Been busy with the photos today..

It's sort of like if Hollywood was doing scenes from last year's IPA 70th anniversary dinner.   

Dumbest government in decades

As seen in the IPA's magazine

We all know it happened like this..

As inspired by the heading spotted at Fairfax "Decoding PUP's Jedi mind trick".

Teen talk time

If you ask me, the chorus of Don't Stop by that Australian boy band sounds too much like parts of Everybody Talks. 

And I have to agree with my daughter that Que Sera is a good song.  And sometimes, the simplicity of a video and the image it manufactures is impressive marketing all by itself:



(It reminds me a bit of Fry at the Beastie Boys concert, though.  Pity it appears Youtube is thoroughly cleaned of Futurama clips.)

Questionable

I see that Tim Wilson uses not only his private twitter account to go on about how we don't need s18C RDA, he also tweets using the Human Rights Commission account too, promoting his column in The Australian against s18C, and by reprinting it on the HRC website:




I didn't think his view on this was the Commission's collective view, and doubt that it is appropriate for him to be promoting his own views in this fashion.

And I have to repeat - isn't it stupid of the Commission to give this particular commissioner the title of "Human Rights Commissioner".   They should all be Human Rights Commissioners, with their subcategory following.   (His being "Preening Lightweight Showpony for Selfie Rights"*.)

* have I mentioned before that I don't like him? 

Predisposition and causation

Study finds genetic links between schizophrenia and cannabis use | Reuters

Some pro-legalisation people will probably think this study helps throw doubt on cannabis as a cause of schizophrenia:

 The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where
cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk.Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use ishigher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population.

"We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as well – that a pre-disposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use," said Robert Power, who led the study at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

But isn't the point this:  even if you are genetically predisposed to both use cannabis and get schizophrenia, does actually using cannabis help bring on the schizophrenia you're genetically predisposed to get?  

And as for the finding itself, I think it's hardly surprising.

Harry Clarke comments

From his blog, talking about the suggestion that ABC iView move to a user pays model:

The Australian might argue that the ABC gets unfair public funding which disadvantages those private media suppliers who must make a buck.  There is some truth to this but The Australian anyway services a different market to the ABC. The Australian services primarily  - the right-wing loony market of cretinous IPA/libertarian types.  The ABC has a more balanced view of the world.

Heh.  

An assessment of the IPA hard to disagree with

Detritus — Thankyou note to John Roskam
(OK, maybe a couple of lines are too harsh, but I'm right up there with the general sentiment.)

Folks are dumb where I come from

Look, it's a clear as anything that Clive Palmer gets votes by being the anti-politician politician, and as such his support is from the politically un-engaged.   We seem to have a lot of those in Queensland, where Palmer polls an extraordinary 14%.

Still, as with Pauline Hanson, it can't last.   The flakiness and insubstantiality eventually seeps through into enough of the electorate, although with Hanson it was perhaps the impression that she was a mere dumb puppet for the men around her who wanted to get ahead that caused her downfall. 

The problem is Clive is the opposite - he uses others as puppets, up to and including visiting US (former) Vice Presidents, and we have to wait for the breakup of his Senators into a fractious disunity, with inside stories of Clive behind the scenes, to see his downfall. 

Well, that's how I think it will go.   Labor doesn't seem quite up to raising money to fund the jailing of a political opponent, as Tony Abbott did.

Salt on Piketty

What a lightweight and snide discussion of Piketty by Bernard Salt in The Australian today.   I've never read Salt's column's much - I found most of them boring - but I didn't really know his political leanings til now.

Also on Piketty, I was interested to read this blog entry on debate now going on about inheritance and wealth taxes.   As I have written before, I had not even realised that the US had such a tax, but the blog entry explains why that may be - very few people pay it.  The British inheritance tax is much larger (I think), but how many people may escape it by positioning money in off shore accounts is something I don't know.

I presume there has been a lot of economic work done on inheritance tax (in fact, I see there was a 2013 paper co-authored by Piketty with the alluring title "A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Tax") , but it's something we never hear about as a prospect for Australia. 

Perhaps that should change?

Bell's theorem confusion

I'm pretty sure that the interpretation of Bell's Theorem in the popular physics books I read in the 1980's (written after the Alain Aspect experiments) was pretty consistent - that it showed reality was "non local".

But this article in Nature, which is not easy to follow but worth reading to get an idea of the continuing debate amongst physicists about some very fundamental concepts, goes into the alternative interpretation, and how the experiments still have unresolved "loopholes".   (Interesting, the suggestion at the end is that the loopholes may be experimentally covered by putting one end of the set up with a human on the Moon!)

Progress in this matter of resolving the very meaning of basic concepts in physics does seem very slow.

Yet another remarkable Jewish story from WW2

Surviving the Black Sea: An appreciation of David Stoliar, the sole survivor of the 1942 Struma disaster | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Read this lengthy review that tells the tragic story of the sinking of a ship in the Black Sea, full of Jews trying to get to Palestine, in 1942.

Suggestions for replacing the "honour killings are morally justified" talk

I don't know:  the Festival of Dangerous Ideas might have got away with a talk by a Caliphate favouring Islamist if they had called it "Understanding honour killings from within the culture," or some such;  but going with "Honour Killings are Morally Justified" was an absurd and offensive bit of trolling for attention. 

Now that the Festival has a gap in the program, I've been trying to think of alternative "dangerous" talk titles:

"Between Clive and the Buffet Table - a caterer reminisces"

"A Rinehart Family Christmas"

"The case for compulsory circumcision"

"The Phil Neitszke Guided Tour of Switzerland"

I'll keep working on it....

Mercury in fish, revisited

The Mercury-Laden Fish Floated for School Lunches | DiscoverMagazine.com

I've posted quite a few times over the years about mercury in fish, mainly because it seems to be a topic they follow closely in the US, but less so here.

At the link is a lengthy article looking at the issue with regard to the dogfish, a type of shark that the US government is looking at using in school lunches and prisons, but not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

Interestingly, I see that the article indicates that Spanish mackerel is pretty high on the list of mercury affected fish too, above tuna, which I don't think I realised before.  I don't mind a bit of mackerel every now and again.  Certainly, our more premium white fish have now become ridiculously expensive.