From the Jerusalem Post

My Word: In the holiday spirit | Columnists | Jerusalem Post:

In an op-ed in the Post on March 3, Michael Bar-Zohar noted that a survey published last month by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center indicates that 46.7 percent of the Palestinians believe that Hamas defeated Israel in the recent fighting in Gaza. On a visit to Egypt many years ago, I was taken aback to discover how many places marked the October 6 War 'victory.' I am not, however, surprised that Egypt - which did nothing to improve life in Gaza during the decades in which it was in control - does not want anything to do with its Palestinian brethren there even now. Let Israel open its border with Gaza, Egypt can't risk it, goes the common thinking in the Egyptian capital.

The terror attack in Cairo a week ago, in which a French schoolchild was killed, shows yet again that they do have reason to fear Islamization. Global jihad is, after all, global. But don't say it too loudly in London or Paris - you might offend the local Muslims.

Nothing like humility

Architect of desire: Frank Lloyd Wright's private life was even more unforgettable than his buildings

I recall from some documentary on him that FLW was an eccentric character with a convoluted love life that featured a gruesome axe murder, but I did not remember how much he liked himself:

When questioned about his vanity, Wright justified himself by saying: "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose honest arrogance."

Heh.

Why not to believe in carbon capture & storage

Carbon capture and storage | Trouble in store | The Economist

Here's a detailed article from the Economist explaining the huge uncertainties and problems with carbon storage and capture. Some key points:

In 2005 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists that advises the United Nations on global warming, came up with a range of $14-91 for each tonne of emissions avoided through CCS. Last year, the IEA suggested that the price for the first big plants would be $40-90. McKinsey, a consultancy, has arrived at an estimate of €60-90, or $75-115.

Either way, that is more than the price of emissions in the European Union: about €10 a tonne. America does not have a carbon price at all yet. A bill defeated last year in the Senate would have yielded a carbon price as low as $30 in 2020, according to an official analysis. So CCS might not be financially worthwhile for years to come....

Omar Abbosh, of Accenture, a consultancy, says that carbon trading as practised in the EU and contemplated in America does not give enough certainty about future carbon prices to justify an investment in a CCS plant. Mr Paelinck of Alstom agrees: no board would risk spending €1 billion on one, he says, without generous subsidies.

The article indicates that the cost of individual CCS plants could be anything from $1 billion to $1.8 billion US dollars. (And that might be based on the fact that the USA apparently has a pre-built system of pipelines in their oil areas that could be used for transported the CO2. I assume Australia does not have anywhere near as extensive a system.)

And will it even work long term? Even small leaks would be a problem:

Carbon dioxide forms an acid when it dissolves in water. This acid can react with minerals to form carbonates, locking away the carbon in a relatively inert state. But it can also eat through the man-made seals or geological strata intended to keep it in place. A leakage rate of just 1% a year, Greenpeace points out, would lead to 63% of the carbon dioxide stored in any given reservoir being released within 100 years, almost entirely undoing the supposed environmental benefit.

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Turnbull worth reading

PM's cheap money shot | The Australian

Malcolm Turnbull's take on the origins of the economic crisis, and Rudd's silly summer essay on the topic, is pretty good.

Hooked on worms

Can Parasitic Hookworms Help In Treatment Of Multiple Sclerosis?

Get this for a cute acronym:

The WIRMS (Worms for Immune Regulation in MS) study ...

Some doctor probably sat up in bed and had a "eureka" moment when he thought of that.

Anyhow, the study itself is kind of interesting:

The £400,000, three-year project funded by the MS Society, aims to determine whether infection with a small and harmless number of the worms can lead to an improvement on the severity of MS over a 12 month period...

The 25 worms are microscopic and are introduced painlessly through a patch in the arm. They are then flushed out after nine months.

Given that cancers can be fought by the immune system too, is there any anti-cancer parasite out there to be found?

Watchmen not recommended

Geek boys everywhere who are into graphic novels seems to be all a-Twitter about the movie version of Watchmen, a movie with the odd distinction of featuring (amongst others) the first blue nude male superhero.

I'm no fan of the whole superhero genre, despite quite liking the last Spiderman. But Anthony Lane's review of Watchmen certainly puts me off any idea of seeing it (and is pretty funny.) Some highlights:

One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch...

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along...

But here's the reason I won't see it:

The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead.

Thanks, but no thanks.

UPDATE: here's Dana Stevens in Slate on the violence in the movie:

Whenever a fight begins (and there's one about every 15 minutes in this 160-minute movie), brace yourself for an abundance of narratively pointless bone-crunching, finger-twisting, limb-sawing, and skull-hacking. These extreme sports are often filmed in Matrix-style slow motion, a technique that tends to grind the story to a halt. Like the money shots in porn movies, Snyder's action scenes are an end in themselves—gratifying if you like that sort of thing, gross if you don't.

Yet the movie is getting a 65% approval rating at Rottentomatoes. Do you ever get the feeling that reviewers (and the public at large,) have become just too immune to graphic movie violence?

UPDATE 2: The two Salon movie reviewers discuss the violence in this video. (One of them thinks highly of the movie, the other doesn't.) Whenever you get a reviewer talking of a violent sequence being "right on the edge" of what's acceptable to depict, (and that is from the guy who likes the movie,) it's almost certainly a sign that it is, in fact, highly objectionable and over that edge.

UPDATE 3: To my surprise, both David Stratton & Margaret Pomeranz on At the Movies liked it a lot, and hardly mentioned the violence. Oh well, just confirms my view that they are both fairly erratic reviewers. I can't say that I reliably find either of them align with my tastes.

GG gets noticed

Both Andrew Bolt and Michelle Grattan write about the, ahem, unusually high profile of Quentin Bryce as Governor-General.

Bolt finds her being far too political in her role, and I don't disagree.

You get the feeling from Michelle Grattan's column that even those with more left leaning sympathies may be feeling that Bryce's profile is higher than it should be.

She notes that (I shall paraphrase here), having already visited every country where an Australian is doing something useful, the GG has decided to visit countries where she'll have a hard time finding an Aussie outside of the consulate:

Africa? That's right. Less than a year into the job, Bryce this month embarks on a seven-nation tour of the continent, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Ethiopia (with stopovers, the total is nine countries).

It might seem an odd destination for an Australian governor-general so early in her term. But it is all part of the Rudd Government's Africa strategy. This has two drivers.

First, Africa is seen as an area neglected by Australia for many years (Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke were Africanists — but that was a long time ago). Second — and very pertinently — the Government is lobbying intensively for a United Nations Security Council seat, and there are more than 50 African votes.

Bryce's African trip is tailored to the Government's foreign policy. In effect, she's an envoy at the highest level.

Sounds like a Rudd vanity project in reality.

Let's hope the Governor-General is offered some odd traditional tribal food that she must eat to be polite. (The Ethiopians will probably serve her a gigantic feast when they assume from her disturbingly thin frame that Australia must be suffering a famine too. Aren't steak and dairy products allowed on the menu at Yarralumla?) I'll be looking for the close up of her grimace at the official gallery, where's it's all Quentin all the time.

But seriously, is someone going to start questioning the travel costs for this Governor-General, and the utility of this trip in particular?

Pot meets kettle

The Age Blogs: Waste of Space: All Men Are Liars

Why on earth does Fairfax continue to run the Sam de Brito blog when he churns out nasty posts like this?

Lock him out

Rebel Catholic priest hopes for positive mediation - ABC News

The more he speaks, the more he appears to be an offensive goose who should be locked out of "his" church.

I refer to Peter Kennedy, sacked priest of St Mary's South Brisbane, whose idea of mediation is not only getting his own way, but punishing those who dared point out to the Church that he was no longer acting like a Catholic:

A mediation process involving solicitors for Father Kennedy is expected to begin next week.

Father Kennedy says he is hopeful of a positive outcome, but until it is finished, he is not going anywhere.

"The realistic outcome would be for me to be reinstated by the Archbishop as the administrator, the vigilantes who reported me to Rome be disciplined and I particularly and the community should be found not to be guilty of denying Catholic doctrine," he said.

Where are the flying monkeys when you need them?

How not to endear yourself to the French

Roger Cohen: One France is enough - International Herald Tribune

Roger Cohen worries that America is being turned into France MkII by Obama's policies (although he blames Bush for the initial problem):

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

He should have just gone all the way and incorporated the phrase "cheese eating surrender monkeys".

On attitudes to drugs

Who are the addicts, the victims or their families? | Melanie Reid - Times Online

This article talks about a couple of notable drug cases in the UK at the moment, including an awful one in which a toddler died at the hands of a mother's heroin addicted boyfriend. Reid writes:

His mother sold her body for drugs while her son was dying from a fatal blow that ruptured his duodenum. The toddler, who had 40 injuries to his body, was then taken to a squalid drugs party, where he vomited brown liquid while, all around him, young addicts partied. They laughed at him being sick. Hours later he was dead. His killer was convicted on Tuesday.

Brandon was not on any at-risk register. Why should he have been, when social policy emphasises that drugs users be supported in their lifestyle, not told to wise up? From top to bottom in the existing system, that ethos rules.

Addicts are official victims. They are not regarded as people with a choice. The presumption, therefore, is on keeping their children at home with them, not removing them. Suggestions that contraception be a condition of receiving methadone for addicts caused an outcry in Scotland, with accusations about eugenics.

Which take precedence? The human rights of the infant born to the junkie, or the right of the junkie to have both lifestyle and children?

I bet that one of the practical problems with taking the child away would be that, as soon as it happened, the mother would claim she has broken up with the boyfriend, put herself on methadone, and then demand the child back. Or alternatively, if she takes a year to sort herself out, you have had the child bond with a foster family, only to be given back to the mother.

Perhaps what is needed is absolute rigidity in the rules: such as addiction to certain drugs as a mother of any children under 5 means you've lost the kid, permanently. Maybe you could allow contact rights in the future (once out of addiction), and always be kept informed as to how the kid is doing. But you don't ever get the child back.

Top post

Manne’s talking again about what bores him | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Top marks to Andrew Bolt for this post about Robert Manne's confusion as to whether or not he knows anything about economics.

Anti toilet paper

Christian Wolmar: Let's wipe out toilet paper | guardian.co.uk

Much explicit talk about wiping bottoms in this Guardian column.

Clearly, he needs to travel to Japan to really appreciate bidet technology.

Last Christmas, I saw a stall in a shopping centre promoting a Korean brand of bidet attachment to fit on top of an existing toilet. I don't think it was Hyundai, but I forget the name. Cost was around a $1000 I think.

Maybe environmentalists could argue that this is a good use for Kevin Rudd's "stimulus".

If they took off around the world, maybe it could mean a bidet led economic recovery from the decades of malaise in Japan (and now Korea.) Or perhaps Australia could establish its own bidet manufacturing plants, using all those left over car assembly line employees. (Suggested company slogan for a bidet start up: "Leading from the rear".)

Just trying to be helpful...

Labor not so good for aborigines

Without the will, the intervention is left without a way | The Australian

Paul Toohey reckons the improvements for Northern Territory aborigines have slowed and will continue to do so due to the Left's ideological opposition to the Howard intervention.

< esm >Gee, didn't see that coming. < dsm >*

* Engage/Disengage Sarcasm Mode

Cultural difference noted

Cash handout? Stupid, wasteful idea, Japanese say

From the report:

Prime Minister Taro Aso is touting a one-time cash handout of 12,000 yen as the centerpiece of a stimulus package to revive the world’s second-largest economy, mired in one of its worst slumps since World War II.

But polls show that most Japanese oppose the idea—though many confess they’ll take the money anyway.

They argue that most people will just save the money, not spend it. Others say it’s a shortsighted plan that exacerbates the government’s ballooning budget deficit.

(That's about $190 AUD by the way.)

A telephone poll indicates that 75% disapprove of the idea.

In Australia last month, 57% of people surveyed by Newspoll approved the stimulus package (including cash handouts of $900.) (Well, they thought it would be good for the economy, at least.)

Take now, pay later.

No questions please

Look, I'll only post this if everyone promises not to make any joke-y comment about why I was reading a CSIRO journal's review of the new edition of "The Joy of Sex". (It is indeed the second time I have mentioned that book.)

OK? You promised.

Anyhow, here's the most curious bit from the review:

As a long standing sex educator, researcher and therapist, I have learned new snippets from this book, including the use of ear lobe manipulation and the big toe as a tool for full sexual satisfaction and orgasm.

The review does not further elaborate.

I wonder if Julia Gillard knows about this?

Too much information, Rod

Thirteen, Alfie? I’d almost given up on sex by the age of 13 | The Spectator

What to make of Rod Liddle's column in the Spectator in which he recalls his youthful sex life which started at 12? He can't quite understand the uproar over "Alfie", although he does ignore the point that young Alfie may be 13, but looks about 9. If he looked older than his age, the tabloid photos would not have attracted half as much attention.

I did note a few months back that reading books such as Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs does at least remind one that young teenage sex did take place in the 40's and 50's as well as now.

Still, I can't help but be a little irritated by the confession of youthful illicit activities (whether they be sexual or related to drugs, alcohol, etc) by the middle aged and relatively successful in life.

I know that there are not many 12 year olds reading the Spectator or Clive James and thinking to themselves "well if they did it, I may as well too." But there's something hypocritical about public and humorous confession of behaviour which they would not have wanted their own child imitating that annoys me in any event.

Babies make us nicer

Basics - In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue - NYTimes.com

A primatologist argues that:

...human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

The difference this makes, she argues, is that humans developed a comparatively good temperament. Sounds vaguely plausible, but the main reason I wanted to do a post about this is because of the odd hypothetical example she gives:

...our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.

So be warned: never fly Chimp Air, no matter how cheap the fare.

It gives me great pleasure...

Regular readers could guess how happy it would make me to see David Byrne appearing on Colbert Report. (The answer for irregular readers: very.)

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

David Byrne Pt. 1

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

(Honestly, it is really is a very relaxed and enjoyable interview of the Colbert variety.)

You can then watch Byrne performing the chair choreography song I like from his new CD.

Important stem cell news

It's good that the use of embryos for stem cell experiments or therapy may turn out to be unnecessary, although I still suspect that much of the promise of stem cell therapy as whole has been oversold.

Discover magazine explains more.