Et tu, Barrie

Report card: strong ambassador, dud budget - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


Barrie Cassidy on Tony Abbott today:

Whether it be repairing a damaged relationship with Indonesia,
responding to the Malaysian air crashes, standing up to Russia, or
confronting the brutality of the Islamic State, Abbott has been
exemplary.

Nothing impresses me about Tony Abbott, including his rush to embrace security issues as something that might be his saving grace in the public eye (as he thinks happened to Howard.)

And let's be honest - there has been nothing particularly brave about any of his responses to security issues - not like Howard and his gun law reform.  Rather, they been boiler plate responses, and not always hitting the right mark, but sounding just a bit too incautious and hairy chested.  Also, his personal popularity rating has not increased since these events happened, so it seems to me the public is not entirely convinced as well.  (Although, I suspect, the more dangerous international situation may account for some votes going back to the Coalition in polling, regardless of its leader.)

So I beg to differ with Barrie, and the only good thing about his column is it again makes a mockery of Andrew Bolt's moronic repetition "the ABC is out of control" (because they don't agree with him on politics.)

Poor old Ludwig, revisited; and the lives of the artistic, generally

A couple of months back, I posted some extracts from a review of a biography of Beethoven about his often unhappy life.

There's another review out on a different biography, and this paragraph is blogworthy:

This physical suffering was intensified by his inability to find the partner he craved so fervently. Beethoven kept on falling in love with women whose higher social status placed them out of reach. After the final collapse of his relationship with Josephine, Countess von Deym, he fled to the country estate of another aristocratic lady, Countess Erdödy, and promptly disappeared. It was assumed that he had returned to Vienna, but after three days a servant found him hiding in a remote part of the palace gardens, apparently trying to starve himself to death. Prudish in his attitude to the sexual behaviour of others - he even disapproved of the 'lascivious' subject matter of Mozart's Don Giovanni - he resorted increasingly to prostitutes for his own gratification. 'I am always ready for it,' he told his friend Baron Zmeskall, 'the time I prefer most of all is at about half past three or four o'clock in the afternoon.' His attempt to express his need for a lasting human relationship by adopting and then micro-managing his nephew Karl ended in disaster, when the object of his affection first ran away and then tried to shoot himself.

So, there you have it:  you now know the timing of Beethoven's sexual appetite down to the half hour.

I have to also say that it surprises me, this frequency with which the use of prostitutes (or at least mistresses) features in the lives of the artistically successful.  I've said it before, but if you're married by age 30 and have a long and happy marriage in which you never sleep with anyone else, it seems you can just about guarantee that you will not be a literary or artistic success.    I'm trying to think of a possible exception to this rule:  the 20th century's most famous Catholic writers certainly don't fit the bill - Graham Greene particularly, but I think Evelyn Waugh is thought to have been a frequent customer of brothels during his overseas travels.  CS Lewis is thought by most to have had a weird mummy thing going on with his deceased mate's mother.   Possibly GK Chesterton (although he's not considered exactly top of the range in the artistic ranks)?

A quick check of some biographic details indicate he did enjoy happy domesticity,  and this (rather interesting) essay about him generally argues with direct autobiographical quotes that whatever temptations he considered himself prone to, he specifically denied they were homosexual.   But really - with his rotundity, you would not expect him to have easy access to sexual liaisons of any kind - prostitutes would have feared for their lives, most likely.

So there you go - maybe I have found a famous-ish author who didn't seem to do anything too untoward in his sex life, although his physical characteristics make it questionable whether it was even possible.   Further examples from readers are most welcome.

Update:  from an essay about attitudes to prostitution generally:   

Many great writers, composers and playwrights have regularly indulged, patronised, and befriended prostitutes, including Franz Kafka, Guy de Mauppausant, Georges Rouault, Toulouse Lautrec, Dennis Potter, Picasso, Paul Verlaine. 

 Dennis Potter seems a bit out of place in that list!

Hope it's not a fizzer

It's a James Ashby interview that looks like it will shed further light on who in the Liberals helped him bring his case, and who lied about it.

Update:  what a tease the 60 Minutes trailer for the interview is.    Another allegation of sexual harassment (but not by who - if it's poor old Slipper, people will probably say "old news, can't he be left alone?");  someone called a liar;  a claim that is "dynamite".    Twitter is full of rumour that Pyne ought to be worried, but we shall see.

Update 2:  fizzer.  Although I did miss, while going downstairs to see where X Factor was up to, the bit that was "dynamite".

Look, anyone with any sense knows Pyne has been deceptive about this from the get go, and that Abbott has lied in the past about his role in political intrigue (Hanson), and almost certainly knew more about the Slipper/Ashby matter than he will admit.   Brough comes across as a complete sleazebag.  Yet   Ashby also remains a person impossible to sympathise with because of the way he played politics too.  

It was all a nasty bit of political dirty work from a Coalition that was desperate to seize power if they could.   [And now that they have it, they're still failing to win hearts and minds.]

But we knew all of this already.

Everyone needs a hobby...

These Two Guys Studied Their Feces for a Year - The Atlantic

(Actually, it's quite an interesting science story about gut biome again.)  

Fast food every night, then?

In what's probably just another bit of Slate click baiting, this article with the heading Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner is still a profoundly silly piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Yes, let's accept that working mothers can have a hard time juggling work and getting dinner ready every night.

But honest to God, the range of easily prepared meal components (by which I mean things like pasta or curry sauces in jars, meal "kits" in a box, pre-sliced or diced meats, even frozen vegetables) which, served up with a pile of steamed vegetables (just how hard is it to steam vegetables?) makes the modern cooking task for relatively healthy meals about twice as easy as it was 40 years ago.

And what does Marcotte or her quoted sociologists expect as an alternative?

Utopia

I've been watching most of Working Dog's new show Utopia on the ABC, and I have to say it has grown on me.

As a satire of how the public service works (well, perhaps the semi corporatised version of the public service?)  I think it does very well.  

Last night's "job performance review" co-plot rang very many bells with I saw in my exposure to the PS, although that was a couple of decades ago now.  (I doubt that it has changed much, though.)

I thought the episode on the Very Fast Train was also pretty good, in terms of how economically unjustifiable ideas can refuse to die.

But I did miss the first episode - and I am bit puzzled as to how the Rob Sitch character has ended up as the boss of an outfit in which he is perpetually unhappy and never gets his way....

A problem easily fixed?

Seeing Adam Creighton is against an increase in compulsory superannuation, I now feel pretty confident that some increase was in fact warranted.  And let's face it, the Coalition is not saying they are against an increase happening eventually, they've just delayed it.

But what I wanted to note was Creighton's argument in the Australian this morning that compulsory superannuation is a "failure" because it is failing to reduce dependency on the pension to a large enough degree.

Yet the reason he gives for this - the pension assets and income test being too generous - is surely one of the economically easiest things to change in future.   And what's more, isn't ensuring that more money is in super in the first place one of the key ways of ensuring that the tightening of the test is easier to politically and economically justify?

Surely you would have more chance of arguing for phased in reduction of government contribution to pension support if you can point to the increase in superannuation income that you're also ensuring for the future?

Update:   just wanted to make it clear again that I was saying that changing the assets/income test is economically easy - in the sense that it can be relatively clear where to set the line and what effect it will have on future government outlays - but not that it was necessarily politically easy.    However, it becomes politically easier if you can tell people their superannuation will be larger too.

And here's another thing - I've noticed small government types are pretty hot for the Singaporean system of health care which works to a large extent on forced contributions to health savings accounts.   (Someone on boring old Amanda Vanstone's Radio National show was talking up something similar the other day.)  

So why are they so against compulsory super savings in Australia?  Is it just because of Union involvement in industry super?

And really, whatever arguments are against compulsory superannuation (due to fees and questionable tax treatment for those who need it least), do small government economists really think people left alone make adequate savings for retirement? 

I hear a lot of whining, but don't hear much about alternatives....

The old Michael Ware is back on my TV

Seven years ago I noted how annoying I found former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware, an Australian given to talking in perpetual hyperventilating Steve Irwin style.

And he's on my TV right now, on The Drum, with Brisbane's Story Bridge in the background (he lives here?) and he's still the same, and still really irritating.

In other Arab news

While admitting that I like the idea of being in charge of an Australian version of the Saudi Arabian institution known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, I would have to run it better than this:

Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on Tuesday removed four of its staff from the Riyadh office after it found them guilty of assaulting a British national and his Saudi wife....

Reports late on Friday said that the Briton was approached by the members of the Commission when he took a check-out at a supermarket reserved for women and families.

When they asked him about his presence in the special lane, he answered that he was with his wife and had the right to use it.

However, the Commission members felt frustrated by the answer and followed the couple until they reached their car outside the mall where they had a physical altercation.

Update:  a little bit of video of the guy being jumped on for being in the women's checkout lane can be seen at the Daily Mail here.

I'd hate to see what they do to someone who goes through the "12 items or less" lane with 13 things.

And by the way, the Daily Mail site has a picture of Riyadh, a city you don't often see much of:

What's the building that looks like the eye of a needle?  I'll have to check:  I see, it's Kingdom Centre, which has a shopping mall, hotel and apartments.   [And, being Saudi Arabia, public floggings in the courtyard on the hour for men caught looking sideways at women with accidentally exposed ankles.]

You can also go up to the "skybridge" at the top.  Photos at its website here. 

Update:   looking around at other local websites reporting this widely publicised story, I have to admit that most of the 40 comments at Arab News (most of which appear to be Saudis) are critical of the Virtue Police.   One comment details another incident, which I repeat for its comedy value (as long as you're not the victim):

There have been many such instances which either go unreported or no action is taken even after a complaint is lodged. A few years ago, the religious police raided a staff house belonging to a corporate in Olaya locality of Riyadh which housed a few Keralites among which one of them happened to be a friend. The religious police searched the entire flat and found a few pornographic CD's, all the flat members were locked up in the toilet from 10 PM to 4 AM and the entire duration was spent by the religious police examining the evidence thoroughly on a flat screen television. Fortunately the flat members were let out after the call for Fajr salah and the religious police left without saying a word.

Ms Popularity

Judith Sloan is having a hot run in the unpopularity stakes at the moment.  From The Australian:

JUDITH Sloan makes some false assertions about how one of my reporters does her job (“Paper’s slant against self-managed super is just so wrong”. 2/9). Sloan suggests she’s “pretty sure” the journalist did not ferret through the Australian Taxation Office website to get figures about self-managed super funds and that she was “probably fed them” by industry super funds.

After speaking to the reporter, and backed by my knowledge of how she works, I am more than pretty sure that Sloan is wrong. My reporter got the numbers from the ATO. She was not fed them by interested parties.

It is one thing to vigorously contest issues. It is another to make false claims about the professionalism of a journalist because you disagree with the angle of a story — all without checking your assertions.
Michael Stutchbury, editor-in-chief, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, NSW

Well, this is confusing...

We seem to have a bit of a bizzaro world reversal going on in the reaction to the Abbott government putting substantial delay into an increase into compulsory superannuation contributions paid by employers.

The Australian website has been running as its headline article a David Crowe report that would not keep the Abbott government happy at all.  The subheading:

WORKERS will take a $20,000 hit to their retirement savings from a shock deal in the Senate to repeal the mining tax, with the Abbott government blaming Labor for forcing it to agree to the change. The losses could reach twice as much for young workers on high incomes, according to an exclusive analysis for The Australian that reveals the impact on millions of employees who will miss out on an increase in their superannuation over the next five years.

(Of course, the paper also contains a "You're Magnificent, Abbott!" piece by the ever obsequious Denis Shanahan about the very same deal.) 

But over at Fairfax, we have Peter Martin talking up the decision to not increase the tax contributions because it was clearly going to eat into salary growth too much.  With the headline "The Coalition helps the workers", the Martin article takes exactly the Abbott line on the issue.

It will be some time before I know what to think about this....

The El Nino that may or may not come

Stalled El Nino poised to resurge : Nature News & Comment

Certainly, no one expects a super strong El Nino now, but I am curious about what happened to the large body of subsurface warm water that they had been tracking across the Pacific earlier this year...

Just trying to be helpful

About this nude celebrity photos in the cloud being stolen business:   I think, given the ubiquity of youthful ownership of phones with cameras, that it's probably a fair assumption in the West that about 95% of males under 25 are already the subject of a nude picture (either of all of their body or part of it), and about 70% of females.   (The other gender difference being that, for men, the majority are likely self taken, but for women, more are taken by their boyfriend.)   It's become so rampant that it may as well be incorporated into some sort of coming of age ritual.  Perhaps at 21,  everyone could have a nude shot of their choice (personality dictating how rude the choice actually is) loaded up to the national  iNude service, with access available to anyone for a modest (ha! pun) fee - perhaps $1 per view, with nearly all of that going to the photo subject.  Of course, how to deal with those who then save and spread the pic to others for free is something I'm not sure how to deal with - I see that the Snapchat self erasing idea is pretty easy to evade.   But if we believe libertarians, if you make the cost of legitimate access cheap enough, people won't pirate.  (A likely story...)

Anyway, the point of the exercise is that if society is based on an assumption that everyone can or will be legitimately viewed nude, celebrities can stop fretting so much about their secret nude photos being stolen.  I guess that's assuming the photo they are worried about is a mere nude one.   If it is one involving sexual activity that they did not want taken or realised - well, the fact that you were already available nude on line might make the unfairness of further intimate releases so much clearer that they are less likely to be clicked on.  (And civil action against the person who released them more justified.) 

As the title says, just trying to be helpful...

Nuclear disasters last a long time...

Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany - Telegraph

 This rather surprising report states:

Twenty-eight years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still
being felt as far away as Germany
– in the form of radioactive wild boars.

Wild boars still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their
meat, which is sold as a delicacy.

But in recent tests by the state government of Saxony, more than one in three
boars were found to give off such high levels of radiation that they are
unfit for human consumption.

 In a single year, 297 out of 752 boar tested in Saxony have been over the
limit, and there have been cases in Germany of boar testing dozens of times
over the limit.

Germany's radioactive boar problem is not expected to go away any time soon.
With the levels of contamination still showing in tests, experts predict it
could be around for another 50 years. 

Astounding hypocrisy

There are few things more annoying than libertarians who freely admit to flaunting the property rights of American film and TV producers by downloading pirated copies of whatever fantasy gory pornquest they currently enjoy, and then deride government attempts to stop them.

And the justification that they give - well, business always knows right, according to libertarians, except when it interferes with their TV viewing habits:

The IPA believes a better way to deal with online piracy in Australia would be to introduce a "fair use exception".

Mr Breheny said he was "concerned" and "alarmed" that the government was not placing more emphasis on the importance of innovation and technological advances, such as content streaming platforms, to resolve piracy issues over ineffective regulations. He said ultimately rights holders needed to take responsiblity by ensuring their content was accessible and affordable.

Yeah, an individual's right to own and do what they want with their property is really important to libertarians, and one of the few things they want government to do is to protect such rights, but their view on TV piracy  comes down to this:  "hey, studio/government, if you don't let us watch it for free, or at least make it cheap enough, of course we'll steal it anyway.  What d'ya expect?"