As Tim Colebatch noted this week in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential, even ontological. Colebatch notes that “in most of Australia, the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians they had when national development was the issue.”Actually, I don't agree with that last paragraph - I think the nutty Right of Australia is just having a temporary confidence boost by the Trump ascendancy, but that is going to crash in a screaming wreck very shortly. Besides, my feeling is that wingnuttery is not as big in Australia as it is in the States, and is artificially boosted in prominence and influence by the Murdoch media.
As I pointed out in an article about the rise of Australian far right, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly in recent years. Amongst the contemporary conservative base, the onrush of tribalism has resulted in the abandonment of enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise.
As a result, movement conservatives quite literally live in a different reality to moderates and progressives, a world where conspiracy theories flourish, climate change is a myth, and western civilisation is under threat from immigrants, feminists and university lecturers.
In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over the party machinery and melding it into a much more muscular, far-right apparatus – just as movement conservatives have done in the United States? Or will the party split apart?
In mainstream Australia, the endless culture war has so far been going very badly, as the marriage plebiscite showed. But the culture war within the Liberal Party has been another matter altogether: in the party machinery, the far right is winning.
As out of touch as the conservatives are with mainstream Australia, they are extremely in touch with the active and increasingly radical right. Indeed, it could be argued that this weeks’ events represent the logical conclusion of the radicalisation of the Liberal right.
t’s no coincidence that energy policy proved the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows just how radicalised the right of the party has become. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift that a section of the party is more than willing to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony.
Such actions do not augur well for a sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.
The cult seems rooted in the notion of the poet’s relationship with his royal or chiefly patron being equivalent to a marriage, the two sharing the same bed. The following English translations from the original Irish may be cited. One poet tells his patron that it is no act of adultery towards his wife to “lie with me and my kind”, while another who has fallen out of favour seeks reconciliation by urging: “Let us not refrain any longer from lying on one couch, O fair one.” A 14th-century poet calls on his patron to “proffer your red lips to me, give me a fervent kiss . . .” The same states: “To him [the poet] is due loving favour, the primest [sic] liberality, precedence in counsel, the king’s counsel, the sharing of his bed . . .” Some of the language employed is even more extravagant. Thus, an elegy by Brian Ó Gnímh over the spiked head of Alasdair Mac Donald (1586) runs: “I love the still-unbleached red mouth/Head of silk complexion . . ./ . . . smooth delicate cheek/ . . . fine soft abundant curling tresses/ . . . gaze-holding green eyes . . ./ . . . perfect tresses”.Whether this should be seen as really, truly gay or not seems to be a matter in dispute:
However, we are cautioned by Prof Pádraig Breatnach that “the guise of ‘spouse’ could be adopted by a poet towards several patrons at once”. The poet’s “full assumption of a feminine role” occurs within terms of an established literary “conceit”, and “we must be wary of drawing hasty conclusions as to his psychology...” A parallel study by Prof Katherine Simms draws attention to the contemporary “traditional role of the poet as in some sense his patron’s spouse or lover”. However, “the bard has no intention . . . of implying a homosexual relationship with his patron . . . Bed-sharing was a general mark of esteem and trust in this society, peculiarly appropriate between a king and his poet.” Both the foregoing base their observations in large part on the earlier work of Prof James Carney.The guy who wrote the article goes on to argue "yeah, nah", but who is right I don't know.
The general election in May has been celebrated for ushering in a new era, but the new government’s first 100 days in power have been marked by increased discrimination, harassment and violent hate crime against the LGBT community.Which is pretty odd, given the anointment of Anwar Ibrahim, alleged sodomite, by Mahathir as the next leader. Anyway, some particular incidents behind the report:
In the early hours of Saturday, the police and government officials raided a small nightclub in Kuala Lumpur.
The venue, Blue Boy, was known to be popular with the LGBT community, but for years had been relatively left alone by the authorities. Until the weekend. Twenty men were detained and ordered into counselling for “illicit behaviour” by the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Department of Malaysia (JAKIM).
Government minister Khalid Samad later released a statement on the motivations behind the raid. “Hopefully this initiative can mitigate the LGBT culture from spreading into our society,” he said....
Just two days before the raid, a trans woman was brutally beaten on the street in Seremban while seven others watched. The attack left her with broken ribs, a broken backbone and a ruptured spleen.
In the same week, a sharia court ordered a lesbian couple to be caned after they were caught having sex in a car, the first time in years such a punishment had been handed out in Malaysia. The judge said it was “a lesson and reminder to not just the two of you, but the members of society”....
The minister for religious affairs, Mujahid Yusof Rawa, has said the government would “take proactive measures to curb the growing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender issues, and help them to return to the right path and lead a normal life”. The deputy minister for public affairs, Dr Lee Boon Chye, stated last week that LGBT people have an “organic disorder”.
I don’t know a soul, clerical or lay, who hasn’t been damaged by the sexual revolution. But I also know there’s no point in saying, ‘It’s always been like this.’
The solution is not married clergy, gay clergy, or even married gay clergy. It’s the same solution it’s always been: a renewal and restoration and re-catechesis of the Church’s complete teaching on sexual morality, and practical advice on how to get it right, at least most of the time.
For the last 40 years we have had Catholic marriage promoted, explained, and supported at every level of the Church. Perhaps it’s time to look at the chaste and/or celibate state in the same way.
We all know many faithful Catholics who can’t marry – or re-marry – for a whole range of reasons. All of us could benefit from some help to live lives that are just as holy and as countercultural as faithful married Catholic couples.
Or how about a former priest, writing in 2010, who puts it this way:From my personal experience, I would guess that obligatory celibacy plays an important role. To paraphrase Saint Paul, for some people the burning sexual energy cannot and should not be contained. The effort often infantilizes men, subverting normal sexual urges into strange pathways, blocking sexual maturity.For a few priests, celibacy appears to deepen devotion to God; many simply ignore it; for others it is a source of malaise and unhappiness. For far too many men, it has led to criminal depravity.The Catholic hierarchy has primary responsibility to find the answer and to make the indispensable cultural and institutional changes in the priesthood. Prosecution of abuses has become more common, but it’s not enough. I don’t see evidence that the clergy — priests, bishops, the Vatican or even the much admired Pope Francis — are willing to address the elephant in the room: What is wrong with the institution of the priesthood and how can it be fixed?
Update 2: Here's a point I may have missed before. Even though (as I noted in an earlier post) Philippa loves to blame homosexuality as at the core of the problem, the irony is that the proportion of gay priests in the priesthood has almost certainly increased over the last 50 years before of the outflow of straight priests who leave to marry!:No, celibacy does not “cause’’ the sex abuse of minors, and yes, abusers of children come from many walks of life. Indeed, most abuse occurs within families or circles of close acquaintance. But the Catholic scandal has laid bare an essential pathology that is unique to the culture of clericalism, and mandatory celibacy is essential to it. Immaturity, narcissism, misogyny, incapacity for intimacy, illusions about sexual morality — such all-too-common characteristics of today’s Catholic clergy are directly tied to the inhuman asexuality that is put before them as an ideal.A special problem arises when, on the one hand, homosexuality is demonized as a matter of doctrine, while, on the other, the banishment of women leaves the priest living in a homophilic world. In some men, both straight and gay, the stresses of such contradiction lead to irrepressible urges that can be indulged only by exploitation of the vulnerable and available, objects of desire who in many cases are boys, whether prepubescent or adolescent. Now we know.
In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s.So even if it was fair [it isn't, in the broad way she does] of Philippa to, um, blame the gays, the fact that celibacy has caused heaps of straight priests to leave the priesthood would still pretty much be consistent with "celibacy is a factor in the sexual abuse crisis."
Climate change denial is at the root of the half-baked policies and outright wrecking that have blighted the past decadeWhy aren't more commentators saying it?
Faced with scenes of blood flowing in rubbish-strewn roads and of streets littered with animal entrails, authorities in the Egyptian capital say they aim to crack down on the outdoor slaughter that marks one of Islam’s main holidays.
Eid Al Adha, or the festival of sacrifice, is marked by Muslims sacrificing animals according to religious traditions at the end of the Haj annual pilgrimage.
Ahead of the holiday, which this year starts on Tuesday, temporary sheep markets have sprung up amid the exhaust fumes and garbage heaps of the sprawling metropolis.
But the governor’s office in Cairo insists it is on a “cleanliness” drive to stop the widespread slaughter of animals in the distinctly unhygienic surroundings of the city’s streets.
To prevent the “barbaric and unacceptable” spectacle, officials in each neighbourhood have been ordered to “strictly” enforce laws prohibiting the practice, city spokesman Khalid Mustafa said....
Traders like Hussain Abul Al Aziz say they welcome the push to eliminate the killings in the streets and claim they don’t engage in the practice.
“It is unacceptable to slaughter in the street, it must be done in an abattoir with a veterinarian who examines the animal and under the supervision of the health ministry,” Aziz said, standing among his well-fed beasts.
But it is clear that the message from the authorities has not reached most people.
Local resident Ahmad Ragab shops around for a sheep for Eid Al Adha.
The father in his fifties confides that he has not heard of the official sanitation drive and was planning to slaughter his animal in the street outside his house.
Malayalam actress and fashion designer Poornima Indrajith and award-winning music composer Shaan Rahman, who have been at the forefront of Kerala flood rescue efforts, on Monday slammed haters who were spreading bigotry and hate in the wake of mass destruction.More broadly, from a recent editorial piece from the ANU based East Asia Forum:
While the majority of civilians and officials have stepped up to help the rain-ravaged Kerala to return to normalcy, there is a section of people on social media who displayed bigotry by claiming that the South Indian state had invited the floods due to their beef-eating habits.
Another hate-spewing comment was that an Indian deity was showing its fury on the state, when a section of its residents demanded that women be allowed in the temple that housed the idol.
Modern Hindu nationalism is not mere traditionalism, says Arun Swamy. The Hindu nationalists seek not so much to preserve existing social hierarchies in Hindu cultures as they do to rewrite social orders fascistically to the benefit of Hindu populations. The Modi government appears to be actively pursuing ‘history rewriting’ and ‘historic romanticism’ agendas and has appointed what seems to be a historical revision committee to ‘prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth’. Other concerns include Modi’s pick for Uttar Pradesh chief minister, a Hindu priest who has incited violence against Muslims, and legislative developments in BJP-controlled states that presume guilt until proven innocent in cases of cow slaughter and urge the enforcement of archaic laws against cattle slaughter (even in Muslim-majority communities).
‘The Hindu nationalist rhetoric was played down (at least by Modi)’, as Adeney explains, ‘in favour of a development narrative. He put himself forward as a normal man, contrasting his humble origins with the “little princeling” Rahul Gandhi, presumed to be prime minister-designate of the Congress though never officially named as such’. The long-term electoral project of the BJP is rather to showcase right wing majoritarianism as the natural force synonymous with the welfare and development of India — hence perhaps that choice of chief minister in Uttar Pradesh.
Events since 2014 raise the question of whether the BJP is the new dominant party of Indian politics. It has captured a raft of state legislatures, and although it did not manage to win a majority in the recent state election in Karnataka, it did win the largest number of seats.
The son of murdered New South Wale police accountant Curtis Cheng has called for an end to political “scapegoating” of Muslims in Australia following last week’s speech by senator Fraser Anning calling for a ban on Muslim immigration.
Alpha Cheng’s father was shot in cold blood by a 15-year-old Muslim boy, Farhard Jabar, outside the NSW police headquarters in Parramatta in 2015. Two others were jailed for planning the attack and supplying the weapon.
But he said that was no reason to victimise a community.
“I am tired of needing to explain to adults that the actions of these individuals cannot be attributed to an entire group of people. If I, of all people, can think this way, then sure as hell our ‘elected’ representatives can think this way too,” Cheng wrote in an opinion piece in Fairfax Media.
There is only one problem with the precedent cited by Shapiro: it is actually a forgotten historic atrocity, which was characterized by mass rape, torture, and murder, and left at least 400,000 people dead. Germans were interned in concentration camps and endured horrific journeys in which pregnant women froze to death. As Tara Zahra explains in a review of R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War:
It was one of many ugly episodes in 1945. On a summer day in Horní Moštenice, a small town in central Czechoslovakia, 265 people, including 120 women and seventy-four children, were dragged from a train, shot in the neck, and buried in a mass grave that had been dug beside the local railway station. It was a common enough scene in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II, when Nazi extermination policies threatened entire ethnic groups. But despite the similarity of means and ends, the massacre in Horní Moštenice was different. For one thing, it occurred on June 18, after the war in Europe had officially ended. Moreover, the perpetrators were Czechoslovak troops, and their victims were Germans who had been a presence in the region for centuries....Update: while I feel I should have known more about that, it did, after all, fall into that part of the world that I have long considered to be:
After the Nazi defeat, the Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled to the West, and were stripped of their citizenship, homes and property in what R.M. Douglas calls “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Douglas amply demonstrates that these population transfers, which were to be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner according to the language of the Allies’ 1945 Potsdam Agreement, counted as neither. Instead, he writes, they were nothing less than a “massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures.” .....
The so-called “wild” or spontaneous expulsions in Czechoslovakia began almost immediately after liberation, in May to June of 1945. But there was nothing “wild” about this first wave of what Czech officials referred to as národní ocista (“national cleansing”). These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps). But the “wild expulsions” were justified as self-defense on the basis of exaggerated or invented reports of ongoing resistance activity by Nazi “Werewolf” units. One of the most infamous postwar pogroms was sparked by the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem in northwestern Bohemia in July 1945. Most of the victims of the explosion were themselves German, but local workers, Czechoslovak Army units and Soviet troops wasted no time blaming Werewolf sabotage and taking revenge. Germans were beaten, shot and thrown into the Elbe River; many observers recall a baby carriage being thrown into the river with a baby inside. The massacre resulted in at least 100 deaths.
During the “wild” expulsions, lucky expellees were given a few hours’ notice and taken on foot by force to the closest border with only the clothes on their back. The unlucky were interned in concentration and forced labor camps organized explicitly on the Nazi model. At least 180,000 ethnic Germans were interned in Czechoslovakia as of November 1945; another 170,000 were interned in Yugoslavia. The internees included many women, children and even several thousand German-speaking Jews. In many cases, former Nazi concentration camps and detention centers like Terezín/Theresienstadt were converted overnight into camps for ethnic Germans. At Linzervorstadt, a camp administered by a former Czech internee of Dachau, the motto “Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth” replaced Arbeit macht frei on the camp gates. Inmates were stripped naked and shorn of their hair upon arrival at the camp, forced to run a gantlet while being beaten with rubber truncheons and then, during their stay in the camp, systematically flogged, tortured and made to stand at attention in all-night roll calls. Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”
Japan's obsession with slender women may harm unborn children and create long-term health problems for the Japanese population. Already, a high proportion of Japanese women is starting pregnancy underweight, and many scientists have criticized the country's official guidelines for weight gain during pregnancy as too strict. Now, a survey shows many pregnant women strive to keep their weight gain below even those targets. This combination of factors has led to an unusually high percentage of low-weight births, which is likely the reason that the height of the average Japanese adult has declined every year for those born after 1980....
The shortening of the Japanese is subtle, but unmistakable. An international study published in 2016 found that since the late 19th century, the average Japanese adult male height rose 14.5 centimeters, peaking at 171.5 centimeters for those born in 1978 and 1979. But by the 1996 birth cohort, it had dropped to 170.8 centimeters. Over the same period, average female height jumped 16 centimeters, topped out at 158.5 centimeters, then dropped by 0.2 centimeters. Some other countries have also experienced height declines, which the study variously linked to economic privation, an influx of shorter immigrants, or—in the United States—poor diet quality, which can impair growth both in the fetus and in newborn babies.
In Japan, experts say the evidence for a link with lower birth weights is strong. As the country recovered from World War II, the percentage of low–birth weight babies—those weighing 2.5 kilograms or less at delivery—declined from 7.3% in 1951 to 5.5% in 1978–79. As babies grew heavier, however, doctors worried about preeclampsia, a complication that can put the lives of both mother and baby at risk. In the late 1970s, some Japanese obstetricians suggested a low-calorie diet could lower that risk, a view incorporated into 1981 guidelines from the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Previously, mothers-to-be were told to ‘eat for two’; now, the ideal is to ‘give birth small but raise a big baby,’" says Hideoki Fukuoka, an obstetrician at Waseda University in Tokyo.
* The burden the prosecutors have to overcome, he explained with a thermometer-like chart, is not that Manafort “possibly,” “probably,” “likely” or “even highly likely guilty,” but that he is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Avenell's own quest began in 2006, when she was combing through dozens of papers for a review evaluating whether vitamin D reduces the risk of bone fractures. In two papers by Sato, she stumbled on a weird coincidence. They described different trials—one in stroke victims, the other in Parkinson's disease patients—but the control and study groups in both studies had the exact same mean body mass index. Looking further, she quickly found several other anomalies. She decided not to include Sato's studies in her analysis.
She wasn't the first to notice something was off. In a 2005 Neurology paper, Sato claimed that a drug named risedronate reduces the risk of hip fractures in women who have had a stroke by a stunning 86%. In a polite letter to the journal, three researchers from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom noted that the study was "potentially of great importance," but marveled that the authors had managed to recruit 374 patients in just 4 months.
Two years later, a letter in what was then the Archives of Internal Medicine was less polite. A study of male stroke patients published by Sato had managed to enroll 280 patients in just 2 months; another one, of women with Alzheimer's disease, recruited a staggering 500 in an equally short period. Sato claimed to have diagnosed all of the Alzheimer's patients himself and done follow-up assessments of all 780 patients every 4 weeks for 18 months. Both studies had very few dropouts, and both showed risedronate, again, to be a resounding success. "We are deeply concerned whether the data provided by Sato et al are valid," Jutta Halbekath of Arznei-Telegramm, a Berlin-based bulletin about the drug industry, and her co-authors wrote. Sato apologized in a published response and claimed the study had been conducted at three hospitals, not one. "The authors did not describe this fact, the reason being that these hospitals were reluctant to have their names in the article," he wrote. He didn't name the other hospitals or explain why they wanted to remain anonymous. The journal apparently accepted the explanation.
The letter's authors also spotted a troubling pattern. In addition to the two papers in the Archives of Internal Medicine, they found 11 further studies by Sato, published elsewhere, that tested whether sunlight, vitamin D, vitamin K, folate, and other drugs could reduce the risk of hip fractures. All but two reported "extremely large effects with significant results," they noted. But the Archives of Internal Medicine didn't want to point fingers at other journals. "You may allude to your concern that other papers have similar concerns," its editors warned Halbekath, "but we cannot allow you to mention those other papers by journal name."
By now, several researchers had raised red flags and waved them for everyone to see—and then everybody moved on. "The trail just went cold," Avenell says.
The article also explains how big a problem such bad research is - it has a real cascading effect on other studies and policies.Sato's fraudulent work has propelled him to No. 6 on Retraction Watch's list of researchers who have racked up the most retractions. At the top is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 183 retractions; his frequent co-author Yuhji Saitoh, also from Japan, is at 10th place, while Japanese endocrinologist Shigeaki Kato is No. 8. Iwamoto is at No. 9. That means half of the top 10 are Japanese researchers. Yet only about 5% of published research comes from Japan. What explains the number of prolific Japanese fraudsters?Michiie Sakamoto, who is leading another investigation at Keio University, into Iwamoto's studies in animals, says it has to do with respect. "In Japan, we don't usually doubt a professor," he says. "We basically believe people. We think we don't need strict rules to watch them carefully." As a result, researchers faking their results may be exposed only after they have racked up many publications.Outside researchers may also be less likely to question anomalous results from Japan. Several early critics of Sato's work say they thought at first that his unusual results might be due to something uniquely Japanese. One case in point: In 2003, Sato published a study on data from 40 patients with a very rare affliction named neuroleptic malignant syndrome, collected over 3 years. In a letter to the journal, a U.K. neurologist said he and his colleagues "could only recall two such cases in living memory"—but instead of casting doubt on the study, they said it was interesting that the syndrome seemed so prevalent in Japan.But none of that explains why Sato decided to embark on his fraud—and nobody seems to be able to shed much light on that question. "Given the number of papers he published, he must have spent a very large amount of time on them," Bolland says. "I don't understand what his gain was. … There must have been some reason to do it." The Keio University panel is just as puzzled. "We discussed this a lot in the committee," Saya says. It might have been like a hobby, he suggests. A thrill. Saya uses the word "otaku," a Japanese term often applied to people who read manga obsessively.
"It would appear that those within the Coalition who do not accept either climate change, or the seriousness of it, are again trying to cause a political crisis over a matter which should have been resolved in this country, and indeed internationally, at least a decade ago.
Here's my message to those politicians, and their supporters: you are wrong. There's no beating about the bush on this - you're simply wrong. You always have been: taking your science not from the vast and detailed literature that has convinced beyond doubt all but a tiny handful of contrarian scientists - literally, you can count them on on one hand - that dangerous climate change is real, is happening, and is a very grave threat to the global environment and humanity.
Your rejection of science has been based on culture war ideology and you are routinely conned by dishonest contrarians - more often than not amateurs with overinflated self regard - who cherry pick and repeat ludicrous arguments no matter how many time they are debunked by scientists.
I've had enough: no political party can rationally support policies that deny the reality of climate change, and the Liberal Party does not.
My message to Tony, Barnaby and their small number of fellow travellers in the Coalition -get out of the Party or the Coalition if you can't get over the fact that climate change is real. You have done enough damage to the credibility of our side of politics on this issue, and given the evidence of climate change harm we see daily on the TV, you are only to do worse harm to your party's credibility if you continue this wrong headed, spiteful path.
And I say the same to any media commentator - be they journalist, economist, or mining magnate, it doesn't matter - who thinks they know more than the scientific bodies and governments of all political stripes: you are wrong. You and your inspiration which comes only from a segment of the American Right are daily being proved wrong, and we can't wait another decade for you to admit it. Shut up, get out of the way, or go form your own party on the basis of your eccentric, factually wrong, convictions.
Thank you."
Yours is the only tweet I'm responding to, I said I'm no longer using twitter for more than posts bc the vile abuse I've received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That's all I was saying. Signing offAs Ben Pobjie quite correctly says next:
No it’s not. What you we’re saying was “Nazism is considered a branch of socialism”. This is factually incorrect. You know this.Later, Andrew Wright says to Peter:
Some pretty severe nuancing required here for ‘branch’: you can argue that European Fascism drew to a significant extent from socialism, especially given Mussolini’s pre-1918 career - but it’s ultimate trajectory was a complete negation of socialismAnd Peter replies:
That's trueWell, if that's true, just admit your initial post was a blatant indefensible overstatement, and stop whinging about people correcting you on Twitter.
Leo’s plan was to study engineering at the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, but engineering proved boring—“the routine application of established knowledge,” in his appraisal. At Willhelm, he attended lectures by Nobel physicist Max Planck, who sparked his interest in theoretical physics, and befriended Albert Einstein by walking him home from school. But even with Einstein’s guidance, Leo struggled to secure a job in his chosen discipline: undoubtedly brilliant, he was also, in the words of his friend Eugene Wigner, “an ass in some respects,” bored by teaching and lab work, distracted by his own quixotic ideas. Tellingly, he put the word “job” in scare quotes. By the end of the decade, he was broke, and Berlin was in crisis. On January 30th, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. A few months later, once Einstein secured him a last-ditch fellowship, Leo moved to London.You can read the article further for the conflict between Graves and Leo, but I'll skip to this paragraph about his rather unsettled life:
It was in London, on a street corner in Imperial Park, that Leo had an epiphany, motivated, characteristically, by irritation. He had just read an editorial by Ernest Rutherford declaring the Wellsian dream of atomic power a theoretical impossibility. It occurred to Leo that a nuclear chain reaction could be precipitated by the neutrons, then a recent discovery, in a “critical mass” of uranium. Vindicated, Leo filed his first patent. Five years later, he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for the United States.
In 1942, under the auspices of Roosevelt, Leo began work as Chief Physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, where the Manhattan Project was first conceived. He collaborated with Enrico Fermi to create Chicago-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, partially devised from Leo’s 1934 patent. Unsurprisingly, Leo was a frustrating colleague from the very beginning—a “peculiar man,” in the words of Fermi, with too many ideas and too few social graces, who “seemed to enjoy startling people.” Chiefly, he enjoyed startling “brass hats,” or the bureaucrats and government officials with whom he would be in conflict for most of his adult life.
As the Manhattan Project continued, the Met Lab came under the control of Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Army Corps of Engineers and Leo’s eventual nemesis in life and death. Groves was a career soldier with a puny mustache, a pugilistic face, and a hearty American distrust of intellectuals; Leo was a Hungarian with a heavy accent, a jocular contempt for military authority, and an ecstatic, evangelizing confidence in his own ideas. The two were instant enemies, bound by a beautifully counterpoised hatred.
During the war, Leo never described himself as socialist or, for that matter, as a Jew. Instead, in a famous quip, he described himself as a Martian. Alien or not, he had always been a moony annoyance, bidden by odd, insistent habits. He didn’t marry until 1951, when he was fifty-three years old, and courted his wife, Trude, by mail over a period of decades—aware, perhaps, that he charmed in prose but chafed in person. Mostly left to his own devices, he seldom bothered with anything so terrestrial as labwork, or laundry, or living in houses. He felt most at home in hotel rooms, roosting anywhere with room service. Leo lived precariously, portably, with everything he owned—clothes, books, papers, patents—slopped into suitcases. His first real permanent address in America was in La Jolla, where he retired and where, in 1964, he died.But here's the real reason I felt compelled to post further about him. The article I'm quoting from deals with a book of science fiction stories Szilard wrote in the early 1960's. Remembering that he had tried to persuade the US government to delay using the atomic bomb, the title story from his book is described thus:
...“The Voice of the Dolphins” takes place in the near future, and follows a cabal of messianic dolphins who take over the Vatican. Possessed of a frighteningly superior intelligence, the dolphins also demonstrate a preternatural understanding of nuclear warheads. To everyone’s relief, they crave only peace. They start a radio show, on which they predict the U.S.-Soviet nuclear crisis of the 1980s. They also resolve it, through a series of byzantine policy proposals. Then, under mysterious circumstances, they die, evoking either a political assassination or the death of Christ.!!
The concept is simple enough: When the energy bag is anchored underwater—at least 25 meters deep and ideally 100 meters or more—the weight of the water naturally pressurizes the air, allowing more air, and thus energy, to be stored in a given volume. (The pressure increases roughly 1 atmosphere, or about 100,000 pascals, every 10 meters.) At depths greater than 500 meters, says Garvey, “the cost of the containment becomes negligible compared with the costs of the power-conversion machinery.”In an interview, the President of the company goes into more detail about the depth at which this should work best (my bold):
In the Toronto system, the bags (or “flexible accumulators,” as Hydrostor calls them) will be deployed at a depth of 80 meters, and they should be able to supply about a megawatt of electricity for 3 hours or so. The company will also be testing fixed-wall accumulators, in which the compressed air will displace water inside the vessel. “This is the smallest size we would contemplate,” says VanWalleghem. A more typical capacity, he says, would be 20 to 30 megawatts that can be discharged over 10 to 20 hours. Eventually, the company will aim for an efficiency of about 60 to 70 percent. The technology easily scales up, he adds. “We just make the air cavity bigger, so there really is no upper limit.” By year’s end, the company plans to build a bigger and deeper underwater energy storage facility in Aruba.
Cameron Lewis: We have an interesting twist on it because we do underwater CAES. For the roundtrip that we do, we’ll take electricity and run it through a specialised compressor, and we capture and store the heat generated out of that compression. We’ll add that back in later and increase our efficiency. So we store the heat and then the air is sent underwater to depths of 80m, 100m, 200m and put into flexible accumulators. You could say that they look an awful lot like a hot air balloon – the balloon will expand and hold the air there. So just like traditional underground fixed-wall caverns do, we store the air at pressure, but the pressure is a result of the depth. Now, when we reverse the flow, the accumulator will collapse and it will push the air back to the surface at pressure, and we will then add back in the heat that we’ve stored. We then run it back through a generator and put the power back into the grid. We get about a 70% roundtrip efficiency on this, but without needing to use natural gas and with several benefits. You’re dealing with an underwater environment so it can be a bit tricky at depths like that, but the advantage is that you get a very low cost cavern in which to store the air. The other advantage is that unlike a fixed-wall cavern, you get out every drop of energy that you put in, because it’s not a ramp up power curve.Well, there's a problem - how far off, say, Brisbane or Sydney do you need to go to get to water more than 60 m deep? Let me Google that for you. The images below from this website show depth contours of 20, 40, and 100 m:
Matthew Wright: So is the material for the accumulator – a buoyant bag, or whatever – something special that needs to be able to handle pressure or is it just the water pressure that’s holding all the air in?
Cameron Lewis: It’s the water that’s doing it. When we pump the air down, it’s at the same pressure that you would find hydrostatically that you’re at. When you look at the fabric that the accumulator is made of, it doesn’t hold much pressure at all – maybe one or two psi.
Matthew Wright: I noted that on your website you’re talking about an example that’s at a depth of around 80m, I think that’s about 1 atm per 10 m. What is the minimum depth at which you can operate? Some of the bays around cities in Australia are not that deep.
Cameron Lewis: The minimum is about 60m, but the range is roughly between 60-500m in depth. In this case, what depth really affects is the cost. The deeper you go, the cheaper it becomes. The reason is that you hold more power per cubic meter at a higher pressure at a greater depth than you do at a lower depth. At a lower depth, you’ll need many more cubic meters to hold the same amount of energy as you do at a greater depth.
This is idiotic. Australians are already paying insane power bills in a nation rich with coal and other electricity-generating resources. Signing into law a 26 per cent cut on 2005 emissions levels by 2030 would only be achievable by erasing more than a quarter of our economy.Yeah, sure. Back to Abbott, is it? Surely even they have their reservations about that.
Shrieking about “the future of the planet” and complaining that “the people that are opposing me within the party do not believe in climate change at all”, Turnbull was turfed by enormous numbers of Liberal voters who contacted their local Liberal branches and representatives.
An identical situation now demands an identical response.
It sits on swampy land, the Java Sea lapping against it, and 13 rivers running through it. So it shouldn't be a surprise that flooding is frequent in Jakarta and, according to experts, it is getting worse. But it's not just about freak floods, this massive city is literally disappearing into the ground.Gosh.
"The potential for Jakarta to be submerged isn't a laughing matter," says Heri Andreas, who has studied Jakarta's land subsidence for the past 20 years at the Bandung Institute of Technology.
"If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged."
It's already happening - North Jakarta has sunk 2.5m in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25cm a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.
Jakarta is sinking by an average of 1-15cm a year and almost half the city now sits below sea level.
