Let's check in on how the brains trust* forecast the UK election..

 

And how are they taking the news of a very, very close result?:

* sarcasm of the highest order.   And yes, I did get the last US presidential election wrong - but this is still fun.

Placebo, placebo

Two  links about the placebo effect for you:

*   people act drunker if they think that what they drink should make them drunk, faster.   (It's a study about mixing Red Bull and alcohol.)   I'm pretty sure this type of effect was already pretty well established, but it's still interesting how anticipation of how a drink should affect you does influence how you feel.

*  Over at Vox, there was a fascinating interview recently with a researcher who says that, for some conditions, giving patients a placebo, even while they know it's a placebo, still helps!:

About five years ago, I said to myself, “I’m really tired about doing research that people say is about deception and tricking people.” 

Let’s just try to see if we can be honest, transparent: Is it possible that [the placebo effect] would work giving a placebo pill and telling people the truth? People said I was nuts. 

The first open-label study we did was in irritable bowel syndrome. 

People on no treatment got about 30 percent better. And people who were given an open-label placebo got 60 percent improvement in the adequate relief of their irritable bowel syndrome.

He admits this makes little sense:

Brian Resnick

What I still can’t wrap my mind around: Okay, the placebo effect is real, and it’s not just about people’s expectations. Fine. But why on earth does the effect still work when you tell patients the drug isn’t real? That it’s just sugar?

Ted Kaptchuk

First of all, I have no idea.

Brian Resnick

That’s actually a refreshing answer.

Ted Kaptchuk

Ultimately, it’s very peculiar. Our patients tell us it’s nuts and crazy. The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.

I don’t know if this is going to keep working [in clinical studies]. It’s really novel and new, in infancy. This needs to be replicated. We need to test it over time, too.

One other surprise in the article - I would not have guessed this:

Placebo effects accompany real drugs. Morphine given without a person knowing — surreptitiously, in a IV drip — is 50 percent less effective than when it is given in front of them. That’s the placebo effect. 

Fascinating! 

And here's a thought, seeing I was recently writing about hallucinogens - to what extent can you reduce LSD or other hallucinogens dose and still talk people into having what they perceived as a full blown trip if they think it is full strength?   Has anyone studied that?

Take that, Monsanto

It might make weekend gardening a lot more fun for the average husband, too:

Laser-based weed control can eliminate herbicides

(Actually, it's currently just an idea for a start up - sounds pretty fanciful to me.)

Let's not worry too much about a vacuum decay end of the universe

I'm making another attempt at a Trump free Friday, so instead I'll refer the reader to a vaguely optimistic post by Bee about why she doesn't worry too much about the potential for the universe to disappear rapidly as a result of quantum vacuum decay.

Go to Mars and die

Yet more research indicating that travelling to Mars is very risky business for astronaut's health.

Collateral damage from cosmic rays increases cancer risks for Mars astronauts. New predictive model, published in Scientific Reports, shows radiation from cosmic rays extends from damaged to otherwise healthy 'bystander' cells, effectively doubling cancer risk

I think one of the first facilities that would need to be set up in a Mars colony would be a nursing home with palliative care.   

Glittergate

So, the video from the guy who was filming the two who assaulted Andrew Bolt has turned up on the net.   Fairfax has it here.

In my previous post, I questioned whether Bolt had gone too far in (so he said) kicking one of the assailants in the groin, while he was down.

The funny thing is, unless there was yet more fighting than appears in this video, and I don't think there is, I can't see that a clear kick happened at all - or at least, not as Bolt described it.   (The young looking Fairfax journalist writing it up is completely on Bolt's side, by the way, saying "He fights back fiercely, kicking and punching his two assailants in the face and groin before they give up and start to walk away."  But I can't see clear evidence of a kick, or not of a kick as Bolt claimed.)

Let's revisit how Bolt himself described it:

I hit the head of one so hard that my knuckles are still tender, and when he was down, legs sprawled apart, I kicked.

Post that footage, moron.

Um, unless my eyes deceive, there is no one " ... down, legs sprawled apart".

He keeps talking about the kick, too.  Here is how he first put it:

Luckily the cameras do not capture me kicking one between the legs. I cannot have my children see me acting like a thug.

(I said it was an insincere, boastful, apology.)

Here's my take on the matter, after seeing this second video:

* It does make Bolt's reaction to swing out and fight them perfectly understandable (not that I ever questioned that);

* It actually shows Bolt stumbling in a way that the previous video didn't show - his performance as a street fighter does not look quite as good as his words suggest.  (Not that he didn't, in a general sense, do well enough);

* I think he's greatly exaggerating the kicking part of his fight, because that plays well to his fan club. (Really, who can avoid the feeling that Bolt secretly thinks this is the best PR he has received in a decade?)

So I reckon he's OK on the disproportionate response to provocation - if he hadn't exaggerated what he had done, I wouldn't have even raised it.

Update:  Again, just to make it clear I make no excuses for the idiot assailants - the three involved ought to face charges.  Even if it's a fine that their family pays for them, they deserve a conviction for assault on their record.

Update 2:  it's still being said on many sites that the stuff sprayed at Bolt was shaving cream, but it sure doesn't look like that on the videos, and it's supposed to have involved glitter and dye.   Last I looked, shaving cream comes only in non-dying white, and without glitter.  You can, however, get glittery hair colour spray, mainly used by kids.   I would suspect that that is more likely what was used, which is a stupid thing to be spraying towards someone's face.

Update 3:  It's not just me.  Despite every single Catallaxy commenter probably having watched the Bolt videos ten times, I see only one asking the same question I have - where's the groin kick on someone down?

And that, I expect, is about where their inquirying minds will leave it.

And now - pop culture

Tom Cruise's The Mummy movie is not exactly getting rave reviews.  Metacritic puts it at 37%, with the great majority of reviews "mixed", which is borderline as to whether I should see it at the cinema.   It does look like too much of a CGI fest on the trailers, but it does have Tom in it...

Agency, consciousness and maths

It's all a bit complicated to follow, but I gather that it is a mathematical argument that emergent consciousness is much more than the sum of its parts.  But as that seems sort of obvious to most of us as lived experience, it's hard to understand the significance of a mathematical proof.  And the reductions dispute it shows anything new at all.

Anyway, have a read:   A Theory of Reality as More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Trump expects loyalty, but doesn't give it

Mike Allen at Axios has a look at Trump's poor record of loyalty to his aides:

So what's with the constant needling and belittling?

• A person who has experienced Trump's moods said: "He feels some sort of deep--seated emotional need to assert his primacy over people he has very clear primacy over. These are people you need to trust, and to be loyal to you."
• Trump's treatment of his aides is a factor in the unwillingness of some top talent to go into the White House, according to an official involved in the search: "You never know when you're going to get thrown under the bus. He has this constant need for reassurance and affirmation that he takes out on the staff."
• An irony: It's people who were with Trump on the earlier side (Sessions, Priebus, Spicer) who seem to take the brunt of his fickleness, while later arrivals like Gary Cohn and Dina Powell (so far) have escaped Trump's crowded doghouse.
• Sound smart: Quick! Name a top-titled White House official — not named Ivanka or Jared — who authentically likes or feels sincere loyalty toward Trump. Then, quick, name a top-titled official — not named Jared or Ivanka — who Trump genuinely likes or feels loyalty toward. This is a problem.

No wonder Trump likes Putin

Both like to talk about how women have "bad days" because of menstruation:

When Stone asked Putin during a tour of the Kremlin if he ever had bad days, Putin said being a man meant he did not have to worry about this. “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days. I am not trying to insult anyone. That’s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles,” Putin told the director, according to Bloomberg News, which has seen an advance version of the documentary.

History repeats - Republicans don't learn

News today out of Kansas that there's been a revolt over not raising taxes:

Kansas lawmakers have voted to roll back a series of major tax cuts that became an example for conservative lawmakers around the country but didn't deliver the growth and prosperity promised by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican.

A coalition of conservative Republicans, some of whom voted for sweeping tax cuts in 2012 or defended them in the years since, sided with moderates and Democrats to override Brownback's veto of a $1.2 billion tax increase.

The law to increase taxes over the next two years comes as legislators seek to close a projected $900 million budget gap for that same period and bolster funding for K-12 schools under a Kansas Supreme Court order.

Which reminds of the Reagan administration and what Republicans in the past have had to do:

Everyone remembers Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. His admirers are less likely to tout the tax hikes he accepted as the 1981 recession and his own tax cuts began to unravel his long-term fiscal picture–a large tax increase on business in 1982, higher payroll taxes enacted in 1983 and higher energy taxes in 1984. A decade later, when a serious recession and higher spending began to upend the fiscal outlook again, the first President Bush similarly raised taxes on higher-income people in 1991; Bill Clinton doubled down and raised them again in 1993. 

Why are the current bunch of Republicans so slow to learn?  Why is Laffer still granted credibility?   At the risk of repeating myself:  it seems that it's mainly to do with the small government/libertarian strain in the American Right - it just doesn't like, on principle, government doing things, and strangling revenue is a means to an end for them.  It's not economics that suggests deep tax cuts are always a good idea - although I gather that Laffer does his best at mathturbation to try to show lower tax States do better than higher taxed ones.   (I suspect this is one of the examples where the huge range of factors that are difficult to account for in economics lets an economist construct a result he desires.)   But the public does expect government to do things now, and the Republicans eventually have to come back towards reality.

As I was saying (about Red States and renewables)

Remember last week I said I was relatively sanguine about the consequences of Trump leaving the Paris Accord* because, surprisingly, Republican States were actually already taking up renewable energy despite their rhetoric on climate change?

Well, there's a full article in the NYT talking in more detail about this, and it's far more widespread than Texas.    Here's how it starts:

Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative state.

Yet by the time the law was scrapped, it had become largely irrelevant. Kansas blew past that 20 percent target in 2014, and last year it generated more than 30 percent of its power from wind. The state may be the first in the country to hit 50 percent wind generation in a year or two, unless Iowa gets there first.

Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election.

The five states that get the largest percentage of their power from wind turbines — Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and North Dakota — all voted for Mr. Trump. So did Texas, which produces the most wind power in absolute terms. In fact, 69 percent of the wind power produced in the country comes from states that Mr. Trump carried in November.

*  which is not the same thing as saying I think it was a wise decision - quite the contrary.  It was a stupid decision made only to get applause from rednecks at rallies and libertarian billionaires and those who they fund.

Brexit consequences you don't read much about

James Annan, who did some quite important work on climate sensitivity, writes scathingly of Brexit and the forthcoming British election.   Well worth a read, and I trust he won't object to my re-printing much of it here:

Of course, it's all about brexit, so there hasn't been any sort of meaningful debate about this. Both tories and labour are rushing headlong for the most catastrophic outcome they can possibly engineer, and there isn't a fag-paper of difference between them on anything substantive. Corbyn promises better employment protection and May less red tape but these are not really issues of how and why we leave the EU, rather what we do afterwards. The Labour vision may be marginally more attractive but that's basically a question of what colour deck-chairs you prefer on the “Titanic Success”.

It's important to realise, there is no such thing as  a “good brexit”. The only reasonable brexit would be something functionally indistinguishable from the status quo, which both sides have ruled out. The choice is between a bad brexit, a worse brexit and a catastrophic brexit, with all the smart money on the latter. All competent experts have repeatedly pointed out the huge problems that brexit will bring, including but not limited to our European flights (there's no agreement for anything post 2019 and timetables will have to be designed well in advance of that), the operation of our nuclear industry (including such details as medical isotopes), the huge customs problem at Dover/Calais for which the infrastructure does not exist and simply cannot be built in time, the Northern Irish border which will likely spark off unification violence, the harm to our financial industry, the fact that we aren't even normal WTO members in our own right and negotiating that will take agreement from the other 162, the 759 separate agreements with 168 countries that need to be renegotiated in the remaining 661 days etc. The whole thing is idiotic nonsense and the failure of most of our politicians to say as much in plain terms is a gross dereliction of their duty.

In my opinion, the most likely outcome by some way remains a year or so of increasingly acrimonious negotiations or rather arguments, followed by a collapse of the process and long period of recrimination. This national humiliation will come at great cost of course, not just economically but also politically, culturally and socially, as we are already starting to see. Lots of people are starting to bleat about the entirely predictable consequences. I'm intensely relaxed about the poor farmers, since just about every field round here had a “Vote Leave” placard this time last year. They of all people should realise that they will reap what they have sown!

And all for what? Even though it was all about “taking back control”, no-one is prepared to make any promises about immigration anyway. For while the EU was always the convenient excuse for the large-scale immigration that govts of all stripes have encouraged over recent years, it was never actually anything more than that. They could have reduced immigration substantially had they wanted to, but they saw the obvious economic benefits of it and rather than arguing honestly in favour, passed the buck on to the EU.

 I strongly suspect he is right.

Not exactly Zootopia

Disgruntled investors can get a little irrational in China: 

Witnesses have watched on in horror as disgruntled shareholders of a Chinese zoo fed a live donkey to tigers in an ongoing dispute with zoo management.

The Changzhou zoo, located in Yancheng city, north of Shanghai, said the shareholders tossed the donkey into the tiger enclosure "in a fit of rage" and later apologised to the public.

Good point, Garry

News at 7: Idiots attack idiot

I dunno - seems to me that the response of Andrew Bolt to the foolish "fascist attackers" (whose use of masks, more than anything, will probably be used as justification by Bolt) looked like it could be argued as disproportionate to the provocation.   (He says he was sprayed in the face and on his suit with some "sticky liquid and glitter" - some reports say it was shaving cream -  yet it seems  he wasn't hurt at all by the alleged face spray, given he went ahead and gave his speech shortly thereafter.)   Clearly, he's happy to boast about "clobbering" then, adding only an an insincere apology about kicking one in the groin.   All good for the ratings of his cable show, I'm sure.

But if the guy he kicked turns out to have suffered serious gonad injury, I wonder what response he would get from the legal system?   If I were Bolt, I wouldn't be making light of it, just in case.  (Actually, never mind, Andrew, go ahead - I would get more amusement from watching another case of your legal system martyrdom.)

In the meantime, there was probably the sound of Viagra being popped out of its packaging across the land of Catallaxy last night, in celebration of a bit of biffo by one of their own.   (Although, amusingly enough, he is not right wing enough for some of them.)

And in case anyone is thinking that I am suggesting he had no right to make a physical response at all - no, I am not saying that.   But I think all sensible people realise that there must be an element of proportionality to provocation as a defence.  It's in the law anyway, whether you like it or not.

If the Right want violent desire policed, perhaps they should stop expressing violent desire

Everyone would like there to be a better way of preventing Islamic inspired terrorists from killing, and there is much concern over facts like one of the London killers having appeared on a British documentary last year about Islamic State supporters.

But what the nutty Right need to get a better grip on is the difficulty of policing violent thoughts, because they keep on expressing them themselves.

Let's face it:  if an Islamic journalist had written in a on line publication with a devoted readership this:

"if there was any justice, the bomb would have gone off at the Studios of Sky News, where the death of the reactionary Right wing commentators that infest the place would have improved our society",

would the defenders of Roger Franklin have shrugged their shoulders and said it was clearly angry satire that didn't really feel threatening?  (I read this morning via the perpetually angry Tom at Catallaxy that Franklin has kept his job at Quadrant - and hundreds of Quadrant are apparently upset that the board was even considering his future.)

And, speaking of that blog, you get death wish comment not infrequently, including last night from migration obsessed troll machine Fisk:

Now, of course (some) readers are going to say that he doesn't have a helicopter with which to carry out his desire - you just have to accept that some people use hyperbole and don't literally mean they   really want their political/cultural opponents to suffer violence or a nasty death.

But the problem is, of course, that the same argument will be used by radicalised Islamists.

Sure the next fallback will be "But violent, radical Islam has form - it is killing people!"   To which the response will naturally be "Right wing killing does occur - especially in the US.   You can't just argue (unless you're a real fool) that you can just tell that if a death wish is expressed by an angry white guy it's always just the righteous blowing off of steam, but if it's from someone on the Left or a Muslim, it's always serious."  (You do actually get this "all Leftists wants us to die" paranoid claim from the commenters at Catallaxy all the time.  It's just part of the ridiculous but sincerely held nutty exaggeration that routinely goes unchallenged there.)

So, yeah, we would all like something to be able to be done about Islamist inspired radicals from carrying out death wishes, and monitoring what they say about death desires towards others is one part of that.

But the nutty Right is its own worse enemy in this regard.

No "Wow" after all...

A paper details what sounds like a credible, but prosaic, explanation for the famous "Wow" radio signal of 1977.   (I thought that the signal was significant for its strength, yet I would have thought a comet's radio signal would be pretty feeble.  Still, they are near neighbours compared to pulsars and the like, so I suppose that could explain that.)

All the more reason for Chris Carter to abandon another bout of X Files.   Although, I suppose investigating the alien connections to Don Trump's hair might make it all worthwhile.

[By the way - having Trump as President undoubtedly means that new POTUSs do not receive a top secret briefing on the existence of UFOs and aliens.   Can you imagine him being able to resist tweeting about that if he did?]

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world...

Time for some random news and stories from places with different concerns:

Fiji: 

There is growing concern on the over-harvesting of coconut crabs.
And if nothing is done, there is the risk of extinction.
The crab, which is a species of the terrestrial hermit crab, also goes by the name Birgus latro or more commonly known as ugavule.

I have been interested in these crabs ever since seeing, perhaps on an Attenborough series?, that they pick up half rotted coconuts, drag them up the tree, drop them to split open the nut, and then come back down to eat the pulp inside.   That has always struck me as a strangely science-y sort of thing for a humble crab brain to know how to do.

Anyhow, further into the Pacific.

Samoa:   a column writer in the Samoan Observer gives a short history of the late 19th century colonial fights over the islands, and it's much more dramatic than I would have expected:

Germany and America were ready to go to war with each other right here in Apia to gain supreme control of Samoa. There were 7 warships in the harbour from February through to mid-March 1889. Germany had three and the United States three. The 7th belonged to Great Britain, the HMS Calliope acting as the impartial party. Rightly so, for Britain was guaranteed possession of the Fiji Islands.

Just when tensions were at an all-time high, a mighty cyclone blew for two days (16-17 March). The Great Cyclone would render apart the intentions of the super powers to settle the Samoan Question then. All six warships perished with a great loss of life in Apia Harbour. They were tossed like toys by her mighty waves. HMS Calliope alone survived. She managed to escape out to sea during the storm.

 Iceland:   Go North, young man:

Iceland will need some 30,000 foreign workers to move to the country between now and 2030, Icelandic business leaders predict.

 Mexico:   construction tries it on:

Some builders in Mexico City have been adding a few extra stories to their construction projects with the hope that no one notices, but authorities are cracking down on the practice.

Yet more about Qatar

The BBC has an article "five facts about Qatar you might not know", and the extremity of the imbalance noted in the first one is pretty surprising:

Men outnumber women - hugely

In a country of about 2.5 million people, there are fewer than 700,000 women.
This imbalance can be attributed to Qatar's sudden population explosion: this is a state built by immigrants, who are overwhelmingly young and male.
The promise of a job has meant people have flooded into Qatar - which is about the same size as Yorkshire - in recent years, taking its population from less than 700,000 in 2003, to an estimated 2.5 million in 2016.

 Yet their treatment of migrant labor is about as bad as everywhere else in the Middle East:

They come from all over the world, although the largest numbers come from India and Nepal, making Hindus the third largest religious group in the country, after Muslims and Christians, according to the CIA's World Factbook.
However, despite the promise of work and a better future, several reports in recent years have said migrants are being forced to work in appalling conditions, with more than half still living in labour camps around the country.
Qatar has promised to improve life for its workers, but Amnesty International's report for 2016/17 said they "continued to face exploitation and abuse".

About Qatar

I think this explanation of the long term background to the situation with Qatar (from Fred Kaplan at Slate) is a pretty clear one.  Then the story in the AFR explains the current dispute in more detail.  (Thanks, Jason.)

The Arab and Islamic world needs more "unity" emojis and "we're all in this together" style hashtags, I think.  

A calm take on the difficulties with preventing terrorism

Many good points made here at Vox.

Oh, and as expected, lots of US websites are saying Trump may well have completely killed his desired travel ban by his stupid use of tweeting.

I also like this critique of Trump's use of fear, in The Atlantic:

Trump is the panic president, bearing a radically opposed message: Fear is not only acceptable, but necessary. Rarely does one see a leader, much less the leader of a liberal democracy, actively embracing, even calling for, panic. But this is Trump’s response, ridiculing Khan’s plea for calm among Londoners. If it is little surprise to see tired demagogues like Lou Dobbs do this, it is distressing to see it in the president of the United States. (There may be a connection—Trump’s rhetoric seems to often derive directly from Fox, Dobbs’s employer.)

This is not a new tendency for Trump. It has been evident since he announced his candidacy almost two years ago, in which he claimed (without substantiation) that unauthorized immigrants were bringing a crime wave with them over the border. It runs through his doomsaying acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last summer, on to his pronouncements of “American carnage” in his inaugural address, and in his repeated, dishonest claims of a nation in chaotic thrall to crime. It is also central to his claim that the only way to stop terrorism in the United States is to cut off Muslim immigration, even if political and legal realities have forced him to scale back that promise.

Trump’s embrace of panic is instrumental: By first instilling fear, he can then build himself up as the solution, as he did in his RNC speech when he declared, “I alone can fix it.” But panic is a dangerous force, not always controllable by those who whip it up in the first place.  

As for the feud with Khan, the London PM:

Khan poses a particular challenge to Trump’s panic-fueled approach on two levels. For one, his appeal to calm stand at odds with the president’s desire for greater hysteria. But for another, Khan himself represents a threat to that political message. If a Muslim like Khan can win the mayorship of a city like London, and if he can win acclaim as a strong leader who upholds liberal democracy, it undermines the president’s fear-mongering about absorption of Muslims into Western society.

Now that’s something for Trump to fear.

 But large slabs of the Right are currently too stupid to see this.  

Some shooting stats

What with the (valid) concern about Islamic inspired terrorism, I see the media here is barely noticing your more routine violence in America, such as shooting last week in Orlando, Florida where a disgruntled employee killed 5 at his workplace. 

NPR has a follow up story on that, looking at some analysis of mass shootings since 2009 in the US, where the definition is that there are 4 or more killed.  The results are fairly surprising - the great, great majority are in a house - like 133 compared to 6 that were solely in a workplace.  (How much the figures are being skewed by selecting this particular definition of mass shooting is unclear, of course.)

But this makes a mockery of the gun right's lobby arguments about gun free zones, doesn't it?   Guns everywhere means a lot of mass shootings at home - often involving ex partners - and (obviously) in places where gun restrictions are irrelevant.

Pirates No 5

I went with the family yesterday to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 5, and can report that, as predicted, I had an enjoyable time.

The movie is, of course, not perfect or groundbreaking, and I have two criticisms:  I don't think the screenplay was as witty or as well thought out as it should have been.  (I don't know that the witch accusation against the young heroine was ever explained, for example; and having re-watched it recently, I thought that Stranger Tides' script was probably sharper and funnier.)    I also find it a tad distracting when films are made in Australia that I spend much time noticing the Australian-ness of the support actors.  (And, in fact, I think both young leads are Australian too, aren't they?)

That said, it looks pretty great (I think it looks a more expensive production than the last one) and I am still in general awe as to the special effects imagination that has gone into this series.  (It's just ridiculous how realistic they can make sailing ships in fantastical environments look - although nothing has ever matched the ships fighting as they swirl towards destruction at the climate of At World's End.)

If you like Depp as Jack Sparrow I think you'll still like him here; it moves quite quickly and the action is (with one or two minor quibbles) well executed.

And, look, I have to confess to this, as it may give a true indication of a what a Pirates tragic I must be:  my face literally started twitching when the vital reunion that ends the film took place.  Yes, I told my family it emotionally affected me - they couldn't believe it either.  But I think we all agreed, we would sign up for a number 6. 

The London attack

I guess I can't let it pass without saying something, so here we go:

*  as you would expect, the reactionary Right is bouncing off the walls:  I do believe I saw someone at Catallaxy suggesting internment for Muslims already here yesterday. (!)   Andrew Bolt is of course doing his best Pauline Hanson impersonation,  and I guess she will get some polling boost from this, especially from the backwoods of Queensland, where they've almost certainly never been within a 1,000 km of a Muslim, but they know they wouldn't like any of them if they did meet them.

*  The level of fearful reaction is, of course, aided entirely by modern media's saturation coverage.  I'm not saying that the media is wrong to provide long coverage - I watch it myself for longer than it warrants - but of course it can inadvertently encourage wannabe terrorists that if they do something similar, they can create a lot of consternation and fear throughout the entire West.  (And the worst at confirming that to them are the likes of Andrew Bolt and the reactionary Right.)

*  What's the bet that this will again turn out to be "home grown" terrorists?   Which would make the proposed Muslim immigration ban rather irrelevant (possibly harmful) in the short term, and as for the long term - well, I think it fair to say that the geo-political circumstances that lead to terrorist movements targetting the West generally don't last more than about 30 years, do they?  (People really need to remember the 1970's more often.)   Particularly with the defeat of IS, one would hope (and one could be completely wrong) that the radicalised arm of Islam will be beaten back into its shell for a while; hopefully permanently.

*  That all said, of course such low tech attacks are shocking and evil.   I thought that Theresa May's response sounded pretty good, really.  

*  We don't really hear much lately about the success of the West's efforts to target IS and radical Islam on the internet.   You certainly don't see much in the way of IS PR videos repeated in the media any more, but have they made the more secretive communications more difficult as well?

*  I would have thought that Trump's tweets would actually hinder him further in his proposed Muslim immigration ban.   But we all know he's so dumb that he won't give up his phone to advisers who know he is hurting his cause on twitter.  

*  I like in particular how the US Ambassador has contradicted Trump on the matter of the London mayor, who is a favourite target of the American Right for daring to be Muslim.  

* Speaking of Trump and his rushes to judgement - I could almost forgive him for assuming that the deadly Manila casino resort attack last week was Muslim inspired, given the trouble with Muslims in parts of that country, but he really shouldn't have said it out loud.   Here it is, fully confirmed - the attacker was in fact a guy, a former public servant, with a big gambling debt. (!)

Free and unwise publicity for drugs

Is it really a good idea for the media to be talking about the "safe" recreational use of illicit drugs?  In this case, hallucinogenic drugs?

The Guardian has something of a history of doing that, and its readers will often joke in comments threads about their fun times with all sorts of drugs.   But this weekend, the Fairfax Weekend magazine has a story by a young man who talks about cancelling a planned trip with LSD with mates,  and the general  tone is to suggest that its use by smart young people can be pretty normal and fun if done carefully enough.

I doubt that this is a good idea.

It's true - the writer does talk about bad trips, and how he got into one by taking cannabis and LSD together;  but there is no getting around that the overall effect on young people reading the article could be to think that it can be a fun drug to take, and why not give it a try.  

It's also true, I reckon, that LSD is having something of a sympathetic come back, with even Nature reporting a couple of studies indicating that its use is "not linked" with psychosis - although I have to say that, to me, these sound like dubious types of studies.

And as I made it clear in comments to my recent post about Cary Grant's use of it (under proper medical supervision) that I wouldn't fundamentally have a problem with medical use if it is well assessed as safe and likely being of value to people with serious depression or other mental illness that is not responding to other drugs.

Call me cautious (I say "sensible"), but I don't see any wisdom in using the drug recreationally, given the Russian roulette game it seems to be as to whether a particular trip will be terrifying instead of ecstatic.  And besides, isn't it just common sense that any chemical which is obviously playing with your brain chemistry in a really powerful way for 12 hours or so, and which (if you use it enough) can cause flashbacks for weeks or months after, is not a healthy thing.  Too unnatural - too much interference with a system which, left alone, should be enough to keep you happy and balanced.

So what about natural hallucinogens?  Going back to The Guardian, they recently gave prominence (as they would) to a survey which indicated that magic mushrooms were the type of drug leading to the least number of emergency hospital admissions.

But look at the headline they use "Study finds mushrooms are the safest recreational drug".

Of course, if you do have to go to hospital for eating the wrong type of mushroom, it can be very, very serious:  the Washington Post has a story today about 14 people struck down after eating "death cap" mushrooms in California in December (yes, including 4 young men who thought they were magic mushrooms.)  Every autumn in Canberra there are people sickened or killed from eating them, too, although I think most people who do eat them mistake them for normal, edible wild mushrooms.  It's a sad fact that they apparently taste pretty great.   What a design fault. *

So eating wild mushrooms for hallucinogenic effect is not without its lethal risks, and it seems it is still a case of Russian roulette when it comes to whether the trip will be bad, or not:

More than one in 10 said the bad trip put themselves or others in physical danger, including from violent behavior, and 2.7 percent received medical help. There were also mental consequences: “Three cases appeared associated with onset of enduring psychotic symptoms and three cases with attempted suicide.” However, despite all of that, “84 percent of respondents reported having benefited from the experience, with 76 percent reporting increased well-being or life satisfaction.”

Again, call me an old fuddy duddy, but a one in ten risk of a really bad experience, possibly with very long effects, is not good odds for recreational drug use; and as such,  a headline such as appeared in The Guardian that indicates an element of safety in taking mushrooms is not a wise thing.

When you think about it, what's tolerated in terms of the implicit downplaying of safety concerns with use of certain illicit drugs would not likely be tolerated in regards to some legal drugs.   Can you imagine the reception that The Guardian would get if it ran a story that drink driving laws were too tough now - the increased risk of driving with a .08BAC is not so bad as to warrant the highly inconvenient level (to people's enjoyment of a night out) of .05BAC?  I don't think that would fly.  (OK, I know - drink driving represents a danger to others as much as to the drunk driver himself.  Not a perfect, comparison, but still...)

So, yes, I am bit sick of this type of reporting, and wish the media would stop doing it.

*  It just occurred to me - does Japan have the same problem, because there is quite a culture there for people going out and picking wild vegetables of various types, and mushrooms are a widely loved food.  I see that, yes, it does:

 The incidence of mushroom poisoning was studied statistically from 2001 to 2010 in Japan. The total incident of mushroom poisoning was 569 cases, which involved 1,920 patients and 10 deaths. The average incident was 56.9 cases per year, involving 192 patients and 1 death. On regional differences, the mushroom poisoning was more frequent in the northeastern part of Japan. The rate of total incidents for each type of poisoning, which were classified according to symptoms caused, 54.6% in the type of gastro-intestinal disorder, 11.6% in the type of neurological symptoms, and 2.4% in the type of intracellular disorder (violent vomiting, diarrhea and dehydration and hepato-nephrosis, or rhabdomyolysis, or erroneous perception, etc.), respectively. Two species of poisonous mushrooms with gastro-intestinal disorder, Lampteromyces japonicus and Rhodophyllus rhodopolius caused the majority (52%) of all poisonings in Japan.

Just use your common sense...

Curious as to what permanent Trump sycophant and excuse maker Scott Adams had said about the decision to pull out of the Paris Accord, I visited his blog and found that (of course!) he wasn't concerned, and had put up this short explanation of his take on climate change:

Disclosure: My current view on climate science is that the climate scientists are probably right on the basic science, and their climate models are probably directionally right too. But no one has created a credible economic model around climate change. Until you have a long-term economic model that you can trust, you have no way to know what to do about climate change or when to do it. The climate science models don’t tell you any of that. They aren’t designed for that. If you want to make rational decisions about climate change economic risks, you need credible long-term economic models, not climate models.
On a related note, there’s no such thing as a credible long-term economic model. It isn’t a thing.

Well, oddly enough, over the years, I have run some posts expressing similar-ish doubts about economic modelling related to climate change:  you can read some here, here, here, here, here and here.

But the problem with the economic uncertainty and difficulty in modelling it is that the increasingly held  view is that the models may have underestimated the cost of climate change, not over estimated it. 

He seems incapable of understanding the argument that uncertainty is not your friend - it doesn't mean "do nothing", at least when it's on a matter where the parameters of possible change are known.  He seems to accept the broad parameters (or so he says), but then uses the technicality of the uncertainty as to when economic benefits of some global warming will be overcome by the economic negatives to say we can never decide to do anything!

It is clearly a nonsense position to take, and exhibits no common sense.   Does he really think it's a good idea to set in place sea level rises of several metres over the next hundred to two hundred years?  Does he think the idea of New York as New Venice is cool?   Does he think that vastly changed rain patterns and heat waves making current large population areas very difficult to live in may not be a costly and unfortunate result?   Does he have a clue about the uncertain ecological consequences of ocean acidification, more algal blooms and low oxygen in the oceans?   And no, you can't use the notion of "wait and see, and then we'll decide if we have to take action".   It's not that kind of problem - you can't reverse it with a wave of the wand, and geo-engineering is likely to invite its own problems.

Yeah, just shrug you ignorant shoulders, Scott; but you make no common sense.

Poets make pretty crook scientists

Clive James is apparently a wiz at languages, and his intellectual life has always been in the humanities.

His lengthy piece decrying climate change "alarmists", run in The Australian today with much prominence, is plainly, to anyone who has read widely on the subject, as worthless and utterly unreliable and out of date as a poet's analysis of the current state of a field of science could possibly be.  (It really feels like it was written 8 or 9 years ago, at the height of the question of the what the "pause" meant - not that serious scientists ever thought it meant that rising global temperatures had magically stopped.) 

There's a reason we don't rely on poets to instruct us on whether vaccines are good public policy, or what form of cancer treatment to take, or if Einstein could really be right because his ideas don't make much intuitive sense.   Fortunately, most know their limits. 

I don't wish James ill - he's been a very funny man in his day - but it is true that such ill formed views are literally dying out.

Rich vampires already exist

Vanity Fair notes:

Jesse Karmazin agrees. His start-up, Ambrosia, is charging about $8,000 a pop for blood transfusions from people under 25, Karmazin said at Code Conference on Wednesday. Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Some are Silicon Valley technologists, like Thiel, though Karmazin stressed that tech types aren’t Ambrosia’s only clients, and that anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions.

Karmazin was inspired to found Ambrosia after seeing studies researchers had done involving sewing mice together with their veins conjoined. Some aspects of aging, one 2013 study found, could be reversed when older mice get blood from younger ones, but other researchers haven’t been able to replicate these results, and the benefits of parabiosis in humans remains unclear. “I think the animal and retrospective data is compelling, and I want this treatment to be available to people,” Karmazin told the MIT Technology Review

According to the article, Ambrosia says that Thiel is not one of their customers, but there are rumours that he has his own source of young blood.

So, how's Prof Davidson's Catallaxy blog taking the Paris Accord news?

Of course, they are popping champagne corks, but the nuttiness and offensiveness of some - who view accepting the reality of climate change as somehow affecting their masculinity - is on full display.

Stand tall, Professor Davidson.  

Update:  In examining the Paris decision,  David Roberts at Vox re-visits his tribalist/cosmopolitan dichotomy explanation for Trump, and at the end of this section, the "masculinity  must dominate again" aspect gets a mention:

Trump is a tribalist

The hallmark of tribalism (a term I prefer to “nationalism,” as it gets at the deeper roots) is that it views the world in zero-sum terms — if one tribe benefits, it is at another tribe’s expense. As has been much remarked (see my post on Trump’s mindset), this describes Trump to a tee. He views all interactions, both personal and international, in terms of dominance and submission.

Tribalism has also entirely subsumed the US conservative movement. The intellectual core has all but rotted; what remains are older, rural and suburban white men and their wives, angry that their tribe is being demoted from its hegemonic position. At a barely beneath-the-surface level, Trumpism is about restoring old hierarchies: the powerful over the powerless, whites over minorities, men over women.

 Clearly, you can see how this is so true, when you read the many examples at Catallaxy.

Rain on the move?

From Climate Central:

A new study ....suggests that Earth’s rain belts could be pushed northward as the Northern Hemisphere heats up faster than the Southern Hemisphere. That shift would happen in concert with the longstanding expectation for already wet areas to see more rain and for dry ones to become more arid.

The study, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, “adds to the large body of evidence that climate change is going to mess with the large-scale motions of air and water in the atmosphere. And this matters, because those patterns largely determine where it's rainy or arid, broadly speaking,” NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel, who wasn’t involved with the study, said in an email.

These changes in rain distribution could have implications for future water resources, particularly in areas where water supplies are already stressed, such as the western U.S. and parts of Africa.

...which regions are wet and dry are also determined by the locations of the Earth’s main rain belts. The positions of those rain belts, in turn, are tied to that of the so-called thermal equator (the ring around the planet’s middle where surface temperatures are highest). And the location of that equator is impacted by the balance of temperatures between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Because the Northern Hemisphere has more landmass, it is heating up faster than the Southern Hemisphere, and, as some climate models have suggested, this could push the thermal equator northward, and along with it those key rain belts.

Makes some sense, and intuitively, one of the most serious potential consequences of climate change.
 

Look at my tatts

Good grief - given my aversion to tattooing, especially when on prominent display on women - I am less than pleased to see a tattoo promoting article on The Conversation by a female academic at RMIT.   (What an academy...)  

Even though she writes:

My interest in tattooing stems from my upbringing. Living in Aotearoa, from roughly the ages of eight to 28, meant that I was exposed to Maori and Pacific Islands tattooing attitudes.

I don't think she has a tribal reason herself for getting tattooed - and the tattoos of her own that she puts in the article are not of a tribal design.   She further gives the "high brow" justification for the practice:

If I see my tattoos as permanent records of rites of passage and power over adversity, ancient women and their societies may have been doing the same - but with a more restricted range of motif options. The limited range of motifs would have been due to both social conventions, the skill of the tattooist, and the tools used to create the tattoo.

Just because women got it done 2000 years ago in Greece or Egypt, I see no particular reason why this should encourage women to get kitchy art permanently fixed to their body now.  (And I maintain - the great majority of tattooing done in the West is kitch art.)

Anyway, each to their own, as they say;  just that I'll keep complaining about it, too, until fashions change.   (I still suspect it will, someday, somehow....) 

Psychological issues

The thing that immediately struck me, on listening to extracts of Trump's "we're leaving the Paris Accord" speech this morning, were the references to other countries "laughing at" the US because they knew the US was being hurt by the deal.  (And he threw in a snide reference to Germany, or Europe, in particular.)     

I was going to say that this is a case of psychological projection - but it's not quite that, I suppose.   It's whatever the term is for psychological deflection - mistaking laughter at him personally, for all of his obvious personal and intellectual shortcomings, as being directed at the country as a whole.  

And as such, it is example of what makes him so unsuited to making decisions on diplomatic and military matters (yes, including the nuclear codes) - you can imagine him mistaking a slight meant to be directed to him as deserving response on behalf of the whole country (because he will think that the country is the intended victim, not him personally.)

Given that Bannon is seem as a key person behind the Paris decision, you can well imagine him having some similar psychological issues too.   (He has been married and divorced 3 times - a bit of an obvious warning sign regarding personality.  He's also looks remarkably old and unwell, for his physical age.  Is he sensitive on that front?)

Apart from the intrigue of what drives the tiny mind of the President,  everyone will be making the obvious point in response to his claimed reasons for withdrawing.  As the Washington Post puts it:

“As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” Trump said — a phrase seeming to contain a logical contradiction. If the agreement is nonbinding, then what burdens can it impose?

And that contradiction gets to the heart of why Trump seemed, on Thursday, not to be arguing against the Paris agreement itself, but rather, against the Obama administration’s pledge under that agreement, in which the United States would cut by the year 2020 its emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels.

But the agreement does not require a particular level of emissions cuts for a particular country; rather, the United States and any other nation can choose its own level of emissions reductions.

“It seems very unnecessary to have to withdraw from the Paris agreement if the concern is focused on the U.S. emissions target and financial contributions,” said Sue Biniaz, who served at the State Department as the United States’ lead climate change lawyer from 1989 until earlier this year. “The U.S. can unilaterally change its emissions target under the agreement — it doesn’t have to ‘renegotiate’ it — and financial contributions are voluntary.”

 As I expected, the attempted explanation of Trump is in part meant to placate his daughter - he didn't take the chance to deny climate change, and he leaves open the possibility of "renegotiation" - of a deal that doesn't bind the country to a particular target anyway.  

It's all nonsense, and the world will laugh - or grimace - again at the President.

Old news, but I like the sarcasm

While wandering the interwebs, just found this pleasantly sarcastic note at Crikey, from February this year:

“Some exciting Friday afternoon news,” IPA long-term inmate and senior fellow Chris Berg writes. The passionate free-marketeer and advocate of low taxes and small government will be taking up a postdoctoral position at … RMIT, the publicly funded university. Your low taxes at work. The old workingmen’s college is a hotbed of free-marketeers, with Catallaxy-blog aficionadi Sinclair Davidson and Steven Kates both having spent years there. How selfless of these men to deny themselves the bracing challenges of the free market, and teach the evils of government funding in an institution that receives about $550 million of its billion-dollar budget from government sources. How interesting it would be to see them offer their sevices in the market, and see how many would pay. Don’t worry, no chance of that. You’ll be working to support free-market advocacy for many years to come. Exciting Monday morning news! — Guy Rundle

 

Update on unemployment

I did note a week or so ago that Adam Creighton seems determined to be a contrarian (and of the kind who would appeal to dumb populist politicians) when it comes to matter of unemployment figures; even when a fellow "small government" traveller like Judith Sloan has long been dismissive of the argument.

Well, for more detail as to why Adam's argument is (largely) crap, Greg Jericho has done a sterling job of explaining it all here. 

Long term lead

Interesting to see that glaciologists looking at lead levels in the European environment, at least, have now realised that lead mining and smelting has been polluting the place above natural levels for a very long time:

When the Black Death swept across Europe in the 14th century, it not only killed millions, it also brought lead smelting, among many other commercial activities, to a halt. That cessation is reflected in a new analysis of historical and ice core data, which researchers say provides evidence that the natural level of lead in the air is essentially zero, contrary to common assumptions.
"These new data show that human activity has polluted European air almost uninterruptedly for the last [about] 2,000 years," the study's authors say. "Only a devastating collapse in population and economic activity caused by pandemic disease reduced atmospheric pollution to what can now more accurately be termed background or natural levels."

Why I am not too worried

As much as I want there to be serious, proper and appropriate government policy directed to urgently work towards reducing greenhouse gases, I am tending towards the sanguine on the matter of Trump (possibly) saying the US will pull out of the Paris Accord, for the following reasons:

a.   while there are those who are ecstatic at the prospect of Trump confirming withdrawal,  it has been clear for years now that you either have to be dumb, old or a libertarian (or a combination of all three) to not believe the science and that political policy addressing climate change is appropriate and necessary.   Thus, they may celebrate it as a great victory, but quite frankly, they don't have the smarts to see the writing on the wall that the war is already lost.

b.   It's not just me who can see that - it's the rest of the world.   Thus, I am feeling reasonably confident that there is insufficient political support in any other important country to pull out, just because the most obviously intellectually challenged US President we have seen in decades and his coterie of ageing fundamentalist supporters (either in religion or ideology) have decided they can pretend the problem doesn't exist.   I suspect they will wait out the passing of this presidency and old guard Republican leadership.

c.   Trump has personal reasons for hedging on this decision - he wants to keep Ivanka and her husband on side.  (And there are other advisers around him who would just as soon stay in anyway.)   Thus, the suspicion already is that if he confirms withdrawal, he will do so in such a way as to not offend his daughter and those other advisers - more than likely, I would guess, by claiming that he is happy to see CO2 reductions, but he just doesn't believe the Paris accord is relevant to achieving that.  And, as we know with the example of Texas, where the Republican leadership would make you suspect it would be a bad place for renewable energy, yet wind power has done very well, sometimes the outcomes in clean energy don't match the political rhetorical in the way you might expect.  In other words, it's not out of the question that actions by corporations  and State governments in the US will continue to make reasonable progress towards green energy regardless of the Federal government saying "we don't care".

d.   There are some (well, at least one!) suggesting that it's actually better for the world for the US to pull out of the agreement rather than stay in and pretend it is following it.  See the argument put up by Luke Kemp, which appeared at The Conversation, and also got noted at the Washington Post.

Anyway, we shall see...

Update:  it's worth looking at the graph in this piece by David Roberts, showing that the US had a tough road to meet its commitments anyway.  The uncertainty is, I guess,  the degree to which Trumpian loosening of regulations (happening even without leaving Paris) will be taken advantage of by industry to maintain current emissions (or increase them).

No news from Laika :(

I'm a bit worried about Laika Studios, as there is still no announcement of its next release.

Kubo and the Two Strings badly underperformed for them at the box office despite (the somewhat too ecstatic) reviews.  (I blame using Matthew McConaughey for a voice.  He can ruin anything.)  But just as it was opened, company owner Travis Knight announced that it was the last of their "kids" films anyway.  He said the next film was going to be very different, still intended for families, but tonally a break from their first four films.  

Well, that makes me very curious, but despite his saying that they would probably announce it last year, a visit to the company website is still silent on the matter.

I still think that Paranorman, closely followed by Coraline, were the studio's best films.   But the artwork and craftmanship in all of them is something to behold.

No, doctors weren't amazed

I suspected as much:

Why This Viral Video of a Newborn Baby 'Walking' Is Totally Normal

Roger Moore's ghost

No, no:  I've had no spectral visitors offering Bondian double entendres.  But I just noticed this story, apparently told by Moore a long time ago, about a ghost he had visit him twice when staying at a hotel early in his career.

The story is interesting (if not a tall tale) for a couple of reasons.  First, it initially sounds like it might be a case of sleep paralysis, which often does involve the perception of a phantom figure in the room, sometimes near or on the bed, causing the paralysis.  But then he says he was sitting "bolt upright" in bed - and I don't think that's consistent with your normal "woke up and couldn't move" case of sleep paralysis.

Secondly, it is surely pretty rare to see the same apparition twice.

So, I wonder if it was true...

(And, by the way, isn't that a terribly designed website the story is on.)

Blockchain, cryptocurrency and unintended consequences

Yes, I think I count as an intuitive skeptic of Bitcoin and blockchain generally.  (If something's beloved of techno libertarians, it should be automatically suspect, in my books.)

But here's the sort of article that puts some justification into my intuition:

Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism

Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power. It could consolidate their control instead.

Of personal interest

I've been noticing certain unwanted age related changes to my skin in the last couple of years:  I'm getting small lumps and brownish patches that never used to be there and would just as soon do without.  So, who knows, a good all purpose aged skin repairing chemical might tempt me to use it:

New work from the University of Maryland suggests that a common, inexpensive and safe chemical could slow the aging of human skin. The researchers found evidence that the chemical—an antioxidant called methylene blue—could slow or reverse several well-known signs of aging when tested in cultured human skin cells and simulated skin tissue.

The study was published online in the journal Scientific Reports on May 30, 2017. "Our work suggests that methylene blue could be a powerful antioxidant for use in skin care products," said Kan Cao, senior author on the study and an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD. "The effects we are seeing are not temporary. Methylene blue appears to make fundamental, long-term changes to skin cells."

The Trumpian path

Matthew Yglesias, one of the most trenchant critics of Trump, has written a lengthy piece at Vox about Trump as "bullshitter" - an analysis that is not exactly news (to put it mildly), but he does go into it at more depth.  In particular, he notes how it fits in with how authoritarianism  works, and ends with this:

The upshot is a conservative movement and a Republican Party that, if Trump persists in office, will be remade along Trumpian lines with integrity deprecated and bullshit running rampant. It’s clear that the owners and top talent at commercial conservative media are perfectly content with that outcome, and the question facing the party’s politicians is whether they are, too. 

The common thread of the Trumposphere is that there doesn’t need to be any common thread. One day Comey went soft on Clinton; the next day he was fired for being too hard on her; the day after that, it wasn’t about Clinton at all. The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is. 

This is the authoritarian spirit in miniature, assembling a party and a movement that is bound to no principles and not even committed to following its own rhetoric from one day to the next. A “terrific” health plan that will “cover everyone” can transform into a bill to slash the Medicaid rolls by 14 million in the blink of an eye and nobody is supposed to notice or care. Anything could happen at any moment, all of it powered by bullshit.

Quite right, I think.   And funnily enough, we have people claiming to be libertarians who are excuse makers in chief for Trump, despite this creepy and obvious "truth means nothing" approach to governing.   The effects of the silly, post modernism movement (which similarly eroded the utility of "truth" in science and policy) still causes them offence,  but when it comes to Trump, it seems to be a case of "meh".

Update:  see this Salon article on libertarians and Trump, too.

Public transport and land value

There's an article up at The Conversation looking at the question of what effect the Gold Coast light rail had on land values.   It seems it's a tricky issue to work out and there could be quite a lot of "rubbery figures" involved.

The idea that public transport could be part paid for by greater taxes on surrounding land that benefits from it just strikes me as an idea too difficult to implement with enough certainty and fairness.  

As for whether people actually like the Gold Coast light rail system or not - some of the comments indicate that some are still dead set against it for more-or-less aesthetic reasons.   I find that rather odd.  I thought it looked modern and efficient last I saw it:  public transport just annoys some people, I reckon. 

Lab meat delayed

I've always been a skeptic of lab grown meat, and this update from Discover indicates that the idea of growing muscle cells into something resembling meat is in fact making slow progress.

I say that the enthusiastic reception of the (apparently) very meat like "impossible burger" (because it contains a blood taste resembling compound, but derived from plants) is going to do away with the interest in lab grown mince anyway.  And as for slabs of fake steak grown in a lab - I don't think they have any idea how to get it texturally like meat, yet.

The Lindt Cafe seige

I watched some of the Four Corners report on the outcome of the Lindt seige inquest last night, and have a few observations:

*  it is clear that there were some inexcusable mistakes made by the police in terms of lines of communication.  I found it gobsmacking that a hostage could ring the negotiator direct number and have it ring out 4 times, because of  a slow changeover happening, for example, or that a text message passed on by a relative did not make it to the upper level of the police operation.

*  the police inability to get things done quickly - getting lights turned out in the mall, which was agitating Monis - seemed kind of incompetent of either the police, or the Council.

* the reason Manis executed the manager remained unclear.  It seemed Manis was reassuring the remaining hostages that they would be OK if they just co-operated, but he made Troy kneel in an "execution" position anyway, then waited and shot him anyway.  Did he want to precipitate the police finally storming the cafe?

*  that said, and not taking away any of the grief of the families of the victims, it is still surely the case that a very early police storming of the cafe would probably have resulted in more accidental deaths from stray bullet fragments than what occurred (one.)   In a broad sense, waiting was responsible.  Once he fired a shot towards escaping hostages, it probably wasn't, and the police seem to accept that now.   But it remains quite on the cards that even entry then might have accidentally killed more.  

Australian Right wing civility crisis, continues

Now that Roger Franklin's long term incivility problem in his job at Quadrant has been opened up for wider public scrutiny by not only the ABC, but also (apparently) The Australian, and Right wing commentators (Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Nick Cater) are putting a lot of distance between themselves and him, that long term exemplar of Right wing incivility, the Catallaxy blog, continues to be in uproar in defence of Franklin, save for about 1% of commenters.  

Sinclair Davidson, who seems to be a close friend of Franklin (and people at Catallaxy sometimes comment on the incestuous world of Labor politics!) is making a (pretty typical for him) hash of the defence of Franklin's comment:

Roger asked, what I thought, a perfectly good question:

What if that blast had detonated in an Ultimo TV studio? Unlike those young girls in Manchester, their lives snuffed out before they could begin, none of the panel’s likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity’s intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty.

True – an early version, quickly retracted, was a bit more intemperate but the question remains valid.

This is just an inane line to take on the matter:   there was no "valid question" - it was a rhetorical device which Franklin answers himself - by saying explicitly that the world would have been better for it. 

Look, the simple fact of the matter is that Davidson is just about the last person to show sensible judgement when it comes to matters of civility, as he has been at the very forefront of providing for Australian Right wing reactionary "conservatives" a outlet for their voice, and he doesn't care what offence they cause, even on a blog in which he can delete offensiveness.

He rarely exercises that power, plays favourites, and is willing to continually ignore plainly defamatory or offensive material - with the Left being its main target.   

I complained about this here, back in early 2013, and stopped my commenting there because of his ridiculous and partisan tolerance of incivility, defamation*, and outright plagiarism (for which he accepted the poster's apology, and then left the patently plagiarised post - from an American site - up on the blog.)

In the current kerfuffle, he has noted that people have (I don't know how recently) tried to get him into trouble at RMIT because of the blog.   That wasn't me, but I do find it pretty remarkable that RMIT would not be concerned about their reputation when one of its key staff has the power to police defamation and offensiveness on a blog, and routinely chooses not to exercise it. 

It would not concern me at all if there were media exposure to the blog and its threads - he used to get his head on the ABC as an economic and quasi political commentator quite often, I think viewers deserve to know that he runs a blog that positively hurts the cause of civil political debate in the country.

It's an echo chamber of the worst kind, reinforcing culture warriors and climate change deniers that they are not alone and can be as obnoxious as they like, thus coarsening public political discourse.   You can actually see the place dumbing down and coarsening thread participants over the years, as those who expect civility in argument and would put up counter views have all abandoned the place.   

Franklin deserves to lose his job at Quadrant;  I reckon more might be achieved if Catallaxy enforced civility on its own pages, but that would require a change of its hopeless leadership.

* unless it's a friend

Blasphemy and Islam

Hey, if you can get past the "please register to read" pester screen (I did, eventually), there's a really good article up at Foreign Policy "The Islamic World Has a Blasphemy Problem". 

As the article notes (various extracts follow):

Blasphemy charges have steadily risen in the last decade in Indonesia and have a near 100 percent conviction rate. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, there has been an uptick in blasphemy charges and prosecutions in recent years. Blasphemy has been spiritedly revived in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. In 2001, there was only one blasphemy trial in Pakistan, but now there are dozens each year. There has been a steady drip of attacks and murders of bloggers and writers in Bangladesh in the last five years, along with a deadly mass protest in 2013 demanding the death penalty for blasphemy....

The use of the charge ranges from the nominal to the horrifying. Since 2016, the Egyptian poet Fatima Naoot has been serving a three-year prison sentence for criticizing the slaughter of animals during Eid al-Fitr on Facebook. A Malaysian man was charged with blasphemy for posing questions to his religion teachers. Even the mere accusation of blasphemy poses the threat of violence: In 2015, an Afghan woman was beaten and murdered by a mob in Kabul after arguing with a mullah, and last month, a Pakistani university student was killed by a mob over allegations, later discredited, of posting blasphemous content on social media....

“As far back as the 1750s, the Saudi polity really was based on religion and specifically Wahhabism [the puritanical, literalist strain of Islam founded in 18th-century Arabia],” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Due to a pact between the Saudi royal family and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1744, Wahhabism is effectively the state religion of Saudi Arabia. “Wahhabism is, truly, all about blasphemy. What is true Islam and what is not,” Bokhari said. “Really, to them, most Muslims who don’t subscribe to their exacting views are committing blasphemy in some way or another.”

Modern Islamic countries, meanwhile, have accrued their blasphemy laws not as a medieval inheritance but through one of two major routes: as leftovers of European colonialism or as products of the 20th-century “Arabization” of the Muslim world in the model of the Gulf states.

It goes on to point out that, ironically, British colonialism introduced blasphemy laws in India and Malaysia to help with interfaith stability. 

Anyway, it's a good read, if somewhat depressing for the lack of any grounds for optimism that its political use will not stop in Muslim countries any time soon.

Weekend update

*  Watched the recent M Night Shyamalan written and directed movie Split.   Like nearly every review said, James McAvoy is very good in his multiple personality role, and the movie is pretty pleasingly directed for the first 2/3 at least.   Not much of it feels very real, though.   (The psychiatrist/psychologist acts well, but the way her character behaves seemed sort of naive for a smart woman.)

But the main conceit of the film that comes to the fore in the last third is pretty silly and vaguely explained - probably because it is impossible to make it highly plausible.   (It seems a bit X Men, a bit Altered States.)   I'm not convinced it's really a return to form for this much criticised director - perhaps because I wasn't actually that impressed with his first couple of hits anyway.

For a more terrifying experience of claustrophobia and characters going mad, I would recommend 10 Cloverfield Lane over this.

*  Cooked a recipe for Indian Butter Prawns that I found on the net.   It involves a lot of butter and cream, and has probably taken 6 months off my life, but it was pretty tasty and basically quick (once you finish de-heading and de-veining 800 g of prawns, anyway.)

*  Had a family issue to deal with - may make posting slow for a day...