Tempting fate

Titanic cruise to mark anniversary of ship's fateful voyage - Telegraph

The Balmoral, operated by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, whose parent company Harland and Wolff built the Titanic, has been chosen for the voyage.

It will carry 1,309 passengers - the same number that sailed on the fateful voyage - on the same route as the Titanic, leaving Southmapton in early April 2012 before docking at the Irish port of Cobh (formerly Queenstown), where the Titanic made its final call on April 11, 1912.

The cruise will continue to follow the route of the Titanic and, on April 14, it will arrive at the exact location the vessel sank some 100 years before, where there will be a special memorial ceremony between 11.40pm (when the ship hit the iceberg) and 2.20am on April 15 (when the ship sank).

Go on, admit it. You secretly would love to see some disaster happen on that cruise.

There's an up side? (And will teddy get a deportation order too?)

Gulfnews: Saudi Arabia to regulate marriages of young girls

Saudi Arabia plans to regulate the marriages of young girls, its justice minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday, after a court refused to nullify the marriage of an 8-year-old to a man 50 years her senior....

A court in the Saudi town of Onaiza upheld for the second time last week the marriage of the Saudi girl to a man who is about 50 years her senior, on condition he does not have sex with her until she reaches puberty...

The minister's comments suggested the practice of marrying off young girls would not be abolished. The regulations will seek to "preserve the rights, fending off blights to end the negative aspects of underage girls' marriage", he said.

In another Gulf News story of interest, being a child in the region can be pretty tough:

An 18-month-old baby has been declared an illegal resident by the Sharjah Naturalisation and Residency Department (SNRD) and has been given one week to leave the country after which she will get a one-year ban.

Nayana Sanjay Kumar was born in October 2007 at Al Qasimi hospital in Sharjah, but her parents, both Indians from Kerala, could not sponsor their new-born baby as their salary was not enough at the time.

The mother works legally as a nurse in a government hospital. Her labour is evidently welcome, just not a baby with rather distinctive eyebrows.

A worthy Bolt

Truth is beyond the Age’s imagination | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Top marks to Andrew Bolt for his illustrated rebuttal of a profoundly ignorant Age editorial.

Condom talk

Yes, I'm late to the party in commenting on the Pope and Pell and their comments on condoms in Africa.

I'm finally prompted to do so by an article yesterday in The Age by a couple of Australian AIDS researchers who cited various studies that they say do not support the Pope's view.

Yet, they spend a lot of time in explaining the success of condoms in non-African countries, particularly those where the widespread use of prostitutes has been at the core of the problem. This is not exactly the same situation as in much of Africa. (You can read the Green article I cite below in support of that.) And besides which, if you could actually pin down Pell on the moral effect of a man visiting a prostitute using a condom, would he say that it compounds the sin, or would he allow that using one reduces the potential bad consequences and, if not a good thing, is at least morally neutral? (I admit he would probably be reluctant to answer, given that he doesn't want in any way to encourage people towards sexual immorality in the first place.)

There's the same missing-the-point in much of David Marr's spray in last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald. He talks of the success of condoms in reducing HIV in Australia - where it was always largely a problem in the gay community. Funny, but I have never noticed the Catholic bishops spending a lot of time teaching that gay men should not use condoms. Even for the heterosexual, I'm always a bit puzzled as to why people think that Catholics who are willing to sin sexually are still going to consider themselves bound by one related issue of Catholic teaching while in the act.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to point people who have not already read him to a Harvard AIDS researcher Edward Green. He wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled "The Pope may be right", but his views appear to have attracted no attention in the Australian media. Here's a key paragraph:

In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations' AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa. In a 2008 article in Science called "Reassessing HIV Prevention" 10 AIDS experts concluded that "consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa."

And why does he think it hasn't worked well in Africa as it has in other countries:

One reason is "risk compensation." That is, when people think they're made safe by using condoms at least some of the time, they actually engage in riskier sex.

So, the Pope and Pell have at least one high profile HIV researcher pretty much on their side. People should at least know that.

When I pointed this out at Harry Clarke's blog, he responded by suggesting that Green was just pushing his Catholic faith. I don't know if he is a practising Catholic or not, but he describes himself as a liberal, and certainly he is not saying condoms should be banned:

Don't misunderstand me; I am not anti-condom. All people should have full access to condoms, and condoms should always be a backup strategy for those who will not or cannot remain in a mutually faithful relationship. This was a key point in a 2004 "consensus statement" published and endorsed by some 150 global AIDS experts, including representatives the United Nations, World Health Organization and World Bank. These experts also affirmed that for sexually active adults, the first priority should be to promote mutual fidelity. Moreover, liberals and conservatives agree that condoms cannot address challenges that remain critical in Africa such as cross-generational sex, gender inequality and an end to domestic violence, rape and sexual coercion.

Here's an interview Green gave to the BBC recently. There you can read this snippet which more directly supports the Pell line on risk compensation in Africa:

There was one where--Norman Hurst of the University of California was one of the authors, it was published in the journal Aids--where they followed two groups of young people in Uganda, and the group that had the intensive condom promotion--and they were provided condoms after three years--they actually were found to have a greater number of sex partners. So that cancels out the risk reduction that the technology of condoms ought to provide. That's the phenomenon known as risk compensation.

Interestingly, in The Age article I initially referred to, they cited the decrease in use of prostitutes in Thailand (where condom use in brothels is very high) as evidence against the risk compensation theory. That may be true in Thailand, but it raises another issue: how much can you say that it is the widespread use of condoms that is the reason for the reduction in HIV spread there, as compared to the pretty dramatic drop in the use of prostitutes in the first place? Seems to me they just want to concentrate on the condom effect, without giving credit to decreased promiscuity.

Here is a long article of Green's that appeared last year in the religious journal First Things. Well worth reading. He disputes the re-interpretation of the Ugandan experience that The Age article notes.

It seems pretty clear that the matter of appropriate responses to HIV in Africa is the subject of some controversy within academia. It's even clear that there is at least some evidence supporting the idea of risk compensation in Africa. The Pope and Pell are not completely out on a limb here when they talk about the African experience, not that you would know that from most of the media coverage.

UPDATE: I just found this commentary at Eureka Street, arguing again that the context of the African experience of AIDS is important:

In contrast to the Western world, religious congregations and parishes were extensively involved from the beginning in caring for infected and rejected women and children. The local Catholic sisters, priests and many bishops generally recognised the dilemma and some have spoken against an absolute interdiction of condoms.

But they also recognise that the instrumental and value free programs imported from the West were less effective in Africa. The spread of AIDS had cultural roots that also needed to be addressed. A view of marriage in which the woman was more than an object, the eradication of magical views of the causes and protections against AIDS, and a culture of mutual respect and of faithfulness within marriage, were required if AIDS was to be checked. These touched the consideration of human sexuality enshrined in church teaching.

The whole article is worth reading.

UPDATE 2: another interesting take on all of this is at The Alligator.

"Just plain nuts"*

Mind Hacks: The chaos of R.D. Laing

Maybe I take a little too much pleasure from stories of the chaotic private lives of the famous; but this is a very good example of a physician who failed to heal himself.

He's been dead for some time now, but RD Laing was the 1960's era psychiatrist/author who promoted the idea that a mental illness was largely was a reaction to family dynamics. As Wikipedia says, Laing's views:

"...ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder....

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness" (his term). He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a "lose-lose situation" and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned."

Unfortunately, encouraging a belief in a full blown schizophrenic that their madness really has been caused by their family, or society at large, is rarely a helpful approach. So he has rather fallen out of favour now, at least for serious cases of madness, but you can see how appealing he would be to 1960's counterculture.

Anyhow, it turns out that his own family life was pretty much a shambles. The above link has a short outline of the story, but the full details are were in the lengthier Sunday Times article last weekend. Here's the summary:

He abandoned his first five children and left them in penury. He went on to father five more children with three different women, had innumerable affairs, was subject to violent drunken rages and became obsessed with his own fame. Yet he treated patients with extraordinary compassion and empathy, qualities he denied his own family.

Of course, he could blame his own family:

...his mother was over-protective, cold, and viewed overt displays of affection, particularly with her husband, as distasteful. Ronnie would later claim his mother made effigies of him into which she stuck pins, but none of his children believed it. It was, however, certainly true that he was not allowed to bathe on his own until he was 15.

Wikipedia puts it this way:

His parents led a life of extreme denial, exhibiting bizarre behaviour. His father David, an electrical engineer, seems often to have come to blows with his own brother, and himself had a breakdown when Laing was a teenager. His mother Amelia was described as "still more psychologically peculiar". According to one friend and neighbour, "everyone in the street knew she was mad".^[5]

Following his divorce, he was involved in this very 60's experiment, amusing described in the Times article:

The idea was that patients and doctors would live together, thus breaking down the barriers between them.

A “community house” was established at Kingsley Hall, a former youth hostel in east London. Sally Vincent was unimpressed. “It seemed to me that the psychiatrists outnumbered the patients, who were all female and uniformly good-looking. Ronnie would be pompousing about dressed in white robes looking like Jesus and I’d be asking him, ‘Why has that bloke got his hands all over that girl?’ The whole thing stank.”

The Times article gives examples of a lot worse behaviour as he aged.

The interesting point is, of course, that even if he could see the source of his inner demons in his unusual upbringing, why could he not use such knowledge to become a nicer person?

* famous Gary Larson cartoon may be viewed here.

Dubai fights back

Gulfnews: Western expats full of praise for Dubai

I'm not sure how close Gulf News is to whatever passes for government in Dubai, but this article sure has the feel of a PR exercise:

Many who spoke to Gulf News said they regard Dubai as one of the most comfortable and tolerant cities in the world and maintained the western media that "unleash mindless criticism on Dubai" is failing to see the real story.

Corrado Chiarentin, 44, who runs a business consultancy in Dubai, said it is "the most tolerant city" he has ever been to.

All depends how you define tolerant, I suppose, as well as how many cities he has been to.

Deserves an award

For the most pretentious photographs you're likely to see for a new range of designer toilets and basins, go here.

(I think it is meant to convey how toilets will look in heaven.)

Capybara revisited

I had a post about this in 2006, but how many of you have been reading since then?

This time it is the BBC with an article about the poor capybara - the red meat you eat in Venezuela when you are not allowed to eat red meat. (We're talking Lent, and perhaps the most opportunistic categorisation of meat ever.)

Not helpful, China

The Tablet - Arrest of bishops loyal to Rome mars Vatican’s China meeting

Old timers of Area 51

The Road to Area 51 - Los Angeles Times

Some former Area 51 test pilots get to talk about their secret OXCART work. All pretty interesting.

More on the project at Wikipedia.

Hard to enforce

As reported in The Australian:

THE Family Court is allowing mothers to leave the country with their children, provided they agree to sign up for the internet-based video telephone service Skype.

A compulsory subscription to Skype, which allows parents to see their children on the computer screen while talking to them, has been a feature of 10 Family Court cases this year.

Um, how likely is it that this is enforceable from the other side of the world?

Still, I suppose that if the court is convinced a parent should be allowed to relocate to another country (especially if they only moved here because of marriage), I guess it is better for them to at least try to promote video chats than not.

Not a good sign

Escaping the Bhagwan | theage.com.au

Here's one aspect of the Orange People cult of which I was not previously aware:

About 87 per cent of residents had a sexually transmitted disease and women who became pregnant were told by the Bhagwan to abort and sterilise, Stork says. She and her teenage daughter were both sterilised.

"Women would write (to the Bhagwan) saying 'I'm pregnant. what should I do?' He would always say 'abort and sterilise'," she says.

"He used to speak so lovingly about children, yet behind the scenes everybody's getting sterilised. There were no children born in the ashram."

Worth reading at Slate

Slate Magazine

Slate is always worth checking, but just in the last few days, there seem to be a remarkable number of stories of particular interest:

* read about what Americans now think of Australian wines (and how aiming for the cheap and cheerful end of the wine spectrum is not always good marketing in the long run)

* Here's a list of professional groups which have the embarrassment of having a subset that have become 9/11 troofers. (As I have suggested before, global warming skeptics who like to cite petitions of generic scientists in their favour should keep this in mind. There is always a subset of any group who will belief fanciful ideas.)

* Meghan O'Rourke's series on the death of her mother continues to be compelling, moving reading.

* For Easter, there's a quick revision on the role of crucifiction, and how peculiar it was to the Romans that a religion should spring up around such an event.

* You can learn that you are not alone if you think Twitter is a ridiculous fad that will pass soon enough. (It reminds me of all the hype over Second Life.) I like this part:

Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. ....

Twitter is different. It's not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short "quips" on bathroom stalls. It's a totally alien form of communication.

* And you can read a lengthy and (to my mind) pretty convincing argument as to why Israel will bomb Iran in the relatively near future. (There are many counter-intuitive propositions involved, but it's a well thought out essay.)

Slate really is the best quality web magazine of its kind, I reckon.

More and more anti-Dubai

The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

A very long article here that puts the boot into Dubai in a very satisfying manner.

32 million brides for 32 million brothers?

Selective sex abortion causes 32 million excess males in China

Some amazing figures in this summary of a BMJ on the massive gender imbalance in China:

...in 2005 alone, China had more than 1.1 million excess male births.

Among Chinese aged below 20, the greatest gender imbalances were among one-to-four-year-olds, where there were 124 male to 100 female births, with 126 to 100 in rural areas, they found.

The gap was especially big in provinces where the one-child policy was strictly enforced and also in rural areas...

Only two provinces -- Tibet and Xinjiang, the most permissive in terms of the one-child policy -- had normal sex ratios.

"Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males," the paper said. "

For Good Friday

A symbol of the noblest of traditions | theage.com.au

Not a bad attempt here at a response to the modern distaste for the idea of sacrificial atonement.

Broadband skepticism, Part 2

As Michael Stutchbury notes about the proposed $43 billion fibre optic network, the government likes to say:

This is suddenly an "historic nation-building investment" that will "help transform the Australian economy".

And then they talk about how left behind Australia is compared to Japan and Korea, which already have the super high speed fibre to the home.

When is some journalist interviewing a politician going to be bright enough to respond to that line with: "Well, if it's so important to economic success, why is it that Japan has been in an economic slump for 16 years, and it hasn't stopped South Korea from suffering in the current economic meltdown? Apart from its entertainment value, how has high speed internet to every home been an economic boon for those countries?"

It seems the obvious question that never gets asked.

A very funny Colbert

I have no idea why politicians agree to do these bits with Colbert, but last night's "Better Know a District" was an extremely funny one:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

False memories still popping up

Chris French: False memories of sexual abuse | Science | guardian.co.uk

These are still an issue, it seems. Interesting stuff.

Broadband skepticism

The blog with the most skeptical reaction to the Rudd government's plan to spend $20 to $40 billion on a new broadband fibre network is probably Catallaxy. I'm with many of its readers, like John Z:

The only use I can see on the retail end is pornography, piracy and maybe movie rentals.

Of course, nearly everyone at Larvatus P loves the idea, because it's the natural inclination of the Left to love big spending governments to build and own things which are not strictly necessary.

But there is another motive of many in supporting the idea: to get around the Telstra network bottleneck. I have to admit there appears to be some merit in that, but not at any price.

There is some commentary today on the doubtful extent to which private industry will be inclined to invest in it.

But really, from the Left end of politics (and my incredibly small corner of the Right), I haven't seen anyone yet raise the question of what better use could be made of $30 billion in clean energy development in Australia.

Nothing like dealing with the really serious issues first, hey Kevin?

UPDATE: I just heard on ABC radio that Green MPs will support it because they expect it will help reduce greenhouse gases.

Oh yeah, sure. Half the population will work from home, will they? That'll help productivity.

The Greens do not understand human nature as well as Mitchell and Webb. (The audio on the video at the link may not be entirely suitable for work.)