Good Lord! Another columnist I wouldn't normally recommend...

...is Miranda Devine, but her take on the matter of Credlin/Abbott/various Lefty, feminist commentators' complaint that this is a matter of sexist attack is actually pretty good.   Also a bit funny (unintentionally, I think) in part:

She has denied the rumours and that should be the end of speculation based on evidence amounting to no more than Credlin feeding Abbott off her fork, buying them matching Tumi luggage, holidaying together, and various other tidbits, mainly unsourced, which have swirled around Canberra for years.

Yes, because a male boss and his female chief of staff holidaying together with matching luggage is never a reason to suspect something going on...

Anyhow, the bits I more-or-less approve of:

Savva’s book documents the avoidable trajectory of his downfall, with on-the-record recollections which fill in details about Credlin’s questionable behaviour and dominance of Abbott.

Despite the damage she was doing, Credlin remained in her job. Her response to criticism was to play the gender card. Abbott’s indulgence of this nonsense was surreal as he castigated his colleagues as sexist. “Do you really think that my chief of staff would be under this criticism if her name was P-e-t-e-r and not P-e-t-a?” he asked the ABC in 2014.

The week after Abbott was dumped, Credlin spoke at an Australian Women’s Weekly event and also blamed criticism of her on sexism. She also made the extraordinarily self-aggrandising claim that she “got them into government, from opposition I might add.”

Credlin’s harshest critics were women, not because they are self loathing misogynists, but because men are cowed into silence by exactly the arguments she mounts. Criticise a woman and it’s sexism. Criticise a man and it’s criticism.

Credlin continued to play the gender card yesterday in a column, saying she wasn’t the first woman to be attacked about the “nature of her professional relationships, and sadly I doubt I will be the last”. Abbott’s not the first man either, so it’s hardly a gender issue.

What a farce

Turnbull heckled by own party as NSW Liberals vote for climate debates - 9news.com.au: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has reportedly been heckled by parts of his party at a meeting where NSW Liberals voted for his government to conduct public debates about climate change and whether the science is settled.

An overwhelming majority voted in favour of the motion at the party's state council meeting on the NSW central coast following a speech by Mr Turnbull at the weekend, revealing the persisting level of climate change scepticism among the party, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

I am reminded of John Quiggin's "Parallel Universes" post of yesterday, too.

I think the right side of politics here is caught in the sort of credibility crisis that Labor suffered in the 50's and 60's, when (if I understand history correctly), it was hard to support a party that harboured too many with an intellectual sympathy to communism.

The climate change skeptics have to be purged before the Coalition can regain true credibility for political judgement.   As many of them are IPA influenced, and the nearest party to that mob is the LDP, they should be told to go join Leyonhjelm's outfit and follow him into electoral oblivion.

A Trump comparison

Boy, it's been many a year since I've recommended a Bret Stephens piece from the Wall Street Journal, but I think he makes many good points in this anti-Trump piece "The Return of the 1930s", which starts this way:

In temperament, he was “bombastic, inconsistent, shallow and vainglorious.” On political questions, “he made up his own reality as he went along.” Physically, the qualities that stood out were “the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth.” His “compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo.” He spoke “in short, strident sentences.” Journalists mocked his “absurd attitudinizing.”

Remind you of someone?

The description of Benito Mussolini comes from English historian Piers Brendon’s definitive history of the 1930s, “The Dark Valley.” So does this mean that Donald Trump is the second coming of Il Duce, or that yesteryear’s Fascists are today’s Trumpkins? Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the parallels with the last dark age of Western politics.

Stephens then goes to note how the current period of economic problems do not go anywhere near matching those of the 1920's and 30's.  In fact, he goes on to point to the positives in the American economy, as a way of deflating the Trump fanbase's feelings that the country needs a new, quasi-fascist,  style of leaderhsip.

But - and here's the big but - why doesn't Stephens then go onto to acknowledge that the Republican's own hyperbola about the economic crisis Obama was allegedly causing was not well founded, and it is their own behaviour that has caused the rise of the Trump base?

Typical Razer

Razer on Peta Credlin, Niki Savva and primordial female horror | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

This somewhat hyperbolic review of merely the extracts of Niki Savva's book displays all the qualities that I dislike in Helen Razor's writing style.   She's not even entertainingly bad, though:  she's just a self indulgent bore  whose clumsy sentences and allusions have to be re-read a couple of times to even try to follow her argument.   (Only to find it wasn't worth the effort.)

Does sound unusual for March

Mildura set to swelter - so supplier cuts power for scheduled maintenance work: Almost 200 households in Mildura will be without power on Tuesday thanks to scheduled maintenance work, despite temperatures forecast to hit 40 degrees for the eighth day in a row.

Age expired

I see that John Stone still writes trying to influence Australian politicians to cut, cut, cut:

That "fiscal path" comprised four components. First, "all ministers should now be put on notice that there will be no room for new spending proposals, no matter how 'worthy'". Second, existing spending needed to be cut hard. "The problem is not the absence of targets for cutting, but the government's faint-heartedness in approaching that task". Third, any and all tax increases should be firmly ruled out. Finally, as one carrot among these sticks, the government should legislate for a 5 (or preferably 10) percentage point cut in corporate taxation, introduced in five equal yearly stages beginning in 2015-16.

He seems to have been old forever, and indeed, I see that he is now 87.  Sorry, according to my rule of thumb, that is past the age where anyone is worth listening to.  (I'm really going to regret this age-ist approach when I'm 87 and still blogging - but by then I'll have had therapies that will mean 87 will be the new 67.  I hope...)

Anyhow, to stop being offensive about our elders, I suspect a 5% company tax reduction phased in over 5 years is probably OK.    But apart from that - the insistence that there is to be no new tax increases of any kind - that's just ideology put above good management. 

I wonder what he would have to say - if he was worth listening to - about the abject failure of the Laffer-isation of Kansas's finances.  That's working a treat.

Hedonism in the news, again

The poppers ban: will it criminalise gay users? | Society | The Guardian

I maintain my conservative line:  the self indulgent hedonism of artificial stimulation to increase the sensation of sex is not good for the individual or society overall.  

Dealer needed

Can very small doses of LSD make you a better worker? I decided to try it. - Vox

I see from the article, written by a man with a lot of previous drug experience, that all I need to beat an internet addiction is to "microdose" with LSD.  Huh.

Mind you, the article is probably best read to learn about some of the over the top pro-drug claims that are still made by later day versions of Thomas Leary.

The future of agriculture and climate change

Here are two stories that show how it's really hard to be confident as to what will happen to agriculture and climate change:

1.   A study looking at South America gives some concern:

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, focused on the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, an emerging global breadbasket that as of 2013 supplied 10 percent of the world's soybeans. The researchers used variations in temperature and precipitation across the state over an eight-year period to estimate the sensitivity of the region's agricultural production to climate change. Those historical comparisons can help in making predictions about the sensitivity of agriculture to future climate change.

The study found that, if the patterns from 2002 to 2008 hold in the future, an increase in average temperature in Mato Grosso of just 1 degree Celsius will lead to a nine to 13 percent reduction in overall production of soy and corn. "This is worrisome given that the temperature in the study region is predicted to rise by as much as 2 degrees by midcentury under the range of plausible greenhouse gas emissions scenarios," said Avery Cohn, assistant professor of environment and resource policy at Tufts, who led the work while he was a visiting researcher at Brown.

2.  An Australian study, on the other hand, notes some possible compensating effects:

Elevated atmospheric [CO₂] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves

PS:  don't tell the numbskulls at The Australian about that second one....

Transgender caution

Obviously, the politically correct name for sex change surgery is now "gender affirming surgery". 

Still, the article at that link is worth reading to see that a guy/woman who has had it noting that it is not the cure all that some hope for.

Just what the Liberals don't need

I've been meaning to comment on the Liberals selecting the IPA's James Paterson for its top Victorian
Senate seat. 

For a party that likes to rubbish career politicians with no "real life" work experience outside of politics on the Labor side (Young Labor, university student politics, brief stint at Union or political staffer, politician), how on Earth do they justify the exact equivalent on their side as being a good idea?  (See this short article about him at The Australian.*)

What's more, haven't they learnt from recent experience that the drier than dry right wing economic views that come from the IPA aren't actually that popular in the electorate?  

I don't really recall seeing Paterson on TV all that often, but I have the feeling what times I did see him I found him rather dull and overly earnest.   Chris Berg by far is the most personable of the IPA kiddy crew, but as I have said before, you can't really trust the ethics of anyone who is willing to be paid by a mob out to deceive the public on climate change and supporting the tobacco industry to make more money. 

*  I see that he is married already, too.  As is Berg.  Why do the heterosexuals who work for the IPA seem so keen on youthful marriage?   Not that there's anything wrong with that!  Just a bit odd...

Flood infrastructure beware

Global warming already driving increases in rainfall extremes : Nature News & Comment

Interesting study reported here.

I see that The Australian remains committed to climate change scoffing by claiming this paper shows a climate modelling fail in the headline:  "Deserts in a for a drenching as theories of climate change again", which is a ridiculous way to spin the study.   (And, as is often the case in the Australian, the body of the report tends to undermine the way it is headlined.)   

Peta speaks!

Well, that's funny.  All of The Australian's stories on the weekend about Niki Savva's book were able to be read via the old "Google around the paywall" trick, but none of the Peta Credlin response stories today were accessible that way.  (To me, anyway.)

But, it would appear that she (though not Abbott) has in an interview denied emphatically an affair with Abbott.


But, to be forensic about it, only her answer appears*, not the question, and she does use the line:

The idea that my relationship with the prime ­minister was anything other than professional is completely false

which leaves open the possibility that her comment is limited to the time he was PM.

Thus I'm not giving up on my theory - that there is something further back that has prevented them from outright complaining about the affair rumour and innuendo (or threatening defamation) until now.   (Though, granted, the way Savva has dealt with it does not leave open a defamation action against her.)

*  I actually brought a hard copy of the Australian to confirm - sorry to have spent money on Rupert.

Update:  and, by the way, I am aware of another rumour involving Abbott that does not involve Credlin.    Mind you, nearly all politicians are subject to such rumour, but with Abbott's behaviour and famously "blokey" demeanour I make special dispensation for him for believing there is fire behind the smoke.

Update 2:  Michelle Grattan's take on the whole matter is really quite harsh (on Abbott/Credlin), but fair.

Update 3:  Credlin's actual opinion piece in The Australian today (which doesn't contain the express denial) is really awful - it actually is so close in parts to what Abbott said yesterday that you have to wonder whether she wrote his response for him!

Clive for Donald

Why I’d Vote For Donald Trump

While it's not exactly an endorsement, it's still surprising to read Clive Hamilton saying that he'd vote for Trump (over Cruz, at least.)

Yet more Tony and Peta ...

A couple of other bits of intrigue about this:

*  why did The Australian, normally so pro-Coalition, run with this?  Well, I think the answer is pretty clear - Rupert met with them, later decided she was a liability.  It's with his approval that Savva was protected in her long campaign to publicise the trouble within the government that Credlin was causing.

*  one incident mentioned from the book has Credlin sounding like an uptight feminist:

In government Abbott held a meeting of cabinet ministers in his office and one of them told an off-colour joke about submarines. “Credlin stood up and stormed out of the room. A distressed Abbott took off after her. She walked back in a few minutes later, with Abbott following closely behind her. The prime minister addressed his bemused colleagues, saying: ‘I think we owe Peta an apology.’ He turned to the towering inferno beside him. ‘Sorry, Peta,’ he said. A couple of them, including Joe Hockey, chimed in: ‘Sorry, Peta.’ Credlin then launched into an angry lecture, telling them they were the reason the government was doing so badly among women.”

Yes, but - if she is that sensitive to sexism, how on earth did she put up with her boss's condescending treatment of Gillard?   Really, how can anyone sympathise with Credlin (even from a feminist perspective - like Jane Caro seems to be doing) given her supportive role with Abbott during that?  

An underwhelming set of reviews

*  From a couple of weeks back:  the last episode of the X Files reboot.  Terrible, just terrible.  The only possible explanation seems to be the suggestion I have read elsewhere:  that a studio forced reduction from an 8 part return to 6 episodes resulted in the compression of the crucial framing story to the point of nonsense.  Really, seriously, this needs to be the end of the show.

*  Kung Fu Hustle:  I mentioned last week how this was my first movie hire on Google Play, inspired as I was by Journey to the West to see more work by Cantonese writer/director/actor Stephen Chow.  Well, this earlier effort is not, in my books, anywhere near as good as Journey.  But it is interesting to note his humour style and imagination at play.  And most importantly:  the Google Play system worked well as a standard definition download watched on a big screen via a Chromecast.   The file download was just under 500 MB for a 90 minute movie, if I recall correctly, but the picture quality was fine enough.   Not sure I would bother with a HD download until I get a better TV.

*  Hail, Caesar:   the latest Coen brothers movie was interesting but, alas, a bit underwhelming.   The bits with George Clooney were all fine,  and the most memorable. But his story doesn't take up all that much screen time.  In many respects the movie was of unclear intent - some parts were suggesting an ironic take on big studio Hollywood, but they weren't quite playing that way.   Overall, it was a case of "not zany enough" compared to many of their earlier comedies.  As much as I like some of their earlier work, I still wonder if now critics see quality in their handicraft which isn't really there.  Their screenwriting help on Bridge of Spies, for example:  I didn't think the Coen-ish aspects of the final screenplay were particularly great.   Still, may they keep on working and (hopefully) one day reach a new comedy peak.

The Tony and Peta show

What's with all this kerfuffle about the matter of whether even Liberals thought Abbott and Credlin were having an affair?   The media is all over it due to Niki Savva's book, but as I noted in December, Peter Hartcher writing at Fairfax (perhaps using info from Savva) had written:

Some Liberals and even people from outside the party confronted Abbott before the February spill over the affair he was supposed to have been having with Credlin, the least original rumour in Australian politics. They were worried less about the reality than the perception.

So the news is actually at least 3 months old.  (And Hartcher might be a bit miffed about why it is that Savva can attract all the attention on this story, but it looks like no one reads his columns carefully!)

As I also wrote in December, it was clear that even News Ltd papers at the end of last year were making  innuendo about  their relationship.  Here's what I wrote:

...this seems to have attracted little attention from the rest of the media today.   (I find that odd.   But I find it even odder that both News Ltd and Fairfax outlets have taken to innuendo about Abbott and Credlin - going skiing together, staying in France together, Tony sleeping on her couch instead of spending his allowance on an actual hotel room - and neither of them, nor their spouses, come out to complain about it.  If I were the subject of such innuendo, and if I had not slept with my staffer, I think I could at least muster a press release of denial and then say I was not going to dignify it by addressing it again.  But just remaining silent despite the increasing openness of the innuendo?   Strange...)

Now, since I wrote that, we have had Abbott being accompanied by his wife on overseas trips, which is pretty strong evidence that if anything was ever on, it had probably long since finished.

But amongst (non Right wing) journalists, the only one who I have noticed who outright doesn't believe the rumour is Bernard Keane, who tweeted that it was "a lie".   I'd love to know why he thinks he can be so emphatic about that, given that the line every other journalist of credibility takes seems to me "I dunno, but it's a rumour that's been around a long, long time."

I note that the denials by Abbott and Credlin this weekend have been more along the lines of "we refuse to dignify this rumour with comment" rather than the more outright denial of "this is outrageous and hurtful to my family.  There has never been any affair."

So this is a great and (almost) entertaining mystery.

Let's list the "pro affair" evidence:

*  rumour of long standing amongst journalists and ALP members;  but also believed by many Coalition parliamentarians as the only explanation for his devotion to her keeping her job, and of their strange physical closeness in public;
*  lack of early and emphatic denial when clear innuendo appeared in press last year - even in Abbott friendly News Ltd papers;
*  lack of threat of defamation;

* the example of history regarding politicians and denials of affairs with staffers;
* some public address I saw some time ago where Abbott was joking about believing he had broken all of the 10 commandments, save for the one about murder (people who joke like that are usually sending a message that they hope humour will mask)
* for God's sake, just look at every photo of them taken together for the last 5 years!   They just look exceptionally close, and she has been by his side seemingly every minute when in public.

On the "no affair" side:

*  Credlin talking once about how Abbott knew about and helped her with attempts to fall pregnant by keeping her fertility stuff in the fridge in his office.  Would be remarkably unlikely that anything would be going on between them at that time;
*  despite many anti Abbott rumours about his marriage being shaky, no clear evidence I have ever seen that Marg was ever planning on leaving him;
*  Marg still travelling with him now;
*  his children not disowning him, either.

Using my powers of Holmes like deduction, I think that by far the most likely explanation is that there was some sexual indiscretion between them at some point in time,  one that "leaked" to some in Canberra, but that this was some years ago and (perhaps) was a very short term thing.    This would explain quite a few things:   the profile of Credlin some years ago (in the Australian?, the one where she talked about her fertility problems) which read as a pre-emptive strike about rumours of an affair;  the unwillingness of either of them to talk defamation or to deny in detail any affair;  the possible "giving the benefit of the doubt" of his wife and kids.

I am curious to see if I am ever vindicated in this theory.  

And as to why this matters:   politician's affairs generally don't, but if Abbot and Credlin had a "thing" going when he was trouncing around Australia on the election campaign as a family man with his daughters in tow,  his hypocrisy would be a thing to behold.  Especially given the appallingly sexist treatment Julia Gillard received on matters of her private life at the hands of Abbott and his supporters.  And besides, it is hard to remember any other PM who has taken on such a high profile staffer who can directly share blame for loss of internal support for her boss.   It's nothing like the interest in Jim Cairn's relationship with Junie Morosie, which really was just the conservative salaciousness of the day, as far as I know...

Update:  the more I read the way Credlin and Abbott have responded with variations on a "I won't dignify this with a response" theme, the more I think I am right.

Friday history - English airship edition

There seems to have been a gap in my knowledge about European airship history.

Everyone knows about the Hindenburg crash, but I did not recall that the English tried building their own passenger airships, the R100 and R101, one of which met a similar fate.

This was brought to my attention by a great series of photos at a Retronaut post from November last year of the interior of the R100.  Here are some examples:

The first trip did not go so smoothly:

After a series of tests, the R-100 embarked on her first great voyage. Originally planned for India, the destination was changed to Canada over concerns about the engines’ performance in tropical heat. The R-100 departed from England on July 29, 1930, arriving at Quebec Airport 78 hours later. It flew some short flights in the area and returned to the UK on Aug. 16.
There were a few minor hitches on the journey. A storm caused the outer membrane to rupture, which had to be repaired in-flight and replaced in Montreal. The galley’s electric oven also broke down due to water damage on the way back.

 And then, the R101 met the same fate as the Hindenburg:

Meanwhile, on Oct. 4, 1930, the R-101 set off for a voyage to India. It crashed in France due to bad weather, killing 48 of the 54 passengers and crew, including several major figures of British aviation. 

The Wikipedia article on the R101 gives a lot of detail.

Is it just me, or is this (other) nail in the coffin of hydrogen lofted airships not very well known?

Well, there's always the Ukraine...

Anti love drugs

How far should medicine go to cure taboo loves and desires

A somewhat interesting discussion here of a complicated topic.

Update:  actually, I am somewhat more interested in what potential there is for drug treatment for those who think they are transgender.   I see there is some guy who enthusiastically runs a site listing many studies indicating that transgender operations are frequently not the source of happiness that the patient desires.  There is also a counter post from someone at Huffington Post claiming this is all rubbish.   Links to both can be found via here.

As we seem to have reached some sort of "peak transgender" in American (and therefore Western) culture, I think it is a genuinely interesting topic to see how much of it is tied up with identity politics, a current cultural understanding of "self", and perhaps even a medical industry's self interest.  

But it's a weird topic.  I haven't yet watched the 4 Corners show that dealt with transgender children in a way that some seem to have found very convincing.  And from little I have read about it, there are some cases where the psychological conviction seems innate and (in a young child) not associated with any other mental issue.  I guess I have more skepticism about the late life transgender case.  Married, a bunch of kids, still likes their wife, then can only find fulfilment as a woman?   They are the cases where I would wonder what certain drugs may achieve in terms of a change of mind.

In praise of Tony Robinson

I've mentioned him at least once before, but he deserves another burst of praise.  Tony Robinson, perhaps still best known as Baldrick.  This guy, in case you still can't remember:

A series of his Walking Through History is on SBS again, and recently they ran his three part "Wild West" show.  (Did I mention it before?)  All great to watch, as was his WW1 series a year or two back.

The simple message is - he just makes terrific and engaging shows on history.  If you see any history show hosted by him, you should watch it.

The strange future is here

The U.S. Military Now Offers Egg Freezing for Female Soldiers - The Atlantic

From the link:

While egg freezing is not yet commonplace, an estimated 76,000 women will electively freeze their eggs by 2018, according to EggBanxx, a fertility marketing company. The procedure was considered “experimental” and came with a cautionary warning until 2012, but it would be a few more years before it took its first big step towards the cultural mainstream—in October 2014, Facebook and Apple announced they would begin offering female employees a health benefit worth up to $20,000 to freeze their eggs, and several other private-sector companies have since followed suit.

El Nino to finally bring flooding rain to California? (And drought in Syria)

El Nino’s Long-Awaited Grand Performance Is On Its Way to California
 | Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

Could be very wet in California in the next couple of weeks.

In other climate related news, a study suggest the Syrian drought (which may have contributed somewhat to the current disastrous war) is the worst one for 900 years, and could indicate more to come:

War has been the direct driver of the refugee flux and behind that is  a complex mix of social and political factors both inside and outside the region. One fiercely studied and debated driver has been a recent dip into a series of severe droughts starting in the late 1990s.


Previous work has prescribed some of the drought — and its impact on the socioeconomic fabric in the Middle East — to climate change. New findings published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres put it in even starker context, showing that the drought is likely the worst to affect the region in 900 years. The Mediterranean as a whole has been subject to widespread drought at various points in the past 20 years. Climate models project that the region is likely to get drier in the future, which Ben Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said drove the new line of inquiry.

“These recent drought events have motivated a lot of concern that this could be an indication of climate change, with the eastern Mediterranean and Syrian droughts being the most obvious,” Cook said....The projections for the region show a continued drying trend throughout
the coming century as climate change contributes to a shift in circulation patterns. That means what’s happening there now could just be the start of more prolonged, more severe drought. In a region already wracked by water scarcity and conflict, more drying could ratchet up
tension even further.

I take it that the economists' models for future effect of climate change on global GDP have trouble factoring that one in?

Some explanation of how America's odd system works

Primary voters don't really look like America | Guide to the presidential primaries

For starters, it's a small group. Just 20 percent of American adults vote in presidential primaries. They tend to be older, whiter, and better-educated than your average general election voter.

Primary voters also tend to be highly partisan, which helps explain why ideas at the fringes of each party (free college for all, a giant wall along the Mexican-US border) gain traction
during the primaries.

Primaries in the US are also sequential; rather than everyone voting on the same day, some states have their primaries early in the year, some later (for more on why, check out our previous videos).

Unless you live in a state with an early primary, there's a good chance your party will already have a nominee by the time you get to vote, meaning your vote is basically meaningless.

New(ish) physics papers

Noted recently on arXiv, a paper with the attractive title:   Black Holes and the Multiverse.  The abstract:

Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form black holes. The fate of the bubble itself depends on the resulting black hole mass. If the mass is smaller than a certain critical value, the bubble collapses to a singularity. Otherwise, the bubble interior inflates, forming a baby universe, which is connected to the exterior FRW region by a wormhole. A similar black hole formation mechanism operates for spherical domain walls nucleating during inflation. As an illustrative example, we studied the black hole mass spectrum in the domain wall scenario, assuming that domain walls interact with matter only gravitationally. Our results indicate that, depending on the model parameters, black holes produced in this scenario can have significant astrophysical effects and can even serve as dark matter or as seeds for supermassive black holes. The mechanism of black hole formation described in this paper is very generic and has important implications for the global structure of the universe. Baby universes inside super-critical black holes inflate eternally and nucleate bubbles of all vacua allowed by the underlying particle physics. The resulting multiverse has a very non-trivial spacetime structure, with a multitude of eternally inflating regions connected by wormholes. If a black hole population with the predicted mass spectrum is discovered, it could be regarded as evidence for inflation and for the existence of a multiverse.

I'm still a bit unclear whether this is relevant to the black hole and information issue.  This gets a mention at the end of the paper, but I don't understand their point.

Another paper of recent interest has John D Barrow, who's been around for a while, as a co-author.  It's Turning on Gravity with the Higgs mechanism.   OK, it's not as if I understand it, but I thought it noteworthy because the authors seem excited that its a genuinely new idea that may help a lot with quantum gravity, and working out the fate of the universe.

Still too radioactive to eat

Norway's Radioactive Reindeer - The Atlantic

Didn't realise that radioactivity from Chernobyl was still causing problems in northern Europe, 30 years later...

Madhouse driven madder

Always full of mad, and frequently offensive, right wing vitriol*, I see that the participants* of Catallaxy** are being driven especially berserk over the clearly poor impression George Pell is leaving in his evidence to the Royal Commission into child abuse.  Not only that, but Andrew Bolt's surprisingly harsh assessment is causing further outrage.  (Don't worry, Bolt will probably recant - he's too much of a cultural warrior to not come back to support for Pell.)

Mind you, I'm still not particularly interested in the matter.  I remain distinctly uncomfortable with the publicity the survivor group is getting.   As truly shocking and terrible (parts of) the Catholic Church have been in this matter, I still cannot get over the feeling that some victims are unhealthfully not moving on, ever; and intense media attention promotes that.

To be fair to some indirect victims, however, such as those with suicide in their family very likely attributable to abuse, it is hard to see how you would ever stop thinking about it.


* average physical age is now up to 70, by my estimate; but mental age:  a cranky 86. 

**  Other recent Catallaxy highlights:  people there cancelling their subscription to The Australian because it's become too left wing [hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha];  the endorsement of Trump by "I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong" economist Kates;  the continuing eccentric obsession with tobacco plain packaging by Prof Davidson; and of course (I'm contractually obliged to mention this at least every 6 months) the continuing failure of the latter's stagflation warning of 2011 - stagflation being the natural consequence of following Keynesian policy, of course.   Now that the global temperature alleged "pause" is well and truly over, I wonder when he'll start talking about policy responses to climate change, too.

Update:  and the predicted Bolt-ian retreat is in.

Yay for a broken record

Of course, if you've been following matters closely, you will know that there is excellent reason to be suspicious of the satellite temperature record, given the complexity of that method of measuring temperatures high in the atmosphere.  

Nonetheless, the psychological effect of having the climate change denier's (now former) favourite graph with a broken record should be fairly big.   At least, if the deniers weren't ideologically devoted to not believing science on this issue:

 

Blame the Tahitians

Last week, I was reading about the effect of Tahiti on the European sexual imagination, and Joseph Banks and his tattoo did get a mention in passing.  Well, it seems from another book (Maritime History and Identity:  The Sea and Culture in the Modern World) that we can blame the current scourge of Western civilisation (tattoos, of course) on the same period in history:

I should add though:  I don't really have an issue with an actual islander person (especially a male) having an authentic islander design on their body, if it is a genuine reflection of connection to a culture that is many centuries old.  (I draw the line at face tattoos, though.)   My biggest problem is, of course, with the garish Western rubbish of skulls, flags, dogs, girlfriend/boyfriends names, slogans, unicorns, fairies and flowers that comprises modern tattooing.

Bringing light to Africa

What difference will Obama's plan to bring power to Africa make? - BBC News

Interesting article here on an American move (with bipartisan support, oddly enough) to bring renewable energy to Sub Saharan Africa to people who currently have no electricity at all.

I particularly like that it notes the infrastructure issues which make your simplistic, "they just have to get some coal power plants built" argument unrealistic.

Malcolm's burden....

Dancing in the New World

How Columbus Said Hello: He Tried Dancing – Phenomena: Curiously Krulwich

An odd bit of history here - talking about how Columbus and other new arrivals to the New World tried dancing as a way of starting up interaction with the natives.  (I guess "natives" is not PC?)

Loss of privacy

God knows that the concept of wanting to be a champion athlete in any sporting endeavour is foreign to me:  the idea of losing a huge amount of each day to exercise, winning a medal or five and then not knowing what to do with your life after you've peaked at (say) 21 sounds horrible.

But it does seem to be what quite a few swimming champions, in particular, go through. 

And so it is that I feel sorry for Ian Thorpe.   And his point about loss of privacy in his teenage years again seems oddly relevant to the Safe Schools program discussion:

The Olympic champion Ian Thorpe has said he would have come out earlier if he’d had more time to become comfortable with his sexuality.....

Thorpe said he was first asked about his sexuality when he was just 15.

“If I had a little bit more time when I was younger I would have come out, because I would have been comfortable with that,” Thorpe said. “And that’s why I think, we’re all making the same point, around why we don’t push people to come out.

Again, I should say that I think much of the concern about the program is being overblown by conservatives (the latest politician to attach himself to outrage about it - Tony Abbott!  Could this man possibly "do a Rudd" any more thoroughly than he clearly is?)

But on the other hand - it sure seems to me that the program might have the consequence of making some teenagers feel under pressure amongst their peers in a similar way that Thorpe did not appreciate.

Careful with the green tea

Herbal supplements linked to at least six Australian organ transplants since 2011, data shows - ABC News 

The "herbal supplement" that is most discussed in this article is green tea extract.  It's put in some protein supplements, apparently, but:

There is research that suggests green tea extract can become toxic at median level at the equivalent of 24 cups in a day.

An unusual form of OCD

Here's an odd story, from a therapist at an American website about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (and which, as far as I can tell, is not aligned with any Christian group), that has particular interest in light of the ongoing discussion about the Safe Schools program and its material related to teenage sexuality:

"Let me guess," I said, leaning forward.  "One day you were doing something you always do, and suddenly you started to pay attention to yourself in a different way.  As you focused on yourself, the thought suddenly came into your head, "Maybe this means I'm gay.  How do I really know I'm not?"  I kept on, "Since then, you keep checking yourself, you know, like looking at guys or girls and trying to see who you're attracted to.  Maybe you watch the way you talk, or walk, or move your hands, to see if you do these things the way a gay or straight person would.  How am I doing so far, Mike?"  He stared at me and answered, "I feel creeped out, like you're reading my mind."

I went on to explain that I definitely didn't have ESP (as far as I knew), but that he was suffering from a very common form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (also known by the abbreviation OCD); one that doesn't get talked about very much, and certainly not a lot by people his age.  Many people with obsessive sexual identity thoughts shared the particular symptoms I had outlined, so they weren't very hard to guess at.  I related to him that at one time, a few years ago, I actually found myself treating six different people at once for this type of OCD, and that we had even held a support group meeting just for this group.  I added that these thoughts weren't confined to heterosexual people, and that I had even treated a gay patient who was troubled by obsessive thoughts that he might be straight.

Michael went on to confirm that his doubtful thoughts of being gay came on suddenly one day when he was looking through one of his bodybuilding magazines.  He remembered looking at one picture in particular and thinking, "I wonder if I find this guy attractive?"  With that, he suddenly became very anxious and horrified that he could have such a thought.  He also found that in the days following, he couldn't get the thought out of his head.  What made things worse, was that the other guys in school had a habit of teasing each other about being gay, a not unusual occurrence.  Remarks that he used to shrug off now became very frightening.  "What if they really can tell?" he remembered asking himself.  He found himself avoiding his usual crowd.  He threw away the bodybuilding magazines.  He stopped going to school.  Nothing helped.  It seemed like the harder he worked to avoid thinking about whether or not he was gay, the more he would think about it.  "But I'm not gay," he emphasized, "I'm not attracted to guys, so why am I thinking this?  I've never been attracted to guys!"  He paused for a moment.  "But the thoughts seem so real."

OK, it may not be very common, but it's possible that the Safe Schools program leads to this in some teenagers.

[Not sure about any teenager with bodybuilding magazines, though.  I can't get my head around that as an interest...]

Dinner party downer

Wittgenstein, bewitched | TLS

Perhaps there's not much new in the biographical details in this review of a book about Wittgenstein, but it is amusing to read lines like this:

As in many of these pieces, one thing that comes across in
Malcolm’s memoir is how incredibly difficult Wittgenstein was. “It was
always a strain to be with Wittgenstein”, Malcolm writes; “not only were the
intellectual demands of his conversation very great, but there was also his
severity, his ruthless judgements, his tendency to be censorious, and his
depression.” Von Wright concurs: “each conversation with Wittgenstein was
living through the day of judgement. It was terrible”.

[Kant, I will remind the reader, was supposed to good dinner party company.]

All true

Ross Douthat says Obama created Trump. That’s nuts.

William Saletan writes scathingly of the Republican blame game:

 In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns
not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies
about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities,
accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. Trump
validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition
party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the
incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a
child.

Ouch, as they say.

Economist confirms economics fail

Economics: Current climate models are grossly misleading : Nature News & Comment

Well, now even Nicholas Stern is joining in on the "economic modelling we've been using for climate effects is almost certainly a crock for being too optimistic" line.

Seems a bit late for that now, doesn't it?   He should have been arguing that about 10 years ago, and just saying something like this:  "Ha!  you expect us to be able to calculate the effect of climate change of various types and uncertain extremity on GDP in 100 years time?   Forget it.   There's obvious potential for massive damage to humanity and its built and natural environment: you just need to get urgent policies into place to get CO2 down now."

Oscars not worth my consideration

I'd be slightly worried that it might be a sign of old age that it seems that each year, the Oscars have become less relevant than the year before to the type of movies I actually want to see, were it not for the fact that the badly declining ratings for the show indicate I am far from alone.

I mean, the movies which probably got the biggest pre and post release publicity (Force Awakens, and perhaps Spectre) are of no real interest to the Academy, it seems. 

But I did see Bridge of Spies, which was OK, if a tad underwhelming, so I should still watch it for a glimpse of my directorial hero and his wife.

Actually, I do want to see Spotlight, too.  And that adult stop motion mid life crisis story Anomalisa, which (strangely) is being shown at a brisbane  art-house cinema once a day at lunchtime.   Perhaps that should be another Google Play rent...

Funniest Oscar related tweet you'll probably see

Only 10 years late

Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid, reviewed.

I mentioned last week that I saw and liked Journey to the West, a well directed kung fu-ish Buddhist comedy.

It was directed by Stephen Chow, who I didn't realise has been a huge name in Hong Kong and China (and relatively well known in the West too) until I read up about Journey. 

He's now got an enormous hit on his hands in China with The Mermaid, which I see has a one cinema release in Brisbane (in one of the more Chinese heavy suburbs.)

I also see from Reddit that lots of people love his 2005 film Kung Fu Hustle, which I found on Google Play movies, and have "rented" to watch sometime in the next month.

(This is the first time I have rented a movie from Google Play.  I see that buying movies from them has attracted much criticism, as they apparently do not allow the downloaded movie to be moved, ever, from the location it was downloaded to.  And that can't be a PC hard drive: it has to be an Android device or a Chromebook tablet.   I also am curious about the SD picture quality.  But all will be revealed when I start watching the downloaded movie...)

Douthat trying to walk that tightrope again

It's one of the signs of the current Republican (almost obscene) clueless-ness that some of them are trying on the "this Trump phenomena - it's all the fault of Obama" line.   Jonah Goldberg had a particularly ludicrous go at this a couple of week's ago at the LA Times, which opened with this:

In Springfield, Ill., last week, President Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of his bid for the White House. He admitted that one of his “few regrets” was his inability “to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics.”

To conservative ears, Obama's comments fell somewhere between risible and infuriating. Obama has always done his best to demonize and marginalize his opponents. Either the president honestly cannot see that or he's cynically pretending that the fault lies entirely with his critics. If only there were some way to figure out whether he's sincere.

(OK, so the column wasn't directly about Trump - it was about how Obama shouldn't appoint the next Supreme Court judge as a way of making it all up to the Republicans who have been hurt by his refusal to bend to their will by things like, well, undoing his signature health care policy.   But you can see how this plays into the "he has caused Trump" line.)

Now it's Ross Douthat's turn, and as usual, he tries to take a more considered, reasonable sounding line.

Look, there is one element of truth in there:  that Obama's first campaign was big on "hope" rhetoric and light on policy - as I've said many times, he didn't impress me as a well qualified person for the job, at all.   And the "change" rhetoric leaves me cold generally - it was too much like the Kevin Rudd line with its shallowness.

But seriously, there is no comparison between the concern that reasonable people may have had about the suitability of Obama for the job with that which they should have with blowhard, "say anything" ratbag Trump.

As the top comment after the article says (typos and all):

We could see this coming, couldn't we? It was inevitable that establishment Republicans would blame Donald Trump's successful insurgent campaign for the GOP nomination on Obama. Ross Douthat ties himself in knots making the argument that it's all the fault of Obama and the Democrats.

But here's the real connection: the election of Barack Obama gave Republicans the opening to make incivility in politics sonehow...cool. He made it possible for them to claim that the president of the United States was born in Kenya; they could yell "You lie!" as he delivered his State of the Union; they could boast that they were going to kick his rear end out of the White House. They did all this and their constituents loved it.

Donald Trump is riding that wave, quite possibly all the way to the Republican nomination. Is it Barack Obama's fault, or the fault of a party that has gone so far off the rails that a carnival barker like Trump is now seen as a plausible leader?

I didn't mind this comment further down, too:

Ross, you're better than this.

Commenters who point to Reagan's imagery, in his campaigns and in office, are completely right. Obama did some over the top stuff in his first campaign, but he didn't invent the celebrity politics business which, at a minimum, goes back to JFK and Jacquie.

You know as well as your readers that the most important influences leading to Trump were: the Southern Strategy, stagnant wages, loss of good jobs, leadership failure of "the elites."

Any contribution from "politicians as celebrities" is completely overshadowed by the take-no-prisoners politics that emerged with the removal of the "fairness doctrine" for broadcast. That, in turn, gave rise to Limbaugh and company, followed by Gingrich revolution in the mid-90s, the rise of Fox News, and, now, the evolution of cable news, a media-politics complex that has turned the Presidential election process into a non-stop source of programming.

Tracing this to something Obama did is, I think, beneath you.

Holding the candle for Tony

I can only assume that it's courtesy of former Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker's taking on the top job at The Australian that it has become so firmly the National Paper of Yearning for the Return of Tony Abbott.  

Which is really pretty hilarious.   No matter how badly Turnbull may be perceived to perform, there is no way that voters are going to think the solution is to go back to gormless Tony.   I work around people pretty passionately against Labor - none of them thought Abbott was a success as a PM.   They think he was an inarticulate idiot in the role.

But it's good to see The Australian sinking further and further into negative credibility and/or irrelevance. 

Update:  as people on Twitter are saying:

Evidence for harmful reef effects already taking place

Landmark experiment confirms ocean acidification’s toll on Great Barrier Reef : Nature News & Comment

Given the complexity of this type of experiment, I would still be a little cautious about its conclusions.

But it's still not good news for the long term prospects for the GBR.

Something I would have thought obvious, but evidently not...

Yeast study offers evidence of superiority of sexual reproduction versus cloning in speed of adaptation

Apples in India

While reading about that too-good-to-be-true cheapo smart phone in India last week, I was reminded about how iPhones barely sell there:

Now, a sales target of a million iPhones is within breaching distance in a country where the installed base of smartphones is very low. According to Counterpoint Technology Research’s senior analyst Tarun Pathak, 106 million smartphones were sold in India in 2015 but 300 million more smartphones are expected to be sold in the next two years. Significantly, Apple has only about 1 percent share of this booming smartphone market. “It is a huge, enticing market that just cannot be disregarded,” says Pathak. “India is a high-potential market not only in terms of volume but also the massive scale and opportunity that lies ahead.”

Amazing.  (But then again, it could just be that I'm easily amazed.)

It would be, like, Peak America

Douthat Apologizes For Trump Joke | The Daily Caller

Poor old Ross Douthat attempted a joke about how an assassination attempt (like one in a movie, which involved the target using a baby to shield himself and thus losing credibility) could end the Trump campaign.  He's since deleted the tweet and said sorry.

Well, normally, conservatives would complain about PC self censorship, but not now, hey?

Because, honestly, who with any imagination at all hasn't had an idle thought about how deeply ironic and "peak America" it would be if Trump were shot on the campaign trail, preferably by some schizophrenic migrant nutter with no health care plan (perhaps with immigrant parents from Mexico?) who had still managed to legally buy a gun with cash supplied by the Koch brothers?

And, as I have noted before, Right wing nutters have been fantasising about Obama being shot for his e-vil (non-existant) plans to seize American's guns.

So Ross should be cut some slack...

Ooh, a mystery!

BBC Future - The quest to solve YouTube’s strangest mystery

I suppose if I read Reddit more carefully, I would have known about this earlier.  And now it's slightly more mysterious, given that when I check the channel in question, it seems the recent Youtubes have been taken down.

All sounds very "numbers station" to me...

A reasonable take on lock out laws

Sydney wasn't vibrant before these alcohol laws, it was embarrassing - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Inner city areas change all the time - weren't people complaining about Oxford Street dying long before the lock out laws?   As the author writes in this very fair minded article, it's also the case that 24 hour liquor licences and sudden popularity with hoards of drunk youngsters crowds out other, more sedate, businesses (like restaurants).

Overly liberal licencing laws therefore benefit some type of businesses at the cost of others.  Tightening those laws means there may be a transition to the other type of businesses in the area.   Residents may well find their property values increasing; drug peddlers, prostitutes and strippers may have to find some other area to work from.  Such is life when governments decide, with voter approval, that regulation needs tightening.

President Troll

I was going to post about how much Trump's campaign behaviour resembles one gigantic troll of the Republican party, and the entire planet, but I see the point has been made before.

The thing is, some trolls can be pretty funny, and I'd be pretty sure that at some of those supporting him think it is all part of a game.

But I can't see it lasting all the way to the White House.

The fact that the Koch Brothers are starting to fight harder against him doesn't mean much - didn't they blow a huge amount of money on the Romney run?

Trump winning the candidacy would therefore have a couple of benefits - it may further impoverish the Koch's bank account and influence, and (presumably) blow up the Party whose behaviour and nonsense ideology for the last decade deserves blowing up.

I also didn't mind this article that gives a possible explanation as to why even evangelicals are voting for Trump:  as a "last hurrah" against a lost culture war.  Or, maybe, evangelicals just enjoy a funny troll, too...

About that Safe Schools program...

Many years ago, I wrote a post complaining that American schools with their gay support clubs were going too far, in the sense that I don't see that teenage sexuality really warrants school based scrutiny or endorsement.   All sensible adults don't really want high school teenagers of any type having sex;  that complete sexuality self understanding is not something that teenagers (in particular) actually need to be certain of seems badly unacknowledged these days; and an emphasis on the right to privacy in terms of sexual feelings should (to my mind) be the priority.   But, as is usual, I find it hard Googling my own blog successfully, so I haven't re-read it for a while.  I think that is how it went.

So now we have some hoo-ha about an anti-bullying program that concentrates on sexuality based bullying.  The idea of an anti bullying program that incorporates sexuality based bullying is fine.   Part of the concern about the Safe School program, though, is that some of the suggested exercises seem a tad too advanced for the age intended.   (The bit about asking 11 year olds to imagine they're 16 and with "someone they're really into".   My recent experience with 2 former eleven year olds is that this would have been like asking them to imagine they're an aardvark - it would have been pretty incomprehensible. )  But as I understand it, educational material like this is not set in concrete - the manual gives suggested exercises that teachers can pick and choose from, as would appear to suit their circumstances.

So part of the complaint appears overblown to me; but it probably does grate somewhat against my views about how sexuality is dealt with not just in schools, but in the media and broader society these days.

Can't an anti-bullying program just emphasise that it's none of  a student's business to care or complain about which gender a fellow student might feel some sexual attraction towards, and that bullying based on that will be sternly dealt with?

But this is not to say that I have any particular problem with school based, quite detailed, sex education material regarding how your basic sex works, and its practical and emotional consequences.  (And contraception, of course.)  After all, the European approach to this does seem to work reasonably well.  And as if teenagers want to hear the details about it from their parents...

A modest proposal

Malcolm Turnbull sticks to Tony Abbott's defence spending pledges in long-awaited white paper - ABC News 

Well, Malcolm Turnbull seems to be truly turning into an Abbott Lite (or "Not So Lite") with this announcement that we'll be going for 12 new submarines.  (And a commitment to a 2% GDP defence budget.)

Now, I like defence technology as much as the next, um, man/woman/transgender defence person, but the whole problem with our submarine fleet has long been not being able to convince sailors to serve on them, hasn't it?.  

How do they propose getting around that problem with a fleet of 12?

My proposal - which will presumably cut costs too - subcontract out their running to the Filipinos.
I understand that they already run a huge percentage of cargo and passenger shipping.  They'll work for half the salary, too, provided they are left with tips after a successful voyage.

I cannot see why I'm not a politician. 

Amazing technology

Li-fi '100 times faster than wi-fi' at shine of a light presented at Mobile World Congress - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Did I post about this before?  I forget, but I have read about it previously.  I find it hard to believe that an LED bulb can transmit data this quickly:

Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 gbps —
fast enough to "download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second",
founder and head of Oledcomm Suat Topsu said.

"Li-fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than wi-fi" which uses radio waves to transmit data, he said.

Fair enough

Proposed Senate electoral reform is essential

The man with the dorkiest face pic at the Conversation (please change it, Adrian) writes about the Senate voting reform, and figures that (unlike Labor's concerns) that Labor and the Greens may benefit from it.

Brain parasite reconsidered

The Myth of "Mind-Altering Parasite" Toxoplasma Gondii? - Neuroskeptic

Hey, maybe cats aren't quite as evil as we all suspect.*   Read above for an interesting study looking again into the question of whether toxoplasma gondii has much effect on human behaviour.


* I doubt this.  I have a theory that they may explain libertarianism.

Marked "not to be trusted"

Chris Uhlmann should mind his language on 'cultural Marxism' | Jason Wilson | Opinion | The Guardian

Interesting column here about Uhlmann believing a right wing campfire scare story that I had never bothered looking into because I always thought it improbable.

Look, my rule of thumb for reliability across a spectrum of subjects holds good here:  Uhlmann years ago made it plain that he thought belief in AGW was more religion than science - a favourite trope of climate change denialism.   This alone indicates he's not the brightest, and his time as host on 7.30 confirmed him as not particularly quick witted, and routinely soft on the Coalition and dismissive of Labor. 

You can't really trust him on anything.

Entirely reasonable

Government set to change Senate voting in bad news for 'micros'

I find it hard to credit that making people vote so as to indicate their actual preferences, as opposed to letting people vote when they are absolutely in ignorance of where their preferences will go, can be argued as being bad for representative democracy.  

I suppose that the "micro" argument is that, regardless of how they get there, having more micro members (so to speak) in the Senate is better for democracy.   They like the current system, but they should be more upfront that it pretty much like running a lottery for a handful of Senate seats each election. 

I would also assume that, should this reform be followed by a double dissolution, it will be goodbye to my favourite Senator to hate, Leyonhjelm.  I will have to re-focus the target of my political hatred elsewhere if that happens.  But I can live with that.  

Goodbye to Ms Lee

Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times

I did enjoy this obit for Harper Lee last week.

One thing I am curious about:  it reminded me that she had said her father (a lawyer) was the model for Atticus Finch, and according to her obit, she appeared in photos with him in a profile done once she was famous.

But, with To Set A Watchman, which was virtually an early (although very different) draft of Mockingbird, she painted a father with racist attitudes.

So, has anyone worked out what the true attitude of her father was? 

News of no interest to Republicans, I presume

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries - The New York Times

It's a bit weird, isn't it, that despite some Republican friendly East coast states of the US having increasing coastal flooding problems, Republicans seemingly don't believe this could be tied to global warming.  Because, I guess, they just don't believe AGW is possible, as the water laps around their ankles?

OK, time for a new theory, that ties in with my last post.

The Right in American is currently so bizarrely nutty (hello, Trump: but also nonsensical tax plans and climate change denialism of the rest of the candidates) that there might be a hitherto unknown pathological cause.  A mosquito borne virus, perhaps?

You heard it here first...

A panic worth having?

At first I thought that the spread of the zika virus might not be as big a global health concern as some seemed to think.  (Although, of course, it would be a big worry if you were planning on having a baby in a poor area with poor mosquito control.)

But more recent articles tend to make it sound definitely worth worrying about for a variety of reasons.

This article in the New York Times talks about its possible mental health consequences, for example:

The possibility that in utero infection could contribute to mental illness first emerged with an observation in 1988 by Finnish researchers that children born during the 1957 Asian flu epidemic had high rates of schizophrenia later in life.

Researchers have long noted that schizophrenia is highest in adults who were born in winter and early spring — just after the peak of flu season.

But estimates of the size of the risk vary. One 2011 analysis of other studies estimated that maternal infections of any kind account for 6 percent of all cases of schizophrenia. (Researchers have done very large studies in Finland, Sweden and Denmark because they have cradle-to-grave records on millions of citizens.)

By contrast, a 2001 study of adults born to mothers infected with rubella, or German measles, during the last American epidemic, which lasted from 1964 to 1965, found that 20 percent had schizophrenia symptoms. The expected rate among adults is below 1 percent.

Dr. Alan S. Brown, the director of birth cohort studies at Columbia University Medical School and leader of that study, said it was “certainly possible” that Zika posed a similar risk, “although ideally, you’d want a controlled study.”

And at Vox, this article starts with the surprising information that:

Before last year, scientists knew very little about the Zika virus. As late as 2007, there had only been 14 documented Zika cases in the world. Research on the virus was so limited, in fact, that printouts of all the world's published literature could basically fit into a shoebox.

A bit of a worry...

It'll blow your mind

A Journey recommended

A couple of weeks ago, SBS showed a Chinese comedy fantasy which really catches one's attention with its opening sequence.

The movie is Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, and its only towards the end that it became clear (to me) that it was like the origin story for the Buddhist Monkey King.  It is on SBS on Demand., and I think its success in China was well deserved.

A salacious South Seas post (part 5)

Well, time to remember that cultural misunderstandings, bacteria and viruses can all conspire to darken the picture.    From this post, I also get the answer to the earlier question about Captain Cook's attitude to his crew's frolics:

Europeans frequently misinterpreted Polynesian codes regarding dress and bodily performance. For example, as Anne Salmond has explain in Aphrodite’s Island, a history of Europeans and Tahitians in which sex plays a central role, “in Tahiti people stripped to the waist in the presence of gods and high chiefs, and a high-ranking stranger was often greeted by a young girl swathed in layers of bark cloth who slowly turned around, unwinding the bark from her body until she stood naked—a ritual presentation with no necessary implication of sexual availability.”[7] Captain Bougainville’s men, who had not seen women in many months, misunderstood the ritual’s meaning, and some of the girls sent to greet the first European ships in Tahitian harbors narrowly escaped (and sometimes did not escape) sexual assault. Not at assaults were simply the results of misunderstandings, of course. A little over a decade later, Captain James Cook would discipline his men for raping women on those same Tahitian beaches.[8]

Consensual or not, sex between Europeans and Islanders had devastating results. Rates of death due to diseases, particularly those sexually transmitted, were extremely high. As Nicholas Thomas notes, the extent of population decline “is highly debatable, indeed this is one of the most controversial topics in public as well as academic argument about the Pacific past.”[9] The debates stem from the fact that there is no reliable data on population before contact. What is clear, though, is that populations declined significantly. In the Marquesas, Thomas’s particular area of expertise, he notes that between 1800 and 1840 the population dropped from at least 35,000 to under 20,000.[10] Howmuch the population had already declined before 1800 is not clear. Some sailors were unaware of the effects of these diseases, but most Islanders and Europeans figured out what was going on; figuring out how to stop it was another, far less successful, matter.

On Cook’s third and final voyage, the one on which he “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, his crew was riddled with gonorrhea and syphilis after their 1777 summer in Tahiti. Cook demanded that his crew cease sexual contact with Islanders. He threatened his crew with harsh punishment, including flogging (something he did far more often on the third voyage than on the first two, as Gananath Obeyesekere famously emphasized), if they had sex with women. Upon their return to the islands, nine months later, they approached Maui, a considerable distance from Kaua‘i, where they had been earlier in the year. Cook surmised that the people of Maui were indeed of the same people group as those in the western Hawaiian islands. He quickly published an order prohibiting any contact with the islanders. It was already too late, though. He recorded the November 26, 1778 entry in his diary: “Women were also forbid to be admited [sic] into the Ships, but under certain restrictions, but the evil I meant to prevent by this I found had already got amongst them.”[11] The population of the Hawaiian Islands was decimated.

 But back in Europe, Michael Sturma (who I quoted earlier) explains how the tales of Tahitian sexual mores became a public sensation:

Sturma writes that this publicity lead to a bit of revisionism by Cook and some colleagues, who started insisting that the Tahitian women who not as bad as all that - those who were married were generally chaste, and not all of the unmarried were throwing themselves at the sailors.   Sturma suggests it was concern over the effect on public morality that was behind this.   Indeed, there was a bit of press backlash against the book:

Hawkeworth's Account raised so many unsettling questions about the true nature of society that he was widely attacked in newspapers, journals and pamphletts for his 'immoral' book.   The resulting furore was blamed for sending the Account's now notorious editor to an early grave six months later.

But, the sensationalism continued:

The general English and European fascination with Tahiti was aided by a 2 year visit to Britain of Omai, a handsome young man with good manners brought there courtesy of one of Cook's ships in 1773.  A brief summary of how his time went in England can be found here.  

It would seem that all of this was part of the motivation for setting up the London Missionary Society (although the "need" for conversion of India and other parts of the world played a large role too.)  

But things did not go easily for them when it came to Tahiti (in 1797):

Nearly seven months later Wilson anchored the Duff off the island of Tahiti, after a voyage via Gibraltar and Cape Horn. Seventeen missionaries were to disembark here, including all those who were married. As the island came into view, the missionaries on board began to sing a hymn, `O'er the gloomy hills of darkness'. The weather was bad, so Wilson moored out at sea for the night, dropping the missionaries by boat around midday the next day. ...

    The men Wilson dropped that morning wore tail coats, high stockings, knee breeches and buckled shoes; their wives wore bonnets and heavy cotton skirts. The missionaries' immediate instructions were commonsensical, if vague: to make as friendly contact with the islanders as possible, build a mission house for sleeping and worship, learn the language of the island and, until able to preach in the native tongue, offer examples of `good and co-operative living'. The Tahitian king, Pomare, who came to examine them from the beach, wore a girdle of bark cloth, jewellery of shark teeth and shells, and a crown-bunch of feathers. He rode astride a slave crawling on hands and knees.

The missionaries who had been left in the South Seas quickly discovered an unforeseen problem. Since Cook's voyages, other ships of exploration and whaling (Russian, French, British and American) had paid visits to the islands. Rum and firearms were now a part of life, as were disagreements and occasional violence between crews and islanders. The natives watching the missionaries disembark from the Duff were as wary about their intent and greedy for their possessions as they were incredulous at the sight of them. The introduction of firearms into Tahitian warfare had made the islands increasingly dangerous places, but most dramatically, bacterial diseases carried to Polynesia by European crews had had a terrible impact on the populations: some islands had seen their numbers decimated. Though the islanders seemed to attribute these plagues to vengeance by their own gods, they were still wary of the crews. The missionaries left on Tahiti probably would not have obtained Pomare's permission to settle at all, had it not been for a marooned English-speaking Swedish sailor called Peter Haggerstein, who had been living on the island for four years and who was able to act as interpreter.

    Of those left on Tahiti, eight of the seventeen soon wanted to leave. Another two, the harness maker Benjamin Broomhall and the Reverend Thomas Lewis, `went native'; the latter having first taken a native woman as his wife. (Broomhall was never seen again; Lewis's broken skull was found two years later.) Most of the deserters left Tahiti aboard the first ship to stop there, a British vessel on its way to Sydney two months later. Two of them had gone mad; one missionary suffered a nervous breakdown, during which he tried to make love to King Pomare's wife and teach Hebrew to her court.

Yet, they persevered and attained success, as you can read at the previous link.

And this seems as good a point as any to end this bit of public self education.