Lenore on the "deeper" Abbott government

Tony Abbott keeps digging himself in deeper, and it makes no sense | Australia news | theguardian.com

What a great column by Lenore Taylor, which contains this interesting detail:

Tony Abbott and senior ministers were deeply angry at Barack Obama’s show-stealing climate change speech during the G20. We know because they have been briefing News Ltd columnists to that effect all week – including graphic accounts of how they rang up afterwards and yelled at state department officials for failing to give a “heads up” that the president was going to “dump on” the PM.

Putting aside for one second the extraordinary position we are in when a speech that calls for an ambitious global climate deal and points out Australia has a lot to lose from a warming climate is seen as “dumping” on our prime minister, let’s think about how government
ministers could have responded.

Read the whole thing if you haven't already...

Something in the water at RMIT?

I see that RMIT has on staff yet another economist with ties to the IPA, who has written an economic analysis of cuts to the ABC which is rather pointless, fanciful and will convince no one other than Rupert Murdoch. 

Along with Sinclair Davidson ("inequality? - Ha! you'd have to be a communist to be against it"*) and the absolutely rabidly Obama hating, climate change is just a Leftie religion, Say's Law obsessive, author of the only economics book that gets things right, Steve Kates, RMIT seems to be the Australian centre of Right wing economic extremism and eccentricity.   Doesn't that have an effect on the number of students who want to go there?

* only a slight paraphrase of what I take his attitude to be.

Why semi-historical films can annoy

The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult Alan Turing | Film | theguardian.com

It's a real problem when films based on recent history don't make it clear which bits are real and which are completely invented.   This film about Turing gets a pasting in this review for some inventions which seek to further hurt the reputation of a man with a pretty tragic life.

I missed that one

ABC, climate change: the Coalition is drowning us in nonsense | Australia news | theguardian.com

Kathrine Murphy makes the point everyone understands, whether they be on the Left or Right:

This morning, on the wireless, I heard the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, say the government wasn’t making cuts to the ABC.

The day before, I heard the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, say Tony Abbott hadn’t actually promised before last September’s election not to cut the budgets of the ABC and SBS. If Abbott had said something like that, then he didn’t mean it; and more
likely, we’d all just misunderstood what the prime minister had said.

Also on Wednesday, I heard the prime minister tell the French president, Francois Hollande, that part of the Australian government’s policy arsenal to combat the risks associated with climate change involved funding an agency called the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

What he didn’t tell the French president was the government intends to abolish the CEFC.

In politics at the present time, we are drowning in nonsense. The nonsense waves are not only lapping, elegantly, at our ankles, they are picking us all up and dumping us head first into the sand.

The Abbott government is performing so many contortions, and running so rhetorically ragged, it’s hard to see if anything coherent is actually going on.

I had missed the  bit where Abbott now claimed the Clean Energy Finance Corporation as his own.   Has he changed policy on that?  Or is it just another example where he tells whichever audience before him what he thinks they want to hear?   I think we all can guess which is most likely, can't we? 

Odd cosmic alignments

Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years

It would be funny if, after looking long enough, for the right sort of thing, astronomers eventually find a message written in the sky.    Something more profound than a big smiley face, I hope; although that would be cool too.

Not that Andrew Bolt will comprehend this

Lake-effect snow in Buffalo: Climate change is making snowstorms more extreme.

A pretty convincing explanation here at Slate, with graphs and all.   Snow is a form of precipitation.  More intense bursts of heavy precipitation were always expected to increase under global warming.  

On the downside

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change - IEEE Spectrum

What did I just write the other day about the wild swings from optimism to pessimism you tend to see in prognostications about the future of energy?

Here we have a somewhat interesting, if not particularly well written, article by a couple of Google engineers who explain why Google pulled the plug in 2011 on trying to come up with an entire clean energy solution.  (I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one who didn't even realise Google had such a broad program in the first place.)

The argument they use seems flawed in a couple of respects:  an apparent insistence that a 350 ppm level of CO2 is key (when it has already been well exceeded), and a large downplaying of any possibility of future international co-operation for pricing carbon.

It's ridiculously easy, I'm sure, to find any number of other engineers/economists/scientists who will strongly disagree with these two.

But such widespread diversity of opinion certainly doesn't help guide politicians.

 

More than you probably needed to know about speculums

Here's a novel topic:  the somewhat controversial history of the development of the speculum, as used for pelvic examinations in women. 

While part of the story is merely unpleasant (its inventor using black slaves for experimental surgery), this part, about the then cultural anxiety of the effect inserting anything, um, down there, is amusing for its oddness from the modern perspective:

Prostitutes were often hired as model patients for doctors to practice on. “There’s this really interesting line between torture device, disciplinary device, sexual device,” says Terri Kapsalis, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the author of the book Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Police officers would even leverage pelvic exams as threats against sex workers when they were arrested. Some doctors worried that using the speculum even on proper women might somehow make them sex-crazed.

In 1850, the Royal Medicine and Chirurgical Society of London held a standing-room-only meeting in which the community heard arguments for and against the speculum. These doctors worried that women would mistake the exam for a sexual experience. The British physician Robert Brudenell Carter reinforced this fear in his 1853 book, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria, writing that he had “seen young unmarried women, of the middle class of society, reduced by constant use of the speculum to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner ... to institute an examination of the sexual organs.”

Simplistic rubbish from Leyonhjelm

In his piece about metadata today, David Leyonhjelm makes this claim:

When governments get involved in regulating things they don't understand, things tend to go terribly wrong. Getting into the insulation business, for instance, resulted in installers dying and houses burning down. This proposal has the potential to have equally significant consequences.

Mmmm yes;  the politician most against government regulation of businesses now tries to make an example of a problem that occurred because of inadequate regulation, or enforcement thereof, in a business.

Shameless inconsistency by a gun stroking numbskull.

As for metadata:  if some ISPs are already storing it for a year or two (as the government has said), then who are libertarians to stop them running their business as they see fit? Sure, privacy concerns are raised by the practice, and that is conceded below. 

Common sense suggests that there is no reason to doubt that metadata could be very useful for some very serious criminal investigations and anti terrorist intelligence operations.

The issue with metadata should not be about storage per se, but about who, and the basis on which, access can be given.

If the argument was restricted to that, I don't see a problem.

But the argument that metadata should not be kept or accessible by anyone at all - that doesn't pass the common sense test.

Update:  I see from this Gizmodo article, that the intention of the government legislation is to actually reduce the number of authorities who can access it:

 Currently any authority or body that enforces a criminal law, a law imposing a pecuniary penalty or a law that protects the public revenue is an ‘enforcement agency’ under the TIA Act and can seek telecommunications data where that access complies with the requirements set out in Chapter 4 of the TIA Act. In 2012-2013 data was accessed by around 80 Commonwealth, State and Territory agencies with criminal law or revenue protection functions.

The Bill will require that bodies who are not a ‘criminal law enforcement agency’ for the purposes of the TIA Act must be declared by the Minister to be an ‘enforcement agency’ before they can authorise the disclosure of telecommunications data. These amendments will ensure that only authorities and bodies with a demonstrated need to have telecommunications information can authorise the disclosure of this information. These amendments are consistent with Recommendation 5 of the PJCIS Report that the number of agencies able to access telecommunications data be reduced.

 This is the type of detail that should be being discussed.

World Toilet Day noted

The BBC notes that it's World Toilet Day with a set of international photos of "My Toilet". 

Perhaps I shouldn't be mentioning this in the context of India while their rock star PM is here, a country strangely motivated to fly space missions while having trouble getting toilets to a huge proportion of their population.   (By the way, I had not realised how nationalistic expat Indians could be until now.) 

But it is true, Modi does recognize his national toilet problem, even though the issue there involves more than just building them. According to a recent report, even if villages have toilets available, a lot of people just still like doing it in the field:

The study found open defecation is very common, even in households with toilets. Toilet use did not necessarily increase with prosperity: in Haryana, one of India's richest states, most people in the villages continue to defecate in the open. Also, men living in households with toilets are more likely to defecate in the open than women.

Why do so many Indians still prefer not to use toilets, even if they are available?

The survey found a range of replies - most said they found it "pleasurable, comfortable, or convenient". Others said it "provides them an opportunity to take a morning walk, see their fields and take in the fresh air". Still others regarded open defecation as "part of a wholesome, healthy virtuous life".

It's a bit hard from a Western perspective to see the "virtue" in poo-ing in the open.   Even Greenies who might yearn for recycling their own will at least use a composting toilet.

The other recent story about Indian toilets was about a study indicating that having them available did not obviously improve local health.   Men doing it in the field despite a toilet being handy may well account for part of that.

Ray on that climate deal

Obama’s U.S.-China climate agreement: Carbon budget and exponential curves show why this is a fair deal.

Ray Pierrehumbert, who has posted a lot at Real Climate, explains why he is cautiously optimistic about China reducing its emissions in a helpful way.

I would make the observation that it seems that energy forecasting is always subject to a hell of a lot of guesswork and ideological motivation.   The great pessimism of the 1970's in terms of oil has been completely replaced by great optimism; the enormous influence of fracking technological change seems to have gone more or less unexplained until it was actually happening; solar and energy efficiency seems to have become cheaper faster than was expected.

What I'm hoping for is that the ability to increasingly incorporate renewables in the energy mix in a reliable way has been underestimated by the pessimists.

Senator dependent on voter confusion wants to keep it that way

Crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm threatens to oppose key Government legislation over legal action
Oh, very funny David L:

"They are claiming that in essence I was elected in NSW with [about] 9
per cent of the vote because of a mistake, because of confusion,"
Senator Leyonhjelm said.

And they would be 100% correct.  Even after months of getting your head on TV and interviews in the press as the first libertarian Senator, your party scored a vote of 1.82% in the WA Senate re-run.

Which is nothing compared to how minuscule your and your party's vote was in NSW before it changed its name:

In 2007, David Leyonhjelm, an agricultural consultant with a love of
guns and finely hewn libertarian views, stood for Bennelong against then
prime minister John Howard. As the candidate of the Liberty and
Democracy Party (LDP), he came 12th in a field of 13. He won just 89
votes.

The LDP's Senate team in NSW had won just 7772 votes, 0.19
per cent. But a few months later, the party applied to change its name
to the Liberal Democratic Party. The Liberal party objected strongly,
warning that the new name could confuse intending Liberal voters. But on
legal advice, the Australian Electoral Commission allowed the change.

In 2013, the Liberal Democrats, headed by Leyonhjelm, drew
first place in the 45 columns on the NSW ballot paper. Hundreds of
thousands of voters saw the size of the ballot paper, saw the word
''Liberal'' in the first box, and just put a 1 against it. The LDP won
434,002 votes, or 9.5 per cent - 50 times the vote it won in 2007 before
it adopted the name ''Liberal Democrats''.

What a complete and utter unprincipled shonk David Leyonhelm is for resisting going back to a name that incorporates "liberty", because it suits him and his party to confuse voters.

And Leyonhjelm staffer Helen Dale is apparently on board with her boss's political bribery attempt, tweeting today "Well, the cat is out of the bag, now. Leave our name alone, or say goodbye to TPVs".   Gee, a nastier person than me might make a wisecrack along the lines of "who'd have expected she would be comfortable with deliberate deception?" 

Let's hope for their personal end of the world soon

BBC News - Islamic State: What the Kassig murder video tells us

There's a good piece of analysis here about the recent IS video which (I didn't realise 'til today) showed 19 men being beheaded, most of them Syrian prisoners.

And again, this branch of Islam's grandiose beliefs are important to understanding what is going on:

Unlike previous videos which are believed to have been filmed in Raqqah, a Syrian city which serves as Islamic State's stronghold, this one is shot in Dabiq.

The city features in a recorded statement attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, known as hadith. The hadith are very important to Muslims and are regarded as providing another source of law alongside the Koran.

Dabiq features strongly in the eschatological aspects of normative Islamic belief.

Based on Prophetic sayings, IS believes the town will take centre stage in a cosmic battle between East and West. The armies of Islam will triumph and the West will crumble.

IS will have chosen the town for their latest video quite deliberately as Western leaders are taunted to send ground troops. "We will break this last and final crusade," says "Jihadi John".

If ever a bunch of killers deserved to be blown up pronto by a drone, it would be the group of men who participated in this cold blooded, religiously motivated, mass murder.

A very good Krugman

When Government Succeeds - NYTimes.com

This column adds further justification to my view that libertarianism is nonsense (and dangerous):   it reflexively dislikes government (save for its barest functions) and hence encourages the policy cynicism that Krugman notes at the end:

The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right
and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs.
But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism
about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to
improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified.
It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their
predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders
want to make government work, they can.

Oh, and by the way, the most important part of the column as an example for Australia was about the actual success of the US government's clean energy funding program.  Here's from the link to Bloomberg:

The U.S. government expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from the renewable-energy loan program that funded flops including Solyndra LLC, supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.

The Department of Energy has disbursed about half of $32.4 billion allocated to spur innovation, and the expected return will be detailed in a report due to be released as soon as
tomorrow, according to an official who helped put together the data.

The results contradict the widely held view that the U.S. has wasted taxpayer money funding failures including Solyndra, which closed its doors in 2011 after receiving $528 million in
government backing. That adds to Obama’s credibility as he seeks to make climate change a bigger priority after announcing a historic emissions deal with China.

A $5 billion return to taxpayers exceeds the returns from many venture capital and private equity investments in clean energy, said Michael Morosi, an analyst at Jetstream Capital
LLC, which invests in renewable energy.

Why the British rush?

Exclusive: The three-parent baby trap - is new IVF technique safe? - Science - News - The Independent

It's truly puzzling, the British rush to endorse experimentation with a method of "three parent" IVF that bears no resemblance to  anything that happens in nature for a tiny number of mothers who would use it to bear their "own" baby in lieu of adopting a genetically healthy child.

I was also interested to read, in Wired, of all places, an article that noted freezing eggs is certainly not the fertility panacea that fertility clinics would like young women to think it is.

It's hard to see reproductive technology as not being driven more by money making potential and a modern sense of entitlement over well reasoned ethics and caution as to what is appropriate or not in assisting reproduction.