Climate change, drought, and bushfires

Interesting article at The Guardian, talking about the question of the Indian Ocean "dipole", which is linked to Australia's current drought, is increasing under global warming:

Recent research suggests ocean heat has risen dramatically over the past decade, leading to the potential for warming water in the Indian Ocean to affect the Indian monsoon, one of the most important climate patterns in the world.

“There has been research suggesting that Indian Ocean dipole events have become more common with the warming in the last 50 years, with climate models suggesting a tendency for such events to become more frequent and becoming stronger,” Ummenhofer said.

She said warming appeared to be “supercharging” mechanisms already existing in the background. “The Indian Ocean is particularly sensitive to a warming world. It is the canary in the coalmine seeing big changes before others come to other tropical ocean areas.”

Australian climatologists have pointed to this year’s dipole as at least one of the contributing factors in the bushfires. Jonathan Pollock, of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said this dipole was “up there as one of the strongest” on record.

The article goes onto note that the dipole has been causing flood problems in East Africa - something getting scant attention in the rest of the world, it seems:

Gemma Connell, of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, raised concern over the impact of stronger and more regular Indian Ocean dipole events on Africa.

“What we are seeing from the current record events is large-scale flooding across the region. Entire swathes are under water, affecting 2.5 million people,” she said.

“And putting it in the broader picture of the climate crisis, this flooding is coming on the back of two droughts. What we are seeing, and what we are going to see more of, is more frequent climatic shocks coming. And all that is on top of the violence and conflict that has already displaced many of the people involved.

What's that?  Increased global warming leading to both big droughts and big floods?    Stoopid people like Andrew Bolt have not been able to get their tribal brains around that prediction for decades.

Mind you, as always, prediction of the exact effects on average local rainfall under climate change is much harder than predicting average global temperature rises:

Another concern for Connell and other humanitarian officials is that although climate scientists are racing to try to develop predictive modelling, there is disagreement over whether stronger Indian Ocean dipole events will lead to a wetter climate for Africa or a drier one.

 And if some reader comes here and says "so that means anything will "confirm" global warming?" - don't be an idiot:  global warming/climate change is settled science on one level, but they've always been open that changes to rainfall patterns on a regional level are hard to predict.

When rich nuts meet and plan the future...

By the way - does anyone in the world really think that any of those three made their billions/millions by really praiseworthy contributions to the betterment of humanity?  

Oh, please...

Just as sincere as his "this is the most humble day of my life" claim to the Parliamentary enquiry into his paper's phone hacking.

In pictures

Australia, November 2019:

 

 

 Australian conservative commentary, November 2019:

 

Former thoroughbred racehorse gets into the Christmas spirit

Too soon?  I mean, don't get me wrong - I'd either ban or at least halve the horse race industry, if it was up to me as benevolent dictator.

Projecting Idiot watch

Yes, Steve Kates plays his favourite song again:

It is almost impossible to have imagined more destructive despicable people than those who now inhabit the left. They want power only for themselves because they see only themselves as having virtue and good will. Everyone else is an enemy, and not just an enemy, but immoral as well. I must confess that I find everything about the modern left disgusting and immoral if it comes to that.

This from a man who thinks climate change is a grand conspiracy of socialist scientists, and who has no concern about a President who laughs at the calls for his political opponents to be locked up, who bragged about grabbing women's privates, who lies and/or bullshits just continuously, who has blown out the deficit, etc, etc.

And get this - CL in comments is playing his old projection game of "I've lost interest, so everyone's lost interest":

The US networks have scaled back their impeachment coverage because nothing has happened and nobody is interested. 

I have said this many times before - my impression is that Sinclair Davidson personally does not believe such vicious political Manichaeism - he just runs a blog that is devoted to promoting it.  Same with anti-gay, misogynistic and racist sentiment - not for him, he just runs a blog that people full of it like to participate in.

Why do it? 

Things I'd like to do too if I was a mad authoritarian President...

I said "things", but the post is inspired by this one example:

Philippines' Duterte Says He Will Ban E-Cigarettes, Threatens To Arrest Vapers

Oh look, here's another mad thing it would amuse me to do:

All tattoos exposed within North Korea must show praise towards the Kim (leaders) family or otherwise have some kind of approved political purpose attributed to them.

Fantastic - I wouldn't ban tattoos, just legislate their content (and parts of the body they can be applied, of course.)   Let's see:  characters from Steven Spielberg movies permitted, but only on upper arms and chest, under the shirt line.   Neck and back tattooing completely banned.  Tattoo on the face means jail time.  

Update:  people who commute to work on bicycles wearing lycra - confiscate the bike.  If they were in the centre of a main road lane - a $10,000 fine too.   Groups riding on a road, in lycra, and not in single file - jail time.

Commuting cyclists should only wear ordinary clothes.  And stick to bicycle lanes.  

Noah argues

I've started following Noah Smith on Twitter, and boy, he tweets a lot and has a lot of opinions.

I am not entirely sure how much to trust him, but he at least argues his positions pretty well.  I liked a recent thread dismissing the "coming automation unemployment crisis" claim (of Andrew Yang, for example), and perhaps I will find it again soon amongst the ridiculously high tweet output he delivers.

He also did not much like that recent article by David Graeber "Against Economics" that I extracted at length.   His criticisms in this article at Bloomberg, however, seems a bit light on to me, though.  It's a bit "well, yeah sure, one absolutely key part of the field of economics is in an absolute shambles, and people have gone back to scratch to see if starting start all over again can help, but do we really need to say economics as a whole is in a bad state?"

Going well, then

Noticed on Twitter:

And from Axios:

• Volker testified that allegations by Ukraine's former prosecutor general against Joe Biden and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch are baseless, and that he knows both to be honorable people.
• Volker also said in his opening statement that he was not aware of a linkage between military aid and Zelensky's announcement of investigations, and that he opposed the hold on security assistance.
• In a major change from his closed-door testimony, Volker said that Sondland raised "investigations" in a meeting with Ukrainian officials in the White House, and that he thought it was inappropriate.
• Morrison testified that he recommended that access to the Trump-Zelensky call transcript be restricted, but that its placement onto a highly classified computer system was an "administrative error."

Cats smarter then we knew??

This really is a remarkable clip, the one shown in this tweet:

As a couple of people in comments say:

Some stuff

*  At the Conversation - an article about the limited effectiveness of controlled burns for preventing bushfires in extreme conditions contains this statement which conservative "it's all the Green's fault" ignore (my bold):

Evidence is mounting of increased bushfire frequency and extent in both Australia and the US - a situation predicted to worsen under climate change. Changing weather patterns mean opportunities for controlled burning will likely diminish further. Coupled with expanding populations in high fire-risk areas, Australia’s fire agencies - among the best in the world - have a challenging time ahead.

* JC, who occasionally comes here to make stupid comments, thinks US Attorney General Barr's intensely partisan speech on how wrong it is to restrain executive power is really important.   Yeah, it is important, if you want an AG endorsing the most clearly wannabe authoritarian President we have ever seen.   Here are a couple of articles ripping into Barr's pair of recent, disturbing, speeches.   As usual, he is an example of how conservative Catholics have made Catholicism deeply unattractive.

JC, I keep telling you - you're gullible and just swayed by the last thing you read, and you self filter to read mainly Right wing alternative reality .  You said you watch a lot of Fox News when you are in the US, I think.  Yeah, I can tell, because you make stupider comments while you are there.  Or am I being too generous - you do make stupid comments all the time.

* Rand Paul:    never liked him.  Now he's the libertarian most in the tank for Trump.  What a disgrace.

* On a Netflix note:   have been watching two French horror/supernatural series - Marianne, and the French/Belgium production Black Spot.

My son and I are pretty much enjoying both.   Both, curiously, feature eccentric and somewhat comic male police investigators, which keeps making me think how the Pink Panther series was ahead of its time.

Both also feature some really fast dialogue, with some really rapid subtitle reading required.   You do have to concentrate.  Lots of people smoking, too.

Marianne is often very creepy and somewhat disturbing, and also features the most aggro modern Catholic priest you are ever likely to see portrayed on TV.  The town where it is filmed is very odd looking - very exposed to the uninviting looking ocean, and it's one of the least pretty French towns I have ever seen portrayed.  This site begs to differ:

“Elden” is actually Doëlan, a quintessential French harbour town located in the commune of Clohars-Carnoët. And yes, Doëlan is as idyllic as it seems in Marianne. At the port of Doëlan, little multi-colored fishing boats float in green water, surrounded by charming thatched cottages. Each afternoon, fishermen sell their catch directly from their boats. A lighthouse – the lighthouse in Marianne — stands at the edge of the port. 

Unlike Elden, which is a nest of gloom, Doëlan seems like a good place to get an Airbnb. Just compare Elden’s foreboding motto, “You’ll be back,” with Doëlan’s simple “A port of two halves.” The former translates to, “Stay away!” and the latter to, uh, “A port of two halves.” 

Also, Doëlan is appears to be relatively untouched by tourists. According to Brittany Tourism, “There are also just one or two boutiques, but this place hasn’t been invaded by tourist shops to date.” Brace yourselves, fishermen of Doëlan. The Marianne fans are coming for selfies.

Maybe it's just the way it is filmed that makes it look unattractive to me.

Anyway, the show is pretty good, if you like this genre. 

Black Spot, especially the first episode, seems to have really lifted too much from Twin Peaks.  Again, it really doesn't look much like the Europe we are used to seeing, but it's good looking and I liked the second episode more, so we will keep watching.

Rumours - Part 2

Well, if only:

The world of woe

Speaking as I just was of the 1960's, I think it fair to note that the globe seems to be in a pretty unusually tumultuous political state at the moment, at least in terms of the number of countries having riots in the last month or so.

Let's see - there's Hong Kong; Iran; Iraq; Lebanon; Chile; Bolivia; France (at least Paris, anyway); Spain (or at least Barcelona); Ecuador; Haiti; Indonesia.  Have I missed any?

Some figures needed

I note that conservative twit James Morrow re-tweeted this yesterday:

The ABC reports this morning:

The burnt area statewide now covers more than 1,650,000 hectares — more than during the past three bushfire seasons combined.

Gee, sounds like it could be pretty much "unprecedented" going by those figures (and bearing in mind there is no way the current bout of fires is going to suddenly stop anytime soon.)

The downside of the 60's

Yeah, I do get the feeling that the drug experimentation outbreak of the 1960's is largely romanticised in hindsight.  I mean, there was excellent reason for social unrest, but did hallucinogenic drug taking really have to be part of that?  

You don't read too many accounts of people or families that were broken by the experimentation, but here's one that has appeared in the Washington Post.  All very sad.

The ultimate goal?

I'm sure everyone in the West feels sorry for Hong Kong and is broadly sympathetic to the protests going on.

But does anyone know what the (in particular) younger protesters think they can ultimately achieve?  

Rumours

So, Trump made a sudden trip to hospital on the weekend, and lots of people are sceptical of the explanation ("the first part of his annual check up - he's fine.")  

I don't see anything at all wrong with wishing his presidency end suddenly due to ill health.   (The funniest thing would be if he was compulsorily admitted for psychiatric assessment by White House staff, because I would love to watch GOP insiders have to deal with the "you're part of the Deep State" wildfire that would then erupt around them, despite their having benefited from conspiracy belief for the last 20 years).  But when his wife was in hospital unexpectedly, it turned out it wasn't due to a scandalous attempt at escaping her marriage, so I don't know that I should be getting my hopes up.

More oddly, I saw on Twitter that someone has started a rumour that Scott Morrison's almost complete disappearance from public appearances or statements in the last (what?) 5 or 6 days is due to a liberal leadership spill being underway, probably by the forces of Dutton (!)   That just seems so wildly unlikely that I can barely credit that someone would speak it out loud.  

Mind you, I suspect someone in the media knows what he's been up to, but they are just not talking about it.  This is usually what they do when a PM takes a plane to visit service personnel overseas, isn't it? 

David Roberts on the impeachment

There's a lot of praise on Twitter for this David Roberts take on the impeachment in light of his 2017 excellent take on what he calls the epistemic crisis in American politics.  It is very good.

In Australia, you see the epistemic crisis writ large in the conservatives (and that is what 99% of them now are) at Catallaxy.  Sinclair Davidson has handed over the keys to CL, the Catholic stuck forever in pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism and society, who is posting at such a pace that it now reads pretty much as his personal blog.  He posted at 1.39am (?) the Australian conservative Right's take on the impeachment:

To recap: the impeachment hoax was designed to cover up the crimes of the Biden family … which came to prominent public attention during the Ukraine hoax … which was conceived to cover up the Russia hoax … which was orchestrated to cover up the illegal surveillance of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The epistemic problem means it is essentially impossible to argue with these self-blinded twits.  

Also true...

Look, can you really blame any country for not wanting to let these two in...

I mean fair's fair; they're both annoying prats.  

If it was up to me, I'd have any person who has ever been to an IPA function on a watch list of undesireables I wouldn't want in my country.

Exactly

All about money, and the state of economics

There's a very lengthy review/essay at the New York Review of Books - Against Economics - all about the parlous state of economics.  I don't know the writer, David Graeber, but he makes reference to having written on economics before, and the book he is reviewing is by a Brit, Robert Skidelsky.

But it's all rather interesting.  There is so much I want to extract.  Here is the opening:

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

On the question of how money is created, I have not heard of this debate before; but then again, the reviewer suggests, that's probably because it has been sort of ignored by the mainstream media:

There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).

Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money, but only on the basis of a multiplier effect (so that your car loan can still be seen as ultimately rooted in some retired grandmother’s pension fund). Only a minority—mostly heterodox economists, post-Keynesians, and modern money theorists—uphold what is called the “credit creation theory of banking”: that bankers simply wave a magic wand and make the money appear, secure in the confidence that even if they hand a client a credit for $1 million, ultimately the recipient will put it back in the bank again, so that, across the system as a whole, credits and debts will cancel out. Rather than loans being based in deposits, in this view, deposits themselves were the result of loans.

The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers do not check their existing funds, reserves, or anything else. They simply create money out of thin air, or, as he preferred to put it, “fairy dust.”

That year also appears to have been when elements in Britain’s notoriously independent civil service decided that enough was enough. The question of money creation became a critical bone of contention. The overwhelming majority of even mainstream economists in the UK had long since rejected austerity as counterproductive (which, predictably, had almost no impact on public debate). But at a certain point, demanding that the technocrats charged with running the system base all policy decisions on false assumptions about something as elementary as the nature of money becomes a little like demanding that architects proceed on the understanding that the square root of 47 is actually π. Architects are aware that buildings would start falling down. People would die.

Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create. Almost all public debate on these subjects is therefore based on false premises. For example, if what the Bank of England was saying were true, government borrowing didn’t divert funds from the private sector; it created entirely new money that had not existed before.

One might have imagined that such an admission would create something of a splash, and in certain restricted circles, it did. Central banks in Norway, Switzerland, and Germany quickly put out similar papers. Back in the UK, the immediate media response was simply silence. The Bank of England report has never, to my knowledge, been so much as mentioned on the BBC or any other TV news outlet. Newspaper columnists continued to write as if monetarism was self-evidently correct. Politicians continued to be grilled about where they would find the cash for social programs. It was as if a kind of entente cordiale had been established, in which the technocrats would be allowed to live in one theoretical universe, while politicians and news commentators would continue to exist in an entirely different one.

 And then we get to a key question: what is the nature of money anyway?:

What it [Skidelsky's book] reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win—for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement? This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced. One important theoretical innovation that these new bullion-based theories of money allowed was, as Skidelsky notes, what has come to be called the quantity theory of money (usually referred to in textbooks—since economists take endless delight in abbreviations—as QTM).

The QTM argument was first put forward by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, during a debate over the cause of the sharp, destablizing price inflation that immediately followed the Iberian conquest of the Americas. Bodin argued that the inflation was a simple matter of supply and demand: the enormous influx of gold and silver from the Spanish colonies was cheapening the value of money in Europe. The basic principle would no doubt have seemed a matter of common sense to anyone with experience of commerce at the time, but it turns out to have been based on a series of false assumptions. For one thing, most of the gold and silver extracted from Mexico and Peru did not end up in Europe at all, and certainly wasn’t coined into money. Most of it was transported directly to China and India (to buy spices, silks, calicoes, and other “oriental luxuries”), and insofar as it had inflationary effects back home, it was on the basis of speculative bonds of one sort or another. This almost always turns out to be true when QTM is applied: it seems self-evident, but only if you leave most of the critical factors out.

In the case of the sixteenth-century price inflation, for instance, once one takes account of credit, hoarding, and speculation—not to mention increased rates of economic activity, investment in new technology, and wage levels (which, in turn, have a lot to do with the relative power of workers and employers, creditors and debtors)—it becomes impossible to say for certain which is the deciding factor: whether the money supply drives prices, or prices drive the money supply. Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand—which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

I've probably pushed the friendship with the magazine too far - go read the rest on their site.

Yet more doctors against vaping

Some European cardiologists really don't like vaping:

Prof Münzel and his colleagues investigated the effect of e-cigarette vapour on blood flow in the brachial artery in the upper arm in 20 healthy smokers before they vaped an e-cigarette and then 15 minutes afterwards. They also measured how stiff the artery became.

They also did a mouse study.

The conclusions:

They found that just one vaping episode increased heart rates and caused the arteries to stiffen and the inner lining of the arteries, the endothelium, to stop working properly in the smokers. The endothelium is responsible for maintaining the correct dilation and constriction of blood vessels, protects tissues from toxic substances and regulates inflammation and blood clotting processes. Endothelial dysfunction is involved in the development of cardiovascular disease.

Prof Münzel said: "The results of the present studies identified several molecular mechanisms whereby e-cigarettes can cause damage to the blood vessels, lungs, heart and brain. This is a consequence of toxic chemicals that are produced by the vaping process and may also be present at lower concentrations in the liquid itself. Importantly, we identified an enzyme, NOX-2, that mediated all the effects of e-cigarettes on the brain and cardiovascular system, and we found that a toxic chemical called acrolein, which is produced when the liquid in e-cigarettes is vaporised, activated the damaging effects of NOX-2. The beneficial effects of macitentan and bepridil indicate that e-cigarettes have the capacity to trigger constriction of blood vessels and to impair our cells' antioxidant and survival systems.

"Our data may indicate that e-cigarettes are not a healthy alternative to traditional cigarettes, and their perceived 'safety' is not warranted. In addition, we still have no experience about the health side effects of e-cigarettes arising from long-term use. The e-cigarette epidemic in the US and Europe, in particular among our youth, is causing a huge generation of nicotine-addicted people who are being endangered by encouragement to switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Research like ours should serve as a warning about their dangers, and aggressive steps should be taken to protect our children from health risks caused by e-cigarettes."

A limitation of the study was that no healthy non-smokers were included. However, the researchers point out that a strength is that they have received no funding from the e-cigarette industry. "Recent studies indicate that e-cigarette industry funding is more likely to lead to results that indicate that e-cigarettes are harmless," write the researchers in their paper.

Colonoscopy considered

A study from England finds a really big difference in the apparent effectiveness of colonoscopy conducted by the NHS, and those done by "independent providers".   Which is not exactly an intuitive result - you might suspect that the NHS ones would be more conducted in more of a rush.  

I would guess the difference must really be down to the experience level of the doctors doing it.

It is consistent with something I heard on (I think) The Drum a few weeks ago - a doctor and some other health system expert saying that if they had cancer, they would choose to get treatment via the public system rather than private, based on the better outcomes found in the public system by virtue of their experience level.

Anyway, this from the study on colonoscopy and the subsequent rate of cancers:

a team of UK researchers set out to compare PCCRC rates between all providers in England to measure variation in colonoscopy quality.

Their findings are based on more than 120,000 individuals undergoing colonoscopy in England between 2005 and 2013 and subsequently diagnosed with colorectal cancer. The proportion of those diagnosed six months to three years after the colonoscopy were identified to calculate a PCCRC-3yr rate.

After taking account of potentially influential factors such as age, sex, and medical history, the PCCRC-3yr rate declined from 9.0% in 2005 to 6.5% in 2013.

However, rates for colonoscopies performed within the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (BCSP) were better (lower) at 3.6% than those performed by independent providers (9.3%) which are increasingly being used to meet the rising demand for colonoscopy.

Yay for socialised medicine, I suppose.

For the parents of 10 year olds

It occurred to me this morning that if you are a child wanting to build a small diorama of a wind farm for a school project, you could readily convert a used electric toothbrush head into a tiny model of one wind turbine. 

Of course, since one of these lasts a very long time, if you want a whole wind farm, you had better start saving them from preschool.

You can thank me later...

Not the sharpest officer

I don't think I have read this story before, of how Auberon Waugh got himself shot by being remarkably stupid:

On National Service in Cyprus in 1958, Auberon Waugh, having ‘miraculously’ become an officer, was sent out with his troop to cover the Nicosia-Kyrenia road between the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize the barrel from in front and give it a good wiggle’. As recounted in his autobiography, the incident unfolds in a laconic slow motion: ‘I realised that it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest. Moving aside pretty sharpish, I walked to the back of the armoured car and lay down.’ Six bullets had gone through him, inflicting injuries that compromised his health for the rest of his life and contributed to his early death at the age of 61 in 2001.

That's from the start of a review of a book about him. 

Still not normal

Just took a couple of photos, in Brisbane's western suburbs, first looking West:

And this one is looking north-east, where and if you look carefully you can just make out some of the city high rise buildings in the smoke haze:

It is quite windy.  Not good.

Bizarre and sordid crime noted

Well, that must have been a challenge for Children's Services:  The Guardian reports on a truly unusual crime in England, in which the parents of 6 children (from their incestuous relationship) murdered two of them, and tried to kill the rest.

One very strange detail, perhaps indicating that the kids might not have had the best of educations?:

“The children believed and even told officers at the scene that their father was dead, having died in the second world war.”

(The eldest children were teenagers.)

Just lies continuously

In fact, whenever Trump claims that he is responsible for something that has never happened before, it seems like a 99% chance that it is an outright lie.

Some commentary on fuel reduction burns

As noted on Radio National, a couple of people with expertise in the area talk about fuel reduction burns. 

ROSS BRADSTOCK: The notion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stop hazard reduction is a piece of fiction.

ISOBEL ROE: He says there's more pre-burning happening in New South Wales than ever, but state agencies don't have the money to do the amount of burning needed to prevent fires like those in the state this week.

ROSS BRADSTOCK: Hazard reduction will only put a dent in risk. It will not eliminate risk, because the amount of hazard reduction you would have to do to eliminate risk is beyond the financial resources of the state. 

And someone from Tasmania adds (I am sure the transcript has an error here, which I have corrected):

ISOBEL ROE: Professor David Bowman works in pyrogeography, the study of wildfire, at the University of Tasmania.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: What we're really talking about here is the tension between a command-and-control and regulating the use of fire in the landscape and a more organic, self-organising use of fire: 'the old school' way of doing it.

ISOBEL ROE: And he says, as the population grows in semi-rural areas, the harder it is to light safe fires.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: And they're becoming increasingly complicated because of the effect of shrinking safe weather windows and increased intensity of the fires.
But as you come down into the settled areas, the complexity of planned burning increases. As you get more land tenures, you have to have more sign-off, more regulation, more agreement.

ISOBEL ROE: Professor Bowman believes the budget for hazard reduction burning needs to dramatically increase, not just to increase burning but to develop better ways of doing it.

Update:  there was more on this in The Guardian.

Factcheck: Is there really a green conspiracy to stop bushfire hazard reduction?

Short answer:  "no".

Hurricane damage revised, upwards

Michael Mann is heavily promoting a new paper that applies a more sensible way to assess whether destruction from hurricanes in the US has been increasing.  His thread starts with this:

and goes on to explain the findings of a new paper, but I won't copy all of the tweets:

A summary of the paper itself is at phys.org:

Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an "area of total destruction," meaning how large an area a storm would have to destroy completely in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: the size of the "area of total destruction."

In previous studies, it proved difficult to isolate the climate signal. The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It was hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth, and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method, this doubt has been cleared. The weather has, indeed, become more dangerous on the south and east coasts of the U.S. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team is more congruent with the climate models used to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes.

 Roger Pielke Jnr is a famously obnoxious commentator on climate change, a trait he seemed to have picked up from his father.  (Both become nasty towards people who don't see things exactly the way they say things should be seen.)

I therefore predict that Pielke Jnr will be furious with this new analysis and will get into a flame war with those supporting it.

Appalling

As I have complained bitterly before, Malcolm Turnbull wasted his dumping by not going on a rhetorical rampage about how the Coalition must purge itself of climate change deniers in its ranks for it to have credibility on climate related policy.   You should go and listen to the clip on Twitter of this ignorant twit (from a "financial" background, not science) claiming that the BOM is inappropriately adjusting temperature records:

And where is he from?   Queensland (of course) - the state that specialises in producing the stupidest politicians. 

Get them into it young...

Spotted this in The Guardian:

The caption:

Funerals are held for American Mormons killed in an ambush in northern Mexica.

The age of the kids wielding shovels is, um, a little weird, no?

When he produces the goods on condoms that men don't mind using, then he can talk tax...

I'm being a bit mean - there's not much doubt that Bill Gates is one of the better billionaires in terms of charity work; but I didn't like his hedging on Warren vs Trump last week.

Some people think he was talking in code:  that of course "the most professional" candidate would not be Trump.   And it's true, he may have concerns about the vindictive vanity of Trump would mean a complete freeze out from Federal government co-operation with Gate's plans.   (It has already stopped work on experimental nuclear in China.)

But really - if a basically decent billionaire can't say something like "if it was a choice between Trump and some weirdo genocide supporting communist Pol Pot, sure I would vote Trump.   Otherwise, as if I would vote for that idiot", then what's the point of being a billionaire?

Gates probably does suffer from over-confidence in his own judgement (I guess it comes with the billionaire territory), and I'm not sure that he has got that many runs on the board for innovation in areas that now interest him.   The research into better condoms, for example - where has that gone?   I'm not sure that his nuclear dreams are all that well founded, either.

And I'll end by noting this Onion article, which amused me:

Not normal

Brisbane from Mt Cootha lookout today, covered in smoke haze:

Honestly, it is hard to credit how stupid the Right has become (and an anecdote about certainty)

Over the weekend, I noticed this widely mocked D'Souza tweet (and I'll just add the commentary on it too, because it is completely accurate):

Some people wondered whether he meant the "is the Earth heading to a new ice age" issue raised in the 70's;  but not, his response seemed to double down on this being a valid analogy.   It's breathtakingly stupid, yet he had plenty of support from Trumpers on twitter.

Then other people notices a tweet from 2015 from someone who now works for Trump:

As the Raw Story report explains, though, she followed it up in 2015 with this:

Lots of people were sceptical and think that this was a mere attempt at a "save" when she realised the wild stupidity of her first tweet.   A Fox News contributor being sarcastic toward the then candidate Trump policy on building a Mexican wall?  I don't think so...

And apparently Hugh Hewitt used to be considered a reasoned, moderate conservative voice:  he's now a Trump suck up like 95% of former "reasonable" commentators on the Right:

  

Update:   I also read over the weekend about how Steve Kates used to be a long haired, pot smoking, fornicating (by the sounds) hitch-hiker through Europe in his younger days. 

Sounds like he would have been very certain of his Lefty (quite hippy sounding, actually) views back in the day;  now he is very, very certain of how appalling the Left are and how "damaged women" are ruining politics, etc, etc.   Here's another recent rant, about the Trump impeachment process:

We just get used to it but these people on the left, these people in the media, these socialist nobodies, wish to overturn the democratic process. They should be put in jail. Not only are these people corrupt to the core, not only are these people ignorant, not only are they attempting to overturn our political system, they are as incompetent in their inability to make sound policy as it is possible to be. We treat much of this like a joke, but that is only because they have been unsuccessful. In fact, they have only been partly unsuccessful. They should be treated as the traitorous scum they actually are.

AND LET ME ADD THIS about the person the left is trying to overturn as president: Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved. The Democrats are soul-sick and vermin. Their leading presidential candidates are policy fools with not a single moral scruple between them. They are liars and thieves, all of which is known.

I've said it before:   it's a good rule of thumb not to trust (or at least, have reservations about) people who were once 100% certain of one political or cultural thing, who then swing around to be 100% certain of the opposite.


I would even apply this to the religious.

I remember once, as a teenager, meeting with a group a good humoured country (Catholic, 50's-ish) priest (in a casual setting), and while I can't remember how it came up, he make a joking reference to the question of whether Heaven really existed.   His quip was something like "well, I certainly hope so, or else I've wasted a lot of my life."   I remember thinking at the time that this was somewhat endearing - a man who had devoted his life to the practice of a faith, but at some level intellectually willing to contemplate the possibility that it's not based on reality.   And take that possibility in good humour, not despair.

Even someone like CS Lewis (who switched from atheism to theism to Christianity) I put in the "not as certain as he liked to make out" category:  I think it fair to say he suffered a bout of late life grief induced doubt as a result of his wife's death.  Also, as we now know, Mother Theresa was worried about her faith, too.

Who knows, maybe Kates sometimes wonders whether he is on the right track.   But at least with silent doubters like Lewis and Mother Theresa, they were (for the most part) making generous gestures and statements towards others based on a faith that they sometimes had doubts about.

Kates, on the other hand, is just nasty and dumb - using extermination linked, fascistic language towards the Left while pretending it is only the Left that uses it against the Right.   A complete sucker for the Right wing spin machine that is uninterested in truth or fairness, and just absorbed in a culture war that isn't interested in facts or science.  Terrible.

Bedroom light

I took the photo, of my son's mess of a bedroom, yesterday because I thought the orange, smoke filtered glow reminded me of the Spielbergian use of light (in ET in particular).

He was packing to go camping with a group of old high school friends; his first adult trip of that kind.  We did a trial run through of putting up the tent we have not used for a few years, so he shouldn't embarrass himself in that regard.  Even better, I think, is that I understand he probably will have no mobile phone reception (it's the beach side of Fraser Island) for nearly all of the week.  I will be interested to hear how he copes with days of limited screen time.   Maybe it will rewire his brain?   Then again, if they are attacked by a pack of dingoes, it's a beach drive to get help.   

He'll be fine...but I will wonder what he is doing quite a few times a day.

A case study of flash flooding in one American town

What a neatly presented story here at NPR on a town in Maryland that has had to face up to major changes following deadly recent flash floods.  (It looks great on my laptop, anyway - not sure how it looks on a phone.)

Confirming what I have been saying for quite a while:  the increased intensity of rainfall is the one of the clearest, earliest example of the dangers presented by climate change. 

About Mormons in Mexico

I was waiting to read more about why there are a bunch of Mormons (breakaway ones at that, which usually means polygamy) in Mexico, and ABC Australia (Blessed Be this Broadcaster) is where I found it:

In the late 19th century, many high-profile Mormon families fled Utah's anti-polygamy laws and headed to the north of Mexico.

By the time of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, there were thousands of Mormons in colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora.

There have been major setbacks — many Mormons had fled back to the United States amid the violence of that revolution — but today there are estimated to be more than a million members of the Latter-Day Saints in Mexico.

According to Jason H Dormady, writing in Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands, the farming and ranching town of Colonia LeBaron remains a place where "fundamentalist Mormon polygynists continue to thrive and struggle against the narcotics violence surrounding them in the 21st century".

The article explains more about the history of the LeBaron family.  

I did not know anything about this until now....

Back soon

A bit busy with this and that, including having a swollen thing that shouldn't normally be swollen checked out.  Should be OK, he says hopefully...

I have more Melbourne Cup thoughts...

People claim that you just can't ban horse racing - there are too many people making a living out of raising, training, riding, and shooting horses to do that.

Ending an industry by government fiat is always tricky, hence I make the following transitional suggestions:

*  the ultimate goal:   a racing industry based on human ridden, robotic horses, powered by rechargeable batteries (to be charged from solar farms on former horse stud land)

*  transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

About Islam and dogs

Well, I didn't know the details given in this article about how nuttily upset with dogs some parts of Islam can be:

Followers of the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, mainly found in East Africa and South-East Asia, are taught that dogs are unclean and impure.

If they touch a dog they must wash the area of contact seven times — the first time with dirt and the remaining six times with water.

This ruling is based on a hadith — a second‑hand account of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which states:

"Cleanse your vase which the dog licked by washing it seven times and the first is with earth (soil)."

If the person fails to do so, their prayers are rendered invalid.

These rules also extend to clothes, dishes and other items with which dogs have contact.

This arduous purification process deters Shafi'i Muslims from having any encounters with dogs, which they have come to view as unclean, aggressive and dangerous.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, stray dogs that roam the streets, and even dogs kept domestically by non-Muslim neighbours, are avoided by Muslims at all costs.

What is the sense in the "first wash with earth" rule??

The rest of the article goes on to explain the controversy that some rather pro-dog Muslims have faced in Malaysia:

Syed Azmi Alhabshi, a Muslim-Malaysian pharmacist, is among the people encouraging more compassion towards dogs.

In 2014, he decided to organise an event called "I Want to Touch a Dog".

Held at a large shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, it attracted more than 800 people, 200 volunteers and dogs of different breed including poodles, golden retrievers and German shepherds.

It was designed to demystify dogs, but the event also exposed its organiser to criticism from doctrinaire Shafi'is and Malaysia's state-backed religious authorities, and even death threats.

Mr Alhabshi eventually spoke at a press conference apologising if he had offended Muslim sensibilities.

"With a sincere heart, my intention to organise this program was because of Allah and not to distort the faith, change religious laws, make fun of ulama (learned men) or encourage liberalism," he said.

The matter did not end there.

In 2017, the Department of Islamic Development of Malaysia (JAKIM) issued a religious ruling reprimanding a Muslim woman for uploading a Facebook post showing pictures of her pet dog Bubu.

JAKIM argued that keeping a pet dog violates the norms of the Shafi'i school and undermines Islam in Malaysia. 

Gawd.   Those parts of Islam with dog phobia need a reformation on the topic.

The new sweepstake

Which Melbourne Cup racehorse will be the first to be sent to a knackery?

By the way, I really dislike the word "knackery".  No explanation - it's just that it has an ugly sound about it.

Nations ruined by social media

Interesting opinion piece by an activist in the Philippines, who blames the incredible popularity of Facebook and other social media there as fuelling a corrupt but populist government:

Americans, look to The Philippines to see a dystopian future created by social media 

The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told me this month that the Philippines was used by that company as a “petri dish” for testing tactics used for behavior modification: among them, to disseminate propaganda and manipulate voter opinion. After all, Filipinos lead the world in spending the most time online (more than 10 hours a day) and on social media for the fourth year running. With Free Basics, Facebook is our internet.

Wylie said what Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, learned in the Philippines and other countries in the global south, that they could “port” to the West. The United States had the highest number of compromised Facebook accounts in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The country with the second largest number of compromised accounts? The Philippines.

In Australia, meanwhile, climate change propagandist Sinclair Davidson has no problem with Facebook allowing political ads that are outright lies.  What a surprise. 

(My take on the matter of Facebook and political ads - if it is too much trouble to fact check them, just don't allow political ads, as Twitter has decided.   Oh, and it should enforce its astroturf rules too.) 

Greatest salesman says he can't be that great

I've noted Steve Kates' astonishing lack of self awareness many times.   I see that it is a trait shared even with his cult leader:

You ought to read the comments following, like these:

Start the week with the eternal return of Nietzsche

Hey, this article in the New Yorker is one of the best overviews of Nietzsche that I have read - not overly biographical (although the parts about his relationship with Wagner is amusing, and pretty new to me), but talks a lot about his contradictions and reception amongst philosophers.

Perhaps it helps that I can find plenty in there to justify my prejudices against his work?  I see I have Bertrand Russell on my side!

But back to Wagner.    I still haven't booked a ticket to see the Ring Cycle next year - perhaps I will today.  In the meanwhile:

She begins with the pivotal event in Nietzsche’s life: his introduction, in 1868, to Wagner, the most consequential German cultural figure of the day. Nietzsche would soon assume a professorship in Basel, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four, but he jumped at the chance to join the Wagner operation. For the next eight years, as Wagner completed his operatic cycle “The Ring of the Nibelung” and prepared for its première, Nietzsche served as a propagandist for the Wagnerian cause and as the Meister’s factotum. He then broke away, declaring his intellectual independence first with coded critiques and then with unabashed polemics. Accounts of this immensely complicated relationship are too often distorted by prejudice on one side or another. Nietzscheans and Wagnerians both tend to off-load ideological problems onto the rival camp; Prideaux succumbs to this temptation. She insists that Nietzsche’s talk of a superior brood of “blond beasts” has no modern racial connotation, and casts Wagner’s Siegfried as an Aryan hero who “rides to the redemption of the world.” In fact, Siegfried is a fallen hero who rides nowhere; the redeemer of the world is Brünnhilde.

Prideaux’s picture of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship fails to explain either the intensity of their bond or the trauma of their break. Early on, Nietzsche was hopelessly infatuated with Wagner’s music and personality. He described the friendship as “my only love affair.” As with many infatuations, Nietzsche’s expectations were wildly exaggerated. He hoped that the “Ring” would revive the cultural paradise of ancient Greece, fusing Apollonian beauty and Dionysian savagery. He envisaged an audience of élite aesthetes who would carry a transfiguring message to the outer world. Wagner, too, revered Greek culture, but he was fundamentally a man of the theatre, and tailored his ideals to the realities of the stage. At the first Bayreuth Festival, in 1876, Nietzsche was crestfallen to discover that a viable theatre operation required the patronage of the nouveau riche and the fashionable.

Personal differences between the two men provide amusing anecdotes. Nietzsche made sporadic attempts at musical composition, one of which caused Wagner to have a laughing fit. (The music is not very good, but it is not as bad as all that.) Wagner also suggested to Nietzsche’s doctor that the young man’s medical issues were the result of excessive masturbation. But the disagreements went much deeper, revealing a rift between ideologies and epochs. Wagner embodied the nineteenth century, in all its grandeur and delusion; Nietzsche was the dynamic, destructive torchbearer of the twentieth.

There is more about the two of them, but perhaps I have copied enough.

Late movie review - Garden State

I thought Zach Braffs' Garden State from 2004 had received mostly good reviews, and checking back on Rottentomatoes, I see I was right.

This article at Vulture, however, says by 2013 it had became popular to dislike it (although the writer then goes on to defend it.)

I thought it started promising, but lost me at about two thirds of the way through.   I kept having a problem with the character Mark - he's a real loser, and criminal, yet the Zack Braff character keeps hanging around with him.  I think I was particularly lost with the visit to the peeping tom motel - it looked completely unrealistic, felt tonally wrong, and it was quickly followed by the waaay too obvious "screaming into the infinite abyss" scene at the giant hole in the ground.  By this point, the movie became not just quirky, but trying far too hard to be quirky for quirks sake. 

The disclosure of the source of the main character's problems with emotions did not have much emotional impact.  And the ending was OK (I was touched by Natalie Portman's acting, actually), but it still felt a bit underwhelming.

Nice try, Zach, but I thought it felt like a movie that hadn't received other writers' input that it needed.

Paella revised

Here's tonight's paella dinner.  Chicken, some salami in lieu of chorizo, prawns, capsicum and beans.

I've revised the process, which I record here for my future reference.

Season chicken and fry in pan, set aside.

Fry capsicum and beans, set aside.

Fry one diced onion, and as much garlic as you like, briefly.  Add three finely diced ripe tomatoes, some chilli flakes, and fry until liquid from tomatoes is reduced pretty much to a paste.   Add salami or chorizo and fry a bit.

Add two cups of rice, two teaspoons of smoked paprika, and stir around a bit.  Add one litre of chicken stock.  

Add capsicum and beans back in.

Simmer for ten or fifteen minutes.  Add chicken back in, push into the rice and liquid.

Fry prawns briefly in separate pan. (Update - no, I should have done them early on in the paella pan and put them aside.)

When most liquid absorbed in paella pan, throw prawns on top, cover in foiland put in hot oven for 15 or so minutes.

Check that rice is soft enough and rest on table for 10 mins.  Take photo and eat.

Yes, no saffron means it is missing a key ingredient, but this is still good.

Who would be funding the Institute for Paid Advocacy for this?

It's been noted on Twitter that the IPA is running a campaign arguing that "race has no place in the constitution".

I'm curious as to which person/companies with money to spare would be funding the IPA to do this.   Gina "it's a pity I can't pay my workers $2 a day" Rinehart?   (Whose company, incidentally, just made a $2.6 billion profit.  Gee, I guess paying workers more than a pittance still allow her to make a profit.  Who knew?)  

But I could be wrong.  It could another ageing, shadowy, rich conservative who doesn't like to make the case him or herself directly.  But it just seems to me an odd thing to want to spend money on.

Answer: none

Cult watch, continued

Like all cult members, Steve Kates continues to find perfection in its head, Herr Trump, and horrifying lack of understanding (or pure evil) in those outside the cult:

The Democrats are full-on totalitarian socialists, would appear willing to use any means they can find to overturn the democratic process. The most astonishing part of the past three years has been the revelation how corrupt the left in the United States is, having commenced their efforts to spy on the Republican candidate while Obama was still president, and then cobble together absolutely anything to find some, any, justification to overturn the election result. Impeachment does not of course mean that the president will leave office but that he will go to trial in the Senate where it requires a two-thirds majority vote to remove the President. That will never happen.

The left has descended into madness, but that is no excuse for any of it. Not an ounce of principle on the left, while the most astonishing part of all of it has been how unblemished Donald Trump is, both in what he has done and in his basic personal integrity.

Can't someone in his family or university stage an intervention?    He needs to be de-programmed, although what to do about his inherent stupidity I'm not so sure.

Late for Halloween

I enjoyed this article at the Washington Post about the scary stories told at Nosleep forum at Reddit.

It's not that I am a fan of such amateur attempts at horror, but I still liked reading about someone who tried to come up with a popular story (and succeeded - for the short time that counts as "success" on a Reddit forum).   It's also cool that a few people who submit there find real screenwriting work that way.