The entertainer: the only problem with the world is the 50% of it that doesn't share my genitalia

Lower end of the range looking increasingly unlikely

ATTP notes that there is increasing confidence that the Nic Lewis/Matt Ridley promoted "lower end of climate sensitivity is more likely" argument is wrong.

There was also an interesting recent post at Carbon Brief noting how closely the rise in CO2 follows the general slope of temperature increase:

Well, that's depressing

From an NPR article  about how American schools have to include "lock down" drills:

On average, there's nearly one school shooting a week in the United States, according to Everytown Research, a non-profit organization which advocates for gun control. Just in the past month, six people, including the shooter, died in a school shooting in Rancho Tehama, Calif. Three people, including the shooter, were killed in a shooting at Aztec High School in New Mexico.

But guns everywhere makes gun lovers feel better, and that's what's really important.

Worst tagger ever

(LONDON) — A British surgeon has admitted assaulting two patients by burning his initials into their livers during transplant operations.

Simon Bramhall pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of assault, in a case a prosecutor called “without legal precedent in criminal law.”

Bramhall used an argon beam coagulator, which seals bleeding blood vessels with an electric beam, to mark his initials on the organs.

Here's the link.

The entertainer is back

Sometimes, the reaction to events involving sexual and "normal" politics at Catallaxy is so ridiculously, stupidly, extreme it makes me laugh out loud.   One of my "favourite" commentators makes this observation post the Roy Moore non-election:

A series of minor observations

*  This seems to be a good season for big, tasty, and cheap mangoes.  Stone fruit:  not so much.  Still waiting to see how the lychees pan out.

*  Summer in Brisbane so far has been rather pleasant - days not too hot or humid; nights still cooling down considerably.   Very little need for airconditioning, so far.

*  Perhaps it's due to Brisbane's mild winters, which don't really require any night time heating, but we got our most recent electricity bill, and it was just under $300 for the quarter.   This is for a family of four - two adults, two teenagers - with solar hot water but no solar panels.  We actually currently have three refrigerators running, all quite large.  (One is kept on the minimum setting and is not often opened, but we are finding unlimited fridge space quite a pleasure at the moment.)  

Anyway, for all the talk of high electricity costs in Australia, doesn't this seem remarkably cheap?   The key may well be in the solar hot water system - people north of Sydney who don't have one are crazy.

* My daughter has a completely unreasonable fixation on owing an iPhone - she doesn't care what size or model, as long as it is an iPhone.  It would appear that she does not know a single female friend (and she seems to have a lot) who uses an Android phone, as she is forced to.  When walking down the street, she looks at every phone other people are using, and if it is an iPhone, she knows which model.   (It's like walking around with an annoying car obsessed guy who comments on every single car passing on the street, regardless of what you may be talking about.)  

My wife objects to any 15 year old being gifted a $500 (minimum!) phone which is eminently lose-able or broken, yet it would appear that the vast majority of other parents of teenage girls don't care.  Maybe many are hand-me-downs from parents who upgrade?

I am very happy with my $350 Android (Moto G5 Plus, in case you had forgotten), and my wife is happy enough with hers.   The complete domination of Apple with teenage girls is something of a puzzle to me. 

Curb your enthusiasm

It's cheering that Alabama has shown that the South is not completely mad;  on the other hand, it's a little depressing to see the racial divide in the voting pattern*:

Well, how depressing it must have been for Obama to get just 15% of the white vote there!   While today's result is much more encouraging, 70% of white voters preferred Moore?  

It's still a worry.

* that's from the Washington Post exit poll analysis, which cuts the results up in many interesting ways.

It's Christmas soon, so let's talk - Nazis

Vox talks about a new study that suggests it was economic austerity policy that helped lead to the rise of Hitler:

The standard explanation is that German voters flocked to the party in Germany in 1932 and 1933 in response to the pain of the Great Depression, which conventional parties proved unable to end. But others have sought to explain Hitler’s coup, in whole or in part, by reference to German culture’s obsession with order and authority, to centuries of virulent German anti-Semitism, and to the popularity of local clubs like veteran associations, chess clubs, and choirs that the Nazis used to help recruit.

A new paper by a team of economic historians focuses on another culprit: austerity, and specifically the package of harsh spending cuts and tax hikes that Germany's conservative Chancellor Heinrich Brüning enacted from 1930 to 1932.

In the paper, released through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gregori Galofré-Vilà of Bocconi University, Christopher M. Meissner of UC Davis, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and David Stuckler at Bocconi are clear that they don’t think austerity tells the whole story. It’s one factor among many. But they think austerity helps fill in some gaps in the conventional, Great Depression-focused narrative of the rise of the Nazis.

Over to you, Homer!

Goodbye, Sam

Labor's looking more credible with the resignation of Sam Dastyari.   If he ends up being replaced by Kristina Keneally (if she fails to take Bennelong), it's all upside as far as most people would be concerned.

Now if only Malcolm Turnbull could get Tony Abbott to resign, things would be looking even better in Parliament.  

Free market triumph

An NPR story:

Why A Pill That's 4 Cents In Tanzania Costs Up To $400 In The U.S.

The further adventures of Margot & Robert

Someone should be running a contest for sequel storylines for both Margot and Robert (with an emphasis on the American setting):

For Margot, all of the alternatives I've thought of so far is that she:

a.   buys a pistol and get a concealed carry licence;
b.   calls Gloria Allred;
c.   finds religion and marries a Republican 5 years older than Robert;
d.   organises the next campus Slut Walk;
e.   experiments with lesbianism;
f.    re-locates to Minneapolis to take up job as assistant producer in small television news room.  (Modern twist:  soon hit on by bald boss.) 

For Robert:

a.   finally gets around to taking the dead cats out of the freezer and to the taxidermist;
b.   buys a simple bed base for his mattress and finds women will now actually stay until morning;
c.   buys the AR 15 he's always wanted and shoots up the cinema (sorry - so plausible in America it's not even vaguely witty);
d.   goes to a doctor for his sore back caused by the sexual encounter, becomes addicted to opioids (see previous rider);
e.   changes voter registration from Independent to Republican. 
f.    takes up sheriff job and finds mysterious 11 year old girl in the woods with psychokinetic powers.

A public service post, for those outside of North America

This is what Red Vines are:

Well, now that I understand that, I can see more clearly how flawed Margot's judgement was right from the second sentence.

A complicated life

A few months back, I posted about the fight that took place between Max Eastman and Ernest Hemingway, caused by the latter not caring for a book review by the former.

I knew little about Eastman, but I see there's a review of a biography about him at Reason, which begins:

"It doesn't cheapen the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject," writes Christoph Irmscher, "to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism." What follows is the life of Max Eastman—poet, nudist, women's suffragist, war resister, socialist editor, and finally a self-described "libertarian conservative."

He makes today's "libertarian conservatives" seem rather boring.  

But then again, boring is sometimes more praiseworthy than "incident filled."   I see from another review of the same book that his sex life was ridiculously active:

When he was young these affairs could be sexy and glamorous. As he aged, they came to seem sad and compulsive. “My love, I would give my soul to lie in your arms tonight,” he wrote to the 24-year-old Florence Deshon in 1917, when he was 34. Twelve years later, at the age of 46, he was making a version of the same speech to the 17-year-old painter Ione Robinson, a protégé of his second wife. A decade later, now 56, he wrote to the 18-year-old Creigh Collins: “I want to sit all day in the big arm chair with your head warm between my knees, and poetry, poetry floating around me on your young voice as though thrushes carried its meaning to my ear.” A year later he impregnated his secretary, the 25-year-old Florence Norton. When she asked for his help in getting an abortion, “Max provided a doctor’s address but otherwise became ‘hysterical’ and essentially abandoned her.” While she was getting a “painful, nauseating abortion,” Eastman was at his house in Croton-on-Hudson, safely back in the orbit of his wife.  

But here is why he is remembered from his early, pro-Communist days:

The list of things Eastman did that mattered on the left, from about 1910 to 1940, is staggering. He published John Reed on the Bolshevik Revolution and Randolph Bourne against the war. He smuggled Lenin’s last testament out of Russia, and translated Trotsky into English. He stood up to the U.S. government, and won, when they tried to imprison him for spreading sedition in The Masses. He was one of the earliest American Trotskyists, and then one of the most important skeptics and rejecters of Trotskyism. He was also, in everything he did, an important symbol to many of a certain way of being and acting.

Then he swung around:

After breaking with the socialist left, Eastman didn’t cease to be good-looking or charismatic, but the easy alignment between his persona and his politics broke down. He began writing for Reader’s Digest, perhaps the least revolutionary of American publications. He articulated a more conservative politics, in defense of the un-romantic virtues of liberal democracy against the revolutionary claims of socialism. He became a cautious defender of Joseph McCarthy, and a scourge of left-wing and liberal intellectuals whom he believed were wrong on communism and the Soviet Union.

A bit like Steve Kates, who says he went from youthful hippy Lefty to intensely uncritical Trump lover, but about 10 times more interesting.

That story

Well, noticing one of the first recommendations on Twitter of the short story "Cat Person" in the New Yorker, I did read it yesterday. And yes, it does show how memorable and good a short story can be.

There's an interview with the writer, who is probably stunned at how suddenly famous her story is, at the magazine too.   She sounds pretty sensible.  Read it after the story.

I probably found the young woman more annoying and blameworthy for her post coital predicament than the author intended.  But yeah, the last word is a killer as far as the guy is concerned.

Must limit reading

I see that tweets after the first screening of The Last Jedi are extremely positive.  However, I am reluctant to look too much into comments anywhere about this film in case of spoilers.  Unfortunately, I think it was on a Reddit thread that I learned the fate of Han before I saw Force Awakens.

Official reviews in the mainstream press are usually safe.  I will just scan them as they become available.