Why now?

Doesn't it seem very odd that no one seems to know why exactly the US is sabre rattling Iran?  As the BBC says:

Mr Pompeo cancelled a trip to Berlin to meet with Iraqi leaders during a four-hour stop in the capital Baghdad.

The visit came days after a US aircraft carrier was deployed to the region, which officials said was in response to threats to US forces and its allies from Iran.

On Tuesday it was revealed the US was sending B-52 bombers to the region.

The US has given little information about the exact nature of the reported threat, which Iran has dismissed as nonsense.

John Bolton, the US national security adviser, said only that the US was acting "in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" on announcing the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln on Sunday.

Does anyone sensible trust Bolton's judgement in such matters?

Things that I wish weren't going on right now

In the context of an election campaign where the polling is closer than it should be, I do wish that we weren't seeing:

*  eggs being thrown at any Coalition politician,

*  animal rights activists invading farms (although it hasn't happened for a few weeks), or

*  the fight over Folau.

All of these issues are capable of motivating culture war sympathy to the Coalition side by undecideds, who are (in some cases), so stupid as to be considering voting for the ridiculously politically vacuous parties of Hanson and Palmer, despite their clear, terrible, history of just being in politics as self indulgent careerists and attracting nutters as candidates.

I am surprised at the ability of Palmer advertising to make unengaged people forget what a true flake he is.   Disgustingly, Morrison and the Coalition should be blasting Palmer for his corporate behaviour with both barrels, but for their political advantage, they aren't.   

John Quiggin on the cost of carbon emissions reduction

A very clear and readable explanation by John Quiggin on the matter of modelling the cost of carbon emissions reduction.

Maximum sentence please

As a class of crime, there's something particularly vicious and nasty about road rage assaults, especially when they come after pursuing someone for kilometres.  Nine times out of ten they suggest an assailant either completely off his face on some drug or other, or full of obnoxious male entitlement, or both.

This guy completely deserves a maximum sentence - and governments need to be publicising road rage punishments at cinema or where ever stupid young men might see them. 

Back to GoT

Heh:  Slate has a whole article on the coffee cup sighting.  

Fantasy land, and the Labor launch

Ha!   What a bunch of cowards.  After months/years of "the Liberals must be destroyed" because the party won't go Trump enough for them, various Catallaxy commenters are falling back into line with "with reluctance, I will be voting Liberal because a Shorten Labor government will destroy the country."   Some, I admit, are holding out, but at the end of the day most will fall into line.

And they live in a fantasy land that, if only the Coalition would go wingnut Right on climate change, the whole issue will go away.  Here's lizzie, the Facebook-iest of commenters there:

If the Libs win I hope there is enough sense in the result for them to drop the RET like a hot brick and start building some coal-fired power stations. Also drop exploding batteries, including the big one called Snowy 11. Then a Royal Commission into Climate Science would be useful to get some realism into the lives of crying (and acting) children. 

Yes, sure.  After rejecting the need for Royal Commissions on useful things, they want a totally pointless one on climate change, as if the ageing contrarians, if they live long enough, will front up and repeat arguments discredited a decade or more ago and convince the Commission that everyone else has been wrong for all this time.

On another point:   I didn't see much of the Labor launch in Brisbane, but it was a triumph of - something - that they managed to get Rudd and Gillard entering together and showing that Kevin can can even bear to make eye contact and rub shoulders with her now.   Was he drugged, or is there some other explanation?

Anyway, it was pretty heartening, really, in the interests of seeing Labor win:

Rupert's reasons

Given the rabid pro-Coalition coverage in the Murdoch press, it's interesting to remember this reported from last year:

According to reports in the ABC and The Australian Financial Review that differ in detail rather than substance, days before Turnbull was forced to walk the plank on August 31, Murdoch told fellow billionaire Kerry Stokes, the Perth-based chairman of Seven West, “Malcolm has to go.”

Stokes apparently disagreed.

"That means we get Bill Shorten and the CFMEU,” he told Murdoch in a version of the story reported by the AFR.

Not to worry, says Murdoch, according to the ABC report, "They'll only be in for three years – it won't be so bad. I did alright under Labor and the Painters and Dockers; I can make money under Shorten and the CFMEU."

I can only assume that one or more of the following factors are currently rattling around Rupert's decrepit looking head:

*  Rupert has had second thoughts about how he could make money under Shorten;

*  Rupert wants to see his "king maker" judgement vindicated at the polls;

*   Rupert really got his nose out of joint when Shorten refused to meet with him (which is something Shorten really has not received enough credit for.)

What was I saying about Poland? (Part 2, I think)

At The Guardian:

A woman has been arrested on suspicion of offending religious sentiment, after posters bearing an image of the Virgin Mary with her halo painted in the colours of the rainbow flag appeared in the city of Płock in central Poland.

The Polish interior minister, Joachim Brudziński, announced on Twitter on Monday that a person had been arrested for “carrying out a profanation of the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa”.

A Płock police spokeswoman confirmed a 51-year-old woman had been arrested over the alleged offence. The woman had been abroad, but upon her return, the police entered and searched her home, where they found several dozen images of the Virgin Mary with the rainbow-coloured halo.

The “Black Madonna of Częstochowa” is a revered Byzantine icon that resides in the monastery of Jasna Góra, a UN world heritage site and Poland’s holiest Catholic shrine.

Offending religious feeling is a crime under the Polish penal code. If convicted, the woman could face a prison sentence of up to two years.

 Update:  can someone point Andrew Bolt to this article, because I see he gets really upset with religious interference in art.  Well, sometimes, anyway:

Permafrost worry

That commentary piece that has appeared in Nature on the great uncertainties in the amount of greenhouse gas likely to come from melting permafrost is indeed a worry.    The basic message is that things are going faster in the North than anyone expected:

Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.

But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.

Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes². Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.

This type of thawing is a serious problem for communities living around the Arctic (see ‘Arctic permafrost’). Roads buckle, houses become unstable. Access to traditional foods is changing, because it is becoming dangerous to travel across the land to hunt. Families cannot reach lines of game traps that have supported them for generations.

In short, permafrost is thawing much more quickly than models have predicted, with unknown consequences for greenhouse-gas release. Researchers urgently need to learn more about it. Here we outline how. 

 There current guesstimate as to how much worse it could be than that in current models:

We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills, could release between 60 billion and 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300. This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually. Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20% of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50%. Gradual thawing affects the surface of frozen ground and slowly penetrates downwards. Sudden collapse releases more carbon per square metre because it disrupts stockpiles deep in frozen layers.

Furthermore, because abrupt thawing releases more methane than gradual thawing does, the climate impacts of the two processes will be similar⁷. So, together, the impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate could be twice that expected from current models.

The rarity of a TV show that ends well

I see via Twitter that the dying episodes of Game of Thrones are continuing to upset quite a lot of long time viewers.   So someone asked "what TV series ended for you in a satisfying way", and people are nominating things I don't agree with (the ending of MASH left me cold, but I had stopped caring much about the show long before the final season) or shows I haven't seen at all (The Shield).

And it's true, so few lengthy TV series do end in a satisfactory way.   Most people were underwhelmed with Seinfeld's final episode;  even worse, it seems The X Files make a final series which everyone simply ignored after the poor quality of the penultimate come back series.   Most sitcoms go on for about 3 seasons too long, and I stop watching them long before the end anyway.

I continue an old devotion to the Mary Tyler Moore show, and I've probably mentioned before that I did think the ending of that show was funny - new management at the TV station recognise that ratings are bad, and decide that the problem isn't the ridiculous newsreader Ted, but the rest of the newsroom which promptly gets the sack. 

I'm struggling to remember another show that I did watch to the very end, and found satisfying in the last episode.

A culinary note

I'm still in long weekend mode, ok?

The culinary note: I really like the distinctive flavour of washed rind cheeses.  They should be more popular than they seem to be. 

I'm eating one from Italy as I write.   This makes me feeler wealthier than I am, and if it got here via airplane it's probably a climate change sin, but I am trying to support the fancy deli/cafe/restaurant in King Street, which seems to have so many experienced staff I fear that Brisbane isn't sophisticated  enough for it.

The Australian sparkling wine I am having with it is quite pleasing too, and carries no guilt.

The passion post

It's the Labour Day holiday in Brisbane.  Beautiful clear blue sky and 24 degrees.  May to September is just great weather here...pity the daylight hours get short.

Anyway, a boring post about this plant:

We have a yellow passionfruit vine growing out of a not very big pot, over an arch that' only about 1.5 m wide.  It is about 2 years old and has produced fruit before, but at the moment, it has gone berserk.   I reckon there are about 35 fruit coming on this  rather small area vine which we basically ignore, apart from watering in dry weather.

I have no idea what will happen if I actually fertilize it.  Or should I just let a happy plant be?

Election on track (I think)

So I've been reading Twitter and some other commentary, and watched Insiders.

Two weeks out from the election I think the view has firmed up that Labor is not in danger of losing the election after all.  Apparently, the betting market has turned in Labor's favour again; people think the social media campaign being run by the Liberals looks desperate and run by people without a clue (the Star Wars themed tweets, for example); and Josh Frydenberg looked and sounded far from confident on Insiders today, which also brought the delightful news that Tony Abbot really is looking likely to loss his seat.  

The best thing that can come from a Labor win would be that it involves not just Abbott but other conservatives losing seats and sparking the internal confrontation that the Coalition has to have in order to rid itself of climate change denialism.  It would be a real disaster if the Liberals scraped home and avoided that fate. 

On a side note, I see from a peruse of the Catallaxy threads that an old commenter DD (Daddy Dave, I think) has turned back up after what would be years of absence.   He used to be one of few moderate Righties on the site, and nearly always maintained a polite disposition.   I think he used to occasionally look in here too, but commented that he thought it a boring and would never have a big readership because it didn't really attempt to engage with readers, or some such.  C'est la vie.

I find it to believe he will continue commenting at Catallaxy for long, given the ludicrous Down Under American Right Culture War site that it has become.  But we will see...

An unromantic lead

A review of Long Shot begins:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in cinematic comedies of the past decade or so, that just about every woman on-screen must be in want of Seth Rogen. From Knocked Up to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to Neighbors, Hollywood has continually presented the star as a romantic lead while marveling at the supposed ludicrousness of the concept, to the extent that his new vehicle is a rom-com called Long Shot. The premise? That Rogen, playing to type as an avuncular, bearded fellow who’s no stranger to sweatpants, gets entangled in a relationship with an impressive and a spectacularly beautiful politician played by Charlize Theron.

I could be mistaken, but isn't the defining aspect of a Seth Rogan film that they have quite a lot of pretty crude sexual humour?   As such, I have never seen one of his films, and would guess that he and his ilk are behind the death of decent romantic comedies we have witnessed over about the last 10 - 15 years.

Even I find this a weird approach to policing

I may give the impression that there isn't a government intervention into lessening illicit drug use that I don't like, but even I find it pretty amazingly intrusive that police in Sydney users sniffer dogs (and strip searches) for drugs on your average commuter crowd at places like Central Station.    I mean, even for someone like me who hates the drug taking aspect of music festivals and am dubious about policies that semi endorse it can see that random searches of commuters is just extraordinary.

The only thing I can say about this is - did Labor have any different policy before the last election?  If so, sorry people, but you got the police state you voted for...*



*  I see that Labor was saying that music festival pill testing should not be off the table, so they do sound as if they were reform minded.