New reason not to go down to the woods today...

This sort of thing, if it turned up on some American crime show, would probably make you think  "how unlikely is that!":

A secret "gingerbread house" deep in a forest sounds like something from a fairy tale, but investigators in Seattle say the one they found was anything but. Now, 56-year-old Daniel Wood faces charges of possession of depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, according to the Seattle Times. 

An employee for Washington's Department of Natural Resources discovered bedding, food and a large amount of child pornography in an elaborate treehouse cabin in the Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest about 50 miles east of Seattle in Nov. 2016.

This set off a months-long federal investigation, that eventually led to Wood.

Forest Service employees had known about the treehouse for about seven years, but nobody knew exactly who had built it. The last time it had been inspected was nearly three years ago, and no photos of the cabin existed....

The employee with the DNR heard rumors of the cabin and decided to try to find it. He looked for it on five separate occasions, and then finally found the treehouse and its cache of pornography.

It looked like a gingerbread house on the outside. The cabin was "dark brown in color and built approximately 8 feet off the ground," according to FBI's Seattle office. "There was a porch around the structure, a front door, and windows on the side, as well as a pitched roof, and a ladder from the ground to the porch.

But, when he looked inside, the employee found something startling.

"On all four walls were framed pictures of fairy-like figures or of what appeared to be young girls, approximately 8-12 years old," per FBI reports.

 Here's the "house":

A hormonal post

There's quite a detailed, balanced and interesting article up at The Guardian: 

Does testosterone make you mean?

The answer seems a definite "it's complicated."

It does note one experiment I don't recall reading about:

Because women are more responsive than men to supplemental testosterone, they were used in one of the key studies into how testosterone essentially removes the burden of empathy from moral decision-making. It’s known as the “trolley car experiment”. Picture a runaway tram hurtling down the tracks towards five unsuspecting workers. There’s a lever that would divert the tram to another track, but there’s someone working on that track, too. “You have to kill somebody to save five others,” says Ryan, and you have to act fast.

The researchers at Utrecht University gave some of the subjects a shot of testosterone the night before presenting them with the dilemma. “The number of respondents who were willing to kill in order to save people, and their confidence in carrying out the act were enhanced,” says Ryan. “And the equivocation they demonstrated was significantly reduced.”

Based on this, I diagnose Chidi in The Good Place as suffering from low testosterone!

(By the way, I've nearly finished Season 2 of that show, and it continues to be a delight.  I see that it has been renewed for a 3rd series, which gives me some concern as to how the creativity of the show can continue to be sustained.) 

Another tax cut fail

I've noted many times how the Laffer inspired and endorsed tax cut experiment of Kansas had been a failure, but I think I had missed that Oklahoma had gone down a similar path to similar failure.  From a report in February this year:

Riding high on the oil boom of the late 2000s, the state followed the Kansas model and slashed taxes. But the promised prosperity never came. In many cases, it was just the opposite.

Around 20 percent of Oklahoma's schools now hold classes just four days a week. Last year, Highway Patrol officers were given a mileage limit because the state couldn't afford to put gas in their tanks. Medicaid provider rates have been cut to the point that rural nursing homes and hospitals are closing, and the prisons are so full that the director of corrections says they're on the brink of a crisis.

In her State of the State address Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin expressed the state's frustration.
"We have two clear choices," she said. "We can continue down a path of sliding backwards, or we can choose the second path, which is to say 'Enough is enough! We can do better! We deserve better! Our children deserve better, too!' "

Many of the tax cuts and subsequent revenue failures have happened on Fallin's watch. Now she wants to fix it, and she's gotten behind a large coalition of business leaders who have come up with a plan to raise taxes and enact reforms.

Where's the "tax cuts always work" crew on this? 

Can someone explain?

Judith Sloan makes this claim re dividend imputation, and while she seems to claim that this should be obvious to commentators, if not us poor plebs, I just don't get how it makes sense:

When an individual earns less than $18,200 and pays no tax, then the individual receives a cash ­refund of 30 per cent. This is only fair. Without cash refunds, the ­effect on very low-income earners would be a tax of 30 per cent on dividends.

Why?   How is it that paying no tax on the dividend and not receiving a cash rebate for tax not paid has the effect of a tax of 30 per cent on dividends??

She seems so apparently confident on the point that I don't know whether it is a problem with my English comprehension, or maths comprehension, or am I am simply being gaslighted??

Go 5-2

I really need to diet again, and once again I will probably try the 5-2 diet, from which I fell off the wagon last time because of apparent reflux issue that started to develop.   I think that's sorted.  Next time, got to get onto 6-1 as a maintenance diet.

Anyway, the diet seems to do good things with the way the body processes fat in the blood.  Sounds good:

In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Surrey examined the impact of the 5:2 diet on the body's ability to metabolise and clear fat and glucose after a meal and compared it to the effects of weight-loss achieved via a more conventional daily calorie restriction diet. Previous studies in this field have predominantly focused on blood risk markers taken in the fasted state, which only tend to be, in for the minority of the time, overnight.

During the study, overweight participants were assigned to either the 5:2 diet or a daily calorie restriction diet and were required to lose five per cent of their weight. Those on the 5:2 diet ate normally for five days and for their two fasting days consumed 600 calories, using LighterLife Fast Foodpacks, whilst those on the daily diet were advised to eat 600 calories less per day than their estimated requirements for weight maintenance (in the study women ate approx. 1400 calories, men ate approx. 1900 calories/day).

Under the expert guidance of the team, those on the 5:2 diet achieved 5 per cent weight-loss in 59 days compared to those on the daily calorie restriction diet who took in 73 days. 27 participants completed the study, with approximately 20 per cent of participants in both groups dropped out because they either could not tolerate the diet or were unable to attain their 5 per cent weight-loss target.

Researchers found that following weight-loss, participants who followed the 5:2 diet cleared the fat (triglyceride) from a meal given to them more efficiently than the participants undertaking the daily diet. Although there were no differences in post meal glucose handling, researchers were surprised to find differences between the diets in c-peptide (a marker of insulin secretion from the pancreas) following the meal, the significance of which will need further investigation.

Self involved? Moi?

It's a testament to the dearth of decent conservative writing available in Australia today that Quadrant has run a tedious book review by Catallaxy inmate "lizzie" - the one with the obsessional need to tell everyone what a fabulous lifestyle she leads with the fantastic husband who adores her, after having risen above a poverty stricken childhood in the West from a family with its fair share of mental illness.   (As is typical with the commenters at that blog, she is apparently a reformed "lefty" who has found the true path of political righteousness.  Climate change is, of course, in her and her allegedly smart husband's view, part of the grand conspiracy of socialist domination of the world.)

As is her wont, the review is roughly 50% about herself. 

Strangely, some at Catallaxy think her circuitous, enormously self-involved and self promoting writing style is very readable.   It is, in fact, the opposite.   She's like the conservative mirror image of Helen Razor, now that I think of it.

Unwanted movie review: Road to Perdition

Finally got around to watching the all star cast (Hanks, Newman, Law, Craig) in the Sam Mendes directed 2002 gangster film, Road to Perdition.

First:  what a fantastic looking movie.   I've only seen a few other Mendes films, and while I don't think American Beauty was particularly memorable for its cinematography (or for anything, really, other than a very unconvincing plot contrivance), I did think Skyfall was a remarkably great looking film.  With Road, it's just every single shot is gorgeous - a combination of fantastically detailed art direction, a cinematographer who I should probably look up, and good direction.   (It's always a bit unclear to me who to credit most between director and cinematographer as to the look of a film, but I assume the director tells the latter what he/she wants and checks throughout that he/she is getting it.)

As to story:  a bit thin and unconvincing in terms of exposition.   One key fortuitous event is left completely unexplained (anyone who has seen it probably knows what I mean), and it's a bit puzzling that more care was not taken to explain why or how it happened; or for that matter, why a more convincing motivation of the crucial killing that sets the story going is not really given.   The movie is based on a graphic novel, and it seems easy to blame that as the reason.    I think it fair to say that I haven't ever seen a film of such origin that has completely convinced me.  

Despite this, I thought Hanks was surprisingly good in a less than entirely sympathetic role.   All of the actors were pretty good really;  the whole movie just suffered a bit from a screenplay inadequacy that prevented it being truly great. 

Definitely worth watching, though.

About that white guy/black guy dance thing...

The controversy over whether and why (American) black guys are just natural "movers" on the dance floor compared to white dudes can look at this for a bit of evidence.   (Yeah, sorry, they just are.   Wakanda and the secret deployment of vibranium into black communities probably has something to do with it.)

Update:  further, perhaps better, evidence along the same lines:



This has also brought up a memory, but I forget which movie it's from:  the one where some older white guy - an authority figure - unexpectedly and in overt racist stereotype fashion tells the black guy to dance, it's in his blood.   What movie am I thinking of?     

An unobjectionable Cohen

Look, Nick Cohen did recently get, shall we say, somewhat carried away with apparent enthusiasm for authoritarian solutions to obesity and lifestyle induced ill health.   All well intentioned, no doubt, but over the top.

Anyway, all can be forgiven with his latest column:  Cranks have turned the world upside down, it's time to fight back.      (Subheading: Conspiracy theories were once a fringe interest. In the era of populists, they’ve now gone mainstream.)

I don't think there's anything in there worth objecting to.  

What's happening?

With Trump going on a twitter storm about the unfairness of the Mueller investigation, everyone's expecting that he's either building up to, or (possibly) testing the water for Republican support of, sacking Mueller.   I don't know that he's rational enough for testing the water; I think he's just waiting for Sean Hannity to tell him to sack Mueller or it's a crisis. 

Because, as Jonathan Swan at Axios says:

On this issue, Trump is dug in and angry. He views the leadership of the FBI as arrayed against him. And that red line he drew in the interview with the N.Y. Times last year — where he said he wouldn’t stand for Mueller prying into his family finances — still stands.

• One crucial variable in all this is Fox News. Trump feeds off the moods of his favorite hosts. If Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine Pirro turn it up a notch, saying the deep state is out to get him and Mueller is out of control, there’s no telling what Trump will do.

Don't Trump cultists see anything suspicious in their soiled political saviour freaking out when his finances are at risk of coming under scrutiny?    (Ha!, there I go again, thinking that cultists can think for themselves.) 

And isn't it a truly shocking state of affairs that Trump is so beholden to a handful of media commentators - experts at nothing other than beating up stories towards a biased conclusion - at Fox News?   

Which leads to the mystery of what is going on in the head of Rupert Murdoch:  he would obviously see the power that a handful of staff have over Trump.   Why wouldn't he want to give out subtle directions as to which way he would like Trump to jump?      If he doesn't want the turmoil that sacking Mueller would entail, why doesn't he pull strings on Hannity and that ridiculous "Judge" Pirro in that regard?     Or is it a case that he just doesn't care as long as he can count the money coming in from higher ratings?   Is constitutional quasi crisis good for his business, so he doesn't care?

It's a really bizarre situation....

Well, duh

Time magazine has a profile of Fox News's Shepard Smith, the who sticks out at the network like a sore thumb for his sometimes effective criticism and debunking of Trump.   (He's also gay, in a place renowned for straight men behaving badly.)  But how's this for the biggest understatement of this century (my bold):

Despite being the cable-news ratings leader, Fox News’ audience is also old. The median Fox News viewer in 2017 was 65 overall, the same as MSNBC, and 66 in primetime, the highest of all cable news networks. “I think that our audience skews conservative. We learn about our audience through research and data,” says Smith. A 2014 study by Pew Research Center indicated Fox News was the most-trusted news source for “consistently conservative” viewers, edging out the Wall Street Journal, Breitbart, and the Drudge Report.

How to annoy Russia

Someone at New Statesman, talking about how Britain should react to Russian assassinations on British soil, concludes:   If we really want to annoy Russia, we should cancel Brexit.   Makes some amusing sense:

So: economic sanctions are hard, war is bloody stupid, and we probably don’t want to get into the habit of trying to knock people off in Moscow restaurants. What we really need is a non-violent action that will definitely undermine Russian interests, doesn’t require US leadership and, ideally, doesn’t cost any money.

Over on Twitter, Jonnie Marbles, who you may recall from his sterling work in the field of hitting Rupert Murdoch with pies, has come up with the perfect idea: cancel Brexit. It’ll make us less dependent on the whims of Donald Trump. It will, if anything, strengthen the economy. And we all know that steps towards European unity annoy the hell out of Putin.

What’s more, the response to the events in Salisbury that's come from Brussels has been far, far warmer than the one that’s come from Washington. Earlier today, the European Parliament’s Brexit supremo Guy Verhofstadt tweeted that, “An attack against one EU & NATO country is an attack on all of us.” It’s like we’ve been beaten up, and the only one who gives a shit is the ex we just dumped in the most humiliating possible way. 

Bowling ball theory

It seems to have taken a surprisingly long time to work it out, but it does sound very likely that Politifact has correctly identified how Trump mangled a legitimate safety test into a "bowling ball" test, misunderstanding and misrepresenting its point completely in the process. 

How did he even know about this, though?   It must have been rumbling around somewhere on a wingnutty site as unfair to American cars, surely?

Of course I negotiate in bad faith - funny hey!

Even the cultist idiots, the wingnut defenders of Trump, aren't putting much effort into defending his open admission that he negotiates in bad faith - just making up claims when he had no idea if they are true or not.

Isn't it incredible that Trump admits this?  Did he do so because he thinks his guess was later vindicated?  I found that part of the quote in the initial report hard to follow.

Clarification can be found at Hot Air, which remains about the only conservative site worth visiting, explaining as follows:

Is that true, that we “lose” $17 billion a year to Canada? It is, just like you “lose” every time you go to the grocery store and hand over cash for food. But if you look more closely at the numbers, you’ll see that Trump is cherry-picking: We “lose” only if you’re comparing exports and imports of goods. If you look at the total trade balance between U.S. and Canada, which includes goods and services, we “win.” In 2016, our trade deficit with Canada in terms of goods was $12.1 billion but our trade surplus in terms of services was $24.6 billion, with exports of $54.2 billion versus imports of $26.9 billion. Even by Trump’s own strange metric of trade “winners” and “losers,” America comes out ahead overall in the relationship by about $12.5 billion.

But even if it was Canada that ended up with the surplus, the volume of trade between the two countries is so enormous that it’d be bananas to risk the relationship over a rounding error like $12.5 billion. Total trade between the U.S. and Canada in 2016 was $627.8 billion, with exports supporting more than a million American jobs. Last year, the $282 billion in goods that the U.S. sent north across the border was the largest amount of exports to any single nation on Earth. Even using Trump’s own math, the trade deficit in goods is a measly three percent of total U.S./Canada trade, which probably explains why Trudeau was insisting “we have no trade deficit.” Effectively, we don’t. And as I say, when you include services, there’s *really* no deficit. It’s a surplus for the U.S.

Slate puts it more bluntly (my bold):

Judging America’s trade performance based on goods alone would not make any sense, mind you; exports are exports, whether you’re talking about cars or financial services. But perhaps Trump heard that number, and mistakenly took it to mean that the U.S. has an overall trade deficit with Canada.

If that’s the case, it would still be a cause for concern. Trump is trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, and being misinformed about basic trade statistics makes it even less likely that he will make rational decisions about the future of the pact. 

It’s also possible that Trump is surrounded by yes-men, one of whom fed him a misleading statistic in order to confirm his own mistaken assumption. That would also obviously be cause for concern. 

But in the end, this is all just a reminder a broader problem: Our president lives in a solipsistic fantasy world, where facts mostly exist to confirm his own intuitions, and his staff either aren’t capable of correcting him or don’t want to. When it comes to legislation, that ignorance limits him to making nonsensical demands of Congress, because he simply doesn’t understand the issues. But when it comes to issues like trade, where he can unilaterally change U.S. policy with the stroke of a pen, his ignorance is an immediate menace. 

Changing a policy that never made sense

A couple of comments on Labor's proposed policy change on tax credits being able to be converted to cash for people who never paid tax anyway:

1.   How did the policy ever make any sense anyway???    It really doesn't make sense as a tax policy.   As John Kehoe writes (with my bold):

My self-funded retiree father complained during a phone conversation this week about Labor's "tax grab" on refundable dividend imputation credits.

I shot back asking why asset-rich retirees should get away with paying negative tax rates for owning shares, when younger workers like me front up at the office each day and lose 30-50 per cent in tax?

2.   Is this why it hasn't (as far as I know) yet been condemned by any of the economists who hang around the IPA and Catallaxy?

3.  It is pretty hilarious some of the examples appearing in the Murdoch press as to how it will affect people:

Update:   Davidson and the IPA were slow off the mark, but of course as the policy leaves more money in the hands of government,  they are against it.  Got to strangle tax so as to be able strangle size of government, after all.   I think there will be other economists willing to put the boot into the way Sinclair tries to spin this:

Labor’s problem is that they are being too clever by half. They want to increase taxes without clearly saying so. That is profoundly dishonest. Receiving a tax refund is not welfare. In the same way receiving your change from the supermarket isn’t corporate charity – it is a return of your own money. Millions of Australians overpay their tax liabilities each and every year and receive a refund from the government. Labor proposes to stop paying refunds to older Australians – both now and in the future....