Back to Australian politics

It feels a little early to go back to speaking about anything other than the death and destruction in Japan, but I’ll briefly note some recent political commentary about Australia that seems about right:

* Annabel Crabb wrote on Friday:

Let's look at the basics here.

Labor's problem is one of trust and consistency.

Political advocacy is about believing something, and setting out to bring a majority around to your point of view. In the best political advocates, principle and determination work together to the extent that even voters who fundamentally disagree with their position on a particular policy stance will grudgingly support them anyway.

Federal Labor is a long way from that right now, thanks to the messages it has sent out to the electorate on a number of issues.

Sounds about right to me. As I was arguing elsewhere on the weekend, with climate change policy in particular, it doesn't seem to be a case (unlike in the Coalition) where actual scepticism of the science has any real sway in Labor (if there were any strong private sceptics in the party room, I am betting we would have heard about it from Rudd aligned leakers during the last election campaign), but rather it just seemed to be lack of will to take on a populist campaign.

While I think there is some under-appreciated value in the way Gillard has announced the intention to have the carbon price in place before the details are worked out (it gives the “Ju-Liar” factor a longer time to burn out before an election,) what was the sense in announcing Tim Flannery was going to be paid to convince Australians of the need for a carbon price only a week or two before announcing we were getting one in a year's time anyway? And whoever thought that it was a good look to have two podiums at the announcement, making Bob Brown look like a co-Prime Minister, won’t be making that mistake again, I bet.

There has been something a bit screwy going on about how policy is made and announced in Labor ever since Kevin Rudd got elected, and it still seems kind of hard for the media to pin down exactly whose fault it has been.

Still, on climate change policy I remain as appalled as ever that Tony Abbott got the leadership on the back of a substantial number of climate change sceptics in the party room who (I am betting) get their science from reading Andrew Bolt.

Speaking of Andrew Bolt, I was a bit surprised to see that even he acknowledged on Insiders yesterday that Abbott uses weasel words on the science which the climate change deniers in the Party can interpret so as to give “plausible deniality” to the idea that Tony might really take climate scientists seriously. Look at his words on Friday after Minchin said warming wasn’t happening:

Climate change does happen, mankind does make a contribution…

As Bolt said, you can easily interpret this to mean that the contribution is absolutely minimal compared to natural forces.

And look at the answers he gave to a series of on-line questions from climate change denying skeptics on Thursday. One of them brings up the “but a carbon tax by Australia it won’t affect the world’s temperature at all” line, as well as giving a spray about how all of climate science is completely corrupt, and Abbott comments:

Good point. People shouldn’t act out of mere environmental vanity

Well what exactly is the point of your plan to match Labor CO2 reduction targets by spending billions of taxpayer dollars, young Tony?

Journalists do know how inconsistent and willing to court climate change denial Abbott has been; I think they just tire of pointing it out all the time because they have bad poll numbers of Labor to talk about instead.

* But going back to Labor’s problems, David Penberthy wrote recently:

The best thing Gillard could do right now is to start a policy fight with the Greens – go and visit Olympic Dam perhaps and come out behind BHP’s push to expand its uranium exports – just to remind them and the voters that she’s the Prime Minister and is running the show. It’s not like Bob Brown is going to pack his bags and go and sit with Tony Abbott. On the current polling the alliance between Gillard and Brown is paving the way for an Abbott Government anyway.

I think that's probably right, although nuclear power is going to have a public image problem until we see how the Japanese post earthquake crisis evolves.

Japan on our minds

There is some anxiety in our house at the moment about the inability to contact some relatives in the earthquake affected areas of northern Honshu. One in particular works in one of the tsunami affected towns, quite close to the waterfront.

In the meantime, the best commentary on the Japanese character and its response to natural disasters I have read is by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. It is well worth a read.

Update: an email came through this afternoon that the people we were most worried about are OK, but there’s still a couple of others about whom we have not yet heard. They would not have been close to the water, however, so we trust they are OK.

Update 2: of course there are heaps of videos being put up on Youtube, but I haven't yet spotted the remarkable seaside town destruction footage that I was watching on TV earlier tonight. But Boing Boing had this video up, showing some very unnatural looking behaviour by some Tokyo buildings:

Actually, I see that a couple of million people have watched this version of the video on Youtube (because it has the link from Boing Boing), but only 5,000 or so have watched the original, uncropped version which the guy also has up on his Youtube account. I actually find the original more interesting, as you get to see other people on the street watching the sway:

Update 3:

I don't want to turn this into disaster porn, but the video below is similar to th longer one I mentioned above that I saw on TV earlier tonight. It does get a bit upsetting when it turns briefly to the scared child and shocked adults watching from their safe point:



Update 4: Let's hope he's wrong, but a UK geophysicist is quoted at the Nature web site saying this:

"Although certainly very big, today's quake was not totally unexpected," says John McCloskey, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, UK. "Technically, it was in fact an aftershock of the weaker quake earlier in the week — even though it may sound odd that an aftershock can be stronger than the main shock." ...

"The previous quake, although much smaller, significantly increased stress in the fraction of the fault zone that ruptured today," says McCloskey.

The sequence of quakes has probably also affected the stress field further south along the fault zone, critically increasing the earthquake risk in the Tokyo region, he says.

"There is a strong interaction of quakes along a subduction zone, and we can certainly expect a number of major aftershocks in the next weeks," he says. "Some may be as large as, or even stronger than, the quake that last month devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And chances are that another very large shock could occur to the south near Tokyo."

My apologies for worrying reader Geoff, who's due to fly into Tokyo soon.

Count me as a skeptic...

...when it comes to the Zero Carbon Australia plan that says Australia could be powered by renewable energy by 2020:

Our research was undertaken with two explicit parameters: energy technologies selected had to be both commercially available and from carbon-free renewable energy sources. This explains why the ZCA Plan identifies a 60/40 mix of concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and large-scale wind developments as the backbone of a decarbonised energy system. Together with existing hydropower, investment in CST with molten salt storage, backup from a small percentage of biomass power, an upgraded electricity grid, and comprehensive energy efficiency measures, Australia can reliably meet its energy needs from renewable electricity generation. The technologies selected were not preordained; rather they were chosen on the basis that they worked within ZCA’s parameters.

The ZCA scenario also includes natural gas. Under the plan, Australia would use existing gas infrastructure in a staged scale-back, until the last gas power plants are mothballed in 2020. The most carbon-intensive coal power plants must be first to be decommissioned as large-scale renewables come online, made possible by the deployment of CST power towers with molten salt storage for 24-h operation.

Brave New Climate has been critical of this plan before. Here's one post about it, but there are others.

Too big for my backyard

Time Magazine has a story on the newly retired space shuttle Discovery: it spent a total of a year in space; was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope; and first flew in 1983: a long time in aviation terms, let alone a space plane. (In fact, it's kind of surprising that it handles the vibration of repeated launches so well, isn't it?)

Here's something I didn't know from the story; there are twin astronauts:

The [next] mission will be commanded by the husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly. His identical twin brother Scott is currently the skipper of the space station; he returns to Earth next week on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The New York Times wrote about where the retired shuttles will end up. There is hot competition amongst various museums, but it seems the Smithsonian is sure to get one.

The Kennedy Space Centre wants one too. I reckon they'll need it, as the tourist value of that place while there's a big gap in developing a new manned rocket will likely diminish.

Higher water

Real Climate talks about the recent finding that some Antarctic ice freezes from the bottom, but also notes the big picture with ice melt:

....there is a new assessment of the net mass balance of Antarctica and Greenland. Rignot et al have updated results, including those from the GRACE gravity measurement satellite, to the end of 2010 and show that the downward trend in ice mass is continuing (stronger in Greenland than in Antarctica). The net rise in sea level associated with this decline is about 1.3 mm/yr, which will likely accelerate with further warming. Complementary analyses of the surface mass balance of Greenland (Tedesco et al, 2011) also show that 2010 was a record year for melt area extent.

This rate of melting is more than was figured into the tabulated IPCC AR4 estimates of sea level rise, and any further acceleration will obviously make the discrepancy worse. Indeed, even in the highest forcing A1F1 scenario, the IPCC calculated only a 0.3 mm/year contribution from the ice sheets averaged over the whole 21st Century! This was clearly a gross underestimate.

Extrapolating these melt rates forward to 2050, “the cumulative loss could raise sea level by 15 cm by 2050″ for a total of 32 cm (adding in 8 cm from glacial ice caps and 9 cm from thermal expansion) – a number very close to the best estimate of Vermeer & Rahmstorf (2009), derived by linking the observed rate of sea level rise to the observed warming.

The Song of the Mice

Physorg notes that there is research going on about how mice sing (ultrasonically):

Whether or not mouse song involves learning either through auditory imitation or behavioral feedback (e.g., from the mother)... is a subject of hot debate, and the answer is proving elusive. To highlight the difficulties facing researchers, two studies published on March 9, 2011 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE have come to differing conclusions about whether mouse vocalization patterns are innate or learned.

Rodents sing and they laugh. Sound like good company, really.

The problems with politics

On the Labor side, this announcement yesterday of a new regime of requiring businesses to report on gender equality issues feels like a real blast from the past, as I seem to recall that 1980's Labor used to like grand gender based social engineering ideas too:

Under the changes announced on Wednesday, companies with more than 100 staff will be required to report on how many workers are female and how their conditions compare to male employees.

Spot checks will also be carried out, with non-compliant businesses to be shut out of government-funded grants and industry assistance programs.

Wasn't there a time when the Howard government actually seemed to be achieving more (or just as much) in terms of women members of Parliament than Labor with all their Emily's List activism?

At least it has the benefit of putting Labor back in the grand tradition of being the time wasting bureaucracy party. It had been slipping in that regard in the last few years.

On the other hand, there's a brief history of the Liberal Party and its attitude to greenhouse gases in The Age today, which also shows the Coalition has taken a strong turn to the past since the Abbott ascendancy.

I remain unhappy with both sides of politics.

Hot places

There’s a short meteorology article out talking about the hottest places on Earth. Turns out that desert temperatures can be higher than I ever realised:

The Lut Desert, located in southeast Iran has long been regarded as one of the hottest places on Earth. Numerous studies have examined the relationship between the expression of severe thermal temperature across this hyper-arid landscape and the unique natural physical characteristics of the Lut, such as the wind-sculpted mega-yardangs, and the vast areas of closely packed rock fragments known as desert pavement (Alavipanah 2007; Azizi et al. 2007). The Lut Desert was determined to be the hottest spot on Earth in two of three years previously evaluated with the Aqua/MODIS satellite LST data (Mildrexler et al. 2006). Here we found that the Lut Desert had the highest surface temperature on Earth in 2004 (68.0°C; 154.4°F), 2005 (70.7°C;159.3°F), 2006 (68.5°C; 155.3°F), 2007 (69.0°C; 156.2°F) and 2009 (68.6°C; 155.5°F), five of the seven years analyzed in this study. The Lut is the only place on Earth to have a surface temperature above 70°C (158°F) and regularly has the largest, contiguous area of surface temperatures above 65°C of anywhere on Earth (Fig. 2).

But then the paper has a local surprise:

In 2003 a scorching temperature of 69.3°C (156.7°F), the second highest temperature of the seven-year dataset, was detected in the province of Queensland, Australia. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with vast arid lands where annual maximum LSTs routinely exceed 60°C.

So, Queensland has recently had a temperature just a fraction under 70 degrees. Amazing.

UPDATE: my bad. As noted in the comment, the article is not talking about air temperature, the hottest measured record of which still seems to be 58 degrees in Libya. I thought that the article was talking about desert air temperatures measured by satellite, but it is talking about "skin temperature", which can be way higher than the air temperature.

Well, that explains why the temperatures seemed extraordinarily high to me. Must not post so quickly.

A brief observation about Charlie Sheen..

Given that he appears to need to smoke continuously during his web appearances, he's quite the gift for the anti-smoking campaigners of the world.

* his last broadcast - hopefully the last broadcast ever - can be viewed here, if you really need to watch a man going insane.

Viewing recommendation

On ABC last night was the first part of the documentary series "How Earth Made Us", which, as the BBC explains, is "the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind".*

It was excellent viewing, making connections between geology and the dawn of civilisation which I certainly hadn't realised before. It also starts with one of the most weirdly spectacular places on earth - that giant gypsum crystal cave in Mexico, photos of which were circulating on the internet in the last year or two.

Get over to iView and watch it while you can, if you missed it.


* I've been noticing lately that "mankind" seems to be making some kind of a comeback, as against "humankind". That's odd, since as far as gender neutral talk goes, I had actually gotten used to "humankind". Now if BBC Two isn't using it, I feel I've been prematurely gender sensitive.

Unexpected downer

Spotted at Physorg:

Daily use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, commonly known as NSAIDs, is associated with a 22 percent increase in the risk of erectile dysfunction, Kaiser researchers found in a study of more than 80,000 men in Southern California. The results were a surprise because erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated ED, is thought to be caused by inflammation, and the researchers expected that use of the drugs would alleviate the problem.

The monogamous Douthat

Well, that sex survey indicating a (surprising) increase in sexual restraint amongst American youth is attracting some interesting commentary.

Ross Douthat had a column "Why Monogamy Matters" which noted as follows:

...there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

One can imagine that such talk would annoy some people as sounding just far, far too much like what your well meaning parents may want to say to their daughter. And indeed, there's a (somewhat childishly) sarcastic article on Huffington Post:

Douthat teaches us that sexual restraint leads to "emotional well-being." Restraint is another word for: happiness! Not knowing too much is the biggest happiness of all. Little girls crave security, that's what you have to understand. Bunnies. Baa-Baa. Binkies! Mommmmy!

I see Andrew Sullivan has also weighed in, but without any venom. Someone at a Slate blog wrote:

I have yet to read a Douthat column without feeling deep embarrassment for the author. He has a completely disorganized mind and seems unable of self-reflection. I read that ... "thing" he wrote yesterday and chanted facepalm, facepalm, facepalm as a calming mantra.

Yes, talking about restraint in sex really upsets some people.

Update: it's been a long time since I linked to Mark Steyn, but his column on this has some more examples of amusingly appalled liberal readers of the Douthat column, and is worth a look.

Evolving dimensions - the start of something big?

Well, this is interesting. Bee at her Backreaction blog has post explaining (not exactly in layman terms, but you can get the general drift) a big, pretty new, idea in physics that may actually go somewhere:

The idea that space-time might not be higher-dimensional on short distances but instead be lower-dimensional has been around for some while, inspired by results from causal dynamical triangulation. In a paper last year, Anchordoqui et al proposed to examine the possibility of lower dimensionality at small distances for its phenomenology in their paper

Vanishing Dimensions and Planar Events at the LHC
Luis Anchordoqui, De Chang Dai, Malcolm Fairbairn, Greg Landsberg, Dejan Stojkovic
arXiv:1003.5914v2 [hep-ph]

Greg Landsberg gave a talk about this work on our last year's workshop on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity (recording of the talk here). The basic idea is that the dimensionality of space changes with distance in such a way that it is 3-dimensional on scales we have tested it, lower dimensional on distances shorter than we have probed yet (about 1/1000 of a femtometer) and possibly higher-dimensional on distances larger than we can observe. The picture suggested is that of a (one-dimensional) string being knitted, and the knitted sheet (2-dimensional) being crumpled to a ball (3-dimensional). The authors dubbed this "evolving dimensionality." The merit of having a smaller number of space-like dimensions at small distances or high energies is that it improves the renormalizability of quantum field theories and esp. that of quantum gravity. (In contrast to additional dimensions which actually make the problem worse.)

Sounds interesting. As Bee goes on to note, the idea has a big problem ("lacks a mathematical model for the new fundamental structure and the dynamics of quantum fields in it") but even so makes some (I think) testable predictions.

Now I'll annoy science types by admitting something: my reason for liking the sound of it is that it seems to get us back to a possible "higher dimension". I always thought it a pity that physics lost the 4th big dimension as a place in which locate God and places like heaven and hell. You can always get around that by living in a type of cyber-heaven in the mind of God, like Tipler uses for his Omega Point, but a hyper-dimensional realm has its own nice feel about it too.

Is it April yet?

There's a 1 April feel about the following story:

Japanese researchers have been immersing iron-based compounds in hot alcoholic beverages such as red wine, sake and shochu to induce superconductivity.

Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.

But as it appears in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology, published on 7 March, it appears not to be a joke.

Red wine worked best, by the way...

Sex ed (and congratulations on the headline)

William Saletan at Slate has a detailed look at the recent (apparently reliable) sex survey that showed (amongst other things) something of a resurgence in virginity in young Americans.

But, as with some of his previous articles, he seems most interested in what the survey shows about, ahem, the prevalence of anal sex. Hence the title for this current article: Impure Lesbians of Sodom.

Whoever came up with that deserves some type of award.

As I'm more interested in the idea that people should treat sex seriously, I'll just extract the part about the (somewhat surprising) increase in youngsters not having sex:

In the 2002 NSFG survey, 22 percent of men and women between the ages of 15 and 24 said they had never had sexual contact with another person. But in the latest NSFG survey, taken from 2006 to 2008, that number increased to 27 percent of men and 29 percent of women (Table 7, Page 38). In the broader age pool, the trend is diluted but still shows up: Among people ages 15-44, the percentage reporting zero lifetime opposite sex partners increased by two points among men (Table 4, Page 35) and three points among women (Table 3, Page 34). (In case you're wondering, no, there was no shift in reported homosexuality that would account for this increase.) The percentage of men ages 15-44 who reported only one lifetime female partner also increased by two to three points. So if you thought sexual mores were moving inexorably in the direction of more, earlier, and kinkier activity, think again. Virginity can return, and apparently, it has.

Pro abstinence sex education groups in America claim that this vindicates their position:

Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association that these numbers are a positive change from 2002 when only 46% of boys and 49% of girls reported no sexual contact and she says the report challenges the wisdom of the recent federal funding cuts to abstinence education.

“One hundred sixty-nine abstinence education programs lost funding and over 1 million students lost access to the very programs that can support and encourage the positive trends represented by this data,” she told LifeNews.com. “If we are serious about decreasing teen sexual activity, we need to use the data to instruct public policy.”

But, as I've noted before, the wildly detailed and open type of sex education in Holland seems to lead to low teenage pregnancy rates and delayed start of sexual activity very effectively too. And America has a huge issue with single motherhood at any age, which is perhaps the much bigger issue to focus on in the long run.

Sex education, and encouraging good social attitudes and outcomes for families at any age, is obviously a complicated field.

Some perspective, please

Andrew Bolt, as well as the bunch of excitable commenters over at Catallaxy, are getting all worked up over an Essential Poll out today showing that a carbon pricing is not a popular idea with the voters.

Yet, given that only the intention to implement the tax/pricing scheme has been announced without the details, I find it hardly surprising that such a generic "new tax" announcement is not immediately popular.

The obvious comparison to make is to the introduction of a GST. A little bit of Googling and here's the Newpoll polling about it over a decade or so.

The percentage of voters "totally in favour" of GST was frequently in the mid 30's in the decade before, and shortly after, its introduction. This is exactly where a carbon tax is today, according to Essential.

Mind you, the successful introduction of a carbon price is almost certainly going to be with more complaint from business groups than the GST, so it's probably a harder political road that Labor will be taking than John Howard (although, of course, people were upset with him for changing his earlier undertaking on never having a GST.)

But still, at around 35% approval in the current circumstances, it is not as desperate a situation for Labor as many commentators are saying.

UPDATE: Newspoll today shows the expected decrease in Labor vote. Of course, the worsening primary vote is the worst feature for Labor, although at 46/54 TPP, this is hardly irrecoverable at this distance from an election. (Just look at the Newspolls Bolt himself showed recently for 2009.)

What happens ideally before the next election: a sensibly balanced carbon tax comes into effect, enough industry comes in behind it to make its removal impractical, tensions within the Coalition as to how to respond cause Abbott and the skeptics to lose control of the party, the pro-nuclear element within Labor changes party policy to allow nuclear power within Australia for environmental reasons, the Coalition does not disagree, the Coalition wins next election and dramatically winds back the National Broadband Network but keeps the ETS and starts the move to a major Australian nuclear power industry.

I can see just one or two potential problems with every step of the way, though!

Madness or breasts

Talk about your unwanted side effects:

Researchers have found the female hormone estrogen can be an effective treatment for men suffering schizophrenia.

The Alfred Hospital's Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne tested the hormone treatment, usually reserved for women, and found positive results for men with the mental disorder.

The centre found low doses of estrogen given during a two-week trial reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.

But Professor Jayashri Kulkarni says using estrogen is controversial because it creates female traits such as breasts.

I see from Googling around that a report last year said that estrogen had already been found to be effective for some women with schizophrenia (in fact, Professor Kulkarni did that study at Monash as well.)

Psychological oddities

Men (particularly singers) with a deep, deep voice are often said to sound sexy, but the downside may be that women will also expect them to cheat:

"In terms of sexual strategy, we found that men and women will use voice pitch as a warning sign of future betrayal. So the more attractive the voice—a higher pitch for women and lower pitch for men—the more likely the chances he or she will cheat," says Jillian O'Connor, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University and lead author of the study.

"Infidelity is costly with the emotional impact, financial costs and potential loss of the family unit. But this suggests that through the evolutionary process, we have learned ways to avoid partners who may be unfaithful as a protection mechanism," she says.

Participants in the study were asked to listen to two versions of recorded clips from a male voice and a female voice, which were electronically manipulated to be both higher and lower in pitch. They were then asked which one, from each pair, was more likely to cheat sexually on their romantic partner.

"The reason voice pitch influences perceptions of cheating is likely due to the relationship between pitch, hormones and infidelity," explains David Feinberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and advisor on the study. "Men with higher testosterone levels have lower pitched voices, and women with higher estrogen levels have higher pitched voices. High levels of these hormones are associated with adulterous behaviour and our findings indicate individuals are somewhat aware of the link and may use this in their search for a romantic partner."

Higher levels of estrogen is associated with adulterous behaviour? I wasn't aware of that. With some women, low testosterone seems to be the issue with lack of libido. And besides which, a woman's voice can only be so high before it becomes irritating. I mean, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I have been watching a bit on re-runs lately), is Ted's girlfriend Georgette meant to be the sexiest sounding woman in the room?

The other odd story from last week was the one about how people are better at delaying rewards for themselves if the decision is made while having a full bladder:

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder—the researchers assessed participants' self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.

The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.

It is obviously therefore important for parents to keep emphasising to their teenage children the importance of keeping very well hydrated as they leave to go to a party with any half disreputable boyfriend/girlfriend.

Free to question

I noted with interest last week how Pope Benedict’s new book re-declares the Catholic teaching since the 1960’s that the Jews are definitely not collectively responsible for the death of Christ.  As the Los Angeles Times and other media outlets noted, this seemed particularly good timing given that it was also only last week that some weird looking fashion figure, with whom I was previously unfamiliar, turned up on video spouting anti-semitic lines (and praise for Hitler) that is hard to credit as still existing post Holocaust. 

But I thought I would mention it here more because of the Tablet’s explanation of Benedict’s analysis:

Benedict follows the scholarly consensus that “the Jews” mentioned in St John’s gospel as calling for Jesus to be executed cannot possibly refer to the whole population of Israel at the time, but refers to the Jerusalem Temple authorities alone; and not even all of those. But the greater problem is presented by Matthew’s account, which refers to the demand of “the whole people” for Jesus to be crucified and which – alone of the four gospels – has them cry out, “His blood be on us and on our children!” This verse kept Christian anti-Semitism alive for many centuries, and was the basis of the charge of deicide or “Christ-killing” laid against all Jews, alive or dead.

Benedict simply rejects Matthew’s historical accuracy, preferring the account in John and Mark. Matthew had gone “beyond” historical considerations and “is certainly not recounting historical fact here”. Matthew is attempting a “theo­logical etiology”, he suggests, with which to account for the fate of the Jewish people in the forthcoming Jewish-Roman war. Furthermore, seen through the eyes of Christian faith, Jesus’ blood has the purifying power of redemption, so the words attributed to the crowd are not a curse but rather “redemption, salvation”. Why that matters, if the words were never uttered, Benedict does not explain.

How interesting.   Catholics don’t take a fundamentalist approach to Scripture, and of course has no problem with understanding Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament as not being written as literal history.

The New Testament, though, comes in for a lot less Catholic doubt as to its relationship with fact, and it’s interesting to see we have it from the top, so to speak, that the Gospels are not always historically accurate.

There’ll be some Protestant churches decrying this is why you can’t trust the Catholic Church.  Mind you, few will go as far as the website www.popebenedictantichrist.com.  (Don’t bother going there, it’s only one page, but it has obviously picked a good name given how high it came up on my Google search results when looking for sources for this post.)  I like this line from the said site, though:

Could it be that Pope Benedict XVI will one day become the Antichrist?  Look closely at the coldness of his eyes in above photo.  Can you really trust this man?  Do his eyes remind you of Adolph Hitler's eyes?

Can't say I've noticed the Hitler resemblance myself.

Of course, the problem once you do allow for historical revision of the truth of Gospel statements, it can be a tricky issue as to knowing where to stop.  Still, it keeps life interesting.

Reefer madness, yet again

I only indirectly referred to a recent Australian study that said cannabis use in teenagers was associated with earlier onset of psychosis, and that alcohol use wasn’t. I see now that it was in fact a meta-analysis of other studies.

The most surprising thing I saw the authors say appeared in the ABC report:

"The risks for older people is about double, so instead of having a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia you are probably likely to have about a 2 per cent chance," he said.

"But for young people who smoke cannabis regularly, instead of having around a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia during their life, they will end up with something like a 5 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia."

I was a bit puzzled, with such a high increase in risk for teenager smokers of developing schizophrenia, that the authors were still hedging their bets on whether you could say cannabis caused their illness.

Anyway, here’s another just published study relevant to causation, and this one followed real people to see what happened:

The study took place in Germany and involved a random sample of 1,923 adolescents and young adults aged 14 to 24 years.

The researchers excluded anyone who reported cannabis use or pre-existing psychotic symptoms at the start of the study so that they could examine the relation between new (incident) cannabis use and psychotic symptoms.

The remaining participants were then assessed for cannabis use and psychotic symptoms at three time points over the study period (on average four years apart).

Incident cannabis use almost doubled the risk of later incident psychotic symptoms, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, use of other drugs, and other psychiatric diagnoses. Furthermore, in those with cannabis use at the start of the study, continued use of cannabis over the study period increased the risk of persistent psychotic symptoms

There was no evidence for self medication effects as psychotic symptoms did not predict later cannabis use.

Interesting. Of course, as I mentioned in my previous post, nothing annoys cannabis smokers more than the studies that keep indicating the connection between their habit and a debilitating disease, especially for those who start smoking young. See the comments following that Physorg at the above link for some examples. It’s such a shame how the evidence keeps piling up against them, though. (Ha.)