Losers giving money to losers noted

Good, too, to see that so much effort was put into the design of the ad, which featured about 90% empty space, fellas.

Still, blowing some money on an ad that will clearly have no effect on politicians, but satiate your anger that your think tank's attempt at bullying them into changing a law which the public were actually happy to keep  failed gives you some sense of satisfaction, I presume.   Not the type of satisfaction that people get from donating to a charity that actually helps the sick or the poor, or just anyone other than rich, male, white, bloviating media figures; but a kind of satisfaction nonetheless.

For an actual decent take on why the s.18C amendment went no where, see Gay Alcorn's column in The Guardian about it.  I liked the last bit in particular:

Bolt himself seemed to grasp at least in part that to have him at the centre of a battle for “freedom” was always fatal.

“To associate it with me meant so many people of the left thought that any law that could be used against me must be pretty good, and I think that’s poisoned the debate,” he told radio station 2GB.

Yes Andrew, it did poison the debate. But the “left” didn’t make it all about you. You did, and so did the government.

Hey, look everybody...

...it's Drawn Fraser.

Update:  this post seems underappreciated.  I'll have to continue work on "Pony Abbott", but photoshopping a face onto the appropriate end of a horse is trickier than I expected.

Update 2:   Oh look...it's "Pony" Abbott:  

 (Forgive me, it was a rushed job.)

An interesting take on marijuana use

Marijuana decriminalisation: High times in Amsterdam and Boulder | The Economist

See, I don't just post negative stories about marijuana experiences.  Sometimes I link to stories by people who are happy casual users - and then point out why they are wrong.

Really, the interesting thing about the story in the Economist was the oft repeated point that Holland has less cannabis use than America, despite its long term legal availability in certain venues.  (And how the main users of the pot cafes are tourists, and how some people find these cafes are pretty unpleasant places to smoke.)  But, as I have noted over the years, the Dutch are an odd mix of relative conservatism with their liberalism - the best example other than drugs being the explicit and detailed sex education their kids get from a very young age at school, yet the teenagers wait longer before having sex and have way fewer pregnancies than their American or English counterparts.

People say this good outcome is because of the sex education; but really, how do you separate out its effect from the social milieu generally?  As I noted in a post a long time ago, it is said that government policy is not to be overly generous with welfare benefits to young single mothers, and people just accept that accidentally falling pregnant is a silly and embarrassing thing to do; so they do (largely) successfully avoid it.  And take marriage and family life pretty seriously.

The same with drugs legalisation - its hard to draw uniform lessons from one society to another, and the Dutch experience may well not translate well elsewhere.  If you legalised marijuana overnight in Japan, for example, I have my doubts that its use would soar immediately.  They are very, very happy with their drinking culture (too happy, probably), and public interest in other ways to get uninhibited (or off one's face) is (I think) very very low.

The thing is, I suspect (but could be wrong) that American culture is not one that is going to find legalisation results in less use, or that the population is primed to just settle into a natural rate of use similar to what has been in place for some decades.  If anything, the entrepreneurial streak that runs through the country will see that legalisation means increased usage, quite potentially to levels where it is clearly seen as a societal problem affecting the economy.

But we shall see...

Discouraging pollution news...

Pollution triples mercury levels in ocean surface waters, study finds | Environment | theguardian.com

Particularly discouraging because it affects some of the tastier fish species.

Update:  The report in Nature reads even worse than the Guardian's:

But study co-author Carl Lamborg, a marine geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says that the deep water's ability to sequester mercury may soon be exhausted. Humans are on track to emit as much mercury in the next 50 years as they did in the last 150 years, he notes.

“You're starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us, with the net result that more and more of our emissions will be found in progressively shallower water,” Lamborg adds. That increases the odds that mercury levels in key food species will rise, increasing humans' exposure.

An important message from the IPA

The story here. [Once again,  witness the enthusiastic mooching from the biggest anti-mooching think tank in the land.]

Sun and health

Link between vitamin D and dementia risk confirmed

I see at the end of the article there's a link to a report about low vitamin D and schizophrenia too.  The correlation of it to mental health is rather interesting, and perhaps a bad sign for the future health of oldies in 70 years time, given the somewhat over the top concern about sun exposure and kids we seem to now have.

I wonder if anyone has ever surveyed dementia risk amongst life long nudists?  Googling the topic doesn't immediately come up with useful results, partly because there seems to be some program called NUDIST which is used in dementia research.

Great comet photo

I guess I expected a smoother, icier looking surface for a comet, but it looks very cool nonetheless.

Is this the beginning of the end for the Credlin/Loughnane role in the Abbott "ascendancy"?

Just noticed in the Sydney Morning Herald:

ICAC hears that Liberal party boss Brian Loughnane knew of developer donations going through federal channels

But, given that it seems Credlin is pretty unpopular within the parliamentary party, her departure may well help Abbott.  So she should stay.

The careless, poisoned Hockey

Sorry, Treasurer, but your tax figures are a long way wide of the mark

You'd think a politician of his experience would know to be more careful.  Joe was saying that higher income earning families pay half their income in tax, which means he's ignoring how they get the benefit of the tax free threshold and lower tax rate on the first part of their income.

More substantially, Peter Whiteford has a really good article that looks at the way the "small government/small tax" wing of the Right tries to use what are in fact successful elements of our welfare system to exaggerate welfare as a problem.  More importantly, he notes that:

"what constitutes a “fair” distribution of national income ultimately comes
down to social value judgements."

The essay is in effect a really valuable look at the poisonous "lifters and leaners/moochers and looters" philosophy that the Coalition - including Hockey - has been infected with from too much contact with the American small government/libertarian wing of the Republicans (and their Australian counterparts in the IPA.)

Today's reading recommendation for Sinclair Davidson, Judith Sloan and the IPA

Reaction noted

I wonder how Sinclair Davidson is taking the Abbott announcement that the government is walking away from repealing or amending s.18C Racial Discrimination Act.

 

Oh.  Pretty much how I expected, then.

Guardians will be viewed

As I know everyone is keen to know what movies I will and will not see (ha!), I confirm that, despite my oft-repeated omplaint that far too many comic book superhero movies are being made, I will go and see Guardians of the Galaxy based on its good reviews, and the fact that it is basically a comedy.

I have always liked science fiction comedy, and hope to like this one.

The way ahead for Tasmania (seriously?)

Noted towards the bottom of a Phil Coorey piece about the talking going on between Hockey and the Senators to try and salvage some part of the budget:

In Tasmania, Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie hit the Treasurer for more funds for Tasmania, funds for mushroom growers and bumble bee farmers, while refusing to reverse opposition to budget cuts. Instead, she said the government should cut deeper into foreign aid.

Actually, I was a bit disturbed on the weekend to see on Insiders that Hockey and her had a two hour meeting (after which he came out gushing about her "big heart" - it was nauseating).   I certainly hope there was someone else in the room, so that the topic of the Treasurer's "package" was kept on track.

Why I haven't blogged about the reactionless drive

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine

I had a hunch that the write ups of the NASA apparent confirmation of a reactionless drive were being a bit too enthusiastic.  This article indicates my skepticism may be well founded.

And one other point:  the thrust the test measured was absolutely tiny.  Even if a totally new effect is at play, I wouldn't get too excited unless it was clearly scale-able to something useful.   Weird (but tiny) force effects of the quantum world already exist - see the Casimir effect - but as far as I know there is no proposal to ever make use of that for colonising the universe.

About time the doctors started talking

Australia's detention regime sets out to make asylum seekers suffer, says chief immigration psychiatrist | World | The Guardian

Good, detailed report by David Marr [and some other journalist who hasn't been on Insiders so I don't know him] on the harm indefinite detention in offshore camps is causing.

The situation is clearly much worse in a humanitarian sense than it was under Howard - where a considerable number of the detained at least had a fair hope of ending up in Australia (or New Zealand, if I recall correctly) if they waited long enough.

The current people there can see no resolution on the horizon at all.

I still believe that the public is simply "living with" this because the government has kept details of conditions under such tight wraps.  There needs to be more exposure and humanising of the detainees.