the papers that were released for the 1978 government, a government that I - I only became a minister at the end of that year, so they were new to me, and all the arguments about debt and how you would deal with the debt, all the arguments about immigration, refugees, are rehearsed in those documents so long ago. These are almost perpetual problems for government. I think that, as you'll see, any government is always having to moderate the pure economic arguments in favour of what the public are prepared to stand. I think that the Fraser Government could have moved the economic changes along more quickly, but that's the wisdom of hindsight. What I can recall is that in 1983, after we'd lost government, I remember reading in The Australian that Malcolm Fraser had been too tough on the unions. History gets rewritten all the time and I think that there was more movement and economic movement at the time of Fraser than is currently being admitted.

Another bit of praise for Fraser, this time from a rather unusual source (about whom I will post more soon) is at Michael Smith's blog.

As good an explanation as any..

Philosophical humour

'Kant Is a Moron': Vandals Mark Philosopher's Former Home Near Kaliningrad — The Atlantic

There is fun to be had in the comments (which suggest the writer got his anti-Kantian philosopher wrong, too.)

Further topic suggestions for Senator Leyonhjelm

The Senator continued his needy, "look at me!" Parliamentary tactics yesterday by suggesting that Australian native animals be kept as pets.   (Unfortunately, he seems to have overlooked the fact that most Australian marsupials have rather small brains and/or quite selective taste buds that go with their cute, furry bodies.  Hasn't he ever heard the makers of Skippy talking about what it was like trying to work with a 'roo?)

He's probably going to run out of libertarian themed topics soon, so I think I'll have to make some suggestions:

a.   Introducing the LeyonBit.  A novel private currency David mints in his basement, featuring 6 different breads of moggies on the back side, and available for paying for IPA membership and lectures, as well as catnip.

b.   Come visit Free Leydonia - created by lashing together a few left over oil platforms from Bass Strait, relocated to Sydney Harbour.  A grand new basis for innovative society, unleashing the power of freedom and ammunition from government regulation and clothes (see next point.)

c.   Relax the nudism laws - seriously, do you know how much wealthier both the poor and rich could be if we could be free from the tyranny of buying  pants - or underpants for that matter.   Wearing cats can keep you warm, anyway.  And if you're offended by wrinkly old testicles on public display, that's your problem, not David's.   There's far too much of this offence taking these days anyway.

I'm working on others...

What about Kansas?

It was disappointing to hear Fran Kelly on Radio National yesterday having a jolly interview with Art Laffer in which she did not raise the matter of Kansas and its disastrous, on going, tax cutting experiment.

Unemployment in Kansas - lagging badly.

Lost revenue in Kansas - credit rating lowered, roads and school funding cut.

Art Laffer - still defending it.

No warning first?

BBC News - Judges sacked for watching porn

I can understand the public service, and private companies for that matter, having policies against use of work internet access to distribute pornography in any fashion, or the watching of any that is illegal, or in circumstances where any other staff could possibly see or know that a person was watching or using it.   And a blanket approach certainly avoid any issues of trying to categorise less or more acceptable breaches of the rule.

But surely, everyone recognises there is a scale of seriousness in which such a blanket rule could be breached?

And it's not as if the access costs to the internet are likely to raise the issue of these judges wasting public money by (say) watching 5 minutes of vanilla porn when everyone else in the office has gone home, as against downloading some recent case law.

So one would imagine a detected breach should result in at least a warning first, and not an instant dismissal.  

Will the media stop reporting it seriously, now?

Mars One Is Broke, Disorganized, and Sketchy as Hell

Ice plume explanation for Ceres?

Bright spots on Ceres could be active ice : Nature News & Comment

“What is amazing is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in the line of sight,” said Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Nathues, who leads the team for one of the Dawn cameras, showed
the images on 17 March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

At dawn on Ceres, feature number 5 appears bright. By dusk, it seems to fade. That could
mean sunlight plays an important role — for instance, by heating up ice just beneath the surface and causing it blast off in some kind of plume r other feature.

Ceres is believed to be made of at least one-quarter ice, more so than most asteroids. Dawn’s goals to figure out where that ice resides and what role it plays in shaping the asteroid’s surface. One idea is that the ice is blanketed by a very thin layer of soil. The ice may occasionally squirt up in towering ‘cryovolcanoes’, thanks to internal pressures within the asteroid.

An asteroid made of 1/4 ice?   Might be a good place for settlement then, except for the fact there is next to no gravity, I suppose.

Taking nutters seriously?

EPA debunks 'chemtrails,' further fueling conspiracy theories ( video) - CSMonitor.com

I suppose it's better, on balance, that a government agency actually addresses conspiracy nutters; but it's a shame in a way that they are being treated as worthy of even addressing.

Perhaps the EPA's statement should have been more "calling a spade a spade"; something like "if you genuinely believe this global conspiracy, there's a good chance you need psychiatric help."

Have to agree

Joe Hockey outclassed on Q&A, by an economist

Mind you, it's not hard for Joe to be "outclassed".   He's just a windbag who shows no consistency in painting an economic picture.  A poor ministerial performer out of a government full of them.

Update:  Ha!  Judith Sloan thinks Peter Martin is an idiot for saying Daley was more credible than Hockey, in a ranty, shouty, straw man and nonsense filled post at Catallaxy.  (Why is she never this ranty on TV?   Why won't she repeat some of her more ludicrous claims there, but adopt a pretence at being more moderate than she really is?)

Her argument that abolishing negative gearing would be "double taxation" is particularly hard to follow, and I had to search the internet to remind myself how she even comes up with it.  In this takedown of her arguments, we get this explanation from JS:

To eliminate negative gearing would be to introduce double taxation. The flip side of an investor taking a loan to buy an asset is a lender providing the loan. And that lender pays taxation on the associated profit.

As the article notes:

Sloan’s argument that “the flip side of an investor taking a loan to buy an asset is a lender providing the loan” and that to disallow the cost of borrowing by investors would amount to “double taxation” is ridiculous.

Using this logic, the private health insurance rebate is not really a cost to the budget, since it is income in the hands of health funds that in turn pay tax to the government. Using the same logic, childcare should be made tax deductible, since childcare centres would earn higher profits, part of which would also be remitted back to the government via company tax (not to mention the extra income taxes paid by childcare workers). To do otherwise would amount to double-taxation, according to Sloan’s twisted logic.

It is plainly nonsense, involving Sloan creating what amounts to her special meaning for the phrase "double taxation".

In other of the collection of her "Greatest Hits of Nonsense":  she won't read The Economist because it is "deeply Green, deeply Keynesian".   (Belief in climate change as a serious issue is an automatic disqualifier for 'seriousness' for dear Judith.)   And let's not forget, Australia's compulsory superannuation "is a tax".   (Again, a completely individual use of terminology, as far as I can tell.) 

Douthat on the poor

For Poorer and Richer - NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat makes a brief contribution to the debate about whether the "social crisis" amongst the American poor is a problem of economics or culture.

He seems to think both sides have some valid points, although (not to my surprise, given his constant Catholic angst about the sexual revolution) he leads more to blaming culture change.

He does make one point which, I think, has some validity, and it's one that has surfaced from time to time in the threads of the Catallaxy blog, before their permanent decline into name calling tedium and obsession:

But recognizing that culture shapes behavior and that moral frameworks matter doesn’t require thundering denunciations of the moral choices of the poor. Instead, our upper class should be judged first — for being too solipsistic to recognize that its present ideal of “safe” permissiveness works (sort of) only for the privileged, and for failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainments it produces, the social agenda it favors) for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the television or firewalling the porn.

It's a worry, my giving quasi-support to the uber Catholics of Catallaxy who think the world started all going wrong in about 1960;  but Catholicism and economic libertarianism were always  philosophically incompatible.  Bigger fool the Catholics for staying in that marriage of convenience, just because they think a mutual hatred of a third party should keep them happy together.

Hello, Thomas

Edison Worked on a Spirit Phone to Record Voices of the Dead | Mysterious Universe

I think I've heard about this before, but I didn't recall that he had been happy to explain all about it in the first edition of his memoir.

Probably a good sign that the policy is OK

Rupert Murdoch blasts Malcolm Turnbull over media reform

But, seeing I have trouble keeping fresh in mind the arcane world of media ownership and broadcast rights in Australia, maybe I'm wrong...

Unintentionally amusing comment

'Horsewoman of the Apocalypse': Liberals defend Peta Credlin against text attack

Julie Bishop commenting on this story:

"It's very colourful language," Ms Bishop told Sky News.

"It's deeply unfortunate it has been said and been made public.

"The less the internal workings of the Liberal Party are made public, the better off for everybody."

When even Cory Bernardi is against it...

Remarkable news this morning that even Cory Bernardi is against Christopher Pyne's threat to cut (not very expensive) science funding if he doesn't get his way on massive University reforms which came out of the blue after the election.

What's not so surprising is Senator Leyonhjelm's predicatable and purely ideological driven support of no government funding for science:

But Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm said he had no qualms about cuts to research because government funding crowded out the private sector.

"I'd wind back government-funded research in a heartbeat, it's hard to justify in a climate of big deficits," Senator Leyonhjelm said.

Doofus.

Keynesian pursuits

Last week Jason Soon linked to a review of a new biography about Keynes that appeared in the (UK) Telegraph.  That review only paid short attention to the parts of the book about his tangled love life, noting as follows:

Keynes’s love of ballet was strengthened through his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, but in the decade prior to his marriage, Keynes had been an active homosexual – even keeping statistics on his sexual encounters. The tangled and overlapping love lives of the Bloomsbury set is as confusing as it is salacious but if this section drags, this is only a small eddy in a book which otherwise flows freely. 

Well, there's no fun in that lack of detail, is there?

Over the weekend, I found a review by the aging, Lefty turned Conservative, Paul Johnson, who was happy to expound more upon this part of the book:

Universal Man contains a fact-packed chapter entitled 'Lover', which contains a good deal of new (to me, at least) information. Keynes's letters chronicle 'the initiations, experiments, risks, sprees, settled confidence and ultimate stability of his sexual history'. Keynes first had sexual intercourse with another male in 1901, when he was seventeen. He discovered (or said he did) that at Cambridge 'practically everybody ... is an open or avowed sodomite'. Apostles divided their activities into 'higher sodomy', which was non-physical but intense, and 'lower sodomy', which was anything else. Keynes performed both, using his persuasive powers for what he called 'flirtation', and his affairs embraced a formidable number of people. Sometimes merely the intimate exchange of ideas was involved - for Keynes intelligence was a major sexual component. Thus he conceived of Einstein, whom he met in 1926, as 'a naughty Jew-boy, covered with ink, pulling a long nose as the world kicks his bottom; a sweet imp, pure and giggling ... I had indeed a little flirt with him.' In the same vein, after a meeting with Lloyd George he wrote, 'I had a terrible flirtation with Ll. G. yesterday.' After Cambridge he transferred his activities to London, writing to Lytton Strachey in 1906, 'I am off to dine at a low sodomitical haunt in Soho ... where guardsmen offer their services at half a crown a bottom.' He compiled, in 1915 or 1916, a list of his sexual partners, identified by their initials and years, showing the wide range of his conquests, from 'lift boy of Vauxhall' and 'sixteen year old under Etna' to 'stable boy of Park Lane' and 'the Chemist's boy of Paris'. The social mix was striking, and included 'the clergyman' and 'Grand Duke Cyril of the Paris Baths'. 

It's rather strange a century later to read about the way the English intelligentsia became so enamoured of the idea of homosexual love as (potentially) a thing of purity and beauty, and intellectualised it so much.* I'm sure I've read that the blame goes back to a 19th century revival of scholarship into ancient Greece.  (The ancient Romans thought the Greeks were so enthusiastically gay because they spent too much time wrestling nude; little did anyone see that naked male pastimes 2,300 years ago would lead to betrayals of Western values to an evil brand of socialism in the 20th Century.  I'm referring of course to the Cambridge spy ring,  not Keynes.)

This guy (I have no idea who he is, writing in Forbes in quasi defence of Niall Ferguson's silly comment that Keynes' homosexuality influenced his economics) at least explains the culture of his times in (what sounds like) an accurate way:

He [Keynes] was not ‘gay’ in the modern sense of the world, fighting against prejudice and bullying from a bigoted establishment. Keynes and his circle were the establishment, whose prejudice led them to bully others. The Cambridge Apostles is the definitive book on the group in which Keynes lived and moved and had his being. He and his circle embraced what they called ‘the higher sodomy’ which was based on the idea, not just that sodomy should be tolerated, but that everything else was inferior. The philosophy of the higher sodomy held that the highest form of human relations was one in which men of refinement, intellect, class and aesthetic superiority combined their male friendships with sexual relations. To go to the club and converse with men of high intellect and then to have to go home to the little woman is a lower life, a falling short of the higher sodomy.

As Strachey’s biographer put it:

“They thought that love of young men was a higher form of love. They had been brought up and educated to believe that women were inferior —in mind and body. If from the ethical point of view . . . love should be attached only to worthy objects, then love of young men was, they believed, ethically better than love of women.”

We have to avoid anachronisms here: Keynes was not the friend of the bride in a modern rom-com, who loved to gossip with the girls. He was drenched in, and in some ways intensified, a culture of misogyny which was characteristic of both his particular era and of his academic milieu. The movement to sexually integrate British universities was a matter of great debate during Keynes’ time at Cambridge. The intensity of feeling is hard for modern people to imagine: Dorothy Sayers’ excellent mystery, Gaudy Night, uses this as the backdrop to a series of crimes and provides Sayers, a Christian feminist (and the only female member of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien’s famous Inklings literary society,) with the opportunity to make the case for women’s equality. Keynes himself actively criticized integration, at least in his own case, opposed having women in his classroom. He went so far as to say that he found female modes of thinking repellant:

“I think I shall have to give up teaching females after this year. The nervous irritation caused by two hours’ contact with them is intense. I seem to hate every movement of their minds. The minds of the men, even when they are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellent”

Interesting.  I suppose you could argue that the rise of feminism has meant the fall of homosexual intellectual elitism, which is a good thing all around.   Funny too, given that both feminism and the gay lobby now are considered allies, especially in some dubious identity politics. 

Anyway, Paul Johnson seems very enamoured of the book, and for a crusty Conservative, he actually seems to hold Keynes in high regard.

*  If only TV and Australian Googlebox had been around at Cambridge back in the 19th century, perhaps everyone would have giggled away the idea of gay couples as having the higher attainment of intellectual purity. 

Floating to the edge of space

Hey, here's some information on one balloon based competitor to Branson's harebrained space tourism venture.

It seems that for about half the price, rich folk will get a 5 to 6 hour ride, spending 2 hours looking at the view from 30 km, without the possible stomach churning effect of sudden weightlessness.  Then they come back down on an already deployed parawing, ending up perhaps 200 to 300 km from where they took off.

This sounds much, much safer than the rocket powered joyride in the space rocket with the weird moving wing design.

Here's the World View Experience website, with some pretty illustrations.

I wish them luck.

Catty

A certain accidental Senator seems to me to be a bit "needy" for attention.  He's given to making speeches to an empty Senate chamber (I suppose, to keep his huge [/sarc], accidental voting base appraised of his views on guns, gay marriage, and how awful government really is) but it has now extended to include puff pieces on, for goodness sake, the cats in his life.

While it's not surprising to know he follows the Heinlein line on how cats are a libertarian's preferred pet,   many readers of the Guardian piece have noted the irony of the way Senator Blofeld then emphasises the importance of keeping furry libertarian analogues under the strictest control. 

Yes, that is true:  cats can't be trusted to do the right thing, just like their fur-free political analogues....

In which I do not criticise Freedom Boy (much)

The Australian government's data retention scheme is not 1984 come to life | Tim Wilson | Comment is free | The Guardian

Good Lord - the nation's most irritating, self aggrandising, political appointee to the Human Rights Commission has written a column on data retention that is moderate and reasonable, and I can't really find anything about it to criticise.

Next point - why has he started wearing a cowboy hat on twitter, the twit?

Please explain

Paul Grimes sacked over lack of 'strong, mutual confidence' with Barnaby Joyce | Australia news | The Guardian

I still don't follow exactly what has gone here.  Is the implication that Grimes was going to dispute Barnaby Joyce's claim that changes to Hansard had not been directed by him (Joyce), but then he didn't, for reasons unknown?   If so, can't that be stated more clearly in reporting?

Oh look - another bit of rubbish from the pages of The Australian

Unfinished business for Abbott, Brandis | The Australian

Chris Merritt here overlooks an obvious solution - replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull and the Triggs "problem" goes away.

Merritt's argument is rubbish anyway - does he think a government can fairly remove an appointee to a statutory authority just by arguing they think the person is biased by the timing of one report?   The Coalition complaint about Triggs is trumped up, bullying rubbish.

Saying that Triggs has to go because of the government not liking her (which is essentially all that has happened) is ludicrous.   Triggs isn't hurting the HRC - it's the government that has shot itself in the foot. 

Gene fiddling caution

Scientists sound alarm over DNA editing of human embryos : Nature News & Comment

Note that the gene editing is said to be of benefit for preventing inherited diseases.

As with "three parent babies" - the obvious advice "just don't have your own baby" to people with clear inheritable, serious diseases just seems too hard in this age of entitlement.

The poor and their values

When Values Disappear - NYTimes.com

This short Krugman column leads to an interesting argument about the relationship between poverty and values.

If you want a dose of "brony" weirdness for today...

What a masculinity conference taught me about the state of men | Life and style | The Guardian

(Actually, there are some comments which make some decent points - and many that don't.  One that I agree with:  "Is the hairstyle affected by the author an attempt to be more like a My Little Pony?" Ha.)

A sign of things to come?

I have mentioned a few times how this summer seemed to involve relatively few storms in Brisbane (but more in Sydney - although that is just my impression.)   It turns out that the Brisbane weather may be an example of future weather under climate change:

In summer, however, the analysis of observational data coming from weather stations and satellites reveals a clear decrease in the average storm activity. This means a reduction in either frequency or intensity, or of both. The scientists studied a specific type of turbulences known as synoptic eddies, and calculated the total energy of their wind speeds. This energy, which is a measure for the interplay between intensity and frequency of high and low pressure systems in the atmosphere, dropped by roughly one tenth since 1979.

"Unabated climate change will probably further weaken summer circulation patterns which could thus aggravate the risk of heat waves," says co-author Jascha Lehmann "Remarkably, climate simulations for the next decades, the CMIP5, show the same link that we found in observations. So the warm temperature extremes we've experienced in recent years might be just a beginning."

One for the libertarian reader

It seems to me that Jason Soon has taken an unfortunate turn into increased enthusiasm for libertarianism, and it has been noted before that he and other libertarian inclined people have a bit of a "thing" for Victorian England as an example of a society where matters such as drug use and prostitution were sort of self regulated and every one (at least with money) had a jolly old time and society trundled on and inventors invented and everything worked out for the best.

Well, this review of a book about the invention of the modern police force puts a bit of a different light on that - in particular, with the way some were using (for about 70 years before they lost!) a libertarian argument against even having a professional police force:

Despite this collection’s title, the earliest extracts were written in the 1750s, and highlight the theoretical positions that would underpin the decades-long debate about whether a paid, uniformed, hierarchical body of men should be created to replace the local, unpaid constables responsible for keeping order in public spaces and bringing criminals to justice. Henry Fielding’s Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) is accepted as the first noteworthy plea for the methodical prevention of crime, rather than solely an improvement in the arrest and punishment of criminals after the fact. Fielding envisaged a new body of crime-fighters as just one element in a new moral order in which the poor would be prevented from turning to vice and crime in the first place. He advised severe curbs on places of entertainment, on the selling of alcohol, on gambling and any aspect of modern life that would tempt the weak-willed into becoming “vicious”. An instant refutation, by the journalist Richard Rolt, pointed out that top-down attempts to “moralize” the lower orders would undermine their liberty and sense of independence. A nation of cringing, hypocritical slaves would emerge, Rolt wrote; better to allow the poor to exercise their own moral choices and accept whatever punishments might follow their wrong decisions.

Later eighteenth-century “moral reformists” wished the poor to be able to benefit from the order and stability that a professionalized police force would foster. Writing in 1780, the philanthropist Jonas Hanway pointed out that not having an effective police was “enslaving” British men and women – who were prey to villains of various kinds and were the most vulnerable part of the population whenever serious civil disorder took place. A body of paid and trained “civil soldiers” – men drawn from the citizenry, not from the Army – would protect against the “atrocious violence” visited on people during criminal acts or breakdowns in order. Such an organization would obviate the need for the local militia or the standing Army to be called in during unrest. Or, as the Solicitor-General put it in 1785: “To keep the bayonet out of employ, the power of the civil officer must be rendered efficacious”.

 Sir Robert Peel would reuse the slavery/liberty arguments during the passage of his 1829 Act; and as his Bill passed, the journalist Albany Fontblanque, a supporter of Peel’s legislation, wrote of “the liberty we have hitherto enjoyed of being robbed and knocked on the head at the discretion of their honours, the thieves”. Legislation similar to Peel’s had failed in 1785 because of outrage at the attempt to centralize London’s policing – wresting control away from the parishes, and especially from the City of London, and handing it to government. Peel cleverly left the City out of his 1829 draft Bill, circumventing that particular vested interest; and he overcame the fears that the new force was to be a militarized body imposed from above by insisting that the Metropolitan Police would bear firearms only in exceptional circumstances and would wear uniform that was as close to civilian clothing as possible. Nevertheless, “Peel’s Private Army” was one of the many slang names Londoners gave to the new force, while the Weekly Despatch newspaper routinely referred to them as “police soldiers”.

 Well, the libertarians of 1750 to 1820 look rather like gooses now, don't they?   Just like Leyonhjelm.  (Although, the article does go on to give examples of some excessive powers of Victorian police, I must admit.)

Update:   when you look at things like this list of English legislation brought in during the Victorian era, it seems to me that the period is actually a good argument for sensible government regulation and intervention in matters relating to labour, public health and eduction, as against the libertarian inclination to be against regulation.  With few exceptions, the period serves as an example of the inadequacy and failure of libertarian philosophy to improve society, doesn't it?

Update 2:  this website appears to have reliable, and rather fascinating, information regarding the English criminal justice system  in the 18th century, including its gradual transition into something more recognisable as modern.  The section regarding the push for professional, government controlled, policing is here:

Policing, such as it was, was rather inefficient in this new urban context. The old system was a mixture of Night Watchmen and 'Thief takers' who were private individuals employed by the wealthy and by magistrates. The system was certainly vulnerable to corruption: thief takers on occasion entered into alliances with thieves to share rewards for the return of stolen property (one is reminded of the old saying: 'set a thief to catch a thief') The bad reputation thief takers is in no small measure due to the exploits of the notorious Jonathan Wild who styled himself as  'Thief Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland'. He was exposed in 1725 as a leading reciever of stolen goods. 
 
The wealthy themselves were frequently reluctant to be magistrates in urban areas. Many lower middle class magistrates, during the latter part of the century, accepted payment for executing warrants for the arrest of offenders. The quality of these 'trading justices' was regarded as low and the Conservative writer Edmund Burke denounced them as 'scum of the earth'  It is as well to remember, however, that payment for services can be seen as a continuation the older tradition in which personal relations predominated over any notion of the impartial application of law.

There was much talk in the latter part of the century about the establishment of a New Police at the turn of the century Robert Peel who became Tory Prime Minister made several attempts in parliament to set up a professional full time police force. He was thwarted (until he finally suceeded in 1829) by country landowners, still powerful in parliament before 1832. 

Their resistance was quite rational. As we have already seen, their control over the local criminal justice system enhanced their rule and status. If it came to tracking offenders then they had plenty of gamekeepers and retainers at their disposal. The traditional fear of the French model of a powerful centralised national police was anathema to the English gentry and their notion of liberty. But the urban middle and lower middle classes had quite a different problem of security. As Philips comments

"The squirearchy might treasure the discretion which the old system allowed them, to choose among a variety of punishments ranging from an informal reprimand to death; but the urban shopkeeper wanted something which would efficiently protect his commercial property." (Philips 1980: 126) 

In the early years of the nineteenth century it was the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the growing fear of the urban masses becoming revolutionary which finally tipped the balance in Peel's favour. But at that point the issue was public order and rebellion rather than tracking down criminal offenders. Indeed during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in 1780 a mob had taken over the centre of London for 5 successive days. This concentrated the minds of those who resisted the idea of a new police, again not so much from the perspective of effective thieftaking but the more general issue of public order. We shall discuss this in a future lecture.

 As for the attempt to crack down on crime by making hanging the punishment for all sorts of things, the section begins:

 As theft was becoming more of an issue as we have described above, so the authorities did the only thing they knew and intensified the penalties. It would be some time before it was generally understood that the best way to deal with crime is to increase the certainty of detection rather than simply impose more severe penalties. The ruling elites hung on to the law and the gallows as the main mechanism of rule at their disposal. The expansion of crimes which carry capital punishment (the death penalty) is a major feature of the period. Not only murderers but thieves, rapists, forgers, were hung. In 1688 there were 50 offences which carried the death penalty. This is amazing by modern standards when even murder gets only imprisonment, but by 1800 there were 200 offences punishable by hanging. The eighteenth century was thus a period of expanding use of capital punishment. People were being hung for all manner of petty crimes. Some court records show that during the two years 1774-6  people were hung for arson, cattle stealing, 'destroying silk on a loom', 'wilfully wounding a horse', sheep stealing, swearing false oathes, 'impersonating another to receive a seaman's wage', and similar.

Vindication 20 years later

How the “Disney Renaissance” marked a turning point in the animated movie musical, from Little Mermaid to Frozen.

Well, if only this video had been on the (then non-existent*) internet in 1994.  Because I do remember at a quasi-date dinner being undertaken in about that year that I was telling a woman that it seemed to me the Disney animated musicals were really replacing (if in somewhat shorter form) the Broadway musicals of the 50's and 60's, and she rather poo-poohed the suggestion.

Mind you, as a single man talking to a woman I had just met about anything to do with Broadway musicals was probably not sending exactly the right message, if you know what I mean.   Oh well:  as the link explains, I was exactly right.  (And I still say Frozen is one of the crappiest Disney musicals around.)

* there is no surer way of feeling old than to realise - "oh, that's right, that was pre-internet."
 

Four year anniversary remembered

250,000 Japanese still displaced 4 years after quake

Monsters Inc

The House That Stalin Built | The National Interest

Here's a very favourable review of (yet another) biography of Stalin.  A sample:

Stalin, whose party nickname was Koba, succeeded, against incalculable
odds, in helping to create a Bolshevik dictatorship in the world’s
largest country; through adroit maneuvering, he positioned himself in
absolute control of that dictatorship. The result, however, bore no
resemblance to the proletarian utopia predicted by Karl Marx. In fact,
the Bolsheviks were turning Marxism on its head by launching a
revolution in Russia. Marx always thought that the revolution would come
in Western Europe. The notion that a Communist revolution would emerge
in Russia, where there was no real proletariat, would have dumbfounded
him. According to Kotkin, the Russian empire’s dissolution in wartime
meant that “the revolution’s survival was suddenly inextricably linked
to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or
no proletariat.” The regime scrambled to come up with a theory
justifying tactical alliances with local “‘bourgeois’ nationalists,” a
term that had as much bearing on reality as did the later employment of
“kulak,” which implied that any peasant who owned a cow or two was
somehow part of the exploitative class. 

 I've never read a book about Stalin, and this one sounds quite good.  (It is further described in the review as "uncommonly entertaining".)

I am currently reading a (not very big) book on Hitler, concentrating on his life up to the time he was diagnosed with hysterical blindness after being in a gas attack in World War 1.   (I knew he had been in a battlefield gas attack, and that this was believed to be why he would not countenance use of such weapons in World War 2, but had not  known he had psychological blindness as a result.)   The book's argument is that the doctor who treated him for his blindness really set Hitler off psychologically on his future path, but I haven't got to that part yet.

There are many other things I hadn't realised before - that he was very likely the result of an incestuous marriage; how long he had tried to make it as an artist, and that his school teachers found him irksome as well.  He was very depressed after his Mum died. 

Certainly, he was an oddball from a very early age. 

Update:  here is an interesting extract from an earlier review of Kotkin's bio of Stalin:

One might disagree, however, with Kotkin's assumption that Stalin's paranoid, vindictive nature was a product of, not a motive for, the pursuit of power and that it was slow to develop. Stalin's youthful sexual liaisons may have been normal ('Stalin had a penis, and he used it,' Kotkin remarks), but his impregnation of the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Siberian orphan Lidia Pereprygina was, even by the standards of the most unbourgeois Bolshevik, the kind of behaviour to be condoned only in a male stoat. Kotkin omits many of the acts of the young Stalin that mark him as a creature of exceptional turpitude among the thugs, bandits, fanatics and misguided adolescents of the Transcaucasian Social Democratic Party. For example, when General Griaznov was assassinated in Tbilisi in 1906 and a bystander, Joiashvili, was arrested, Stalin composed an incriminating pamphlet to ensure that Joiashvili and not the real assassin was hanged (Stalin admitted this with pride in the 1920s). Likewise, he tried to have fellow party members executed on false accusations of treachery. The best evidence for any semblance of humanity in the young Stalin is not in Kotkin's narrative but in the pictures. The photograph of a dishevelled Stalin standing with his mother and his in-laws by the open coffin in which his first wife lies is the sole picture of Stalin showing anything like remorse, sorrow and embarrassment. Kotkin might also have cited some of the postcards Stalin sent back to Georgia from London, in which he appears as just a laddish adventurer out to have a good time, hoping not to shock his new bride.

Stalin's childhood injuries and illnesses are well catalogued by Kotkin, but he does not pursue them as a possible source of Stalin's sadism (as some have done, on the Dostoevskian principle that the primary desire of a man suffering from toothache is that everyone should share his agony). Medical historians conclude that Stalin was in more or less acute muscular, neurological and dental pain all his adult life. His pain threshold was high - as is testified by his endurance of extensive root canal treatment from the bravest man in his circle, the dentist Yakov Shapiro. But Stalin's brutality towards the medical profession, hitherto sacred to all Russian authorities, hints at the frustrations of a man in unremitting pain. (Kotkin does not mention the first murder of a doctor attributed to Stalin: the death in 1927 of Dr Bekhterev, two days after he remarked that he had just examined 'a paranoiac with a withered arm'.)

 Hmmm.  It looks like my idea for history changing time travelling doctors (see previous posts referring to Hitler needing a fecal infusion to make him a nicer person) has to include a couple of good dentists to deal with Stalin.   

Not sure what this proves...

Jason Soon yesterday tweeted with approval this article by the Grattan Institute arguing in favour of electricity network privatisation.   You know the story - private companies can run networks cheaper instead of the unionised government networks.

Yet one of the key tables in the article is this:

But surely this chart is hardly conclusive of the privatisation argument if the comparison is between government owned network Queensland and privately owned network Victoria.

Given the geography and population spread of Queensland, wouldn't you expect network costs to be substantially more expensive?   Yet they are clearly less than double, and the total cost of electricity is virtually identical.  

OK, people can point to the New South Wales vs Victoria columns (and I admit, it's hard to understand why the NSW network costs should be so much larger than Queensland;)  but the point remains - it seems to me the charts show that public ownership is capable of maintaining reasonable network costs and the same electricity costs to consumers.  

Update:  I see that The Australian is even worse - it runs a "fact check" that privatisation is definitely better for electricity prices - but when you click through to the graphs some of them actually show Queensland with smaller electricity costs than Victoria!

The comparisons they rely on most heavily are always about the rate of price increases over the years, including to the network costs, while conveniently ignoring where we are now at with actual prices to the consumer.  

Update 2:  After listening to John Quiggin on the radio this morning:  I should have also mentioned that South Australia did undergo a type of privatisation, yet has very high network costs for a very small and concentrated population, and substantially higher consumer prices.   How is this supposed to support the privatisation case?

Easily conned companies

I have never heard of this woman before, but given the contents of this report, I would be surprised if she turned out not to be an extraordinary fraud.

But what surprises me even more is that someone like her can get a publishing deal and (by the sounds of) a sweet deal with Apple, and those companies do not ask for the most basic of verifications that her claims are true. 

Well, I guess with Apple, Steve Jobs went all "alternative" on his cancer treatment, and fat lot of good it did him.  Maybe it's just in the company's genes, so to speak, to be gullible on matters relating to that illness.

Having second thoughts, Joe?

Hockey trial: 'I don't instruct or control' the North Sydney Forum

Somehow [he says with what he hopes readers will detect as understatement] I don't think the Hockey evidence is going all that well for him at his defamation trial.

Update:  has this been done before?  (I did see one with "Joke", but I thought this was more appropriate):

Now, the Hockey family seem such sensitive souls, I wonder if I should feel guilty about this?   But really, the guy lives in a $6 million Sydney mansion and has several other bits of real estate around the place, and a wife who is a good earner in her own right.    Why shouldn't he be ridiculed into what I would consider a happy, early retirement?   

The (uncertain) psychology of becoming a jihadist

ISIS and the Foreign-Fighter Phenomenon — The Atlantic

Here's a rather interesting article on the psychology of the foreign fighters joining ISIS.

I guess the situation is not entirely new - extreme ideologies have long attracted the unhappy outsider who desires a sense of belonging - but as with climate change denialism, I think it is a bit overlooked that the rapid promulgation (and continual repetition ) of the ideology because of the internet is a novel element. 

The internet is a pretty wonderful thing, but I don't think that anyone speculating on where it would lead us foresaw that it would also facilitate the outreach of some seriously dangerous ideas and ideology.

Local weather

It still seems unusually warm and humid in Brisbane for this time of year.  

I see that there is a cyclone watch for Far North Queensland, although no one seems to think it will affect the weather this far South.    Yet the nights have been still and clammy - it feels like the prelude to a cyclone even down here.

(And by the way, these new "wind speed visualisations", one of which is at the previous link, are very cool, no?) 

In other, not so local weather, (unless you live in the Arctic Circle, I guess)  there is considerable interest in the fact that the winter maximum extent of Arctic ice seems to have occurred very early this year, and is also very low.   Whether this means that the summer ice minimum will be a new record is anyone's guess at this time, but the current conditions are at least consistent with such a possibility.   Only 6 months to go til we know.

There was also a new study out last week indicating that long term measurements, including those by submarine, show a very substantial thinning of Arctic ice.

And finally, I haven't seen the GISS  temperature figure for February yet, but even the UAH satellite series shows that, despite it being very cold in parts of the US, it was not a globally cold month at all.

Local reaction

It would appear that Republicans think they can win the Presidency on the over 50 vote alone...

Rand Paul says calling same-sex unions marriage 'offends' him and that gay marriage should have been replaced with 'contracts'

Surely any potential presidential candidate isn't wise to use the word "offend" in relation to his view of gay marriage if he or she wants the under 50 vote. 

Japanese tourism in two parts

1.  Puts a different spin on writing a "glowing" review:

Fukushima is looking to recruit someone willing to visit the prefecture and help publicize its tourist appeal on a blog or other social media platform.

The position pays ¥10,000 an hour. Applications should be filed by March 15.

The prefecture hopes to attract more tourists while working with the Fukushima Destination Campaign tourism promotion initiative, which will be launched jointly with East Japan Railway Co. (JR East), in April.

Only one person will be hired for the SMS-based campaign, and the job will last for one week. The successful candidate should visit several locations and is expected to work eight hours a day, updating his or her blog or Facebook page at least once a day.

The prefecture will pay up to ¥560,000 for the job.

2.  Here's what Japanese tourism really needs:  more ninja.

Japanese officials are enlisting one of the country’s best-known historical figures — the ninja, the martial arts masters and assassins of feudal times — to encourage tourism.

Governors and mayors from prefectures around the country traded their usual bland suits for ninja costumes Sunday to announce the launch of the Ninja Council.

The council sees local authorities forming alliances with tourism agencies to thrust the ninja — usually known for their ability to become nearly invisible — into the spotlight.

The council will gather and provide information on its website about ninja and about tourist destinations, organizers said. It will also respond to inquiries from home and abroad, and is scheduled to host events to boost the popularity of the dark warriors.

Doing arithmetic unconsciously

The smart unconscious � Mind Hacks

Interesting account here of an experiment which seems to show the unconscious mind can do arithmetic reasonably well.   (Actually, I kinda expected this might already have been known via other experiments.)

Still, you'll read it if your unconscious is interested...

Dream type 2

Last night provided an example of another type of dream - the story driven one,  which can be annoying not to finish, because I wanted to see how it ended.  

This one involved time travel, and a secret, but the secret was not revealed.  I did go into the future, but only into the same household.  The lead female, in this movie-like scenario, was still pleased to see me, which was nice.  Actually, now that I think about it, it seemed I was both actor and participant, but again the details are getting sketchy. 

Dream combinations

So, I was at the doctor's on Friday; yesterday both prawns and wine did come up in conversation with my wife; and last night I noticed a video on line that was something to do with a comic book store, but I didn't watch it.

I suppose that's why I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was in a doctor's surgery, and he had all these comic books laid out on the floor, while also mentioning that he sold wine - made from "air prawns".  In fact, everything he sold was made from "air prawns".  I said something about air prawns being related to silverfish (one of which, incidentally, had been spotted and killed in the house sometime in the last week.)  The dream then got into some protracted nonsense about removing a build up of ear wax, but the details are sketchy now.

Soon after I woke up, and while using the tablet in bed, I noticed a silverfish stationary on the wall beside the bed.  (It is now an ex silverfish.)

Look, it's not exactly up there with Jung's scarab story, and synchronicity related to insects is easier if you haven't put down any surface spray in the house for a while;  but I'm still not sure why my jumble box brain came up with "air prawn"...  

Quantum physics for birdbrains

From Physics World:

Scientists believe that some species of birds navigate using Earth's magnetic field – an idea known as magnetoreception that is backed up by experiments that show that captive birds will respond to changing magnetic fields. Understanding how this happens is tricky. Although electron spins in biological molecules are affected by the Earth's magnetic field, the size of the effect is so small that it should be completely washed out by thermal fluctuations. However, some quantum systems can be extremely sensitive to external magnetic fields, and this is why scientists believe that some birds could navigate by making quantum measurements.

One such bird is the European robin, which appears to have magnetoreceptor molecules located in its visual system. Physicists believe that the measurement process is triggered when a "cryptochrome" protein absorbs light. This causes a flavin adenine (FAD) nucleotide on the protein to form an excited singlet spin state, which involves two electron spins with a combined spin of zero. This state then decays in picoseconds to a "radical pair state" in which the spin of one of the FAD electrons is transferred to an amino acid that is located about 1.5 nm away along the length of the protein.

This transfer is believed to preserve quantum coherence and because each spin is isolated from its surroundings, the resulting radical pair remains in a coherent quantum state for times greater than 10 ns. This, physicists believe, should be long enough for a robin to make a quantum measurement.

The direction in the protein along which this separation occurs provides a spatial reference for measuring the Earth's magnetic field. In particular, the relative orientation of the separation direction and the Earth's field affects the rate at which the radical pair will decay to a protonated state that provides a signal to the bird's nervous system. Scientists believe that it is this protonated state – or subsequent chemical reactions – that links the bird's sensory system to the magnetic-field measurement.

Ticks and a terrible allergy

I was catching up on some episodes of Catalyst last night, and came across the fascinating, if worrying, story of how it has recently been discovered that tick bits (on humans) can lead them to developing an allergy to red, mammalian meats.   What an incredibly annoying allergy that would be to develop! 

The story sounds so improbable, I wondered for a moment whether it was an April Fools show.

But now that I Google it, I see the topic got some publicity in 2013, but I had missed it back then.  Here's a medical journal article about it.

The show also displayed the new recommendation for how to remove a tick - by freezing it with one of the few skin freezing products you can now apparently get from the pharmacy.

This was therefore a really significant show.   (And, I note, that there is no equivalent of any type on commercial networks.)

Unexpected consequences

Drought-Stricken Sao Paulo Battles Dengue Fever Outbreak - WSJ

It turns out that restricting the water supply to a city in drought causes people to store it in in buckets and containers that then breed mosquitoes that spread a disease that is more common when it is wet.

An immature and churlish government

1.  Abbott must stop sacking Labor appointees | The Australian


2.   The Coalition is refusing to guarantee funding to scientific research in Australia, threatening over 1,700 jobs and 27 research facilities.

If you ask me...

...there is actually too little public interest in what the bright spots on Ceres are.

The thing that seems most peculiar to me is that there brightness seems to persist as the asteroid rotates in a way that doesn't look quite like a simple reflection from a flat bright spot.  (OK, it's a video from a nutty UFO source,  but I think its a genuine close up.)

And:  here is one of the "possible" explanations as listed on Cnet:

 6. Aliens' solar concentrators. In a 2008 TED talk, physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson suggested that the dwarf planets of the outer solar system, near Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, would be a good place to look for life. Dyson thought that although finding it might be unlikely, it might not be that hard to search if we simply looked for the reflection of the mirrors and lenses that any life forms would surely need to concentrate sunlight to survive on places like Europa and beyond. It sounds far out, but could it be that we've just found some ancient, abandoned solar concentrators even closer to home than Dyson imagined?

Weird experiences noted

When Things Happen That You Can’t Explain - NYTimes.com

Another big problem with smoking

Smokers responsible for increase in Adelaide house fires 

Wow.  The figures are really surprising:

An alarming rate of house fires linked to cigarettes in South Australia has prompted the Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS) to issue a public warning to smokers.

Since January 1 there have been 47 house fires linked to cigarettes and smoking with firefighters responding to about 160 cigarette-related fires each year.

Commander of community safety and resilience with the MFS, Greg Howard, said he
was concerned by the spike in such fires so far this year.

"If we keep going at this rate we're going to pass our annual level of house
fires caused by cigarettes by the middle of the year," Mr Howard said.

A misleading headline

No link found between psychedelics and psychosis 

Read the article and my point should be clear.   I would have thought the sub-editors for Nature would be more careful with such stuff.

The article notes a condition I had not heard of:

“This study assures us that there were not widespread ‘acid casualties’ in the 1960s,” says Charles Grob, a paediatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has long has advocated the therapeutic use of psychedelics, such as administering psilocybin to
treat anxiety in terminal-stage cancer⁴.

But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.

For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.

Krebs and Johansen, however, point to studies that have found symptoms of HPPD in people who have never used psychedelics⁵.

 

No, I would not watch

Gogglebox Australia: Here's what it is and why you would watch

I guess I have seen bits of Gogglebox for a total of aobut 30 minutes now.   I think it is an awful in concept and execution. 

That is all.

Does anonymous, informal, suicide counselling work?

Reddit and suicide intervention: How social media is changing the cry for help, and the answer.

Quite a detailed, interesting, article here on informal suicide quasi-counselling on Reddit and other on line forums.   I also learnt about one strange corner of the net that's new to me:

A couple of years ago, a mini-controversy erupted on Wizardchan, an online forum for reclusive male virgins. The site’s name is borrowed from a viral joke—the punch line is that when a man reaches age 30 without having sex, he’ll acquire magic powers—but the premise has amassed a base of sincerely dedicated users who go to the forum to comment on boards dedicated to hobbies, random thoughts, anime, and depression. After seeing that some posters in the depression board were discussing suicide plans and
self-harm, an administrator pinned a crisis hotline number to the board, encouraging users to pick up the phone if they were truly at risk.

Wizards were offended at the suggestion. This was a bunch of guys who had built a community around their own outsider status, and now some authority figure was stepping in to tell them that they had problems that needed to be fixed in the most conventional way possible: by calling a 1-800 number. The number was eventually removed from the board, and when one user recently suggested that Wizardchan bring it
back, another explained, “I think most people here are over normie advice, talking to some random guy who doesn’t understand where you’re coming from on the phone isn’t going to help them.” Another user said that hotline workers are just “not trained to handle the problems we face as [wizards]. It’s kind of sad how society treats us.”

More on the divided United States

U.S. runs hot and cold in record-shattering February - The Washington Post

I've been reading that the early indications are that February will be a globally warm month.

And, again, the reason the record cold in one half of the US does not contradict that is shown in this example of February temperature anomalies:

A shower time observation

I don't really get to see that many movies lately - and by "lately" I mean over the decade or so that usb memory sticks have become ubiquitous. 

Of all modern tech stuff, they remain one of my favourite.  Barely a dollar a gigabyte now, I'm just intrinsically impressed by their capacity, and continually marvel at the virtual library of information (or portable programs) that can, in theory, be carried around on a key ring.  I'm always tempted to buy a spare one or two when I see them on special at Harvey Norman or Dick Smith.

Yet for all of that, I would have thought that information stored on one would have turned up as a plot point in some spy or suspense movie or other.  Perhaps one could be swallowed to be smuggled out of a country.   Some important plot McGuffin could surely be built around what's on one of them.   Yet I do not recall a usb stick ever featuring in an important roll in a movie.  

Of course, it may be that I have just missed a movie where one featured.  So I would like to know if that is the case.  Or should I be writing the first movie starring one?  Perhaps the humans could be incidental to the plot.

Knox Grammar: the finest molestation money can buy

OK, this is one of those matters which is so gobsmacking it's practically laughable - more as  reaction of surprise than it actually containing humour, which it doesn't.   It's probably not even safe to admit to a tiny sense of Schnadenfreude, at least with respect to the super-rich fathers who sent their sons there just because their father, and his father before him, all boarded at Knox, and it doesn't really matter how the kid does academically, but the old boy network will see him into a good job.  No, not safe, and not very fair to the kid or even the father, really, but still.  No.  (In fact I should really change that title.)

Let's just go back to the original point:  the evidence of how they used to treat allegations of sexual interference with the boys at the elite Knox Grammar School in Sydney is pretty incredible.

The inquiry heard that a student came to Paterson in the late 1980s to complain a teacher, Damian Vance, had touched him inappropriately and asked him to engage in mutual masturbation. Paterson told the boy to go to the library and “think about what he was alleging”, he told the inquiry.

“He was a drama boy,” Paterson said as explanation for why he did not immediately believe the boy.

Paterson said he eventually believed him and counselled Vance but said he did not report it to police. “I was not aware it was a crime,” he said.

Paterson gave Vance a reference when he left Knox but said it had a code in it that signalled there was “more to say” on Vance because Paterson had written at the end he was happy to be contacted to discuss the reference further.

Paterson said it had not occurred to him the reference would be used by Vance to get another job as a teacher.

 Wow.   Then there is the next bit:

He also conceded he took more seriously allegations another teacher was giving senior boys alcohol and cigarettes than allegations he was molesting boys. He said he had since undergone a cultural change since the 1980s and now recognised the seriousness of child abuse allegations.

And another reference given to a man with serious, serious issues:

Chris Fotis was the teacher suspected of the groping and he was eventually dismissed after being caught masturbating in a car outside the school.

Paterson also wrote Fotis a positive reference when he left the school saying he was “enthusiastic for his job” and “meticulous in the standards he requires from students”.
He conceded the reference was “grossly inappropriate”.

Amazing.

I see that journalist and chronic bandana wearer Peter FitzSimons boarded at the school in the 1970s (and sent his sons there too - wait while I roll my eyes) and is rather incredulous as what is coming out of the inquiry too. 

It puts me in mind of the section of Evelyn Waugh's account of his early teaching career, and how an openly pederast teacher could move around, even getting better and better jobs - when he wasn't having to suddenly leave them in a hurry.   (You can read about it in this rather interesting account of visiting the former school where Waugh briefly taught.)

The difference is, Waugh was talking about the 1920's; this was going on at Knox in the late 1980's.

A plausible argument

Climate change implicated in current Syrian conflict : Nature News & Comment

The drought that ravaged Syria from 2007 to 2010 was the worst in that nation’s recorded history, devastating agriculture in the region. Roughly 1.5 million people fled rural areas for urban outskirts where, in March 2011, social unrest boiled over into civil uprising.

Now, researchers say that global warming helped to cause that drought — and,
by extension, helped to exacerbate the conflict, now a full-blown civil war, between armed insurgents and the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The study, published on 2 March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹,
documents a century-long trend of increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall in the region. Because the observed trend could be reproduced only when climate models took manmade greenhouse-gas emissions into account, the study’s authors conclude that global warming helped to drive the recent drought.

Sounds more plausible than the mere headline suggests, no?   (In an Australian context, it's hard to come to grips with the numbers involved in some of these drought/refugee situations around the world.  It's like the entire population of Brisbane and the Gold Coast relocating to Sydney - so hard to imagine.)

I'll also take this as support for my line that economists have no hope of working out the true economic effect of climate change in 80 years' time.

 

Even more Mars deep skepticism

Cosmic cabin fever: Getting to Mars isn’t the hard part — it’s living there | National Post

Although I mainly know of National Post for its hosting climate change fake skepticism, this article about the psychological problems that have been found on long space missions is quite good.  For example:

In space flight studies, the worst manifestation of this is known as
“third-quarter syndrome,” for its typically late onset in a mission. It
was shown for example, in the Mars500 crew who emerged in November 2011
after 17 months in an isolation pod in Moscow, with ailments that
included severe insomnia.

“I’ve lived it, and I can describe it,” said Pascal Lee, a planetary
scientist and co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, who has
done 30 expeditions to polar regions, including as director of the
Haughton-Mars Project in the Canadian High Arctic. Priorities shift once
you get past the climax of a mission. “You get tired of holding back.
You get tired of accommodating other people’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.
… It’s psychological erosion.”

Missions to the International Space Station have typically lasted six
months or so, and psychological research has shown, over time, negative
feelings get displaced onto mission control, breeding resentment.
People get irritable; they make more mistakes. They get cabin fever on a
cosmic scale. One study documented “psychological closing” among
astronauts, who picked favourites among mission controllers and
perceived others as opponents.

More Mars deep skepticism

Mars Missions Are A Scam - BuzzFeed News

I have argued for years that the priority for off planet colonisation should be establishing the true extent of ice water on the Moon, and figuring if you make that work.

Emulsified

Widely used food additive promotes colitis, obesity and metabolic syndrome, research shows

Hmmm. A mouse study testing a couple of widely used emulsifiers in processed food suggests that they make changes in the gut microbiota which are not good for us.

Most interesting comment in the report:

While detailed mechanisms underlying the effect of emulsifiers on metabolism remain under study, the team points out that avoiding excess food consumption is of paramount importance.

"We do not disagree with the commonly held assumption that over-eating is a central cause of obesity and metabolic syndrome," Gewirtz says. "Rather, our findings reinforce the concept suggested by earlier work that low-grade inflammation resulting from an altered
microbiota can be an underlying cause of excess eating."

Storms noted

I don't know what an average summer there is like, as it is one Australian city I have never lived in for any length of time, but it really seems Sydney has had an unusually large number of big storms this summer. 

Brisbane, on the other hand, has been hot but seems to have had fewer storms than average.  (Although the billion dollar hail storm was a big one.)

Cold beer

BBC News - Why Iceland banned beer

Here's quite a long article on Iceland's odd history of alcohol control, including full strength beer being banned for most of the 20th century.

For amusement, here are some more peculiar drinks from the island:

• Brennivin - a clear schnapps, made from fermented grain or potato mash and flavoured with caraway; also known as Black Death, which one Icelandic blogger
  says "explains a lot". She continues: "Many Icelanders never touch it,
  and a majority of the ones who drink it only do so when feeling
  patriotic, such as... when trying to impress foreign visitors."
• Whale beer - the Icelandic micro-brewery
  Stedji has produced a number of ales flavoured with different parts of
  whale, including Hvalur 2, a brew infused with dried whale testicles; Stedji's beer has proved popular in Iceland, although the company has been criticised by conservationists

Mixed emotions

Well we seem to be in one of those anomalous polling periods.   A couple of polls have indicated something of a move in voting intention back towards the Coalition, even taking into account the spectacularly ugly attacks on Gillian Triggs last week.   Just as with Kevin Rudd's popularity, there is sometimes no accounting for what is going on in the mind of the swinging voter.  (Is it tough talk on security, or the abandonment of a couple of budget measures that is doing the trick?  Some even suggest people are already factoring in a new leader, given that Abbott still has such a low approval rating, and they don't expect him to last to the next election.  Who knows...)

One thing I feel certain about, though - those who already disliked Abbott before the last fortnight have had the intensity of their feeling against him greatly enhanced last week.  I mean, probably half of his backbench feel that way too.

I presume this deflates the rebels in his own party who want him replaced.  Which, for those who want to see the entire party lose next election, is almost certainly a good thing.   Still, he does deserve to be turfed out after an embarrassingly short run - he really does...

Update:  I forgot to mention Chris Uhlmann's comment on  Insiders yesterday that Four Corners are doing a story around Parliament House, with rumours that they have documents that will be very embarrassing for Abbott regarding a deal to buy Japanese submarines.   Hope it's true...

When libertarian idealism hits reality

Krugman recommended this article about how Silk Road began with libertarian inspiration but imploded.  Here's the key paragraph that sums up what it's about:

Ulbricht built the Silk Road marketplace from nothing, pursuing both a political dream and his own self-interest. However, in making a market he found himself building a micro-state, with increasing levels of bureaucracy and rule‑enforcement and, eventually, the threat of violence against the most dangerous rule‑breakers. Trying to build Galt’s Gulch, he ended up reconstructing Hobbes’s Leviathan; he became the very thing he was trying to escape. But this should not have been a surprise.

It's a good read.

Still charming to read comments from a real von Trapp

BBC News - The truth about the Sound of Music family

I think most people know by now that the film bears scant resemblance to the way the real life story unfolded, but the family was not terribly unhappy with the way it was portrayed.  They wished the father had been shown differently, though:

Far from being the distant rather domineering father of the Sound of
Music, Johannes says he was "a very charming man, generous, open, and
not the martinet he was made out to be both in the stage play and in the
film. My mother did try to alter that portrayal for the film, but she
was not successful."

Is it really that bright?

'Bright Spot' on Ceres Has Dimmer Companion | NASA

I have been wondering whether the intensity of the bright spot(s) on the photo of Ceres is at least partly due to image processing.  They do say that the brightest spot is "too small to resolve with our camera".

It certainly looks odd.