Poor building decisions

The Washington Post has an article about the increasing cost of hail damage in the US.  

I don't think it argues that hail storms are increasing per se, but puts the blame in the rise in damage to expansion of cities prone to hail storms, larger houses, and (to my surprise) this:

Around the time that homes began to grow in size, vinyl siding was also invented. It has become increasingly popular over the past 50 years because of its lower cost, and it is now the most popular exterior for new homes. Unfortunately, vinyl siding is also notorious for being shredded by hail as small as quarter. This means even lower-level hail from severe storms could leave a home looking something like Swiss cheese.

Am I mistaken, or is vinyl siding virtually unknown as an exterior house finish in Australia?   I thought from TV that house construction in the US looked very similar to ours, but perhaps I am wrong.

[As an aside, the other country where a difference in common house construction methods is evident to the casual visitor is Japan.]

About hothouse Earth

Here's a worthwhile thread on Twitter about the "hothouse Earth" paper that has had a fair amount of media attention.

There's been a lot of back and forth on Twitter between climate interested scientists and journalists about whether it's a good or bad thing to highlight the paper - the downside being the risk that people perceive preventing disastrous climate change as a lost cause.  

But surely the point of the paper is that it encourages serious action to prevent a long term hothouse Earth.   The problem is more likely with some of the reporting rather than the content.

Better get Piketty onto this

Seems to me that Piketty might have something useful to say about this surprising graph from the US that turned up at Axios.   Because it would seem that productivity increases have become more or less uncoupled from wage increases - and that's not the story economists normally tell us, surely...

As anyone who reads Catallaxy knows...

Angry People Think They’re Smarter Than They Are

Don't tell the alkaline water nutters

Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have found new evidence in lab-grown mouse brain cells, called astrocytes, that one root of Alzheimer's disease may be a simple imbalance in acid-alkaline -- or pH -- chemistry inside endosomes, the nutrient and chemical cargo shuttles in cells.

Astrocytes work to clear so-called amyloid beta proteins from the spaces between neurons, but decades of evidence has shown that if the clearing process goes awry, amyloid proteins pile up around neurons, leading to the characteristic amyloid plaques and nerve cell degeneration that are the hallmarks of memory-destroying Alzheimer's disease.

The new study, described online June 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also reports that the scientists gave drugs called histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors to pH-imbalanced mice cells engineered with a common Alzheimer's gene variant. The experiment successfully reversed the pH problem and improved the capacity for amyloid beta clearance.

Link.

This Canada Saudi Arabia thing is very strange

It's hard to fathom the over-reaction of Saudi Arabia's hip new leader in waiting to what Canada did.  As an opinion piece at WAPO explains:

In the past 48 hours, Saudi Arabia seems to have mistaken Canada, a member of the Group of Seven and NATO, and a distinguished ally of many European nations, for the small Middle Eastern nation of Qatar, which Riyadh blockaded last June.

Last week’s arrest of Samar Badawi, the sister of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi, led Canada’s Foreign Ministry to issue a statement in Arabic on its Twitter account that urged “the Saudi authorities to immediately release” her, along with fellow activist Nassima al-Sadah. It was this tweet that sparked the ire of Saudi authorities and propelled them into taking action. Saudi Arabia responded by recalling its ambassador in Ottawa, freezing trade relations, withdrawing Saudi students from Canadian schools and even canceling flights between Saudi Arabia and Toronto.

When Canada’s embassy in Riyadh tweeted its government’s statement in Arabic, Saudi officials saw it as a challenge to national sovereignty on domestic social media, which has increasingly become the battleground to control national public opinion and promote hyper-nationalism. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials, MBS, is signaling that any open opposition to Saudi domestic policies, even ones as egregious as the punitive arrests of reform-seeking Saudi women, is intolerable.

The Turnbull disappointment

I've been thinking about all the ways Malcolm, who still strikes me as having a likeable personality, has nonetheless disappointed as a Prime Minister:

1.  Has failed to react to the revival of Hansonite racist panicking over immigration and culture;

2.  Has failed to directly confront climate change skeptics in his Party and the media - the true source of disunity and dysfunction within the Coalition for many years now;

3.  Has failed to show any real interest in reform of important tax matters such as negative gearing;

4.  Has ignored serious behavioural issues within his government, such as Deputy PM being (by his own confession now) a renowned adulterer, including with his own staff;

5.  Has devised a policy on energy that convinces no one, on the Left or Right, that it is worthwhile or meaningful (again, all as a diversion from the fact that he has failed to defeat climate change skeptics in his own party);

6.  Has presided over the appalling administration and treatment of people being punished by permanent confinement on Nauru and Manus Island;

7.  Has given away half a billion dollars to a small conservation foundation in an utterly non-transparent manner which, by rights, should be a bigger scandal than it currently is.  (Why - probably in the hope of walking the impossible tightrope of appearing environmentally friendly while doing nothing positive about renewable energy);

8.  Has used personality based attacks on Shorten in a manner which didn't impress me when Paul Keating did it, and doesn't impress me now.


He became Prime Minister perhaps about 7 years too early, before the climate change skeptics have been fully routed.   This Northern Hemisphere summer seems to be going a long way to achieving that goal.

Malcolm shows that personality isn't everything in successful national leadership (unless, of course, it is at an extreme such as with Trump).   

It is time for him and his party to be replaced in government, and it is a bit concerning to me that the Federal polling is currently so close.  There should, by rights, be at least 5 percent between the parties in TPP, so let's hope it drifts back to that soon.

Let them eat cake

A funny/serious sort of article about the effects of a bad Brexit:  How Brexit will kill the sandwich.

I like the name of this association:

“I don’t think consumers understand how complex and global our industry is,” said Jim Winship, director of the British Sandwich Association. “If we crash out of Europe, we’d have problems even if only at border control because our industry works on a fresh basis and our products have a low shelf life. Ingredients could rot in the docks before getting to us.”

Turns out that about the only thing the British are self sufficient in when it comes to a ham, cheese and salad sandwich is the bread.  Although, even then, they don't look at the question of where their flour comes from.  Here, I'll do it for you:

About 80-85% of the wheat used by UK flour millers is home-grown, although the precise proportion depends on the quality of the UK harvest. The main sources of imported wheat within the European Union are Germany and France, whilst Canada and the US are the main sources for the rest of the world. Canadian wheat is generally imported for bread-making purposes, because it has excellent characteristics and gluten strength which work well in a blend with UK wheats. French wheat is generally used in the manufacture of French style products where softer flours are required. German wheat usage fluctuates according to the quality of the British crop.

Yet more syphilis

Hey, I got to the end of the first season of The Frankenstein Chronicles, and I can summarise the final episode with the observation "well, that's one way to cure syphilis".    Netflix here doesn't have the second season, which I assume is full of characters who answer their front door and then start screaming.  (You will have to watch the show to understand.)

Anyway, I keep accidentally finding articles that reference syphilis, including this one from the TLS about the eugenics movement, particularly in the US.  Apparently, in the early 20th century, there was a remarkable push against women merely suspected of being promiscuous, all in the name of defeating syphilis:

A second book, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women by Scott W. Stern, looks at the same set of laws during more or less the same time frame, but through the particular experience of Nina McCall, one of many white working-class teenagers swept up by the state of Michigan’s over-zealous morality police, and whose life was upended by the ensuing nightmare. Suspected of having venereal disease seemingly for no reason other than her having been observed unaccompanied on a trip to the Post Office, McCall was, in 1918, detained for months without any semblance of due process. She lost her job and her reputation and became estranged from her family. Her vagina was probed endlessly and her body injected with mercury and arsenic, all in the name of “cure”. The relentless prodding of “suspected” young women was not accompanied by anything like scientific rigour, consistency of observation, accuracy of record-keeping, or coherence of diagnosis.

McCall, once forcibly tested, was arrested based on a supposed diagnosis of syphilis, but ended up being given anti-gonorrhoeal medications. What makes McCall unusual among the many tens of thousands of American girls also targeted is that she sued the state. It took two years for her to be partially vindicated by the Michigan Supreme Court, which recognized her right to a trial, and even so her small victory did not slow the ideological diffusion of the American Plan for moral purge. (Tellingly, the court only ruled that McCall’s detainment was unlawful because the grounds for suspecting her of infection were a little too weak.) McCall’s story is captivating as pure biography, but it is all the more remarkable documentarily: it stands as one of the few formal challenges to these laws, and one of the very few whose heart-wrenching traces were captured in a trial record.

More generally:

The American Plan (not to be confused with the anti-union movement of the same name) was a programme designed to control sexually transmitted disease. It was different from the earlier French Plan instituted by Napoleon, which sought to confine prostitution by semi-legalizing it. Known as “regulationism”, the French system required sex workers to register, submit to regular genital inspections, and confine their activities to particular (red light) districts. In contrast, the American Plan never completely bought the idea of prostitution as something that could or ought to be regulated; true to its more Puritan legacy, the US set about trying to eliminate “immorality” by outlawing it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, public governance tended to treat prostitution not merely as a moral failure but as a criminal act. “Waywardness” in a woman was deemed not only a product of socialization, but reflective of innate mental deficits associated with “imbecility” or “feeblemindedness”. Anti-corruption squads composed of police, sheriffs, social workers and religious leaders, combed the streets of cities and small towns, detaining women and girls en masse and conducting crude genital probes. And it did not necessarily matter whether these “tests” resulted in diagnosis of any sort, for the conduct of these righteous teams was itself often corrupted by greed, reputational gossip, and stereotype: black and immigrant women were presumed to be looser in their conduct. Poor women could be labelled promiscuous if they merely seemed so to a detention officer. A neighbour with a grudge could call the vice squad. In addition, police received bonuses in line with the number of arrests and detentions, and policies could be touted as “successful” based on volume alone. Although the Reagan revolution is remembered for its racialized nomination of “welfare queens” and “the undeserving poor”, these too are concepts that date back to the Progressive Era.

The mosque clip

I'm not sure if this extract from that Who is America trollfest of a show is going to stay up for long, but it's worth watching.

I'm not the biggest fan of Sacha Baron Cohen - he gets too immaturely crude in a lot of his material if you ask me - but I have to admit, the way he escalates the torment of this group is very funny:

Bugs and diet

As has probably been suspected for a long time, it seems gut bacteria can make a big difference to successful weight loss.  The way it works is pretty interesting, though.  NPR writes:

"We found that people who lost at least 5 percent of their body weight had a different gut bacteria as compared to those who did not lose 5 percent of their body weight," Kashyap explains. Their findings are published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The successful dieters had an increased abundance of a bacteria called Phascolarctobacterium, whereas another bacteria, Dialister, was associated with a failure to lose the weight. And, Kashyap says it's likely that there are other types of bacteria that might influence dieting as well.

So, how might bacteria influence weight loss? It turns out we can get a significant number of calories from our microbes.

Here's how it works: Consider what happens when you eat an apple. You digest most of it.
"But there's a certain part of the apple we can't absorb," explains Martin Blaser, a professor in the Department of Microbiology at NYU Langone Medical Center. "We don't have the right enzymes to digest every bit of [the apple], but our bacteria can."

Think of it this way: The bacteria eat what we can't.

And, in the process, they produce byproducts that we can digest. So these byproducts become another source of calories for us.

The new study suggests that certain bacteria — or mix of bacteria — may be more efficient at creating "extra" calories for us to digest.

"Somewhere between 5 to 15 percent of all our calories come from that kind of digestion, where the microbes are providing energy for us, that we couldn't [otherwise] get," Blaser explains.

This calorie boost could be beneficial if food were scarce. "If times were bad, if we were starving, we'd really welcome it," Blaser says.

But at a time when many people want to lose weight, these extra calories may be an unwanted gift.

Should not be surprised he can't get his facts straight

Robert Manne writes a good response to Bolt's appalling immigration column, noting how he got some numbers wrong.

I see that Bolt was complaining about Bernard Keane's take that his talking about the numbers of Jewish folk in Caulfield was anti-Semitic.   Manne says (reasonably) that Bolt was not trying to be anti-Semitic (given Bolt's anti Muslim attitudes, you can't credibly believe he was intending to suddenly take offence against Jews).  But you still have to wonder - what on Earth did Bolt think he was achieving in pointing out the number of Jews living in a suburb?   He may well like Jews (or at least, those who support their current Right wing government), but pointing to any group and implicitly complaining about how they like to cluster together still points to bigotry against a class - immigrants of any kind!

Mission Impossible 6

Saw it on the weekend.

I liked it, and it kept coming back to my mind on Sunday.   (That's generally a good sign of a movie getting under your skin a bit.)  I do have some minor criticism about it, though.

A number of times, I thought the cinematography looked a little murky, for some reason.  I read today it was shot on 35 film, not video.   I wonder why.   I thought the digital editing required to remove safety ropes was much easier on video?   Does this account for it not looking as sharp as I expect from movies now?  Was it just less than ideal projection in the cinema I saw it in?

As for the set pieces:  I'm starting to think that the series best visceral thrill sequence may always be Tom swinging on a rope on the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol.  I still think it's just great movie making every time I see it, and it plays extremely well with everyone's sense of vertigo.  MI:6 is more about chase and action, and while the climatic set piece was, of course, impressive in its way, I think as a sequence (particularly with the cutting back and forth to the situation on the ground) it wasn't quite as well constructed as it could have been. 

Interestingly, despite its references to events in the prior movies, the story also did not really feel like it was designed as the end for the series.   Which is good, because my dream would be that Spielberg signs on to director for the last one.  

As I say, gone completely stupid...

Andrew Bolt this morning:

I like the way he (or someone) takes the opportunity to re-publish the "foreigners are here to devour our country" cartoon that would not be out of place in a pro White Australia newspaper from 100 years ago.

Speaking of inane, unjustifiable posts, I see that Sinclair Davidson thinks "luvvies" are being hysterical when they complain about Trump's "enemy of the people" repeat line about the Press.  Note how he does not repeat the line:

The luvvies are outraged – how dare President Trump criticise the press? Our democracy is at risk! Although to be fair, their democracy might be at risk; however the democracy where people turn up on election day and vote for a representative is doing just fine.

Who knows what that third sentence qualifier means - lack of clarity is something I find he often specialises in.

Anyway, he then goes on to claim press "hypocrisy" because the media (and "luvvies" generally) didn't get up in arms a few years back when Bob Green was complaining about the "hate media" (being the Murdoch press) were running a constant campaign against a carbon tax, as they still, undoubtedly, would.

The clip of Bob Green shows a man who calmly complains about the Murdoch press, yet never calls it (like Stalin and Hitler did) the "enemy of the people".   There is nil comparison with the repeated rallying call of Trump, to which his dumb ass, heavily armed, cult followers respond with applause.    It's a false equivalency, a case of the Right's "whataboutism" which fails the test of history and common sense.

And speaking of Right wing politics generally, I liked Greg Jericho's column on the weekend:

A virus of odious ignorance has infected conservative thinking – and politics

But sigh, no. Conservatives have been rendered so bereft by climate change that anything carrying even the slightest taint of an environmental impact is viewed with distrust. And so the plastic bag ban quickly became a new focus of the culture wars.

It’s all rather odd, but fits perfectly within a strain of thought that has decided the way forward is to ignore evidence and instead pursue an ideology of wilful ignorance.

It has led to the point where there are barely any conservative commentators worth reading or listening to. It’s not that there are no intelligent conservative thinkers, but the lunacy of climate change denial and distrust of expertise has so infected the conservative media that prominence is now almost exclusively given to those for whom a worldwide conspiracy is more believable than reports by multiple universities and public agencies.

What’s more, their realisation that they can spout their views free of supportable evidence on this issue has also led to an unlocking of all manner of views they once kept hidden, but which now come forth with great delight. 

Exactly.

For people who like deadpan NZ comedy

I see that with little fanfare, SBS has started showing Wellington Paranormal, a TV series made in the same style as What We Do in the Shadows.

If you liked the movie, and a lot of people did, you will find this pretty hilarious too.  Here's the opening scene from episode 1 that someone has put on line.  It gives you a good idea of the style of humour:



I see some people are putting full episodes on Youtube.  I watched it on SBS on Demand.

The Iran street

I think it very, very unlikely that the Trump/Bolton tactic on increasing pressure on Iran is going to lead to a good outcome.  I would say disaster is much more likely.  But, to be honest, in that part of the world, it never pays to be too certain. 

But have a read of this cautiously written article at the (now very depleted) Christian Science Monitor.

A strange outing

I have rarely seen gay "celebrity" Todd McKenny on TV - I'm not one for such kitchy shows as Dancing with the Stars, or Boy for Oz, whatever else he has been on.   But I always thought there was something dislikeable about him (not the sexuality per se - he's just one of those people, gay or straight, that has an air of something that makes me not trust them.   I've always put Eddie Maguire in that category, too.)

Anyway, he's in the news this week for a very strange outing.

Back in the 1980's, I remember Simon Gallaher being the subject of one of the old fashioned "gay marriage" rumours with Mike Walsh.  (It was a sister in law who swore someone she knew was at "the wedding".)   I always thought this type of rumour was odd, and they do seem to be very much of that period - I think there a similar rumour around Jim Nabours?  Yes, I know he was gay, but the point is more that it seemed that people wanted to believe the profane unnaturalness of homosexuality by insisting that gay men were having secret mock marriages, in the same way a devil worshipper's black mass was supposed to mock the real thing, I guess.*

Anyway, I had little interest in the topic, other than categorising it as likely urban myth (it was always a friend of a friend who had seen the real thing), but felt a little sorry for Gallaher.  Later, when I read that Gallaher was married and had children, I assumed that my suspicion had been confirmed.

But now McKenny, who seems not to get on with his sister much, decided, with no forewarning, to tell the world that he had been in a gay relationship with Gallaher for 5 years, before he married his sister.

The SMH says that Gallaher and his wife are far from happy:

Simon Gallaher called McKenney a "headline whore"; his wife, Lisa, called her brother a "douche bag".  Simon declined to say more when PS made contact this week, except that it was "time to move on". His wife told friends: "We all have to just duck the fallout now.

It seems unclear, from that article, whether Galaher's sons knew of his relationship with their uncle.

It's an odd story that presumably rarely happens - but it does give some justification for my dislike of Todd.


*  Actually, I should tread carefully on this topic, since I do feel that gay marriages which stylistically imitate straight marriage - such as two women who wear classic wedding dresses - do look weird because of the imitation aspect.  Should come up with something novel for what is, after all, a completely historically novel invention.    

Now that's funny

Also from Colbert, using Manafort trial sketches:

Why would Paul do it?

He's a good sport, I suppose, but he really looked as if he might be wanting to throw up at the end:

I try to be polite, but really...

Sinclair Davidson turned up in comments here recently:  whether that means he reads this blog regularly, semi-regularly or only when he gets a mention, I don't know.   (Actually, he gets a mention here pretty often, so the last two categories are pretty close.)

Now, this may not be quite on a par with the gobsmacking, how-could-he-possibly-ask-that-question, reputational harm of asking why calling an aboriginal man an ape was (or even, could be) racist; but for a person obsessed with free speech, it comes very close.

I'm talking about his post today in which he pretty much defends Trump repeatedly calling the media "the enemy of the people".   OK, let's be generous to Trump and note that after his daughter said they weren't, he tweeted that he didn't mean all,  just a "large percentage" of the media that spreads "fake news".

Davidson notes in comments to his post that this is what he understood Trump to mean - "just CNN and some others."

Some others, hey?

Cue his mate Andrew Bolt - who will soon be dying his hair red so as to feel ever closer to the very soul of  Pauline Hanson after his "I hate the way immigrants cluster together - it makes me feel yucky and uncomfortable and I don't like it" column yesterday - has attempted a similar, pathetic defence of Trump as not condemning all media as "enemy of the people" - just the media that criticises him.

I mean, honestly, Bolt's post itself notes that Trump has specifically cited and attacked as "fake news purveyors" the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, Associated Press, MSNBC, "and so on".   That's all three of the big broadcast media networks in the US!   We all know what Trump means - any media which has criticised him and his administration, and in particular, reported on Russian collusion, is peddling "fake news", is not to be believed, and is "the enemy of the people".

 It's a serious joke that Davidson cannot see, or excuses, the authoritarianism inherent in any President labelling the professional establishment media (we're not talking some internet bozo like Alex Jones or Jim Hoft) as "an enemy of the people" -  and I would say that regardless of the size of the media element that is so labelled.   In Trump's case, it's virtually all of  the media save for Fox News, Breitbart and the Washington Times - all of which, while privately owned, are so close in allegiance to Trump that they are effectively the same output as State media.

You thought a man who hails from South Africa might have a better idea about racism than he did, and a better nose for authoritarian rhetoric?

You thought a frequent defender of free speech might have qualms about a President who wants his followers to completely ignore, and worse - consider their enemy, all media free speech which has reporting and opinion said President doesn't like?

Well you would be wrong.

But illustrating again the embarrassing intellectual and moral joke that the Right, whether conservative or libertarian, has become in Australia?   You would be right.

PS:   it's clear what this is about - it's in the extracted commentary in Sinclair's post explaining that CNN has to realise that the rage of the Trumpkins is just them finally having their chance to let the media finally hear their frustration with their product.    

Yes, it's the media's own fault for not respecting enough the views of the Right - or the Trump right, or whatever.   It's the "but you don't take me seriously enough" cry of the people who believe that climate change is a massive conspiracy, Obama was a Muslim born in Africa and the Worst President in History, that Hillary is a murderous harpy, etc, etc.

In Sinclair's case, I think he may be having trouble coping with not getting enough respect from the media, even though he campaigned for years in his own way against climate change,  made a big and wrong warning on Keynesian spending after the GFC leading to stagflation in Australia, and completely voluntarily opened himself to ridicule on the matter of the use of "ape" in a racist context.

Maybe if he owned up to errors instead of blustering past them,  he might get more media respect and be less inclined to want defend dangerous authoritarian sentiment?   Just a suggestion.

Update:  for those who seem to need educating, or reminding:  in the Guardian this morning:   'Enemy of the people': Trump's phrase and its echoes of totalitarianism

Another medical study to believe in

Both long term abstinence and heavy drinking may increase dementia risk 

People who abstain from alcohol or consume more than 14 units a week during middle age (midlife) are at increased risk of developing dementia, finds a study in The BMJ today.

Good to know I am hitting a happy medium.

David Murray, goose

It seems to me from reading this article in the AFR, regarding AMP wannabe saviour David Murray, that he typifies the rule of thumb I've been pointing out for years: if someone, no matter what success they may have achieved in life thus far, does not believe the science of climate change, then their judgement about everything (even their claimed area of expertise) is not to be trusted.  

I'm sorry:  that's just the way it is.

So much for nuclear power being the saviour for climate change

Quite surprising, this:

Shut reactor: Ringhals, Sweden. Reuters reports that the water is too warm for reactor cooling in the sea off Sweden and Finland, and the River Rhone is too warm in France.

“Utility Vattenfall, which operates seven reactors in Sweden, shut a 900 megawatt (MW) PWR unit – one of the four located at its Ringhals plant – this week as water temperatures exceeded 25 degrees Celsius.”

“France, like much of Europe, is experiencing scorching weather in its southern regions, and forecasts show temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) in the Rhone valley area. EDF’s nuclear plants along the Rhone use the river’s waters to regulate the temperature of their reactors, discharging warm water back into the waterway.”

National trends to avoid

*  The BBC says that South Korea is having a spy cam porn epidemic.  Sorry to say it, but wouldn't most people have guessed that Japan might be more prone to that?  Maybe politeness wins out there.

*  I hesitate to post this, and mean no disrespect to Indians generally, but it's not every day that you read about a social media outcry related to the gang rape of a pregnant goat.

*  Claims from Japan that a university dealt with the "problem" of gender balance amongst doctors by marking down entrance exam results from females. 

*  Back to India, and I don't think I have posted before about the reports that fake rumour spreading on WhatsApp in particular is being blamed for stupid lynchings and riots:

For several days, messages warning about child-lifters on the prowl had pinged on smartphones in Rainpada, a tribal hamlet in Dhule district, 400 km northwest of Mumbai. Then, on July 1, the villagers saw a group of seven tribal nomads from the Davri Gosavi community speaking to a child. A group of around 20 locals, certain these were the child-lifters the WhatsApp video had warned of, pounced on them and began beating them before locking them up in the local gram panchayat office. Two men managed to flee.

Soon after, a mob numbering in the hundreds- most had converged on Rainpada from adjacent villages for the weekly market- broke into the office and beat up Bharat Bhosale, Dadarao Bhosale, Bharat Malve, Appa Ingole and Raju Bhosale using whatever they could find- rods, sticks, stones and logs of wood. Two police officers who arrived on the scene and tried to intervene were also attacked. Bharat, Raju and Dadarao died on the spot. Malve and Appa succumbed to their injuries en route to the hospital.

The Dhule incident was only the latest in the series of WhatsApp-transmitted lynchings across the country this year leading to the deaths of 30 people. If technology is a double-edged sword, India felt its sharp edge, the high-speed network's ability to misinform and inflame. Sixteen such cases have been reported since May 10, from Maharashtra to Tripura.

Netflix news

*  Finished Lost in Space a few weeks ago.   I didn't mind the last episode, which moved faster than some in the series, and I would say that the show has just enough going for it for me to look at the second series, whenever it comes out.   I have a fear that the science is only going to get worse, but I'll give it a try.

*  Finished Babylon Berlin last night.   What a satisfying, high class potboiler of a show that has been.   Some characters did seem ridiculously hard to kill,  and the close call of one of them in the second last episode was upsetting.   I'm betting on the nephew becoming an enthusiastic member of Nazi Youth, by the way.    It really deserves all the praise it has received.   A third series is on the way, apparently, and I hope it can keep up the standards, with more Nazis this time.

*  Tried Dark, another German series, for a couple of episodes, but it seemed a bit too Stranger Things except with time travel.  My son and I both felt it wasn't really worth continuing with.

*  Will finish the first and only (on Netflix) series of Frankenstein Chronicles soon.   Quite enjoyable and a clever idea behind the series, I think.  Like I said before, good to see syphilis finally get a prime role in a TV series, given how many people it did affect in real life.   And one thing I was always noticing:  how cold it seemed for the actors throughout the series.   Even in indoor scenes, there were so many times they characters were puffing steam as they spoke.  I would have assumed that film lighting would have heated the place up, but maybe they were doing it with less lights than normal, and during a really cold winter.

*  Need more recommendations for series.   The Alienist, perhaps? 

Update:  I see that The Alienist has less than enthusiastic reviews.  The oddly named Peaky Blinders, (could they have possibly picked a name - and images - more likely to obscure what the series is about?)  though, seems very well reviewed.   I think it has been on ABC but I've never watched it.   Seems that should be the next thing to try.

A TV confession

There's much high minded horror from folk both Left and Right being expressed at the idea of an ALF re-boot.  But I have a confession:  I found the original series quite likeable.   I thought the exasperated acting of both the father and mother was pretty amusing, and ALF himself had some funny lines.

Am I the only person who didn't find it cringeworthy?  (And I say this as a person who, as a child, could never bear to watch family bland comedy like The Brady Bunch, or even worse, The Partridge Family.  Or later, the horrible Full House, or the terrible Good Times.   But ALF, it was harmless and amusing.)

A life of Graves

I only had a vague idea about the life of Robert Graves - I knew he had been through World War 1, and did poetry and novels.   Literary Review has open access (for a while) to a review of a new biography of him, and I'm a little amused to see that he fits into two of my favourite stereotypes:

a.  English literary figures of the early 20th century who had at least some degree of homosexual experience as a young man (don't you get the impression it was virtually compulsory for that line of work?); and

b.  famous literary figures of any nation having extremely messy and complicated love lives, full of adultery and what not.   (Again, appears compulsory.)

Some extracts:

Graves finished his school career a precociously published poet and Charterhouse’s welterweight boxing champion, his broken nose recording that feat all his broken life.

He enrolled on the call to arms, weeks after leaving school, putting off Oxford for a short while, or so he thought. One in three Carthusians who joined up with him never heard the armistice bells – those bells which, as literary legend has it, were ringing when the telegram announcing Wilfred Owen’s death was delivered....

Having been timidly homosexual for twenty years, Graves rushed into postwar matrimony and Abrahamic fatherhood. He was ‘clumsy’ in physical love, his first wife, the artist Nancy Nicolson, discovered. She declined to accept his surname. But the paths that family, guardians and class had laid down for him before the war were resolutely not taken. He dickered with Oxford. For a while he made do as a village shopkeeper. He mainly survived on scroungings from his family and fellow writers – John Masefield, Sassoon, T E Lawrence. Prose potboilers, he discovered in the mid-1920s, kept the wolf from the door so he could get on with what mattered: poetry. Good-bye to All That, like the later Claudius saga, was devised with the same aim in mind.

It was also in the 1920s that Graves embarked on a second union, this time with the American poet Laura Riding. The result was not division but enlargement – a sexual ‘trinity’. ‘Sick Love’ is one of Graves’s finest meditations on guiltless sexual promiscuity: ‘O Love, be fed with apples while you may,/And feel the sun and go in royal array,/A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway’.
It wilfully echoes the biblical Song of Solomon: ‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.’ Solomon reputedly had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Polyamory, Graves believed, on his own, less Solomonic scale, was helpful to the poet. Dutiful monogamy, another of his poems asserts, is a double death sentence:

Call it a good marriage:
They never fought in public,
They acted circumspectly
And faced the world with pride;
Thus the hazards of their love-bed
Were none of our damned business –
Till as jurymen we sat on
Two deaths by suicide.

The polygamous love bed, Graves later discovered, leads to different dead ends. But there was more stimulus for singing along the way.

Graves’s life was, in every sense, chaotic, but purposely so. He believed that ‘tranquillity’ (the Wordsworthian recipe) narcotises true poetry. The poet, like the kettle, must boil to produce. A few weeks before Graves started on Good-bye to All That, Riding enlarged the ménage to quatre with an Irish literary adventurer. It went all wrong and she jumped out of a fourth-floor window in Hammersmith. Graves followed suit. Both survived.

And you know what?  The short extracts of his poetry that appear in the article do absolutely nothing to dispel my life long instinct that poetry is bunk...

(Sorry Tim, Jason et al.  I must be the equivalent of tone death to that particular literary form.)  

This is appalling

Good thing I had already shifted Andrew Bolt's link on my blogroll to it's special category "Gone completely stupid and offensive".

This is truly appalling stuff, harking back to the Asian immigration scare claims of Hanson in the 1990's.   And look at the editorial cartoon with it - the foreign hoard coming here to devour our land.   Pathetic.

Turnbull should be on the news tonight calling this out - Bolt personally, and the pathetic paper:

Maybe when I'm retired?

A tweet about someone's nice looking home baked sourdough loaf led me to a site with a post called "Beginner's Sourdough Bread".

The process just looks ridiculously fiddly and time consuming, when I can go buy a very nice loaf from a specialist bakery for $6 or $7.  Mind you, I don't have a specialist bakery near me, but who knows, that may change.

I think getting into home sourdough making must be something only the retired (or the house-spouse) can have the time to do.

Ocean acidification is not going away

Ocean acidification only pops its head up occasionally in the media now as a dire threat from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere:  probably because it is such an incremental change that it doesn't have the ring of immediate alarm about climate change as do heat waves, floods or fires. 

But it's not going away, even if it is pretty difficult to study.    (Replicating the effect in laboratory settings turned out to be a lot trickier than initially realised.)

There's a new study out on how it affects ocean areas with naturally venting CO2.  I'm sure we've seen similar studies in other places, but it confirms that the future of the coastal areas under high CO2 is more likely green and slimy with less biodiversity:

To assess the likely ecological effects of ocean acidification we compared intertidal and subtidal marine communities at increasing levels of pCO₂ at recently discovered volcanic seeps off the Pacific coast of Japan (34° N). This study region is of particular interest for ocean acidification research as it has naturally low levels of surface seawater pCO₂ (280–320 µatm) and is located at a transition zone between temperate and sub-tropical communities. We provide the first assessment of ocean acidification effects at a biogeographic boundary. Marine communities exposed to mean levels of pCO₂ predicted by 2050 experienced periods of low aragonite saturation and high dissolved inorganic carbon. These two factors combined to cause marked community shifts and a major decline in biodiversity, including the loss of key habitat-forming species, with even more extreme community changes expected by 2100. Our results provide empirical evidence that near-future levels of pCO₂ shift sub-tropical ecosystems from carbonate to fleshy algal dominated systems, accompanied by biodiversity loss and major simplification of the ecosystem.

 A report on the study explains:

They found that while a few plant species benefitted from the changing conditions, they tended to be smaller weeds and algae that blanket the seabed, choking corals and lowering overall marine diversity.

These species, and some smaller marine animals, are thriving because they are more tolerant to the stress posed by rising levels of CO₂.

Jason Hall-Spencer, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth, said: "Our research site is like a time machine. In areas with pre-Industrial levels of CO₂ the coast has an impressive amount of calcified organisms such as corals and oysters. But in areas with present-day average levels of surface seawater CO₂ we found far fewer corals and other calcified life, and so there was less biodiversity. It shows the extensive damage caused by humans due to CO₂ emissions over the past 300 years and unless we can get a grip on reducing CO₂ emissions we will undoubtedly see major degradation of coastal systems worldwide."

Jim Holt looks at the Greeks

The Jim Holt whose science and other articles and essays I've praised since I started this blog?  Yes, it would seem that that Jim Holt, who I have not noticed on line for quite a while, has written an entertaining review of a new translation of an old book by Diogenes Laertius, a third century (CE) writer through whom, apparently, we know some details about the famous (and not so famous) Greek philosophers of yore.   

DL (no, I was not familiar with him either) apparently has been much ridiculed by later philosophers for his writing skills and choices.   Holt starts:

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

His style of biography is summarised this way:

In all, over eighty individual figures get entries—including one apparently rather clever “lady-philosopher,” Hipparchia the Cynic. (A couple of female students of Plato are also mentioned, one of whom is reported “to have worn men’s clothes.”) The author typically says something about the philosopher’s family origins and his teachers, then moves on to anecdotes about his life and apothegms expressing his opinions. We are furnished with details of his sex life, the more scandalous the better. Letters (some spurious) and wills are quoted, and the philosopher’s written works are listed. These stacks of titles, sometimes extending over several pages, are extremely valuable, since the works in question (like the aforementioned dialogues of Aristotle) have generally vanished. Finally, we are given an account, or several alternative accounts, of the philosopher’s death, often with an ironizing comment by the author in what he calls “my own playful verses.”

The principle of selection for these biographical materials is simple: cram in everything, without regard to plausibility or philosophical relevance. Physical details are abundant, if not always consistent. We are told of Zeno the Stoic, for example, that “he was lean, longish, and swarthy,” but also that he was “thick-legged, flabby, and weak”; also that “he delighted…in green figs and sunbathing.” Plato is “weak-voiced” but mocked for his “long-windedness.” Aristotle had thin calves and small eyes, wore fine clothes and lots of rings, and “spoke with a lisp.”

Holt then explains that Hegel and the philosopher I love to malign, Nietzsche, disagreed about the matter of the importance of how philosophers live their lives:

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel judged the work of Diogenes Laertius harshly. “A philosophic spirit cannot be ascribed to it,” he declared; “it rambles about amongst bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand.” What is important, Hegel argued, is not that a philosopher lived in such-and-such a way and said this or that; rather, it is how the philosopher fits into the evolution of human consciousness toward truth.

After Hegel, the reputation of Diogenes Laertius suffered a sharp decline among both classicists and historians of philosophy—as witness the abusive quotations I opened with. Yet one abuser, Nietzsche, later turned into a passionate (if ambivalent) defender. As a philologist, Nietzsche had contempt for the sloppy scholarship that went into Lives. But as a philosophical subversive, he had two motives for championing the work. The first was his hatred of Socrates’s moral optimism—a precursor, he thought, to slavish Christian morality—and his preference for what he saw as the darkly “tragic” worldview of the pre-Socratics. From the materials that Diogenes Laertius had preserved on figures like haughty Heraclitus and Etna-leaping Empedocles, Nietzsche hoped to recapture a sense of pre-Socratic tragic grandeur in Greek culture. His second motive for championing Lives was a more general one. Whereas Hegel insisted that the biography of a philosopher was irrelevant to his conceptual contribution, Nietzsche took the opposite view: bios is the ultimate test of logos. He wrote:

The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.

Now, one is loath to put oneself in the position of adjudicating between Hegel and Nietzsche. In this case, however, I think it is safe to render a verdict, if a disappointingly bland one: they are both partly right.

That's probably enough cutting and pasting, go read it all.

Some flying optimism

The Air & Space mag asks: 

Is Green Aviation Really Coming? 

and answers in its usual upbeat manner - yeah, it really is.

Further on Gadsby

So, further to my previous post, I went back and finished watching the much acclaimed Hannah Gadsby Netflix special Nanette.   Spoilers will follow.

Let me just say this:  for a lesbian comedian who started this special with what sounded like a bit of criticism of  lesbian identity politics (as a result of a lesbian telling her she was not putting enough lesbian material in one of her shows),  the primary theme still comes back to the difficulties of growing up lesbian (or at least, different.)   I don't wish her ill at all - but her show did the opposite of dispelling the impression that Gadsby herself mildly mocked at the start - that lesbians as a group have a bit of a reputation are angry, overly serious people really upset with men.  

It's presumably true that she has had a hard life in key respects, and that she is right to think that telling her story in a straight forward manner may be a better service to humanity than having used comedy with its inherent self-deprecation.  But is she partly angry with herself for taking quite a long time to realise that?

Sorry, again, I don't wish her ill:  in fact she seems a person who deserves a bit of psychic peace.   But I still don't care for her show...

Update:  I feel I need to explain more as to why I felt unmoved by some of the revelations in the show - that a guy in the street bashed her badly for looking lesbian, or that she was sexually abused as a child, and raped by two men as a young adult.   The problem is, for me, that these statements are made too briefly and (except for the bashing story, I suppose, with no context) to have impact.  While some people may be completely un-inclined to question such self reported history, I tend more towards wanting to know at least some of the details before feeling confident that the teller's claims are likely true and the reaction is warranted.    I'm sorry, but not every story of sexual wrongdoing is exactly as claimed.  Now, it's not that I think she should be telling us more as part of some self explanatory public exercise:  it's just that I don't really know how to react to such a scant revelation by an angry person on stage...

So, this Brexit idea is working out well...

From The Times:

Ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

Blueprints for the armed forces to assist the civilian authorities, usually used only in civil emergencies, have been dusted down as part of the “no deal” planning.

Helicopters and army trucks would be used to ferry supplies to vulnerable people outside the southeast who were struggling to obtain the medicines they needed.

Fast food corrections

*   A few months back, I dissed the popular Mexican food chain (originated by an Australian, no less) Guzman y Gomez based on my first, very uninspiring, meal there.    My daughter re-assured me that I should try them again, but stick to the nachos with grilled chicken.   I did, and yes, they make for a very tasty, good value and relatively healthy meal.   I still don't know that their other menu items are worth ever eating, but yes, those nacho meals are really good.

*   MacDonalds has been on a losing path for my allegiance.   I was very keen on their "create your own" burger system going back a few years ago, but yeah, as anyone could have guessed, it was likely too labour intensive and not worth it, so they have retreated into permanent menu of just a few special burgers.  But even so, it seems they can't stop fiddling with them, so that one which I had settled on as my favourite has now disappeared.   You can still modify the ingredients on the screen, but the options are reduced and it seems hardly worth the effort.   My daughter is over the company, and I think it needs some renewed shake up, too.   [At least on my recent visit, the irritation with the never ending change on the menu screen while I was trying to decide what to eat had stopped.   That only took a year or more.]   

*  Are MacDonalds suffering at the hands of Grill'd and other high end burger chains?   I guess so.  I think Grill'd is pretty good and the price point about right.  

*  In not strictly fast food news, I had a meal at a sort of SE Asian casual outdoor food place at South Brisbane a few weeks ago.   The corn fritters were delicious (sort of a round ball thai style, not anything American.)   I must attempt making something similar at home...

New battery technology needed

There's a commentary piece at Nature about how it would be a good idea to get going with alternative battery designs, due to the limitations on minerals for current lithium batteries.   They cite not a supply problem with lithium itself, but cobalt and nickel.  (I thought nickel was pretty common stuff, but apparently not.)

As it happens, it seems Australia is a pretty good source of all three current materials:

Cobalt-rich minerals are found in just a few places⁶. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supplied more than half (56%) of the 148,000 tonnes of the metal mined worldwide in 2015 (ref. ⁶). Most of this goes to China, which holds stockpiles of 200,000 to 400,000 tonnes⁶. Australia hosts 14% of the world’s cobalt reserves but has yet to exploit them fully. Cobalt has been extracted from the deep sea floor, but mining here would be too expensive, ecologically and economically.

Likewise, nickel production is dominated by a dozen nations. In 2017, Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, New Caledonia, Russia and Australia together supplied 72% of the 2.1 million tonnes mined globally. Of this, less than one-tenth went to batteries; the rest was used mainly in steel and electronics. Nickel is cheaper to extract than cobalt, through a series of reactions with hydrogen and carbon monoxide⁷. Nonetheless, rising demand has boosted nickel prices by about 50% since 2015, from $9 to $14 per kg.

Both cobalt and nickel have suffered sudden price hikes and crashes. For example, disrupted Australian supplies, increased demand from China for steel and speculation by hedge-fund managers led to a five-fold surge in the price of nickel and a tripling of that for cobalt in 2008–09.

Projected shortfalls

If nothing changes, demand will outstrip production within 20 years. We expect this to occur for cobalt by 2030 and for nickel by 2037 or sooner.

Soft denialism

Hmm.  Which of my readers has expressed the view that Alex Steffen attacks here?  If only I could remember...

A fishy post

When I really want to bore readers, I like to talk canned seafood.

For canned fish of any kind, I generally avoid the John West brand as being unnecessarily expensive, even though it does seem to be generally of high quality.  (Or am I just a pushover for their advertising line which has been the same for what seems like decades?)  However, in my search for  canned mussels which are not from China, I saw a couple of months ago that JW are now doing 2 types of canned Spanish mussels, and this one (despite it being pretty costly at $4 a can) is really very nice:

Then today, I was looking for sardines for lunch, noticed that these were on special for $1.95, and found (a bit to my surprise, as I never thought of rosemary as a flavour that would go with sardines) that they were quite delicate and delicious:

If only I were an "influencer" and thereby make money boring people...

Good news if you're thinking about a time travel story...

...as I have been.  Here:

How Quantum Computers Could Kill the Arrow of Time

Here are some extracts:

Very orderly and very random systems are easy to predict. (Think of a pendulum — ordered — or a cloud of gas filling a room — disordered.) In this paper, the researchers looked at physical systems that had a goldilocks' level of disorder and randomness — not too little, and not too much. (So, something like a developing weather system.) These are very difficult for computers to understand, said study co-author Jayne Thompson, a complexity theorist and physicist studying quantum information at the National University of Singapore. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Next, they tried to figure out those systems' pasts and futures using theoretical quantum computers (no physical computers involved). Not only did these models of quantum computers use less memory than the classical computer models, she said, they were able to run in either direction through time without using up extra memory. In other words, the quantum models had no causal asymmetry.

"While classically, it might be impossible for the process to go in one of the directions [through time]," Thompson told Live Science, "our results show that 'quantum mechanically,' the process can go in either direction using very little memory."

And if that's true inside a quantum computer, that's true in the universe, she said.

Quantum physics is the study of the strange probabilistic behaviors of very small particles — all the very small particles in the universe. And if quantum physics is true for all the pieces that make up the universe, it's true for the universe itself, even if some of its weirder effects aren't always obvious to us. So if a quantum computer can operate without causal asymmetry, then so can the universe.

Of course, seeing a series of proofs about how quantum computers will one day work isn't the same thing as seeing the effect in the real world. But we're still a long way off from quantum computers advanced enough to run the kind of models this paper describes, they said.

What's more, Thompson said, this research doesn't prove that there isn't any causal asymmetry anywhere in the universe. She and her colleagues showed there is no asymmetry in a handful of systems. But it's possible, she said, that there are some very bare-bones quantum models where some causal asymmetry emerges.

Martian lifeboat is full of holes

It's worth clearing your cache (if you have visited Wired too often already) to read this article: 

Sorry, Nerds:  Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars

Rainfall intensity increases are not in your (or my) imagination

I've been posting for years about my impression that an increase in rainfall intensity is one of the first obvious, and underrated, disastrous effects of climate change.   [Go on, use my blog search bar at the side for the topic "rainfall intensity".]   I noted in 2015:

My strong, strong hunch is, however, that at least South East Queensland (if not other parts of the country) is now clearly undergoing the type of intensification of rainfall that was always expected under global warming and is suffering badly for it.  

Last Friday's rainfall was deadly, remarkable, and unseasonal across most of the South East, but particularly just to the north of Brisbane.   It reminded me of the intensity of rainfall that led to the Lockyer Valley disasters in the 2011 floods - where all forms of normal drainage (and Brisbane's drainage is built to sub-tropical standards) is so overwhelmed  that the flood is disastrously out of the norm in terms of suddenness of onset.    

But I'm not sure whether we are getting a good analysis of this in a timely fashion.

Well, it took them a while, but we now seem to have a paper which confirms the hunch, and it is getting plenty of publicity.

The SMH writes:

"Unique and alarming": Engineers to be tested as rain events intensify

which ties in neatly with my recent complaint here:  

...sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.

Even the Courier Mail appears to be covering the story with the some headline about "freak superstorms" and making reference to infrastructure too.  Good.

As for a science site that explains a bit about the study, try Science Daily:

Published today in Nature Climate Change, the study shows that in Australia:

• Extreme daily rainfall events are increasing as would be expected from the levels of regional or global warming that we are experiencing
• the amount of water falling in hourly rain storms (for example thunderstorms) is increasing at a rate 2 to 3 times higher than expected, with the most extreme events showing the largest increases.
• this large increase has implications for the frequency and severity of flash floods, particularly if the rate stays the same into the future.

Dr Selma Guerreiro, lead author, explains:
"It was thought there was a limit on how much more rain could fall during these extreme events as a result of rising temperatures.
"Now that upper limit has been broken, and instead we are seeing increases in rainfall, two to three times higher than expected during these short, intense rainstorms.

Papal infallibility has got nothing on this guy

So, Sinclair Davidson posted about an article by the GOP conservative Senator Orrin Hatch in which he called for:

... a détente in partisan hostilities, an easing of tensions that can be realized when both sides adopt certain rules of engagement—norms to rein in the worst excesses of the culture wars.

This led to this response by one of the (likely geriatric) culture war/climate change losers in comments (with support from a few others, including uber 50's Catholic CL):

I used to have to argue with Lefties about this:    it's an obvious mistake to start thinking that Reason gives you only one answer in politics.   They are many ways to "reason" about people, politics and a bunch of other stuff - don't start claiming in politics that your side is the only one that has "reason" on its side, as if it is the equivalent of a message from God telling you that you have the One True (and Self-evident) Answer to complicated  matters.

The times have changed and it is now typically the Wingnut Right who are more likely to claim the mantle of infallibility based on "Reason."

What's worse, my complaint about the overclaims for Reason does not apply to the matter of facts.    Wingnuts, with their climate change denialism, don't even get to first base on the matter of the credible use of reason on that crucial issue, because they do not even accept facts.  

Another view of that building...

I let a weekend slip by without providing another photo of that building made of wood and glass.  Here you go:

The slippery polls

Congratulations are due to Bill Shorten and Labor on the wins in this weekend's by-elections, when most pundits (and, I think, polling - but more on that next) had seemed to prepare us all for the historically rare  scenario of an Opposition losing in at least one of the seats up for grabs.  Instead, Bill got what could be called "a beautiful set of numbers", and with Longman's result in particular, he must be feeling very happy:

Re the polls:  I saw on Twitter just on Friday some 2PP figures from Newspoll which looked better for Labor and made me think they may well be OK in Braddon and Longman after all.   So congratulations to Newspoll for at least predicting the winner accurately, again.  (Actually, they polled both seats as 2PP 51/49 to Labor, so they underestimated the Labor result.) 

The downside for Shorten is that on a national level, recent Newspolls have also shown a narrowing of the 2PP down to 49% to 51% for Liberal/Labor.  Given that I normally would allow the incumbent government to pick up a bit during a full election campaign, I think it's still going to be quite a close Federal election.   But Turnbull now has no incentive to call it early (I bet he would have if he won a seat off Labor this weekend) so a lot in change in the next 6 months.

As for the nutty Right's reaction:   I couldn't be bothered reading the Catallaxy thread about it in any detail - as you would expect, it was all about Turnbull not being right wing enough, with many longing for the destruction of the Liberals under him so that from the ashes a truly conservative force in politics will arise to slash taxes, spending & immigration, sell the ABC to Gina Rinehart, etc.   Yes, they think the rise of Trump tells us something about where politics is heading: because they are his people - white, dumb (or at least, wilfully misinformed) and old. 

Sinclair Davidson, on the other hand, despite being pro-migration and relatively pro-Turnbull, will presumably continue to do his own bit to hurt Liberals if he keeps going on about privatising the ABC.

Seems to me that it doesn't matter whether they are of conservative or libertarian bent over there - they are all clueless about policies that actually are electorally popular.   Good.

Metrosexuals of the 18th Century

Boring, ageing right-wingers of today are always complaining about how so many modern young men are voluntarily emasculated metrosexuals, unlike the grand old days when men were real men, etc, with no appreciation that the very same talk had been around a couple of hundred years ago in Britain (and, I expect, other advanced countries).  Read this rather amusing review of a book about the Macaronis of Britain, around the heyday of Captain Cook.  Here's a taste:

As Peter McNeil’s Pretty Gentlemen efficiently illustrates, masculinity was a muddled business in 18th-century Britain. It masqueraded in different guises, literally: in costume, in print culture and on the stage. McNeil narrows in on the ‘Macaroni men’, those dedicated followers of fashion, deliciously lampooned in literature and yet central to the social, sexual and cultural history of Britain from 1760 to 1780....

The Macaroni, he explains, were the fashion eccentrics of the 18th century, marked by their distinctive sartorial preferences: heeled shoes, black satin bows in their hair, fitted jackets, tiny tricorns, elaborate wigs and eyeglasses. They were too loosely organised to constitute a subculture, but from the composite account that McNeil puts together, it is clear that the Macaroni could be as outré as punks once were and as affected as hipsters still are.

For a period of around twenty years, their style seeped into every aspect of public life. Their image was reproduced in stylish portraits and comic prints; their look was emulated by the leisurely classes and roundly mocked by most others. McNeil helpfully describes their identifying characteristics and then determinedly spots them everywhere – from Julius Soubise, a freed slave petted by the Duchess of Queensberry, and Charles James Fox, that most eminent British statesman, to Richard Cosway, the society portraitist, and Joseph Banks, the butterfly-catching botanist who sailed the South Seas....

I have posted a bit about Joseph Banks before.  I assume his fashion habits must have been a bit dandified when back in England, but I don't think he was considered anything other than enthusiastically heterosexual, given his stories of adventures with the South Pacific islanders.   However, the sexuality of other Macaronis (the name being partly derived from their fondness for visiting Europe) was questioned:

They were, McNeil suggests persuasively, a living embodiment of cosmopolitanism in an age of anxious nationalism. And so it makes sense to locate them in the tradition of carnival, burlesque and carousing, a gleefully festive and subversive upending of received attitudes, manners and hierarchies. 
 

This argument makes most sense in terms of the Macaroni man’s ambiguous relationship to conventions of gender and sexuality. McNeil’s detailed account of Macaroni trends – large floral corsages, chatelaines or hanging watches, finely turned canes, decorative snuff boxes, the use of cosmetics, face whiteners, rouge, breath fresheners, even preferred drinks (asses’ milk!) – suggests a profound challenge to ideas of patrician or military masculinity. Trawling through archives of prints and portraits, McNeil assembles a remarkable vision of the Macaroni: canes dangling insouciantly from wrists, toweringly tall toupees dressed with pomade and powder, arresting colours – ‘pea-green, pink, red and deep orange, garnished with a great deal of gilt’. We are accustomed to critiquing the male gaze that is habitually turned to scrutinise female bodies, but here the Macaroni is such a staggering spectacle that we might reflect on the idea of a male gaze powerfully scrutinising the male form too.

Crucially, in McNeil’s account, the Macaroni is an indeterminate personality, not fixed in gender or sexuality. It isn’t obvious that the apparently effete figure of the Macaroni automatically signalled homosexuality, but it is clear that their uniform, habits and culture provided a different and widely disseminated form of masculinity. The Macaroni presented an alternative model of social conduct, concerned with manners and deportment, keen to make visible the consumption of luxury goods and to engage in acts of self-care rather than displays of machismo and swaggering swordsmanship.

About those Northern summer records

I see that Axios has a handy list of recent broken records:

The big picture: All-time high temperature records, along with heavy rainfall milestones have fallen as a warmer, wetter climate exerts its influence on day-to-day weather. Here are just a few of the records set so far:

• In North America: Los Angeles set an all-time high temperature record of 111°F on July 6. Montreal, Canada also set its all-time high temperature record, during a deadly Quebec heat wave in early July. This week, Death Valley, California, has broken three straight daily records with a high of 127°F.
• In Europe: Unprecedented heat led to a wildfire outbreak in Scandinavia, and record highs have been set all the way above the Arctic Circle this month. According to the U.N., Sodankyla, Finland hit 89.2°F, or 31.8°C, on July 17, which was an all-time record for that location.
• Friday was the hottest temperature on record in Amsterdam, at 34.8°C, or 94.6°F.
• Remarkably, in northern Norway, Makkaur, set a new record high overnight low temperature of 25.2°C, or 77°F, on July 18.
• Heat records have also fallen in the U.K., Ireland and France. In London, high temperatures hit 35°C on Thursday, and were forecast to potentially eclipse that on Friday. The U.K. is suffering through one of its driest years on record.
• In the Middle East: Quriyat, Oman, which likely set the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28, when the temperature failed to drop below 109°F, or 42.8°C.
• In Africa: Ouargla, Algeria, may have set Africa's all-time highest temperature on July 5, with a reading of 124.3°F, or 51.3°C.
• In Asia: Japan set a national temperature record of 106°F, or 41.1°C, in a heat wave that followed deadly floods. 

Of course, Southern hemisphere dimwit's think that a colder than usual winter in Australia means there's nothing to worry about.    

In the selfie mirror

It must be testament to my selfie uninterested age that I had not realised until this morning that when using the front facing camera on mobile phones, they flip the image on the screen so that it looks the same as a mirror image.   The photos taken then are also a mirror image, unless you go into settings and tell it to stop doing that.   The mirror image photo is a default on all phones, I gather.

I guess everyone under 50 who has taken a selfie with words on their T shirt has realised this.  But if you are over 50 and take about one selfie every year, it's easy enough to miss this.  

Twitter considered (and a Trumpian piece of stupidity found)

I find it very frustrating when you read a good tweet over breakfast that I'd like to re-post here, and then a couple of hours later you can't find it again.   Twitter search is not as good as it should be, either.

I might keep looking, later...

Update:  here it is:

Not all economists.  There'll be at least one RMIT economist (Kates, of course) who will find a way to process his cult leader's words in some fashion that he thinks makes sense. 

A neat combination

So, UFOs may be time travel machines, and aliens very evolved humans from the future.  I've toyed with that idea in my head for some time, but I don't think I had thought to drag in the Men in Black, too:

Then, there is the matter of the sinister Men in Black. They are perceived by UFO researchers as human-looking alien creatures or government agents, whose secret role it is to silence UFO witnesses, something that history has shown they are very good at. Maybe, though, the MIB are not the bad guys, after all. Perhaps they are “time-cops,” working to ensure that UFO witnesses don’t get too close to the truth – namely, the time-travel angle. After all, just about everything about the MIB is out of time. They almost always wear 1950s-era black suits. Their mode of transport – old-time Cadillac cars – is out of time, too. They have even asked witnesses, on more than a few occasions: “What time is it?”

Maybe they’re actually asking what year they’re in. Or even which century. Perhaps, in the distant future, little is known of our time. Maybe we destroyed ourselves and, as a consequence, the people of the future are tasked with repairing the planet and doing their utmost to save what is left of our species. Possibly, they have limited knowledge of our culture and even our fashions, apart from what they know from the pages of aging, crumbling old magazines from the 1950s. So, they adopt the attire they assume will allow them to blend in with the people of the 21^st century, when, in reality, it’s the exact opposite. The MIB stand out like a sore thumb. Or, like a man out of time.

Paranormal researcher Joshua P. Warren comments on this link between time-travel and the Men in Black: “It could be that the Men in Black follow all this UFO stuff around; that’s their job. Not that they are causing these things to happen, but they’re alerted to it when there’s a dangerous timeline issue that needs to be corrected. They’re not necessarily the bad-guys at all; they might be doing damage control, and maybe that includes warning and silencing witnesses to protect the time-travel secret. They might be weird, and they might look weird, but their overall mission may be just to keep order and protect the timelines.”

A study to believe in

Look, it's probably been debunked somewhere already even as I type this, but if ever there was a study that gets from me a "I want to believe" response, it's this:

Study: Drinking Alcohol More Important Than Exercise to Living Past 90

More idiocy

So Trump, talking today, has confirmed again that he thinks F35s are literally invisible;  has primed his wingnut cult followers to believe that if Democrats do well in the mid terms, it will be because Putin has changed allegiances; and gone completely Orwellian in his attacks on the free media (not that he would have ever read him.)  Jeez, even the imagery, with the silly uniform of the audience, looks Orwellian:

He is also having to offer government to bail out his mid West soy farmers, presumably from the deliberately depleted tax revenue:

Corporate tax receipts in June were 33 percent lower than a year ago, according to data released by the Treasury Department Thursday, as companies made smaller estimated payments due to the reduction in their tax rates. Total receipts were down 7 percent, while payroll taxes were 5 percent lower compared to June 2017....

“More broadly, the federal deficit is swelling as government spending outpaces revenues,” Rubin wrote. “The budget gap totaled $607.1 billion in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year, 16% larger than the same point a year earlier.”

But the anti Trump New York Daily News has put off staff, so all Tim Blair can muster is his Nelson Muntz act of "ha ha".   Yeah, 'cos that's what's important at the moment.

What a disgrace

From the Washington Post:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was speaking at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday when the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up.” The phrase was a common refrain among supporters of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and referred to the desired punishment for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Sessions, whose position advising that campaign was parlayed into one as the nation’s chief law enforcement official, chuckled.

“Lock her up,” he said.

And this, from another Trump flunky:

Jones, host of “Infowars” and “The Alex Jones Show,” posted the video Monday on his personal YouTube page, making the unsubstantiated claim that Mueller is responsible for child rape. Jones alleges that Mueller, leading the investigation into Russia’s involvement with the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign, covered up for billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who spent 13 months in jail for soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14.

“That’s the thing, is like, once it’s Mueller, everyone’s so scared of Mueller, they’d let Mueller rape kids in front of people, which he did. I mean, Mueller covered up for a decade for Epstein kidnapping kids, flying them on sex planes, some kids as young as 7 years old reportedly, with big perverts raping them to frame people. I mean, Mueller is a monster, man,” said Jones.

“God, imagine ― he’s even above the pedophiles, though. The word is he doesn’t have sex with kids, he just controls it all. Can you imagine being a monster like that? God.”

Yeah, but the more serious problem in America is that stupid young Lefties shout down Right wingers at colleges, hey Jason?