Clearly, a moron

Am slightly curious to see how followers of the Cult of Trump will explain away this.  (Well, not really.  Their Moron in Chief has already told them it is "fake news", and they have brain washed themselves thoroughly enough by only believing what their inner circle of fellow cult members repeat that they will believe it.)

It's been clear from day one that normal people in the world of politics and government worry a lot about Trump and his capacity for the job.   The big question has always been - how long will key Republicans keep pretending that it's all under control, no need to worry, he's actually on top of things, etc.

Anyway, I liked the sub heading to Kaplan's commentary on the Trump Goes Nuclear story:

Only this president could think 4,000 nukes aren’t enough.  

From the body of the report:

All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.

Seems entirely accurate.

Allahpundit at Hot Air, no Trump fan, has nonetheless defended his right to be completely ignorant on the matter of the international nuclear arsenal and to put stupid ideas at meetings.  

If only we could all be so comfortable with having idiots completely ignorant of key things under their control in control of the US. 

To their credit, in another story, Hot Air does call out as rubbish the Trump tweet about "challenging" NBC's licence for running the story.    Again, true Cult of Trump followers, who have convinced themselves via conspiracy think that criticism of Trump is all just "the Establishment" undermining Trump by lies, so as to enable the coming Socialist Takeover of the World, will find a way to defend the idea.   They are incapable of believing their Glorious Leader really is a dangerous moron.   I'll go over to Catallaxy shortly to see if there are some examples there.

I've said before - Presidents don't have to be the smartest person in the room, but they should have good instincts, know who to take advice from, and have at least a basic level of understanding of key things both as they stand, and from history.

Just how many times does it need to be demonstrated that Trump does not even come up to that standard?

Lesson not learned

A good, pretty detailed explanation at the New York Times about how the Kansas experiment in tax  was a complete failure, yet the Republicans at a Federal level want to try the same thing.   (Not just a tax cut, but to do with the pass-through exemption.)

How can they not have learnt the lesson? 

Never been stupider, I keep saying - and with plenty of evidence.

Bannon BS noted

Men dancing

Seeing that most straight men who happen to see male ballet dancers perform are probably already thinking at one point or another "that looks pretty gay", is it such a big step to have ballets developed to show "two men fall in love"?   Maybe not, but one would have to bet that an art form that is surely already female heavy in audience is not going to do anything to change that by going into gay stories.   (I've never been to a ballet:  it's an artform I "get" in much the same way as I get poetry - pretty much not at all.)

Dance generally is a funny medium regarding this male sexuality thing.   I've probably mentioned this before, but for some reason, I've often felt that Australian male dance performance on Australian TV looked particularly, well, not exactly straight - but is it just a thing about Australian choreography rather than the dancers themselves?   I think that it is not generally noticeable in American movie or TV choreography.   It's a subtle thing, and a bit curious, as I would assume that dancing as a career in both countries attracts a somewhat higher than average number of gay men (as does many parts of show business.)  But look at the dancing in something like La La Land - you virtually never get a gay vibe at all.  Is it partly to do with more black men, with their annoyingly natural grace in dance movement, being in American dance? 

Just one of life's puzzles.

Oh, is that all?

Axios extracts the thoughts of Anne Applebaum on the matter of "what Putin wants":

...a concise description of what Vladimir Putin's Russia aims to achieve by interfering in elections in Germany and throughout the West this week on NPR's Fresh Air:

• "It wants to end the European Union, which it sees as something that thwarts its ability to do corrupt deals, and do bilateral deals in Europe.
• "It wants to end NATO, because it wants the United States and its influence out of Europe.
• "More generally it seeks to undermine and dislodge liberal democracy wherever it can, partly for practical reasons because Russian companies do business using corrupt methods and it would be more useful to them to do business in states where rule of law isn't so respected and they can bribe people…
• "But I think they also seek to undermine democracy for a bigger reason — namely that democracy rhetoric, or the ideals of rule of law, and freedom of speech and freedom of decision, these are ideals that are undermining for the current Russian regime. It's an oligarchic, corrupt dictatorship, so what it fears the most is people on the streets calling for democracy. So the extent to which it can undermine its neighbors, and undermine their democracies, it's good for them. Then they can point and say, 'look, democracy is a disaster, it doesn't work for the United States, it doesn't work for Germany, so why should you want it either?'"

And Jason - going to give a big "meh" in response?

The tantrum White House

I thought this was a pretty good look at all the reporting of Trump's tantrum problem. 

Cult followers will not have a problem with it, of course.  They just view their glorious leader as righteously angry.

Hollywood's a weird town...

You know Terry Crews - the muscle bound, very likeable, black actor who plays Sergeant Terry on Brooklyn Nine-Nine?   He's tweeted out a story of being openly groped by a "high level Hollywood executive" at a function only last year!   He wanted to floor the guy, but knew it would be bad PR, so just left (with his wife.)    He therefore finds it stressful reading about Weinstein's behaviour.

How remarkable.  First tweet about it is here.

A look at Mexico City

Given my general interest in Mexico, I was happy to watch World's Busiest Cities - Mexico City last night on the ABC.

I had not realised how many of the suburbs were more or less completely "owner built" - but by owners whose only qualification as builders was watching and helping their neighbours build their homes!    And God knows how such structures went in the recent earthquake.

It seems many suburbs have to rely on trucked in water, too.   It looks like such a ramshackle place to live, yet the ties of family and community always seem appealingly strong. 

The government is undertaking some grand improvement schemes for infrastructure, though: most notably a very large, deep sewer line.  Would have been a scary place to be during the recent earthquake, too.

The other thing that surprises me whenever I watch any documentary about Mexico is how the place genuinely does seem infested by roaming mariachi bands, which also seem to genuinely spend most of their time repeating the 2 or 3 greatest hits of Mexican music.  Don't the residents get sick of that!

Anyway, well worth watching...

Harassment on the rocks

Well, just to show that it's not only Hollywood that's had a problem with sexual harassment over the last couple of decades, Science has details of some harassment claims from Antarctica, going back about 20 years, though:

The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.

The article notes that other women complained about him too;  but he also has his defenders.

The details are pretty strange.  I'll leave the reader to read more for themselves about the sexual taunts, but this just sounds like very childish bullying:

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.

Controversy, please

I see that, for some reason, SBS ran two stories on Helen Dale launching her new book.  (Both sourced from AAP?)   One is about a Brisbane book store cancelling a book signing on slightly odd sounding grounds, and the other a more general one about how "hoax author braces for new controversy".

Given that the novel, which I gather from a piece about it in The Australian that appeared on the weekend, is an alternative history featuring Jesus and a Roman empire with technology (sort of Roman steampunk-ish, I think), it's a bit hard to imagine just why any controversy from such an eccentric sounding work can be expected. The article notes:

But Dale hopes readers take seriously her suggestion that in today's world Jesus, along with Islam's prophet Mohammed, would be viewed as terrorists under contemporary anti-terror laws, which she believes undermine civil liberties.

Actually, I think quite a lot of people wouldn't be too concerned about a modern Mohammed getting caught up in terrorist laws.  Apart from partaking in on the ground battles, he really had it in for critical poets, and was hardly one for free speech himself, to put it mildly.   Quite a different kettle of fish from Jesus's one bit of aggro in the Temple.


As I have mentioned before, alternative history fiction is a rather niche market (it certainly doesn't interest me, generally), and I just have this sneaking suspicion that Ms Dale would quite like some controversy, if it would help sales.   I find it hard to believe it will have a big market without it.

Still, I await reaction (from other than her odd, small, but strangely intense fan base) with interest.

When being half right is worse than being completely wrong

I remember years ago that I once posted a link at Catallaxy, in response to the increasingly foolish Rafe Champion, showing from part of one of the IPCC reports that it had always been acknowledged that there would be benefits to some parts of the globe from global warming, at least up to a point.   I think he pretty much ignored it.

It has thus long been a furphy from climate change fake skeptics that scientific and economic research into climate change has always ignored benefits.  The latest dimwit to grab that ball and run with it is Tony Abbott - to no one's surprise.   People knew he was lying opportunistically about believing in climate change when he was PM; the net effect of his speech is just further confirmation. 

However, there is a sense in which you can say Abbott is half right.    Journalists and others who are completely dismissive of global warming potentially having net benefits (at least, up to a certain level of warming) are wrong. 

But - he and the others in the cultural warrior/go for growth set make a much bigger mistake - they act as if either:

a. global warming will magically stop before the net detriments start to clearly outweigh the net benefits (ignoring, for the moment, the difficulty of accurately working that out equation with any precision - given that, for example, thousands of people with flooded homes in one part of the world may not feel all that cheered by the fact that some Russian farmers had a better crop of beetroot because of global warming); or

b. that stopping emissions and stopping further warming can done in an instant - when it clearly cannot.

Hence, the "catastrophists" may be making a misinterpretation of the what climate scientists and economists have said, but even so, it is not one that makes a change to sensible policy for the future benefit of the world.

Tony Abbott, Matt Ridley and all of their set of disingenuous twits, on the other hand, do want to set the world on the path of climate change destruction based on their mistakes and flim flam.

Their mistake is much, much more serious.

When self medication fails

Who knows, it may have flaws of some kind, but still, this study puts a bit of a hole in the argument that cannabis users (or at least, those with mental illness) just relax and chill out as a result of using it:

The research by Dr. Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC, psychiatrist at the Institut Philippe Pinel) and Dr. Stéphane Potvin (PhD, professor at the Université de Montréal), which studied 1,136 patients (from 18 to 40 years of age) with mental illnesses who had been seen five times during the year after discharge, took into account substance use and the onset of violent behaviour.

Previous research has already shown that a cannabis use disorder is associated with violent behaviour. According to this new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, users who reported at each follow-up visit that they continued to smoke cannabis presented an increased risk (+144%) of violent behaviour.

These results also confirm the detrimental role of chronic cannabis use in patients with mental illness. According to the principal researcher Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC): "an interesting feature of our results is that the association between persistent cannabis use and violence is stronger than that associated with alcohol or cocaine."

Persistent cannabis use should therefore be considered as an indicator of future violent behaviour in patients who leave a psychiatric hospital for follow-up in an outpatient clinic, although the researcher points out that this behaviour tends to fade with time.

"This decrease could be explained by better adherence to treatment (the patient becomes more involved in their treatment over time) and by better support from their entourage. Even though we observed that violent behaviour tended to decrease during follow-up periods, the association remained statistically significant," noted Dr. Dumais.

Don't let Freud near this

It was posted on Youtube in July, but I just found it via The Anomalist:



Japanese advertising executives do have a certain talent for making me want to watch an ad for its eccentricity quotient, at least.

Believe it when I see it

What's Nature.com going on about seasteading for?   They write:

But the Seasteading Institute and the new for-profit spin-off, Blue Frontiers, have racked up some real-world achievements in the past year. They signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia in January that lays the groundwork for the construction of their prototype. And they gained momentum from a conference of interested parties in Tahiti in May, which hundreds of people attended. The project's focus has shifted from building a libertarian oasis to hosting experiments in governance styles and showcasing a smorgasbord of sustainable technologies for, among other things, desalination, renewable energy and floating food-production. The shift has brought some gravitas to the undertaking, and some ecologists have taken interest in the possibilities of full-time floating laboratories.

They do go on to express grounds for skepticism,  but honestly, unless you're a scientist who wants to do human embryo or head transplant research out of reach of all ethics restrictions (and frankly, that's not something that should be welcomed),  I can't see any reason to believe that research on an isolated lab has any greater chance of ground breaking advancement than in your conventional labs. 

Message to monty

Those who do bother engaging with you show no goodwill, use cringeworthy attempts at dismissive humour instead of genuine debate or rebuttal, live in political/cultural fantasy worlds that are so ingrained they'll never be broken out of them, and often suffer psychological issues ranging from obvious immaturity to (I'm pretty sure) actual personality defects.  It is pointless trying to score points against people like that.

All points made before, but after watching some exchanges you have, I just feel compelled to make them again.

How principled of him

The Atlantic has an article up about Brexit regret, noting many things of interest.  

I note this claim re Murdoch:

“There’s no point in vilifying Bregretters,” Mike Galsworthy, a scientist who founded the prominent anti-Brexit groups Scientists for EU and Healthier in the EU, told me. “Bregretters do have to accept some responsibility for this mess we’re now in, but blame also clearly lies both with Cameron for calling a referendum in the first place, and the 40-year dominance of euroskeptic media,” including Brexit-friendly outlets like The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and, from Rupert Murdoch’s media portfolio, The Sun and The Sunday Times. “When Murdoch was asked why he was so anti-Europe he said: ‘That’s easy—when I go to Downing Street they do as I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice,’” Galsworthy told me.  These outlets are rife with Euromyths. (Perhaps the most legendary example is the bendy banana euromyth, which claimed that EU regulators banned imports into Britain of bananas that were bent out of shape. This turned out to be false—EU regulations simply stated that the pricing of bananas should be different according to their shape—but it may have had an impact on some people’s decisions to vote Leave, like the infamous Banana Lady.)

Sure, businessmen are often motivated by power and money;  but what's pretty sickening about Rupert is that to get his power, he trades in direct manipulation of the public.  

Zero G woes

Hey, there's a great extract out (in the Fairfax weekend magazine) from a book by astronaut Scott Kelly explaining how sick he felt after returning from a year on the International Space Station.   (As well as a bit of an account of his morning routine while in space.)  For example:

I had been on the station for a week, and was getting better at knowing where I was when I first woke up. If I had a headache, I knew it was because I had drifted too far from the vent blowing clean air at my face. I was often still disoriented about how my body was positioned: I would wake up convinced that I was upside down, because in the dark and without gravity, my inner ear took a random guess as to how my body was positioned in the small space. When I turned on a light, I had a sort of visual illusion that the room was rotating rapidly as it reoriented itself around me, though I knew it was actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.

The light in my crew quarters took a minute to warm up to full brightness. The space was just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag, two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko and my daughters, a few paperback books. I looked at my schedule for today. I clicked through new emails, stretched and yawned, then fished around in my toiletries bag, attached to the wall down by my left knee, for my toothpaste and toothbrush. I brushed, still in my sleeping bag, then swallowed the toothpaste and chased it with a sip of water out of a bag with a straw. There wasn't really a good way to spit in space.

It really doesn't make anything other than a short time in zero G sound much fun.

Sex in the news

*  Harvey Weinstein is surely a spectacular creep who sounds lucky to have avoided jail for indecent acts, but when anyone from the Right says "will he be treated by liberals like they treated Bill O'Reilly?  Hypocrites!"  it's at least right to note a couple of key differences:   Weinstein doesn't make a wealthy living out of telling America nightly (and in umpteen books) how conservatives values were being trashed in the nation and needed to be reinstated; and (unlike O'Reilly) he doesn't claim the women are all lying.   Still, yeah:  Democrats should be running away at a rapid pace from his money.

*  While just Googling for a link for the Weinstein story, I saw a link to this one about an American College that had a forthright practical suggestion as to how male students could avoid sexual assault problems.    The weirdest, dumbest thing is to see that whoever made that slide didn't think it would get back to Disney that they were using one of their characters to promote masturbation. 

*  This interview at Vox is with a guy who has made a documentary explaining that the internet, and tech heads who establish and run porn sites that provide copious free scenes out of other company's porn are making it extremely hard for the porn actors to make any sort of living out it anymore:

So a lot of people are making a lot less money and are working much, much longer hours to make that money. That’s happening a lot. Whereas the people in charge of PornHub are making so much money they don’t know what to do with it.

These tech people who’ve never set foot on a porn set in their lives, these optimizers and algorithm people and AB testers, these “respectable people” — they’re the ones who seem to be causing the most trouble [in] the lives of porn performers. 

I saw time and time again, people [in the porn industry] would have to move from pretty nice houses to much smaller houses. Porn performers have to go into escorting to pay the rent. More and more producers are going out of business. So in many ways it’s decimating the San Fernando Valley, but the tech people are doing very well....

Alexander Bisley

One of PornHub’s tech guys, exploiting performers’ work, boasted to you: “I’m not a piece of garbage, peddling smut.”

Jon Ronson

When I ask him about the people whose lives were being decimated as a result of the business practices, he went, “Ugh, okay. Their livelihood.” He talked like a tech utopian, somebody who thinks the tech world can do no wrong. A lot of tech people go out of their way to not think about the negative consequences. You shouldn’t not think about those insidious consequences.

Well, it's hard to know what to make of this.   I mean, on the one hand, who really wants to encourage anyone to get into the porn industry as a performer/producer?   Looking at it that way, the more unattractive it can be in remuneration, the less one would hope anyone ever thinks about getting into it.   On the other hand - surely it's wrong to dis-encourage something by more-or-less stealing income from them.  

The interview does explain one thing I never really understood before:

The volume of streaming sites and sharing methods makes it hard for porn companies, often strapped for resources, to fight piracy.

How Comey got it right

Trump has had a spectacularly bad week, what with the weird, weird optics of things like the Puerto Rico paper towel throwing, his utterly tone deaf attempts at a pep talk to officials there, the self promotion evident in his tweeted videos of his visit to Las Vegas, and his now disclosed fury at Tillerson not denying calling him a moron. 

It's been so obviously bad to all but cult followers like Steve Kates (honestly, how can any economics student at RMIT take him seriously?) that I haven't been bothered posting about each individual incident.

However, I thought this story from CNN about what was happening earlier this year when the FBI and intelligence agencies were looking into the Steele dossier was very instructive - it shows how government officials can reliably predict that Trump will be defensive and seek revenge if they present anything to him that he thinks hurts his image:

In the weeks before the US intelligence community published a January report detailing Russian meddling efforts in the 2016 election, top officials at the FBI, CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence discussed including parts of the Steele dossier in the official intelligence document, sources tell CNN.

The debate came in part because the FBI was concerned about being alone in shouldering the responsibility of briefing the incoming President about the allegations. FBI officials hopes that including the dossier allegations in the intelligence report would show the entire intelligence community speaking in one voice.

Then-FBI Director James Comey expressed concerns to his counterparts that if the FBI alone presented the dossier allegations, then the President-elect would view the information as an attempt by the FBI to hold leverage over him.

But the intelligence community had bigger concerns, sources tell CNN. The classified version of the report would be disseminated beyond then-President Barack Obama and the President-elect to other officials including members of Congress. And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed.

In the end, the decision was made that the FBI and Comey personally would brief the incoming President on the allegations. That briefing occurred January 6 in a one-on-one conversation following a broader intelligence briefing on Russian meddling provided to then-President-elect Trump and his key staff.

Trump later told The New York Times in July that he took Comey's briefing on the dossier to be an attempt to hold it as leverage over the new President.

"In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there," Trump said.

Exactly what Comey feared had come to pass.

Any intensely defensive, narcissistic ego at the top makes for extremely dysfunctional government - and to some extent I am put in mind of Kevin Rudd's nightmare of a government for the Ministers and public servants who had to work for him.  

A case could probably be made that Trump is like what you would get if you started with Rudd, but dropped the intelligence by 80% and cranked up the sexism and racism by 200%.    (OK, perhaps drop the empathy down 70%, too.) 

Before I stop posting only about gun control, I must recommend ....

...this chapter of the book Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire which has been published at Slate.

It's a pretty balanced, terrifically written condemnation of how paranoia and fantasy has led to the present state of gun control in the US.

Weasel words

Surely I can't be the only person who immediately thought that "should be the subject of additional regulations" (the NRA talking about bump stocks) is a very weasel word way of expressing support for what might ultimately amount to nothing much?    The "additional regulation" most people are looking for is a complete ban - why not say that?

At the same time, they also make it clear that they are still pushing for the national right to carry concealed weapons.   Yeah, way to make a country feel safe for a tourist...

On the matter of the typical Right wing arguments on gun control which I have been interested in discussing this week, Jason Wilson at The Guardian does a great round up of the matter (quoting things from the Right wing media this week.)  This one made me laugh:

Breitbart offered a defense of “bump stock” devices – which effectively convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns – disguised as an explainer. One of the “key facts” they offered was that banning them would be a “typical leftist war on the poor”.

 Update:  the WAPO notes the NRA's gall in trying to blame the Obama administration for not banning them:

 Expect to hear plenty of this talking point: that this was something the Obama administration allowed. The NRA is basically saying that it had nothing to do with these modifications in the first place, and it's actually Obama's fault. But the BATFE — more commonly known as ATF — actually decided that it couldn't regulate bump stocks because they were firearm parts and not firearms themselves.

Yes, and I bet the NRA was really, really concerned about that finding at the time!

Deserves recognition

I have been mentioning Diane Feinstein and her prescience in warning about rapid fire bump stocks, but I didn't realise she has a long history of trying to do the right thing in US gun control:

The California senator Dianne Feinstein, who authored the now expired 1994 ban on assault weapons, has pushed for nationwide legislation banning the sale of bump stocks and related devices. In 2013, in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed the lives of twenty schoolchildren and six adults, Feinstein proposed a prohibition on the accessories. Congress rejected it. On Wednesday afternoon, Feinstein again reintroduced a bill that would outlaw bump stocks and accessories designed to mimic a machine gun’s rate of fire.

Meanwhile, I see that, predictably, Tim Blair and other excuse makers for the American gun culture are mighty impressed with the article by Leah Libresco in which she claims that gun control policies she formally believed in crumbled away when she examined the evidence.

Her article, which I first saw in the Washington Post, was in fact more about her changing attitude to risk and regulation than anything objective about gun control.    Ironically, a statistical examination of gun deaths which leads to dismissing ideas intended to limit the carnage from a small subset of  gun fatalies seems to me quite akin to commentators telling the Right that statistically they have little to worry about from Muslim terrorism - and Tim Blair just loves to hear that line, doesn't he?

What common sense suggests, rather, is that you take practical steps that are proportionate and  reasonable in response to the possibility of similar attacks being repeated, regardless of the improbable statistics of any one person being killed that way.  I have no problem at all, for example, with pedestrian malls next to roads having bollards limiting vehicle access, given the spate of those attacks.   Similarly, increased airline security is an obvious response to 9/11 and we all feel safer for it.

No, her article (and she would know this) works as a salve to the "too hard to do anything" brigade, who should rightly be viewed with disgust.   Interestingly (I had never heard of her before) she is also known for moving from atheism to Catholicism as a result of going to university.  I don't know what brand of Catholic she is, but I would have to suspect it might be on the conservative side, given the wingnutty alignment they tend to have here and in the US. 

Update:   German Lopez wrote a good article The Research is Clear:  Gun Control Saves Lives, disputing  Libresco's claims about studies.  



  

The spectacular straw man

Ben Shapiro deploys the straw man against Jimmy Kimmel daring to speak out on gun control:

On Fox & Friends, Ben Shapiro denounced celebrities who have argued for gun control in the wake of the shooting, including Jimmy Kimmel. “I would never try to ban Jimmy Kimmel from talking on television—he should stop trying to ban me from owning a firearm,” he said. “[W]hen they say things like, ‘A little bit of common sense gun control would stop of all of this,’ that’s just a chimera; it’s not true. They’re making things up because this is all about the moral disapproval of people who own guns.”

No, you moron - Kimmel (and others) talking about gun control never, never claim ‘A little bit of common sense gun control would stop of all of this.’  

What Kimmel said was that it shouldn't be possible for a killer with guns to be able to kill and maim so many so quickly - a statement which allows for plenty of common sense discussion about sensible gun regulation as potentially making future gun attacks have less of a body count.  

Republicans never used to be this stupid - but Republican pundits certainly are.   But I should be careful, really, about how broadly I do cast aspersions, because polling asking the right questions at the right time can certainly indicate that Republican voters are open to tighter regulation.  Just over a year ago:  

A new CBS News poll of 1,001 random adults found that 57 percent of Americans now favor a nationwide ban on assault weapons, up from 44 percent in the last CBS poll on the issue from December 2015. In this week's poll, 38 percent of respondents oppose a ban, down from the 50 percent who opposed it in December. When split by political party, 78 percent of Democrats support an assault weapons ban, and only 18 percent oppose it. For Republicans, half of the respondents oppose the ban while about 45 percent are in favor of it. Independents are split on the issue, with about 47 percent supporting the ban and 45 percent opposing it. 

In the same poll, nearly 9 out of 10 Americans supported background checks as part of gun sales, with 89 percent backing a policy of universal background checks. This high number crossed party lines, with 97 percent of Democrats, 92 percent of Republicans, and 82 percent of independents backing universal background check policies. A large majority of gun owners, 82 percent, agree with these background checks as well.

 The true enemy of common sense are the Republican politicians, the NRA (foul, foul creatures), and the Right wing media punditry of Fox News and the wingnut crazies.

The tiniest sliver of light?

Hot Air has a couple of contributors who have already come out in support of Diane Feinstein's proposed bill to ban the bump stock device that appears to have been used (or intended to be used?) by the Las Vegas killer.

The article says some Republicans are asking why they weren't already banned.  God knows why they would, since as I noted yesterday, Feinstein was suggesting a ban years ago when they first got publicity.  How credible will it be for Republicans to run the line that it was Democrats' fault that it went nowhere?  

Of course, I am not going to hold my breath about this:  American gun lovers' paranoia will come to the fore with its usual BS arguments that there is no point in doing anything ever, because slippery slope and all that.   Like this, in the CSM:

Larry Pratt, emeritus director of Gun Owners of America in Springfield, Va., notes that the Las Vegas mass shooting “is a very unusual situation in many ways, because the bump-stock, this is the first time anybody has ever heard of it being used this way, so to say [banning the device] will solve our crime problems is a bit much.”

In his view, such a push would fit into what he sees as a familiar pattern, where gun control advocates ask for small concessions and then increase their demands – a slippery slope toward more regulations. “I’m not interested in the details about, ‘Oh, this is a particularly vulnerable point and we ought to address it’; no, what they are looking for is any way they can get momentum,” says Mr. Pratt.

“This whole thing with bump-fire stocks, I think it’s funny,” says Wickerham, because they are not a quality add-on. 

“But if this place turns into California [with its strict gun control laws],” he says, “I’m not going to complain; I’ll just leave.”

This whole shooting has the Right scrambling around to try to find the right narrative - first, they had to desperately hope that the killer was a Muslim, or a mad Lefty, because, you know, talking about gun regulation can be avoided if you can just bleat on about how it's all an ideology's fault. 

So instead (thus far) they've had to fall back onto the "pure evil" or "just insane" lines, with the shoulder shrug that you can't do much about that.   On the mental health matter, The Atlantic has an article today making important points:

While improving access to mental-health care might help lots of suffering Americans, researchers who study mass shootings doubt it would do much to curb tragedies like these. According to their work, the sorts of individuals who commit mass murder often are either not mentally ill or do not recognize themselves as such. Because they blame the outside world for their problems, mass murderers would likely resist therapies that ask them to look inside themselves or to change their behavior.

The connection between mental illness and mass shootings is weak, at best, because while mentally ill people can sometimes be a danger to themselves or others, very little violence is actually caused by mentally ill people. When the assailants are mentally ill, the anecdotes tend to overshadow the statistics. Both Jared Loughner, who shot and severely injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes, for example, had histories of mood disorders. But a study of convicted murderers in Indiana found that just 18 percent had a serious mental-illness diagnosis. Killers with severe mental illnesses, in that study, were actually less likely to target strangers or use guns as their weapon, and they were no more likely than the mentally healthy to have killed multiple people....

As Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has written, in a database of indiscriminate mass shootings—defined as those with four or more victims—compiled by the Stanford Geospatial Center, just 15 percent of the assailants had a psychotic disorder, and 11 percent had paranoid schizophrenia. (Other studies have come to a higher estimate, suggesting about 23 percent of mass killers are mentally ill.)

Certainly, getting those 15 or 23 percent into treatment might chip away at their pathological thinking—and thus their potential future acts of violence. But as Fox argues, linking psychopathic killers with the mental-health system is no easy task. After studying mass shooters for decades, he’s concluded that the killers have more mundane motivations: revenge, money, power, a sense of loyalty, and a desire to foment terror.

The wingnutty Right can't run credibly with the "if only someone in the crowd had a gun" line for this killing - although some are desperate enough to try it.  I'm sure I heard of a woman saying something along the lines of "if only another guest in a nearby room had a gun"    [And, obviously, could work out what was going on and knew how to break down a door.]   Truly, gun nutters like that just live in a fantasy land - and the rest of society pays for it.  

As for Australian wingnutty reactions - they've all been on their usual lines at Catallaxy, and it's a bit boring to repeat them.   Except for sad sack Tom, who seems to be a ex journo with a huge grudge against the industry as it presently is, made this declaration on Monday:

The second US Civil War is now underway.

 As I say, paranoia and the wingnutty Right go hand in hand.

Update:  just how dumb do most of these House Republicans sound?   

About bump stocks

It would appear likely that "bump stocks" were used to allow the rapid, virtually automatic, gun fire at Las Vegas.

There's a good article about them that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013.   And yes, a Democrat Senator warned about their danger.  You can watch a video of them in action here.

They are legal in the US.

But someone can kill 50 people in a car, so what's the point of doing anything, hey?

Update:  or - Freedom!   Having a device that's purely designed to achieve rapid fire with limited accuracy is just a bit of fun, and who wants to interfere with fun?  As this guy says at the end of an article at The Guardian:

“I got my fun out of it but the novelty kind of wore off,” Rich said. “It’s definitely not reliable as a self-defense method or anything else.”

He said on Monday night that he expected the devices would face intense scrutiny, and that some politicians would call to ban them, which he said would be regrettable.

“I don’t want to see anything banned because of the actions of one person,” he said. “That just doesn’t jive with my principles of freedom.”

Libertarians are the pits...

Update 2:  Here's another prediction - if testing of the guns used in the Las Vegas killings show that the bump stock ones weren't actually used, the argument will be "well, he didn't use them so why ban them?"   

The nonsense against common sense is unleashed again

This is by far the most frustrating thing after every mass shooting in the US - watching the nonsense arguments getting a run again by the gun lobby, and the Right generally (both conservatives and libertarians.)

In fact, it gets boring even posting about them, but honestly, as I keep saying, we've never seen the Right stupider - both conservative and libertarian.

Here's the arguments we're seeing, again:

*  if any of the guns were illegal - well, it's all about enforcing current laws better then, isn't it - there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  if all of the guns were legal and nothing was missed on background checks - well, there was no way of stopping this man or [implied but not often stated]  anything at all about how many he killed and how quickly,  and hence there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  people can kill scores at once by using trucks, cars or explosives - therefore what's the point in doing anything about gun laws?   [I find this just about the stupidest of all stupid arguments - why not just say "Everyone dies - what's the point of ever legislating to make anything in life safer - you're just delaying the inevitable?"] 

*  if the guy had mental health issues - then it's all about controlling the mentally ill better, because [again, implied but not often stated]  legal gun owners are never OK at the time they buy and then go nuts - the mentally ill are just obvious and if we can stop them getting guns we'll be OK  

*  most gun deaths in the US are not mass shootings, therefore there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.  [Even a casualty count of more than 500 isn't beating that one.  Perhaps a single incident of 1,000 might do the trick?]

*  a particular change to gun laws not directly related to the means of this most recent killing spree (say, correcting the loop hole on background checks on those who buy at gun shows) would not have stopped this most recent incident, so what's the point of pursuing such a law change now?    

The answer is a given - "there's no point in changing gun laws (unless it's to relax them, because gun owners are the Righteous protectors of the nation and their families)", and the arguments deployed don't need to make sense, as long as they end up at the same point.

The good thing about Jimmy Kimmel's emotional plea was not that it was not just a "do something" argument - it specifically noted that it's not just a case of the NRA and Republicans wanting to keep things as they are - they actively work to make access to guns easier, even with law changes which a majority of Democrats and Republican's don't actually support - and it should be scandalous. 

Gopnik goes there

Yes, I think any normal person hearing Trumps tweet of "warmest condolences" to the families of victims of the Las Vegas shooting must have thought "that's a very peculiar way of wording a condolence message".   Gopnik thinks it tells us something about Trump's personality:

President Trump, deprived from birth by some genetic accident of all natural human empathy—one should listen to a recently recovered tape of Trump, speaking to Howard Stern, in which he is actually boasting of his indifference to a man he thought was dying—speaks empathy as a foreign language and makes the kinds of mistakes we all make in a second language that we have barely mastered, placing adjectives in places that no native speaker ever would. Who sends warmest anything to the families of murder victims? Vice-President Mike Pence, who is not a sociopath, merely a Republican, knew that the right language is the language of bafflement, talking about “senseless violence” and the rest.

Pretty harsh, but I suspect it may be right.   He certainly doesn't seem to have the normal range of emotions.

Automatic fire

A pretty stunning revelation here about the number of automatic weapons held legally by Americans, all courtesy of the nutjobs of the NRA, largely:

New fully automatic weapons were banned completely for civilians—except manufacturers and gun dealers—the following year [1986] by an amendment to the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, also known as McClure-Volkmer. That law didn't solve the problem of semi-automatic conversions. And the bill as a whole contained pro-gun measures that won it support from the NRA, even though the organization denounced the automatic weapons amendment. In fact, then–NRA lobbying chief Wayne LaPierre was quoted in an article in the NRA newspaper Monitor as saying that repealing the automatic weapons ban would be “a top priority.” As detailed by the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann in the Huffington Post in 2013, that article announced that an evidently short-lived organization, the National Firearms Association, had been created specifically to repeal the machine gun ban and to “educate the public about automatic firearms.”

Machine guns made prior to the cutoff date in 1986 remain legal but highly expensive—typically running in the five figures—and are tracked closely and individually by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. According to the NRA, the state of Nevada, where the shooting occurred and where Paddock reportedly lived, does not impose any further restrictions on legally owned machine guns. There are reportedly around 193,000 pre-cutoff machine guns in legal ownership nationwide, and special events around the country offer gun enthusiasts space to celebrate and fire these weapons. In August 2016, the Atlantic’s John B. Fischer reported on the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot. “For two days in June, hundreds of people traveled to Wyandotte, Oklahoma, for the opportunity to fire nearly every species of automatic weapon from the past century,” he wrote. “There were UZIs and M16s, Barrett .50-caliber rifles, WWII-era belt-fed Brownings, and even a Minigun—a giant, chair-mounted cylindrical device powered by a car battery.”

Gun owners who want weapons capable of fully automatic fire can’t legally modify the internal components of their semi-automatic rifles to accomplish this. But they can buy legal accessories like the Slide Fire or the GatCrank that help shooters mimic automatic fire without altering a semi-automatic gun’s internal mechanisms.

Update:  Wired has an article talking about how easy it is to convert a semi automatic to a fully automatic.   I'm not sure that it's all that good an idea to publicise that at this ti,me, except that I suppose anyone who wants to do it already knows.

Movies, noted

*  To my surprise (come on, it's not as if Ridley Scott movie sequels have been riding high lately), the new Blade Runner movie has received really good reviews.   I wrote here recently that watching a DVD of one of the narrator-less versions really made me wonder about the original being overrated, but nonetheless, I'll probably go watch it next weekend.

* Now for a movie review you don't need - the 2006 widely acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro .    Just saw it on Netflix this past weekend, and I have to say I don't really get the critical enthusiasm.   Yeah, sure, while somewhat visually imaginative and well made, I had too many reservations.   For one thing, the violent cruelty of (and even towards) the stepfather felt too gratuitously graphic.   But the main problem was that I didn't feel the story had any narrative push to it - things happened, but there was no feeling of building towards a climate.   (There was no reason, for example, to see why the girl was given - or imagined - the quest like tasks with a time limited urgency.)   I also didn't really feel convinced about the girl's character being portrayed consistently, with a rather key "breaking of the rules" during one fantasy quest not being foreshadowed or explained satisfactorily.   The movie has an interesting, if not novel, premise,  but it just isn't fleshed out well enough.   There is next to no interplay between the fantasy sequences and what is happening in reality, and that is what I think the movie really lacked.    

*  Also watched 1978 cheapo disaster flick Avalanche being given the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment on Netflix.   What on Earth were Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow thinking?   Evidently desperate for money that year, it would seem, even though Hudson had gone through the 1970's consistently earning money on the long running TV detective show McMillan & Wife.   (I remember little about that, except that I think it had one or two funny characters in it.)    Hudson looks chubbier than I ever remember him in this movie, too.   I see that he would have been about 53 at the time (I would have guess a bit older than that), and within 6 years of the film, he would be diagnosed with AIDS and die shortly thereafter.    Anyway, the MST3K episode featuring it did make me laugh, a lot.  (Mind you, most episodes do.   Why isn't it confirmed as coming back for another season??)  

A well deserved corrective

I complained back in June about an article that appeared in the Fairfax weekend magazine that painted a very normalising picture of LSD use for recreational fun, and which contained only a mild warning of the possibility of a bad trip.

I am somewhat pleased to see that Fairfax is today running another article by the same writer, who appears to some degree to be making amends by telling the story of a Sydney teenager who had a very, very bad time with LSD.  His mother contacted the writer after reading his first article. 

It's better than nothing, and I liked the way it showed that precautions don't always work.  The teen in question (up to a point) tried to be careful - using a kit to check its purity, for example.   But perhaps it would have been better if Fairfax hadn't run the "it's all just a bit of mind expanding fun if done cautiously" original article.

On the Hefner death

A few observations:

a.  One suspects The Onion have been saving up this pun in their bottom drawer for years: 

Officials Investigating Hugh Hefner’s Death Suspect Foreplay

OK, it is pretty great as far as puns go.

b.   Helen Razor is, I reckon, by far the worst opinion writer in the land who still somehow manages to make the occasional buck doing it.   (She has her fans, bizarrely.)   I just can't stand her highly mannered, self  absorbed style, and I only occasionally look at it to awe at its awfulness.  She writes about Hefner's passing here, but you won't learn a thing, except that she's in ongoing psychiatric care, apparently.  (Which makes me feel a tiny bit guilty about attacking the quality of her work, but she's not a shy retiring petal, even though I wish she would retire.)

c.   There are umpteen articles around on the same theme - how do you judge his legacy when it's a balancing act between his liberalising and exploitative influence on attitudes to sex?   I think he deserves far more derision than praise; although I have to say, the UK culture of tolerance of topless page 3 girls in their tabloid papers - which started in 1970 in the Murdoch owned Sun (and, with his usual stunning lack of morals, it apparently upset him until he started counting the money it brought in) - was perhaps a worse exploitative thing than the high gloss Playboy.

Still rubbish after all these years

Having just looked at an article by a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fan at Philosophy Now, I remain as convinced as ever that the author's "metaphysics of quality" is a vastly overrated bit of opaque hooey.

That Cuban mystery

Rather remiss of me not to have posted earlier about the ongoing, very weird and rather science-fictiony, mystery of what's been happening with the American Cuban embassy, and why it makes little geopolitical sense why it is happening at all.  (Actually, mischief making Russia would seem to have more motivation than Cuba.)

This recent article at The Atlantic sums it up, and this article at The Guardian had a couple of experts talking about the potential use of ultrasound to cause illness.

I see that in another Atlantic article, there is even more worrying news:  Tillerson likes trash novelist Ayn Rand!:

Weaponization of sound was a plot point in the book that Secretary Tillerson has called his favorite, Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. In it, the federal science institute creates a weapon of mass destruction which deploys ultrasonic waves. The head of state uses the device to flatten a goat in a demonstration of power, and later to destroy the work of industrious private inventors, successfully stifling private-sector innovation.

Fire him at once.  Fondness for Rand = can never be trusted politically.

I see that Berg, Davidson & Potts are hard at work on their next blockchain essay

Have a read of their essay at Medium for an explanation.

Idle libertarian hands must do something to amuse themselves, and it seems RMIT is happy to indulge them.

Schrodinger: love cat/rat

I just noticed at Bee's blog that she did drew a card of famous physicist Schrodinger,  in which one of his claims to fame is noted as "practised open polyamory and got away with it."   Can't say that I recall reading that about him before. 

But, yeah, he was unconventional in his love life, and tuberculous didn't hold him back.  From a book "Great Physicists" we get the general picture:

 

For more detail on the menage a trois arrangement that lasted a long time, there's this summary:

Erwin Schrödinger ... lived in an open polyfamily: a ménage à trois with his wife Anny Bertel and partner Hilde March. They had the blessing of March's husband, the physicist Arthur March, who was himself a lover of Anny's. Together the three raised Erwin and Hilde's daughter, Ruth March.

Despite his brilliant career, world fame, and 1933 Nobel Prize in physics, Schrödinger was apparently rebuffed at Oxford and Princeton for his unconventional home life. Eventually, in 1940, the family settled in Ireland by the grace of the Irish prime minister (a mathematician).

His wife, Anny, had another lover apart from March, apparently:

...Schrödinger asked for a colleague, Arthur March, to be offered a post as his assistant with him where he went.

The request for March stemmed from Schrödinger's unconventional relationships with women: although his relations with his wife Anny were good, he had had many lovers with his wife's full knowledge (and in fact, Anny had her own lover, [the mathematician and physicist] Hermann Weyl). Schrödinger asked for March to be his assistant because, at that time, he was in love with March's wife Hilde.

Gee, it's a wonder that these physicists doing the great ground breaking work of the first half of the 20th century had the energy to come up with their insights, after all this bed-hopping.

Schrodinger's love of love was not without it's unfortunate consequences, though:

He kept a detailed log of his numerous sexual escapades, included a teen-aged girl he seduced and impregnated while acting as her math tutor. [Well, there he goes as a poster boy. –Ed.] He had children by at least three of his mistresses...

 And the reputation of a liking for the very young girls apparently followed him around:

However on a darker note, it also triggered “his fascination with young girls on the brink of adolescence.” And although Gribbin is careful to point out that Schrödinger never really acted on these urges, it was not always for lack of trying (he was once warned off a colleague’s 12-year-old daughter) and the fixation certainly is troubling.

Well, you can learn something disreputable every day, it seems...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

...it would seem that a high energy cosmic ray started its trip towards Earth.

This science story from earlier this week is pretty interesting, as is the way high energy ray direction was worked out:

To spot enough of the extremely rare highest energy cosmic rays, a detector array has to be huge, however. Auger consist of 1660 particle detectors covering 3000 square kilometers, an area nearly the size of Rhode Island, in the Pampa Amarilla in Argentina. Each detector is a tank holding 12,000 liters of ultrapure water that produces a flash of light when struck by particles. In addition, four stations of telescopes overlook the ground detectors.

Spotting the sources of the most energetic rays was always going to be tough. Because they are electrically charged, cosmic rays swirl in the galaxy’s magnetic field. To point back toward their sources, they have to be so energetic that their paths do not curve too much. More common lower-energy cosmic rays—thought to emerge in the aftermath of supernova explosions in the Milky Way—curve so much in the galaxy’s magnetic field that they appear to come from all over the sky.

In spite of the difficulties, at first it seemed that Auger would find the sources of the higher-energy rays. It started taking data in 2004, and in 2007 Auger researchers announced that cosmic rays with energies above about 60 exa-electron volts (EeV) appeared to come from the fiery hearts of galaxies thought to contain supermassive black holes feeding on in-falling debris, so-called “active galactic nuclei.” However, that correlation has not held up as more data has come in. Moreover, Auger researchers had expected the highest energy cosmic rays to be light-weight protons, which bend less in magnetic fields. Instead, they have found that many of the rays consist of heavier nuclei, which curve more—making the job of figuring out their origin tougher.

 So this is what one cosmic ray detector looks like:

Kind of pleasingly mundane looking for science technology.

Catholics and Nietzsche, again

It was a Catholic acquaintance of mine, many years ago, who first alerted me to the fact that there was to some degree a sympathetic following amongst the religious to nutty old Nietzsche.   Here's an example of same from the Catholic Herald:  Is Nietzsche the antidote to the snowflake generation?

I'll quote one part, which perhaps explain why some Catholics think his views on Christianity can be downplayed:

Despite his enthusiasm for his subject, West is not overawed by him. He includes several humorous asides, such as “Nietzsche had much in common with Karl Marx – nationality, money problems, a duelling scar, imposing facial hair, disciples who understood the master very badly indeed…”

Shot through Get Over Yourself is Nietzsche’s loathing of Christianity. My criticism of the book in this respect is that West doesn’t place this hatred sufficiently within the context of Nietzsche’s upbringing within a stifling, narrow-minded, Prussian Lutheranism. He saw what Matthew Arnold also observed: the hypocrisy of outwardly respectable Christian habits, but bereft of the person of Christ. Essentially he inveighed against the late 19^th century’s corruption of Christianity.

Boring daydream believer

Can someone pass on this message to Tim Blair?:  the endlessly repeated return to the fantasy of no government funded ABC for Australia is an incredible bore.  

Like climate change, it's time you learnt to face reality:   the ABC is trusted and its funding is popular.

Something to do with hedonism?

I reckon people will be puzzling over the reasons for this odd finding from a new drugs survey:

The analysis, to be released on Thursday, shows people who identify as homosexual or bisexual are six times more likely to use ecstasy or meth/amphetamine, which includes ice and speed, than heterosexual people.

"Homosexual and bisexual people were almost six times as likely as heterosexual people to use each of these drugs, and were also about four times as likely to use cocaine as heterosexual people and three times more likely to use cannabis or misuse pharmaceutical drugs," AIHW spokesman Matthew James said.

On the other hand, this is not so surprising, at least in regards to meth use:

The report found mental illnesses were becoming more prevalent among illicit drug users.

Among people who had used an illicit drug in the previous 12 months, about 27 per cent had been diagnosed with, or treated for, a mental illness, an increase from 21 per cent in 2013.

Mental illness rates were particularly high for ecstasy and meth/amphetamine users.

"In 2016, 42 per cent of meth/amphetamine users had a mental illness, up from 29 per cent in 2013, while the rate of mental illness among ecstasy users also rose from 18 per cent to 27 per cent," Mr James said.

"Drug use is a complex issue, and it's difficult to determine to what degree drug use causes mental health problems, and to what degree mental health problems give rise to drug use."

Those who tend to talk about ecstasy as a pretty harmless party drug have some explaining to do too.  (They'll probably just fall back on the self medicating excuse, like they have for decades on marijuana.) 

Simple life advice

Those who read climate change blogs will be aware that climate scientist and writer Andy Skuse recently died at a relatively young age (63, I think) from the spread of prostate cancer (ugh - men of my age really wish this disease was not so prone to controversy over testing and treatment), and many folk have linked to his touching post in which he disclosed that he didn't have long to go.  

The part that particularly resonated for me was this:

The certainty of a premature death focuses the mind. Strangely, at moments of acute stress, one sometimes feels the exhilarating sensation of living in the present moment—experiencing a beautiful, perfect, harmonic world—instant Zen mastery. But it is fleeting. Familiar mental attitudes reassert themselves. At least that’s what happens to me.

But one unexpected change is acquiring a lasting and enhanced appreciation for the humdrum, the everyday stuff of living, rather than the extraordinary experiences that we sometimes think ought to define our lives. As he died of cancer, the singer Warren Zevon advised: “Enjoy every sandwich.” It sounds trite, but it’s true.

Forget about bucket lists. Get used to replacing the thrill of new experiences with the intensity of doing ordinary things for perhaps the last time.

I think that's a good way to live, even without cancer.   And seeing he's talking about food, as I have said before, one good thing about these new fangled fasting diets is the intensity with which one appreciates the taste of any food that's in your meagre 600 calories a day.   But even when I am off the fasting wagon, as I am again at the moment, I do often notice the pleasure of many foods.   And things like the thrill of making a $1 razor cartridge last who knows how long?   :)

In grooming news

Back in June I advised the world that I had started using a very cheap version of one of those razor sharpening rubbery things (bought for $5 at Target, not one of the $20 or $30 overpriced ones at the Razor Shop.)

I'm still using the same cartridge (a generic brand one from Coles, made in Mexico), and it's getting up to 4 months' use now.

It definitely works.  Previously, after about a month, I could tell by the application of after shave that I was getting more micro nicks and scratches on my skin, and also could sometimes start cutting myself a little due to applying additional pressure.  None of that is happening.

I recently suggested to my children on the drive to school that I should set up a stall on the school grounds offering "Common sense advice" for $2, for things that modern teenagers seem to be missing out on from the current education system.   This would right up there in my list of life advice worth imparting. 

Yet more marriage talk

Must be same sex marriage that's making everyone talk about marriage more generally.

Peter Martin writes about its current state in Australia in an interesting article "Getting married is a surprisingly rational thing to do". 

The only I would dispute is that it is all that surprising.

He notes:

People who are married are, on average, happier than those who aren't. Until recently it was thought this might be because happy people got married rather than the other way around. The good news is that a detailed examination of British happiness surveys by two Canadian economists shows pretty clearly that, whether or not happy people get married, they do indeed become more happy after marriage. It had been thought that happiness blast didn't last – that married couples lost the sparkle after two to five years. Married couples do indeed become less happy over time, the researchers find, but that happens to everyone of marriageable age. The important finding is that at every age, married people are on average happier than ones who aren't married.

As for evidence about what makes marriages last, he notes from some research:

They find that what helps most is being similar. Couples who are close in age have less than half the risk of separation as couples where the man is nine or more years older. Couples with different views about whether or not to have children are twice as likely to split. Couples where the man is much better educated than the woman are 70 per cent more likely to split. If one partner smokes and the other doesn't, separation is 75 to 95 per cent more likely. If the woman drinks more than the man, separation is two-thirds more likely.

What each partner brings with them matters too. If they bring low incomes, they are twice as likely to split. If the husband is or becomes unemployed, they are three times as likely to split. If one or both of the partners have divorced parents, they are 60 to 85 per cent more likely to split. If one or both brings with them children from earlier relationships, they are two thirds more likely. Differences in race and religion turn out not to matter at all.

Over at The Conversation, meanwhile, there is some surprising research discussed which indicates this:

Our new data analysis finds parents with daughters are slightly more likely to separate than those with sons, but only during the teenage years. And it’s the strained relationship between parents and their daughters that might bring a couple to the breaking point.

Our working paper studied more than 2 million marriages in The Netherlands over ten years and shows that divorce risks increase with children’s ages until they reach adulthood – with parents of teenage daughters at greater risk. However, this risk disappears in cases where the fathers themselves grew up with a sister.

There's more:

The effect peaks at age 15, when the risk faced by parents with daughters is almost 10% higher than the risk faced by parents with sons. In the following years, the differences narrow again, and they disappear once the child turns 19. A similar pattern is also found among second-born and subsequent children.

Although no causal link could be established from the Dutch data, the higher divorce rates might be explained by strained relationships between young women and their parents.

The increased odds of divorce from teenage daughters aren’t unique to Dutch married couples – we find the same association for Dutch couples in de facto relationships, and for married couples in the US. In fact, we find that both of these groups face considerably higher increases of divorce odds from teenage daughters, compared to Dutch married couples.

I have a teenage son and a younger teenage daughter:  I can tell them tonight over dinner that he's a protective effect on the marriage.   I think she'll find that idea pretty funny.

And as for same sex marriage, I suppose I should note another article at The Conversation that is rather bland and says that same sex marriage makes the same economic sense to the couples as does heterosexual marriage.  No surprise there. 

With this generally positive publicity for marriage, I'm expecting that any day now Jason will be asking Homer to officiate at his. 

How to make people marry?

I suppose the "yes to SSM" people will say this is an irony:   that social conservatives who don't care for SSM nonetheless keep pointing to the association of no marriage to poor economic outcomes in the US in particular (and I would guess, to a lesser degree, in Australia too), and wish that more people would marry for that reason.    But, it's hardly a valid point - the percentage of gay marriages out of the total number of weddings appears to be around 2% in the UK, for example, and I have the distinct impression that gay marriage anywhere is primarily a middle class and up thing in any event.

I'm talking about this because of this article in The Atlantic, talking about research looking into the question of how much difference good quality education really does make to poverty and economic mobility in the US.  The result was a bit surprising (if it holds up, I guess):

Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their  hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.

Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.

For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. “We can’t educate people out of this problem,” he says.

His work, like Chetty’s, is not causal—meaning Rothstein is not able to identify exactly what explains the underlying variation in his economic model. Nevertheless, his work helps to provide researchers and policymakers with a new set of background facts to investigate, and signals that perhaps they should be reconsidering some of their existing ideas. (Both Raj Chetty and his co-author Nathaniel Hendren declined to comment for this story.)

Jose Vilson, a New York City math teacher, says educators have known for years that out-of-school factors like access to food and healthcare are usually bigger determinants for societal success than in-school factors. He adds that while he tries his best to adhere to his various professional duties and expectations, he also recognizes that “maybe not everyone agrees on what it means to be successful” in life.

The article goes on to note that this is goes against the grain of what politicians (of both sides) like to claim, but at least those on the Left (who probably tend to make the biggest claims on the importance of education) can point to other things that they support as being helpful:

As a stronger explanation, Steinbaum points to the rise of  “interfirm inequality,” a phenomenon in which even workers with very similar education histories, ages, and industries make very different amounts of money depending on which firms they work for.

Meanwhile, other studies have suggested that differences in local labor markets can affect economic outcomes and upward mobility. For example, in 2015, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, in conjunction with the economists Richard Freeman and Eunice Han, published a report building on Chetty’s work and found that union membership seems to be another critical factor helping poor people escape poverty. The researchers went beyond Chetty’s regional-level analysis to compare outcomes between individual union and nonunion households. They found that low-income children who grew up with parents in unions earned more as adults than the children of nonunion parents. They concluded that making it easier for individuals to collectively bargain would likely help boost economic mobility.

Anyway, the marriage point:   I guess the problem is a bit chicken and egg as to whether there is any causal relationship between it and poverty.  But everyone does feel in their gut, don't they?, that less single parenthood and fathers having the motivation of providing for a family they live with every day must be a healthy thing for how well off a family does, and the economy more broadly.  But how do you make it happen?  

Brain light

I always thought that those animations of the brain and neurons you see on science shows, the ones where there are like flashes of light in neurons, were just fanciful illustrations of electrical type signalling.

But I seem to have missed that there is something called biophotons, which have been known about for some time, even if their purpose (if any) was unknown.  Here's some information from a recent article about them:

Here’s an interesting question: are there optical communication channels in the brain? This may be a radical suggestion but one for which there is more than a little evidence to think it is worth pursuing.

Many organisms produce light to communicate, to attract mates, and so on. Twenty years ago, biologists discovered that rat brains also produce photons in certain circumstances. The light is weak and hard to detect, but neuroscientists were surprised to find it at all.

Since then, the evidence has grown. So-called biophotons seem to be produced naturally in the brain and elsewhere by the decay of certain electronically excited molecular species. Mammalian brains produce biophotons with wavelength of between 200 and 1,300 nanometers—in other words, from near infrared to ultraviolet.

If cells in the brain naturally produce biophotons, it’s natural to ask whether nature may have taken advantage of this process to transmit information. For that to happen, the photons must be transmitted from one place to another, and that requires some kind of waveguide, like an optical fiber. So what biological structure could perform that function?

Today we get an answer of sort thanks to the work of Parisa Zarkeshian at the University of Calgary in Canada and a few pals. They've studied the optical characteristics of axons, the long thread-like parts of nerve cells, and conclude that photon transmission over centimeter distances seems entirely feasible inside the brain.