A very tricky issue

There's No Such Thing as Free Will - The Atlantic

This perhaps isn't the best article on the matter of free will, and the consequences of not believing in it, but still worth reading, I think.

As it happens, I noticed that the edition of Philosophy Now magazine  currently at my local newsagent had several articles on free will.  I haven't finished them all, yet, but I'll probably get around to mentioning one of them here, later.

[I keep thinking, incidentally, that the current way young folk in particular in Western society are thinking about gay and transgender issues is influenced not just by Freud, but by their increasing and almost unconscious acceptance that free will is not real, and our feelings are all determined by a dance of atoms that we have no control over.]  

An interesting result

Magic-mushroom drug lifts depression in first human trial : Nature News & Comment

As readers would know, I'm the last person to endorse recreation use of drugs (beyond alcohol), but persistent and deep depression is a very serious thing, and if one dose of a hallucinogen seems to be shown to help most people with the condition, it's worth considering.

The biggest buffoon to ever run for President

I had missed the "Trump complains about modern hairspray" story from last week, but here it is, covered by Colbert:



You would have to be seriously stupid to consider voting for this clown.

Oh look - Steve Kates is still making sympathetic posts about him.   (And a bunch of Right wing culture warriors still think he's great, 'cos he annoys "Leftists".)   I see that some anonymous contributor to the blog is also now re-posting items from a Fox News commentator about Hilary Clinton.   Seriously, the place has become so dire that you can feel it slowly sucking intelligence out of the universe. 

Probably a bad thing...

If California legalizes marijuana, consumption will likely increase. But is that a bad thing? - LA Times: The data from Colorado and Washington, where voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, are still preliminary. We do know, however, that the number of Coloradans who reported using marijuana in the past month increased from about 10.5% in 2011-12 to nearly 15% in 2013-14. In Washington, reported use increased from just above 10% to almost 13%.

Given that both states' preexisting medical systems already provided quasi-legal availability, it is hard to imagine that commercial legalization did not account for at least some of these increases. (That said, other factors could influence marijuana use and it will be some time before researchers have enough data to conduct rigorous analyses. Some of the increase could also come from respondents being more honest now that marijuana is legal in their states).

But is an increase in marijuana consumption a bad thing from a public health standpoint? Not necessarily.

I didn't realise the increases were that large, but this article is from a pro-legalisation advocate.

On the matter of public health, the problem is partly the length of time it takes to work this stuff out.  The rate of increase in smoking in the relatively young is the major issue, but its full effect may take years to clearly establish.

Given that the worst possible health effect (apart from possible car accident death) is a really debilitating mental illness (schizophrenia), surely you don't need too much of an increase in the rate of that to say that its increased use is a real public health negative.

Good grief

Donald Trump to meet with Henry Kissinger on foreign policy.

I see that Kissinger is 92 now.  Mind you, his safe "use by" age was probably 40.

Viewing recommendations

Greece With Simon Reeve | SBS On Demand

This documentary/travel show about Greece (last night on SBS) was very good, if somewhat depressing, viewing.   From the (pretty obvious) environmental degradation of the Mediterranean sea around Greece, to the surprisingly nutty men of Crete, it was fascinating in a way I didn't quite expect.

After that, although I missed part of it, there was Matthew Evans' show What's the Catch, about where our seafood comes from.  This is a repeat, evidently, but I had missed it the first time around. 

Again, this was very eye-opening.   The fishing practices around Thailand, to make the fish meal that is fed to their cheap farmed prawns that I already refuse to buy at the supermarket, were a real worry.  The problem is, places like Dominoes pizza will source their prawns from countries with such dire environmental practices.

Anyway, all praise SBS and ABC, again: for running educational material you won't see on commercial television.

Looking at why evangelicals would support Trump

Trump’s success with evangelical voters isn’t surprising. It was inevitable. - The Washington Post

The short answer:  because the modern, politically engaged, American evangelical typically has views that are not really Biblically based at all - except when it comes to homosexuality, I guess. 

On the other hand, NPR has an article about some evangelicals who are saying they can't in good conscience vote for Trump.

Letting Laffer off lightly

Cutting taxes to balance the budget? You're having a Laffer - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

It seems to me that when journalists here write about Art Laffer, they tend to let him off pretty lightly.   (Kansas rarely gets a mention, strangely enough.  How's it going?  - still terribly, I see - you have to go to somewhere like Forbes to find a "free market" proponent to run the Laffer line that it'll all work out for the good - just you wait and see; give it a decade or so.  Oh, and universities and highway funding - who needs them? It's all a "spending problem", not a revenue one.  Lol.)

But nonetheless, Ian Verrender's explanation of what's happened with low interest rates (companies are paying out big dividends, while simultaneously having earnings decline) was interesting.

My duty to note Spielberg

A Word With: Steven Spielberg - The New York Times

I will read, and usually post about, any Spielberg interview I find.   As usual, he presents as the smart, self aware, and very likeable man I've always perceived him to be.

I see that The BFG seems to have received enough positive reviews at Cannes (well, it seems to me the British press were kinder to it than the US media) to ensure it will be a success.  

Trust me, I'm a business man

So, a high profile business man is not only able to completely misrepresent and massively exaggerate about a Labor Party policy, but he's also able to completely and utterly backtrack on a former position? :

 

That's what self serving business men do, hey Symond?  

Interesting...

Peta Credlin suggests government lawyers said boat turnbacks were illegal | Australia news | The Guardian

I'm not surprised:  advice given to Labor governments about the likely illegality of the practice would not have changed.

In my opinion, Australian journalism has been far too supine in accepting the Coalition government's refusal to discuss "on water" or "operational" matters.  And unwilling to spend the money to find out the fate of some returnees. 

Deep thoughts for a Monday

Physicist Bee H tweeted a link to this interview, so I presume she found it interesting.  Here's the best part:

Seeing as you’re a physicist who has thought so deeply about Gödel’s theorem, do you think the absence of a theory of everything in mathematics suggests there might be no theory of everything in physics?
I totally think about that. Why should we think, since physics is so rooted in mathematics, that there is going to be a physical theory of everything? The way we usually think about the Big Bang is: The universe is born, and it’s born with initial data. There are laws of physics, and somehow the initial data is just… something else. We really are dishonest about where that comes from. What if the law of physics that describes the origin of the universe is something that has to make a claim about itself, which is a classic self-referential Gödelian setup for a tangle. [A Gödelian tangle is an unprovable, self-referential mathematical statement, such as, “This statement is unprovable.”] What if the laws of physics have to make a claim about themselves in such a way that they themselves become somehow uncomputable?

I’m also super interested in the idea that the initial data of the universe could contain irrational or uncomputable numbers. Then the universe could never finish computing the consequences of the initial conditions. Maybe we can’t predict what’s coming next because every digit of the initial data is a toss of a coin.

But it’s not enough if I only have words, and I’ve never found something to write down in math, so I’ve just kind of waffled. I think a smart thing to do would be to look at a specific Gödelian tangle that exists in mathematics and try to map that to fictitious laws of physics. Then you would have a universe in which there was a Gödelian tangle. There are constructive things to try.

Just plain nuts

TLS | Otter ego

Is this to be taken seriously?   Sounds more like an April Fool's joke.   But if not, seems to me that this piece would be more appropriate in The Guardian as an example of self indulgent eccentricity, but here it is in the Time Literary Supplement.  An extract:

The real novelty of Foster’s approach, however, lies in his second
instrument. Foster is going to inhabit – not just imaginatively but
physically – the landscape of his target animals. He exchanges
hallucinogens in the living room for adoption of the lives of the
badger, the otter, the fox, the red deer, and the swift.

Foster is not someone who believes in half-measures. To replicate the
life of a badger, Foster and his eight-year-old son live for several
weeks in a “sett” – more accurately a hole in the ground gouged by the
JCB digger of a farmer friend – in the Welsh Black Hills. Like badgers,
they sleep in this sett by day, and crawl around the forest on their
bellies by night, eating worms, grasshoppers (and lasagne provided by
aforementioned farmer friend), licking slugs and smelling their
surroundings (they even construct a scent map of the forest). Over the
weeks, the importance of vision, in this new, dark, ankle-high world
they inhabit, is progressively replaced by hearing and smell.

If anything, Foster’s approach to being an otter is even more
demanding. Spraint is otter dung – used to mark their territory and
often deposited in highly visible locations, such as the rocks beside a
river pool. Foster enlists the help of his children, encouraging them to
deposit their own “spraint” along the riverbanks of Devon. They all
then learn to identify, using their olfactory abilities, each other’s
spraint, assigning individual piles of it to individual persons. Foster
completes his inhabiting of the life of an otter by sleeping in storm
drains by day – nestled warmly in a bed of nappies and syringes – and
swimming in the rivers of Dartmoor by night, attempting, unsuccessfully,
to catch fish with his teeth.

Update:  Ha!   I just click over to The Guardian, and what do I find?   Another story, this one about a British guy trying his hardest to become "goatman"!:

Thwaites spent three days in Alpine meadows, doing his best to mix with a herd of goats. “No one was using that much energy, there weren’t wolves around, we weren’t being driven along a mountain path, but it was still difficult, especially going downhill,” says Thwaites. “After a while, the prosthetics started rubbing, and I got sweaty and cold.” This physical discomfort “encroached” on his attempts to think like a goat.

Is there something in the water over there that the government ought to be looking into?

On shifting the blame for Trump

I don't always care for Bill Maher, but in this clip about how some on the American Right are attempting to blame the Left for the rise of Trump as a presidential candidate, he is spot on:

For those of us who can't get enough Wittgenstein anecdotes

Freeman Dyson in a review in 2012 (don't think I've linked to it before, although I certainly did refer to the book he's reviewing):

When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

That is weird

The Mothership of All Alliances: Scientology and the Nation of Islam | New Republic

I now know slightly more about Nation of Islam, and am particularly surprised to learn it's a science fiction religion, just like Scientology (which it is in the process of embracing):

Farrakhan himself has called white people “a race of devils” and the
Nation teaches that the apocalypse will involve a UFO, or “mother
plane,” that will eradicate all Caucasians.However, there are
some striking theological overlaps that might help explain how Farrakhan
came to adopt a religion invented by a white man. There is, of course,
the attachment to science fiction: Scientologists believe in an alien
dictator, Xenu; the Nation holds that the white race was created by a
mad scientist named Yakub.

 

Marvel-lous box office (even if I don't care for them)

Here I was, idly thinking "is it just me, or has this latest Marvel Captain America movie really not had much build up and media attention - are people getting less excited about these multi superhero movies, which increasingly all look the same?"; and then I decided to check the box office numbers.

Worldwide gross of $765 million, in about a week??   Gee.   (It has had generally good reviews too, so it might not burn out as fast that [Bat V Super] x man critical failure.)

Marvel fanboys and fangirls obviously still care - as so do some reviewers - for a genre I don't (much). 

A gay explanation?

Genetic tug of war linked to evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in beetles | EurekAlert! Science News

In this study the scientists looked for evidence to support the
theory that genetic links exist between SSB and other characteristics
which carry benefits in one sex but not the other. Thus, SSB in one sex
could occur because genetically linked traits are favored by natural
selection in the opposite sex - the genetic tug of war.

The scientists based their hypothesis on the fact that most genes
are expressed in both males and females and often code for more than one
characteristic. For example, previous studies have reported that the
same genes that code for SSB are also the genes that code for mobility.
Mobility is known to be costly to female seed beetles as they do not
need to range as far as males to mate.

To test their hypothesis, the team of scientists selectively bred
male and female beetles to display increased SSB, studying how this
affected their mobility and reproductive success compared to beetles
that had been bred to display decreased SSB. The scientists showed that
when a particular sex had been bred for increased SSB, siblings of the
opposite sex enjoyed an increase in reproductive performance. They also
showed changes in traits such as mobility and sex recognition after
selective breeding on SSB, providing evidence for genetic links between
SSB and these traits across the sexes, according to the researchers.

Not sure about the design

Inside the world's largest cruise ship, Harmony of the Seas | Travel | The Guardian

There's no doubt about it, these massive new cruise ships look awesomely, um, massive, and are surely marvels of modern engineering.

The waterslides look a bit scary, though:

And I have two other reservations:  the way these cabins look across the void straight into other cabins - not much privacy there without a closed curtain (although no doubt much better than being stuck in an windowless internal cabin):

And - I'm no marine engineer, but the whole ship looks a bit disturbingly top heavy, doesn't it?:

There's a hell of a lot of ship for a side on wind to blow against...

Dubious journalism continues

The Right is thrilled that a person who appeared on Q&A and made an entirely valid point about tax rate changes turns out now to have some pretty serious sounding criminal convictions, too.

I would have thought sensible people would at least have misgivings about national media giving front page treatment to this guy's past - is embarrassing a Liberal politician on the ABC enough grounds for the Murdoch press to do that?   But, there is the aspect that an Q&A producer had (unwisely) referred to him as a "national hero" in a tweet, and the fact that lots of people promised money to him when they didn't know the full story.   So I find it hard to say that his background is completely un-newsworthy; but surely it is still being handled disproportionately and with no regard to how it may affect Storrar and his family.

Of course, Storrar himself could help by, say, getting someone to agree to be trustee of the money on a trust set up for his daughter's education and benefit.  That is, if any of the money promised now materialises.

And my complaint about Sinclair Davidson (who thinks the ABC should be running around investigating the private live of everyone who has ever appeared on Q&A) remains:  he was calling this guy a "parasite" before any of this came out, and simply because he doesn't pay net tax.

Update:  it's been decades since I have seen it, but the movie Absence of Malice just came to mind.  I remember few details, except I'm sure it dealt with the journalistic ethics of printing stories that were technically newsworthy, but which carried a strong chance of "collateral damage" to people who were part of the story.    (I only remember one scene, which must mean it was really effective - the poor woman who, I think, had had an abortion after an affair with a politician? running around the neighbourhood in the early morning, trying to pick up newspapers delivered on the front step before they could read them.  I wonder if I have that right?)   Pretty much the same goes here.

Update 2:  I just checked the plot of the movie on Wikipedia - I was pretty close.

New summer melt record seems increasingly likely

People who follow these things closely are increasingly saying that early conditions are so below average for this time of year, a record summer Arctic ice melt this Northern summer seems on the cards:

Not sure I'd feel comfortable within 20 m of it...

They've been talking about the need to clean up the Ganges River in India for years, possibly decades, but here we have another lengthy article at the BBC about the dire condition it's in.  How's this chart, for example:

And after that appears the line:

Here in Varanasi it is sometimes more than 150 times the recommended safe level for bathing, yet vast numbers of people bathe away regardless.

Mice behaviour

Mice cooperate if they benefit -- ScienceDaily

I didn't know mice often have communal nests:

Female house mice can raise their young with other females in a communal
nest. Two or several females pool their litters in one nest and jointly
care for all offspring, even if litters differ by a few days in age. As
the females cannot tell apart between their own young and the offspring
of the other females, they indiscriminately nurse all pups in the
communal nest. If one female has more pups than the others, she invests
the same into nursing but weans more young and therefore has an
advantage.

All a bit socialist of them...

Help! Our cash reserves only went up $150,000 last year!

I love the way the IPA makes a call for membership/donations when there's an issue they think can motivate  the suckers  sympathising readers to part with their cash.

The reality is, as I'm sure I've pointed out before,  that the IPA already sits on a piggy bank of  cash that's been increasing substantially over the last 5 years.  Here, look at this page from their 2014/15 report:

Oh woe is them!  Cash reserves have only increased $1.14 million over the last 5 years. 

And for all of that, what did they get?   A Liberal PM who made promises directly to them that he didn't keep.    And even he's supporting the new PM in the superannuation changes the fight against which is supposed to be the rallying point for new membership.

If the IPA wants to run an advertising campaign supporting the ALP on this issue (lulz), why don't members (new or existing) tell them to use their growing cash reserves to cover it? 

Delcon dismay

The Delusional Conservatives who pine for the return of Tony Abbott as PM must be feeling some dismay at his lengthy support for the Turnbull changes to superannuation in the budget.

More skepticism on company tax cuts

Election 2016: The weak case for a company tax cut

Oh, so it's not just Crikey and Bernard Keane arguing that the benefits of cuts to company tax aren't proven.  Peter Martin now explains the reasons it might not be such a good idea, after all.

I find this issue confusing, partly because someone like Ken Henry, who was clearly perceived by some Right wing economists as being a soft headed friend of the Left, argued for it.  But as Martin says today:

And earlier plans to cut company tax were to be at least partly
funded by the companies themselves (Wayne Swan wanted to do it by
removing loopholes, the Henry review by a mining super-profit tax).
Turnbull's plan is different. It's give, without the take.

On the plus side he is cracking down on multinational tax avoidance, and to
some extent a lower company tax rate might itself make avoidance less
attractive.

The centrepiece of his election campaign is far more than a thought bubble. It derives from serious economic modelling. But it might not yet have been completely thought through.

On the matter of the "Google tax", I heard on Radio National this morning that (based on Britain's experience, which Turnbull is copying), it's not really expected to raise much tax of itself, rather it is designed to encourage companies not to minimise their tax by their offshoring profit methods.  [Hence, it wouldn't do much to make up the loss in revenue that Martin explains today.]

Both sides take damage; but only one looks nasty

I didn't see Q&A on Monday night, but have been following the story about Mr Storrar, who argued that a tax change at the high end of the scale gives no benefit to people (like him, allegedly) with income at the bottom of the scale.  Fair enough argument, one would have thought, but he did paint it in a very personal light.

I take it that Kelly O'Dwyer (who, in my opinion, used to come across as very hard nosed and an economic dry, but has softened somewhat since having a baby) didn't counter convincingly.   Whereupon The Australian decided to follow up on Storrar's personal life not once, but two days running.  Meanwhile, a unionist set up a donation site which has led to much money being promised to Storrar, most of it perhaps by people who may not have realised he didn't live with his daughters and (from today's Australian) has an adult son who is estranged from him, claims he led him into drug problems, and is annoyed at the positive image his father got from his TV appearance.

Even before this morning's story in The Australian, Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy was angry at this guy's "sense of entitlement" and quoting passages from Atlas Shrugged(!) at him.  In comments, he went as far as calling him a "parasite". 

As far as I'm concerned, the whole incident demonstrates three things:

a.  a certain gullibility on the Left to immediately accept appearances when it comes to "hard luck" stories;

b.  the somewhat creepy way The Australian has sought to attack government critics personally, whether they be statutory appointments (Triggs) or mere audience members on an ABC show.    Sure, they came up with the goods, so to speak, this time;  and perhaps they would not have thought it worthwhile were it not for the donations being sought for him.   But it still seems to me to have become an ugly, nasty paper, even with former editor Chris Mitchell leaving.

c.  the nasty and poisonous taint of Randian name calling that is just under the surface of part of the Australian Right.  That Sinclair Davidson, a man who seeks to be influential in Coalition policy, and is invited to talk at Liberal Party functions, should use "parasite" for someone who receives government benefits shows he has no idea how that language demeans himself in the eyes of the broader Australian public.  The extreme and eccentric views of Ayn Rand have never caught on here like they have amongst a certain political corner of America, and in our more egalitarian society they are never likely to do so.  As I have said before, the Liberals could only benefit by distancing themselves from the IPA, and him.*

So, I think both sides take some damage from this story, but only the Right ends up looking nasty.

* And why no ABC journalist ever questions him when he on TV or radio about statements he has made on his blog, but give him a clear run, is a bit of a puzzle.  Perhaps they need me to supply links?

Intersex issues

The spectrum of sex development: Eric Vilain and the intersex controversy : Nature News & Comment

A somewhat interesting article here about an intersex researcher who has had his share of controversy.

Here's one part (in the first paragraph) that I thought surprising, if true:

At Necker University Hospital for Sick Children in Paris in the
1980s, he says, doctors presumed that a child would be psychologically
damaged if he or she did not have normal-looking genitalia. In Vilain's
experience, that belief was so strong that doctors would take genital
abnormalities into account when deciding how hard to fight to save a
premature baby. “The unanimous feeling was that boys with a micropenis
could never achieve a normal life — that they were doomed,” he says.
(The paediatric-surgery department at Necker refused to answer questions
relating to past or current standards of care.)

DSDs occur in an estimated 1–2% of live births, and hundreds of genital
surgeries are performed on infants around the world every year¹.
But there are no estimates as to how often a child's surgically
assigned sex ends up different from the gender they come to identify
with.

Of course they are right to worry

Packing Heat Onto College Campuses - The New York Times

Seems that there are a handful of sensible Republicans on guns:  such as this one:

The gun lobby’s relentless drive to arm students across the nation’s
college campuses ran into an unexpected hitch in Georgia last week when
Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a measure that would have let students carry
concealed weapons to class. Mr. Deal scoffed at the rationale of fellow
Republicans in the legislature that arming students would increase their
safety. “It is highly questionable that such would be the result,” he
stressed in his veto message.

But the best paragraphs of this article are at the end:

And in July of next year, all six  Kansas state universities and dozens of community colleges and tech schools must allow their students to carry concealed weapons on campus, classrooms
included.  A poll of 20,000 Kansas college employees found 82 percent said they would feel less safe on an armed campus, according to National Public Radio. Two-thirds said the presence of guns would necessarily hamper their freedom to teach effectively. Critics of the move wonder, what if students get into a gun fight in class? And what happens to open discourse in a place tense with concealed carry?

The legislative majorities pushing this issue as a public safety necessity insist armed students and professors are the best way to defend against armed intruders. But a new study of federal firearms data indicates licensed and armed private citizens wind up harming themselves or others with their guns far more often than shooting attackers. The study by the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety advocacy group, found that over a three-year period ending in 2014, less

than one percent of victims of attempted or completed crimes of violence used their firearms to try to stop crimes. The notion of quick-draw self defense remains a macho fantasy for gun buyers.

He's got it all covered...or so he thinks

Backreaction: Book review: “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll

Well, atheist physicist Bee thinks atheist physicist Sean Carroll's book is very good.

The comments following her review are likely to go on for some time, and be interesting, at least in parts.

I see one of them refers to Peter Woit's more skeptical take on the point of the book.  In fact, Woit's comments make for more interesting reading than Bee's review.

Legal cannabis and driving is a serious problem, after all

Fatal road crashes involving marijuana double after state legalizes drug: Foundation research also shows that legal limits for marijuana and driving are meaningless -- ScienceDaily

I always suspected that this would be a likely problem, but the evidence to show that it was really was seems to have been slow coming forward.  And the thing is, because of the way THC works and hangs around for a long time at detectable levels, it's a tricky one to respond to.   (Short of saying any THC in the test will result in a punishment, I guess.)

Update:  here's a story about a recent case in Australia illustrating the difficulties of making "drug driving" laws for THC.  I see that the Greens recommend following British laws where they also test for impairment - but I've always been doubtful about the reliability of roadside impairment testing. 

Perhaps not quite as bad as it looked

Nearly 90 per cent of Fort McMurray still intact; 2,400 structures lost - The Globe and Mail

I was interested in the comparison with the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009, and (apart from the death of 173 people making it obviously a greater human disaster) here are the figures for structures lost:

So, Australia, we still do bushfire disasters way better than the Canadians. Yay, sort of.... (Sorry, is that too black?  Pun not intended either.)

When even the TLS likes it, I should see it

The TLS blog: The Jungle Book rebooted

I've been telling my (now teenage) kids that, even though they had no inherent interest in it (and nor did I), The Jungle Book has been such a critical and popular success* that we ought to see it.

Now that it is even the subject of a blog review at the TLS, I am further sure of my view.

*  $783 million globally.

Claustrophobia, anyone?

Here's an illustration from an article at Slate about how the Hyperloop designs are going:

Seriously, is no one thinking of the claustrophobic effects of being in a tube (with no windows) for even half an hour? 

So the IPA wants you to vote Labor? Ahahahaha

Disunity is meant to be death in politics, and surely the IPA's proposed campaign against the Coalition's superannuation changes is only going to hurt Turnbull and his government in this election.

Now, some might say that the sight of a think tank campaigning on the grounds "but think of the rich...the poor mistreated rich!" might actually encourage swing voters who might have leant towards Labor to go for Turnbull after all;  but I can't see it working that way.    No, I think the effect will be more along the lines that they won't vote for the side of politics which the rich think they can push around to get changes back in their favour.  

It's early days, but I suspect the Coalition must be feeling pretty nervous about the way this election campaign is going so far.

Good quotes

John Quiggin has posted quotes from Jennifer Rubin (herself a conservative) writing at the Washington Post about the need for conservative politics in the US to reform itself, and I have to agree with JQ that they are very, very sensible:

Somewhere in that mix are the contours of a platform that is contemporary and conservative and for which there is arguably a broader demographic and geographic appeal. It should not include (for there is no political appetite for these things, and they are unattainable and/or unwise from a policy standpoint): opposition to gay rights; large tax cuts for the rich; protectionism; expelling women from combat in a volunteer army; rooting gays out of the military; obsessing over bathroom assignments; fixating on local ordinances about wedding services; keeping the status quo on entitlements; cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net; never, ever raising taxes on anyone; and mass deportation.

What follows will be different from 1980s conservatism because we are more than three decades removed from Ronald Reagan. Our problems are different — stagnant wages, resurgent and varied enemies, the withering of communal organizations, crumbling infrastructure. We have recognized that the old solutions — a rising tide lifts all boats (not if you have no skills) — are insufficient. However, Republicans should not sell snake oil. Telling working-class whites that the problem is immigrants is a lie. The economic data overwhelmingly show that immigration spurs growth, creates jobs and aids innovation, and no amount of junk statistics from zero-population Malthusians is going to change this. (There are solutions for the tiny segment of the workforce, usually the last wave of immigrants, that might be adversely affected.) Telling workers that millions of jobs went to China is a lie, too. The problems are real, and the solutions must be real as well. We need the world’s best and brightest workers, a humane society and methods to control borders and prevent visa overstays.

 Along with all of this, conservatives have to end their intellectual isolation and self-delusions. They need to stop pretending that climate change is not occurring (the extent and the proposed solutions can be rationally discussed) or imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal-size government. Conservatives must end their infatuation with phony news, crank conspiracy theories, demonization of well-meaning leaders and mean rhetoric. It’s time to grow up, turn off Sean Hannity, get off toxic social media and start learning about the world as it is. (Read a book authored by someone without a talk show, spend time with non-Republicans, take an online course in economics.) Confirmation bias has become pathological.

Good marks for effort..sort of

Thai university students caught using spy cameras, smartwatches to cheat on medicine exam

Three students used glasses with wireless cameras embedded in their frames to transmit images to a group of as yet unnamed people, who then sent the answers to the smartwatches.

Mr Arthit said the trio had paid 800,000 baht ($31,000) each to the tutor group for the equipment and the answers.

"The team did it in real-time," Mr Arthit wrote.

Of more general interest in the report is the explanation that the Thai education system is not doing so well:

In the 2014 PISA rankings, which measures global educational standards, Thai students performed below the global average and much worse than those from poorer Vietnam in subjects like maths and science.

Last year, the World Bank said improving poor quality education was the most important step the kingdom could take to securing a better future, with one third of Thai 15-year-olds "functionally illiterate" — lacking the basic reading skills to manage their lives in the modern world.

Critics say the kingdom's high corruption levels and ongoing political instability has made deep-seated education reforms impossible over the last decade.

Then there were two

Had a very pleasant meeting last evening with a long term blog reader.  This is only the second reader (of the variety who only knows of me via the blog) I have ever met, and the first was maybe 9 years ago, so it doesn't happen often.   Mind you, with my scant hit rate, this still probably means I will have met all regular readers by the time I'm 80...if I haven't done so already.  :)

Nightwalkers of all kinds

Transvestite Vicar Ghost in Interwar England - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beachcombing tells the tale of a night time cross dressing English vicar in the 1920's, and it is odd and somewhat amusing.

But before he gets into it, he notes:

First, it might be worth noting that there were many nightwalkers in
Victorian and Edwardian England who were often mistaken for ghosts. Some
were men or women who used the night to walk naked through familiar
countryside, and a rarer category were men who used the hours of night
to dress in their wife’s clothing.

Can't say that I've heard before of naked, pale night walkers of England as an explanation for some ghost sightings in Victorian England!  

Update:  I see that "nightwalker" had a much earlier meaning in England, as explained in this article from an interesting looking site.

Are Donald and Art even talking?

In April, Art Laffer was claiming:

“You know, [Trump] wants to cut tax rates, Poppy. He does not want to cut taxes. He wants to cut tax rates to bring economic growth back in. He wants to bring jobs back into the United States by having a corporate tax of 15 percent versus the highest tax in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]. And he’s completely right on that. And by the way, so is Ted Cruz completely right on that. Everyone else is missing this.”

Some other claims by laughing Art in that interview were, um, interesting:

Laffer then said that Trump would cut the national debt by using “asset sales.”
Adding, “You have all these properties, you have the post office, you have Camp Pendleton, which is worth $65 billion. There are all sorts of assets.”
Harlow interject, “Who are you going to sell it to?”
Laffer responded that “Southern California beachfront property is still going very nicely. You’ve got the oil reserves. You’ve got gold in Fort Knox. You’ve got all of these assets — it could probably bring down the national debt.

Again, Harlow interrupted, “I’m asking but who are you going to sell it to to eliminate $19 trillion in national debt?”
“Well, you couldn’t eliminate the whole 19 trillion with asset sales, but if you brought the budget back in, you got economic growth, you wouldn’t reduce it to zero, but you can make a huge hit. I mean the tax amnesty program by itself, Poppy, with a good tax plan could probably bring in $800 billion. I mean just past taxes being paid.”

Today, Trump is reported as saying this:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday he was open to raising taxes on the rich, backing off his prior proposal to reduce taxes on all Americans and breaking with one of his party's core policies dating back to the 1990s."I am willing to pay more, and you know what, the wealthy are willing to pay more," Trump told ABC's "This Week."

From the rest of the report:

The billionaire real estate tycoon has said he would like to see an increase in the minimum wage, although he told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday he would prefer to see states take the lead on that front instead of the federal government.
"I don't know how people make it on $7.25 an hour," Trump said of the current federal minimum wage. "I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I'd rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide."
Trump's call for higher taxes on the wealthy is a break with Republican presidential nominees who have staunchly opposed tax hikes for almost three decades. Tax hikes have been anathema to many in the party since former President George H.W. Bush infuriated fellow Republicans by abandoning a pledge not to raise taxes and agreeing to an increase in a 1990 budget deal.
Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, have pressed for increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans for years.
Trump released a tax proposal last September that included broad tax breaks for businesses and households. He proposed reducing the highest income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 39.6 percent rate.

He is evidently the "say anything" candidate. 

Oil sands and the fire

How bad will the fires in Fort McMurray hit the economy?

Interesting report in Macleans notes this:

There is also the risk no one wants to talk about just yet: the possibility that a return
to business-as-usual in Fort Mac may simply not be in the cards. Allan Dwyer, an assistant professor of finance at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, says the wildfire is merely the latest wound to be inflicted on the oil sands and its future—and therefore Fort McMurray’s as well.
In addition to a depressed global outlook for oil prices, the current list of headwinds facing the industry include the  fractious political debate over building more pipelines, mounting concerns about the impact on climate change and recently elected provincial and federal governments that promise economic diversification. “A few years ago, when oil was trading around US$110 a barrel, there would be no doubt about it being an all-hands-on-deck approach to rebuilding and getting people back to work,” Dwyer says. “Now it could be a different response.”

Dwyer also wonders how many homeless oil sands workers will be eager to return to Fort McMurray and rebuild given the doom and gloom that hangs over the sector. “There’s been a growing sense, as the global oil prices has gone down and stayed down, that the oil sands is
somewhat of a sunset industry—that it’s yesterday’s aggressive style of producing hydrocarbons,” Dwyer says. “This only adds to that creeping negative sentiment.”

 

A very cool video

Sky Magic Live at Mt.Fuji : Drone Ballet Show by MicroAd, Inc. from Sky Magic on Vimeo.

Nietzsche and his mum

From a review of new book about Nietzsche (and the reviewer, incidentally, in other parts of the review, is no anti-Nietzsche critic):

In fact, Nietzsche spent a good deal of his early years composing just such books. He completed his first memoir when he was just 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. They weren’t written to record his academic achievements (negligible), much less his prowess on field or track (non-existent), but, rather, according to Blue, as a ‘mirror’ in which, abstracted from history and environment, his ‘latent self’ would come into focus. ‘Autobiography’ was what Nietzsche wrote ‘in order to see who he was’.

On the evidence adduced here, what he was was a mummy’s boy. As late as her son’s undergraduate days, Franziska Nietzsche was still lecturing him on what coat and trousers to wear in the rain. And whenever a more metaphysical storm broke, mum was always Nietzsche’s first port of call. Even when he was called away from his studies for military service, he was granted a dispensation that posted him in his hometown — and allowed him not only to live at home with Mum, but to lunch and dine with her every day of the week. Blue, who seems to have read everything ever published on Nietzsche (and translated much new material hitherto available only in the German), doesn’t mention Joachim Köhler’s Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nonetheless, he does an awful lot to endorse Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche was a repressed homosexual.

Well, he was at the very least, rather eccentric from an early age.

More on Trump not winning

Donald Trump just threatened to cause an unprecedented global financial crisis - Vox

Scott Adams presumably thinks that things like this don't hurt the path of a "master persuader" to the Presidency.  Well, I have just checked on his blog, and all he seems to think Trump needs to do is this:

To be fair, Trump scares the pants off of about one-third of the public.
So “risky” will hit home for those voters. The problem for team Clinton
is that Trump has complete control of his persona. All he needs to do
is act less risky for a few months to prove his campaign persona was all for effect. That process is well underway.

I am completely unconvinced.  I think Adams himself is just a showman, milking this for all its worth.

Company tax cuts, again

I see Bernard Keane and Crikey are continuing the case against company tax cuts leading to increased investment.

Interesting.

Not so much furious as incredulous

That was my reaction at watching Fury Road last night.

Look, post apocalypse movies are not generally my thing; nor are movies based on car crashes and violence.  (Chases are OK, of course, but the Mad Max movies - I gather, as this is the first I have watched - are all about the revving engines and the grinding sound of metal upon metal, often with human flesh squished between it.)

So, it's not as if I was ever destined to like it.  But really, the utter, utter ridiculousness and perverse lack of thrills I was experiencing did mean I kept watching it.  It doesn't reach the "so bad it's good" level, although I strongly suspect that there must have been a substantial part of the cinema audience like me - incredulous at the inanity of what they were watching. Seeing it after knowing it was strongly reviewed, nominated for and had won several Oscars, and made a reasonable amount of money at the box office, only added to the incredulity level.

Let me be specific about a few points:

*  I did not consider it well directed at all.  Good action directing lets you know who (or what) is where in a scene; this quality seemed to me to be distinctly lacking in most of the action sequences.  How Miller got nominated for a directing Oscar indicates something quite worrying about the current crop of Hollywood directors: they don't know good action direction when they see it. 

*  The film was supposed to be one that used little CGI.  Yeah, sure.   I'm not sure how many bodies I saw face plant into sand at about 80kph - it seemed at least a few dozen - but every time one did, of course it was obvious CGI was involved.   It reminded me a bit of the publicity about the much maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which also claimed low CGI in its action sequences, but clearly there was plenty.  (Not that I minded much.  Unlike Road, it was a movie with a plot, after all.)

*  Of what little dialogue there was, I still had trouble understanding some of it, both audibly and narratively.   Was I alone in that?

*  What an embarrassing enterprise for adults to be involved in making; Miller in particular.  As someone writes at IMDB (where there is a bit of a backlash underway in user reviews, it seems):

 So what is this film's targeted demographic? I'm not sure. I can imagine that if you are a 13-year old boy, really into cars/trucks/slipknot, pretty redneck, and probably a little slow, this movie may seem pretty cool. I mean it does have ridiculous cars/trucks outfitted with lots of weapons, spikes, flame-exhausts, (breast-milk?) and guys playing "cool" guitar riffs for no apparent reason. There's also lots of explosions and fighting. And scantily clad women. And tornadoes. And skulls.

Exactly.  I said something more particular to my son as we watched it:  it's like it was written by a 13 year old boy - one who has grown up with aging heavy metal parents, still into Iron Maiden, who took him to every demolition derby and monster truck show in town since he was a toddler.  That Miller made the first couple of Mad Max films when he was a relatively young man is one thing; that he should want to wallow in this world with ever greater improbable visuals, scale and scenarios I have difficulty interpreting other than as an embarrassing sign of immaturity at heart.

*  The one thing I found vaguely interesting:  there was one, not very major, character who I suspect bore a deliberate physical resemblance to Philip Adams.  Adams famously loathed Mad Max, and wrote scathingly of it as violence porn.  (I suspect his reaction was actually a bit overblown, but that it still bore some truth.)   I am curious whether I am right about this being a deliberate joke on Adams on Miller's part. 


In any event, I see now that the movie was not quite the box office smash that its critical reputation suggests.  In the US it made a respectable but far from outstanding $153 million, and $378 million world wide.  

As I'm guessing that 1/4 to 1/3 of the audience actually didn't think highly of the film, I think I can fairly call it not that big a success after all.  Good.

Cheaper for youngsters

So, something interesting happens to weed after it’s legal - The Washington Post

In case you don't want to click - it becomes cheaper.

As the article says:

Falling pot prices create winners and losers. Because state taxes are
based on a percentage of the sales price, declining prices mean each
sale puts less money in the public purse. On the other hand,
bargain-basement prices undercut the black market, bringing the public
reduced law enforcement costs, both in terms of tax dollars spent on
jail and the damage done to individuals who are arrested.

For consumers who enjoy pot occasionally while suffering no adverse effects
from it, low prices will be a welcome but minor benefit; precisely
because they consume modest amounts, the price declines are only a
modest win. On the downside, young people tend to be price-sensitive
consumers, and their use of inexpensive pot may rise over time, as might
that of problematic marijuana users.

Of course, I choose to emphasise the downside...

Never too much when it comes to Nazis...

First, there's a review of a book about the diary of a key Nazi figure who I can't say I recall hearing about before.  (No explanation about the name, though.)  Anyway, worth reading the review.

And from Literary Review, an anecdote about Hitler being funny:

Was Hitler ever – intentionally – funny? The answer, surprisingly enough, is yes. After hosting Mussolini in Berlin in September 1937, the Führer helped his entourage let off steam by mounting a full-scale parody of the Duce: ‘His chin thrust forward, his legs spread and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto and basta.’ For a dictator who only spoke German, the act exceeded Hitler’s ordinary range and the court architect, Albert Speer, noted that the laughter was more than polite: the performance ‘was indeed very funny’. 

Of course!

Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot | City Journal

The subheading from this article:

Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.

The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...

Adams is wrong

I see that Jason Soon has tweeted to a WAPO article giving publicity to the Scott Adams argument that Trump will win "in a landslide" because he's a "master persuader."


I doubt very much that JS actually agrees with Adams, but I have been meaning to note since I first read that Adams was running this line that he is a very eccentric character who is way overconfident in his understanding of humans.  (I posted years ago about his mysterious loss of voice, which he overcame.  He is very big on hypnosis, which is not exactly a practice to dismiss, but not one to tie your credibility to, either.)  

In the meantime, I see there is much laughter on the internet today about this tweet from Trump:

I can't see anyone disputing that it's real, so, yeah, what a "master persuader".  /sarc

My complaint about young(er) people

I see on Twitter and around the place that younger than me, lefty sort of people find the ABC's iView comedy "The Katering Show" hilarious.   Having watched a few episodes, I can see the potential - it's a funny concept, and while not exactly the original short form food/cooking porn parody (see England's rather funnier Posh Nosh from 13 years ago) the women are pretty funny actors.

But seriously, too much of the humour is from the cheap and simple device of a sudden outbreak of swearing, usually as part of a sudden outbreak of "honesty".

It doesn't appear in a natural context, either.   It's way too obvious.

The humour in Posh Nosh was more subtle and naturalistic and better for it.

Young people who find this technique hilarious - you're wrong and encouraging lazy comedy writing.   [Because I say so.]

Stable bugs

Our personal skin microbiome is surprisingly stable

I guess I am not surprised.  It probably explains why unfortunate people who have a skin biome which results in really strong body odour (or, on the other hand, the lack of it) are stuck that way unless they make a very major attempt to change it.

Bill on the rise

I don't normally pay attention to the Budget Reply, but the status of this one as effectively the first major election campaign speech meant it was worth watching.

And I'm glad I did.  Shorten clearly did well, sounding confident and reasonable and, well, rather like a Prime Minister.   I don't actually agree with all of his policy positions, but he is sounding good....

Is the true situation "nobody knows"?

Adam Creighton has another one of his peculiar columns up where the headline position doesn't seem all that well supported by the details.  It says in the opening paragraph that Treasury has "hit back" at claims a tax cut for companies will hurt Australia, but the details of the analysis don't sound all that convincing.

For example:

Labelling it a “tax on foreign capital”, the analysis said a company tax cut to 25 per cent would increase employment in the long run by 0.1 per cent, equivalent to about 12,000 jobs, and boost real wages 1.1 per cent.

0.1% is supposed to be impressive??

Creighton then goes on to note one dissenter:

Janine Dixon, a researcher at Victoria University, last month challenged the orthodox view, finding gross domestic product and workers’ wages would rise but not by enough to make up for the transfer of government revenue to foreigners, which could no longer be spent on public services.

“The right indicator of national benefit is the impact of a company tax rate cut on national income and that’s clearly negative,” she said.

Of course, there is the fact that Ken Henry was a supporter of a company tax cut to 25% to make us "more competitive with Asia."   On the other hand, the US doesn't exactly seem crippled by its corporate tax rate, although no doubt there is the argument that big corporations find motivation for their off shore tax shenanigans in the relatively high tax rate.

I reckon the truth is that no body really knows how good an idea it really is.

Climate change and Canadian fires

Did climate change contribute to the Fort McMurray fire?

It's a short article, but some surprising figures in there for the increase in the area of Canada burnt in bushfires over recent decades.

Agreed

Donald Trump isn’t going to be president.: Donald Trump begins the general election with a huge deficit in head-to-head polls, deep unpopularity, and major demographic headwinds. Unless he wins unprecedented shares of black and Latino voters, or, barring any improvement with nonwhite voters, unless he wins unprecedented shares of white voters, he loses. And he has to do this while running as the most unpopular nominee in 30 years of polling. He has to do it while running against a Democratic Party operating at full strength, with popular surrogates (including a former president) crisscrossing the country against his campaign. He has to do it with a divided Republican Party. He has to do it while somehow tempering his deep-seated misogyny and racism. All this, again, in a growing economy with a well-liked president—solid conditions for a Democratic candidate.

Donald Trump has to become a radically different person to win.

Donald Trump isn’t going to win.

Budget reaction

M'eh.*

A bit more detail:

*  is the Murdoch press in the can for full on support for a Coalition win in July, or what?

*  a significant danger for the Coalition in the election campaign should be the deferral of a decision on university fee deregulation and HECS support.   But will that get swamped by the "big picture"?

*  the IPA and small government types are not going to be impressed with this budget, but seriously, how many of them would really manage to vote without at least preferences going to the Coalition?  (Bolt has already put the boot into it to a surprising degree - but he tends to take his economics talking points straight from the IPA.  I would bet a pile of money that he will not, however, endorse a vote for Shorten.) 

*  the danger - the big, big danger - for Labor will be things like that downwards revised estimate for revenue from tobacco taxes.   People are too easily convinced that Labor is too optimistic on revenue to justify its spending.  

*  listening to Richard de Natale on Radio National this morning - he's really the best Greens leader we've ever had.   Sounds extremely reasonable.

*  why did aged care have to take such a hit?  Have we got too many nursing homes now?

*  politically, it's not great; but on the other hand, it looks fantastic compared to the dire first attempt by Abbott.

Update:   hey, hell is about to freeze over:  I will now quote Judith Sloan as making a useful contribution in economic commentary:

Why should we believe this when none of the other budget projections have come to pass? We are expected to believe that nominal GDP growth, the key driver of revenue, will jump from 2¼ per cent this financial year to 4¼ per cent next year and 5 per cent per annum thereafter. Note that nominal GDP grew by only 1.6 per cent in 2014-15.

The reasoning behind this optimism is Treasury’s view that the economic output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) must eventually narrow. However, any significant hiccup in the world economy or China means the assumptions on ­nominal GDP growth are out the window.

And just take a look at what is expected to happen to revenue. Next financial year, general government revenue is expected to come in at 24.2 per cent of GDP. By the end of the forward estimates, revenue will be bringing in 25.9 per cent of GDP.

In historical terms, this would be an extraordinary outcome. In the period since 1996-97, there have been only two years when revenue as a percentage of GDP exceeded 25.9 per cent, in 2000-01 and 2005-06. Now many of us would agree that we live in extraordinary times, just not the sort of extraordinary times that would generate the surge in government revenue assumed in the budget.

And there are a number of breathtaking assumptions. Capital gains tax revenue is expected to go from $13.4bn this year to $17.5bn in 2019-20. And superannuation taxes will rise from $6.6bn this year to $10.9bn at the end of the forward estimates, an increase of 65 per cent.

Even taking into account the changes to the taxation of superannuation contained in the budget — a series of measures that will no doubt induce anger among the ­Coalition’s base and negate the Treasurer’s pledge to spare current retirees — the increase in superannuation taxes looks implausible. There is a long history of appalling forecasting of super­annuation taxation receipts on the part of Treasury.

In other words, it is quite on the cards that the Budget will suffer the same fate as those under Swan - based on cheery Treasury forecasts which don't sound all that likely, and will have to be revised downwards.

Update 2:  Peter Martin really praises the good bits of the budget.

Yeah, I agree up to a point.   The bigger issue, and one for which I blame both sides of politics, is that a moderate increase in GST (I was arguing for 2.5%)  would have given a substantial, and pretty much dead certain, boost in revenue.  Instead, we get changes which are of uncertain revenue impact over many years.   Both sides aren't really being serious about revenue measures.   And the Coalition is especially profligate when it comes to defence.  There has also been no serious discussion about the Coalition's climate change spend - when a modest carbon tax would make much more sense.



*  I see the "correct" spelling is "meh", but I always have the urge to put in an apostrophe.  I can't see why both can't be right.

Japanese ghosts are nasty

In the early 2000's, I was busy baby wrangling (with my wife, of course) and so didn't catch up with the Japanese ghost/horror genre of the likes of The Ring, and The Grudge.

Well, on Sunday night my son declared an interest in watching something scary, so I found the 2004 US version of The Grudge available on the streaming service Stan.

The movie received mixed reviews at the time, and I'm not the biggest fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it did strike me (and my son, more so) as being very efficient at delivering scares.    I liked the way it was set in the complete opposite of a gothic city (Tokyo), and the silence that accompanied many of the dreaded "walking up the stairs to see what's making that sound" scenes.   I see that it was only rated PG-13 in the US (on Stan it showed as M), and I am quite surprised at that - it would have to be one of the creepiest movies to get that rating, surely?

After it finished, something fell unexpectedly out of the cupboard behind the living room, delivering an appropriate final fright for the night.

Airport security is not just "security theatre"

Carry-Ons Bristle With Loaded Guns At Airport Security - The New York Times

Just last night, on SBS on Demand, I was watching for the first time (and with my son) Adam Ruins Everything, and it was pretty entertaining.

But the second one we watched spent time dissing American's TSA, and claimed that airport security was more "security theatre" than effective.

I said to my son that I don't find this a convincing argument, and today by coincidence, I come across this in the NYT:

Anyone annoyed at long airport security lines and
picayune-seeming inspectors should be grateful that watchful agents of
the Transportation Security Administration have been confiscating guns
at an unfortunately record pace from travelers who mindlessly pack them
in their carry-on bags.

This is plainly illegal, but last year, 2,653 firearms —
83 percent of them loaded!  — were seized from carry-on luggage, up 441
guns from the previous record haul in 2014. The pace keeps rising. In
the week of April 18, airport agents detected and seized 73 guns from
carry-ons, the most ever in a week. Sixty-eight of them were loaded and
27 had a round chambered and ready to be triggered. That violates the
most basic safety precautions that the gun lobby insists most
law-abiding, gun-carrying citizens carefully observe in indulging their
Second amendment rights in public.

Stopping a couple of thousand loaded guns getting on board aircraft is not mere "security theatre".

A new dark matter solution?

Speculative theories of gravity are a dime a dozen on arXiv, and I don't usually pay that much attention to them (well, they are hard to understand); but I am interested to see that there are two recent papers up, one by a handful of European physicists, and another by a couple of Japanese ones, talking about a bimetric theory of gravity that incorporates something that makes sense as a dark matter particle.  Here's the European abstract:

Observational evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is limited to its gravitational effects. The extensive program for dedicated searches has yielded null results so far, challenging the most popular models. Here we propose that this is the case because the very existence of cold Dark Matter is a manifestation of gravity itself. The consistent bimetric theory of gravity, the only known ghost-free extension of General Relativity involving a massless and a massive spin-2 field, automatically contains a perfect Dark Matter candidate. We demonstrate that the massive spin-2 particle can be heavy, stable on cosmological scales, and that it interacts with matter only through a gravitational type of coupling. Remarkably, these features persist in the same region of parameter space where bimetric theory satisfies the current gravity tests. We show that the observed Dark Matter abundance can be generated via freeze-in and suggest possible particle physics and gravitational signatures of our bimetric Dark Matter model.

You heard it here first.  Probably.

How ignorant can you get?

Very, very ignorant, if you just live in the Right wing climate change denial-o-sphere, as does Steve Kates.    (Climate change denial goes hand in hand with believing Obama has crushed and killed freedom, the American economy, and all Western values, by the way.  That's Kates' other favourite line at Catallaxy.)

Anyway, my evidence for his extreme, gob smacking ignorance, is this from his recent short post:

Global warming is almost totally out of the news since the evidence that is happening has all but disappeared.

This is by way of introduction to a video by retired climate scientist Lindzen, which had already been thoroughly debunked (at length) by Barry Bickmore.  

Not that Kates would have known of the Bickmore post.   It's outside his denial-o-sphere. 

I see that only a few comments have been made at the Catallaxy post.  Is it possible that even they can see when Kates is exaggerating to a ridiculous extent?

Skepticism on company tax cuts

From Crikey.   (Bernard Keane is a real mix of policy beliefs, no?   Often, when it comes to "nanny state" issues like licensing hours, he sounds like a libertarian.  But he hates them on guns, and hardly follows their small government economics to the letter.)  

About those submarines...

It's been a little while since the Turnbull government announced it was going to go with a fleet of French designed, Australian built, submarines.  Twelve of them, in fact, but (as I understand it) to be built at a somewhat glacial pace.

A few observations, if I may:

a.  of course this will be criticised.  Surely the public has noticed that all major Defence acquisition programs look, at one stage or another, to have been a wrong decision: at least in terms of cost, and often in technical  ways too. So it doesn't matter which of the contenders had been chosen - any would have been criticised and would go wrong in one way or another.

b.  Apparently, Defence came out strongly in favour of the French bid.   Given that Abbott had told the Japanese, apparently on a handshake (and probably one of his stupid winks) that they had the deal in the bag, this gives someone like me who disliked PM Abbott decidedly mixed feelings.   On the one hand, it's deprived us of the criticism of the Japanese subs which would have been inevitable (see above), and hence the blaming of Abbott when the Defence preference was made known;  on the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that Abbott might have been right - the Japanese submarine probably would have been ultimately fine; cheaper too.  The Japanese remain good at hi tec stuff at a reasonable price.  The French do well in aerospace, but not sure about cost.   Is it silly of me to think I can judge a nation's likely submarine building capacity from their car making ability?   Because I would prefer a Japanese luxury car to a French one.   Not that I know anything really about luxury cars, either.

c.  The criticism of the contract is already starting, and, amusingly, it's the "delcons" who don't like Turnbull, such as Andrew Bolt, leading the charge.   All further evidence of the internal crisis in the Coalition.  Does Bolt really think he is doing the Coalition a favour by criticising them for making a decision that Defence wanted?  Or that he is helping Australia's diplomatic standing by dredging up what France did 50 years ago?   Once again, I sense a Turnbull "with friends like Bolt, who needs enemies" response coming.

d.  Twelve submarines?  Really?   As I have mentioned before, without a willingness to have Filipino seaman run them under contract, I thought we couldn't even manage [insert gender neutral word for "manning"] the 2 or 3 Collins class that are available at any one time.  And that's despite throwing money at sailors to try to convince them to become submariners.  Seriously, how does the government intend dealing with that problem?   And is there room for Labor to make political headway by announcing that if it wins the next election, it'll only be going to contract for 9 or 10 submarines, saving a substantial amount of money in the process?  I reckon there could be.

e.  Building them here was an inevitable result of politics trumping dry economics, but I have no big problem with that.   There does seem to be speculation, though, that what the Liberals are doing in concentrating spending in Adelaide and WA is going to be at the expense of votes in Queensland - especially with them not being able to at least throw Queensland the bone of some patrol boat builds. 

A somewhat more serious take on the economics of supporting industry (esp defence industry) can be found here at the Lowy Institute.

Following the Republicans

It's kind of fascinating, if not edifying, to watch the Coalition in Australia follow the path of the Republicans.

I don't know how long the Liberals have sent people over to America to study Republican electoral tactics, and I suppose that you can't blame them for thinking they might learn something useful.

Instead, it has just encouraged a contagion of the American Republican problem to Australian right wing politics - what with the climate change denial, economic rabid anti-Keynesians and Laffer-ites continually decrying economic pragmatists in Treasury (and confused Coalition Treasurers trying to walk a path between the two), and the revival of culture wars amongst the conservatives with more than a dash of misogyny thrown in.

On the last point, it's hard to read the return of Chris Kenny to his own vomit of the Abbott/News Ltd attack of Gillian Triggs in any other way.   It's just the nuttiest and most strangely obsessive personal attack on a statutory appointment I can ever recall coming from the Right of Australian politics. 

I expect it must also dismay Malcolm Turnbull, too.  But one of the mysteries for which we have to wait (perhaps) another few years, until he publishes his account of his time in office, is how he must really feel about having to dance with and corral the conservative ideologues in his party.   Surely he is doing his part, with hypocritical walking back from former views on everything from climate change policy to negative gearing, but is he really happy doing it? 

The split within the Right in Australia at the moment is such an obvious (but smaller scale) version of the split within the Right in America.   Sure, we don't have a populist like Trump shaking up the corridors of Right wing power; but we did have the pretty close analogue of blowhard Clive Palmer.   Perhaps in that respect we are slightly ahead of the Americans, in that Palmer has (politically) blown apart already, but we are waiting another 6 months or so before we see it happen to Trump.  Who can doubt that, if we had some similar electoral system to the Americans, that Palmer would have run for President in the same self funded manner?  

It could be right, what the dimwitted Abbott diehards are muttering to themselves - that the best thing that can happen to the Coalition is a surprise fail at the next election.   [It's hilarious reading Catallaxy at the moment, where the pro Abbott supporters congregate and threaten a Labor vote, while openly dissing Sinclair Davidson for his support of the Turnbull overthrow.  It seems that SD can't ban anymore commenters who are rude to his face (up to and including one who now openly calls him an "idiot") because of the large number he would have to cull.]   The only thing is, the "delcons" (delusional conservatives) think that it will vindicate them - so their imperviousness to evidence will remain a problem, unless they are the ones to then leave the fold and establish a breakaway conservative party.   Yes, let that happen, and let the moderates of the Right tell their Party they have to decide whether to stand with the evidence free, ideologically driven side of the Right, or go with the centrist and and pragmatic Right.   It may be the only way to resolve the current problems.

MIT needs a new writer

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

What's this?  MIT Technology Review appears to have a  writer who is completely on board with the EmDrive being a real, new physics thing.

I remain deeply skeptical.  And someone in comments claims (not sure if it is right, though), that the EmDrive, if true and configured right, could generate its own power and zip around forever.  So you could build your own UFOs powered by perpetual motion, I guess.  Would be rather cool, but come on, how likely is that?