A slight improvement for witches

More curbs on Saudi religious police powers | GulfNews.com

Riyadh: Saudi Arabia has set new limitations on the powers of its notorious religious police, charged with ensuring compliance with Islamic morality but often accused of abuses, its chief said on Tuesday.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice “once had much expanded powers, but with the new system... some of these powers, such as interrogating suspects and pressing charges,” will be restricted to the police and public prosecution, Shaikh Abdul Latif Abdel Aziz Al Shaikh told AFP.

The religious police may still arrest those carrying out “flagrant offences such as harassing women, consuming alcohol and drugs, blackmail and the practice of witchcraft,” Shaikh said of the new law approved by the cabinet.

However, the cases of such people will be referred to the police and brought to justice, as the religious police will no longer have the right to determine charges against them, he said.

Looking back at 50's science fiction movies

Nuclear monster movies: Sci-fi films in the 1950s were terrifying escapism. - Slate Magazine

Not a bad review of the themes within the genre here.   A pity they don't mention Earth Versus the Flying Saucers - one of my favourites.

I like the section headed "That women are scary" in particular.   (It reminds me of one of the best laughs in Monsters Vs Aliens.)

It was probably carrying kimchi and a Samsung smart phone

South Korea launches satellite to join global space club : Nature News Blog

Bedrooms and penicillin

Syphilis and the Sexual Revolution � First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

Hadn't heard this theory before:

It may have been penicillin, not the Pill, that triggered the sexual revolution, a new study indicates. Hypothesizing that “a decrease in the cost of syphilis due to penicillin [which, in 1943, was found to treat syphilis effectively] spurred an increase in risky non-traditional sex,” the Emory University economist Andrew Francis discovered evidence that “the era of modern sexuality originated in the mid to late 1950s,” prior to the debut of oral contraceptive pills in 1960. (Full PDF here.)

How much do we really know with any accuracy about sexual behaviour on the big scale in previous centuries, though?   I mean, we know there were a heap of prostitutes in Victorian London, but who was their typical customer, and what was happening in the rural areas in the meantime?   You can say the same about any similar period, really:  we may know from both fiction and non fiction written at the time that certain societies may have been more libertine about certain things for certain periods, but without modern methods of crunching numbers,  it's surely always very hard to be certain about population wide behaviours.

More about marriage and kids

Don't mention the M-word - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Jeremy Sammut suspects that academics in Australia are too devoted to supporting "family diversity" to come out and admit that marriage has the best outcome for kids, and single parenthood the worst.

I suspect that he may be right.

I have complained about this before:  if governments want to promote good outcomes for kids, they should really be promoting marriage.  Not de facto relationships.  Unfortunately, as the government saves money by treating welfare recipients living together as if they were a married couple, it seems hard to find a way for the government to encourage people into marriage via how benefits work.

And of course, if they did find a way to do this, we would go through the same boring "but why are you discriminating against us just because we don't have a piece of paper:  are you doubting we love each other?" arguments that we got in the 1970's when recognition of de facto relationships really got a kick along.  

I wonder if anyone really has come up with plausible ways government can encourage marriage.

The Prime Minister getting married to her long term partner would, of course, be a good first step!

Update:  someone in the Atlantic warns against promoting marriage by painting too rosy a picture about it.  Fair enough too.

Simplified forecasts for global temperature

Global Temperature Anomaly Forecasts, January 2013 | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

Last year, climatologist John Nielson-Gammon came up with a sort of simplified graphical way of looking at the global temperature trends, and made some predictions from it.

It only works if there is an underlying global warming, and he's expanded it now to update his predictions.

The method looks pretty convincing, and (so far) works.

I meant to post about it back then when he came up with this, but I don't think I did.  It is well worth looking at.

David Byrne admiration post (again)

I see that David Byrne was in Australia a couple of weeks ago for a few shows with St Vincent, a nice young woman with whom he did his most recent musical collaboration.  They didn't come to Brisbane, and I didn't care too much for a couple of the songs I briefly heard on the 'net, but I see they still got good reviews.  Actually, as long as he throws a few Talking Heads songs into any show, I think he will always get admiring reviews:  there just seems to be an enormous well of public affection towards that back catalogue from everyone in the age range of 25 to 65.  (With good reason, I might add.)

But the main reason for the post is to link to the great series of posts he has put up on his journal following his visit.

I've recommended this before:  he is a great writer with eclectic interests, and whether he's covering his visit to MONA in Hobart, watching Spanish experimental theatre doing Verdi at the Sydney Opera House, eating a Moreton Bay bug and (in particular) his long account of the eccentric interests of  Percy Grainger, he is always a great pleasure to read.  

I think I read he is 60 now, but that charisma and strong voice is still there.   I shouldn't be embarrassed about finding him so appealing - just read the comments after nearly any Youtube video and you can tell how much people like him.   

So, to end my annual renewal of devotion to Mr Byrne, a couple of videos.   First, a video of one of the songs he did with St Vincent which I only found tonight and don't mind at all.  It shows him making the odd moves which people like (even though black and white makes him look older):



And secondly, just a short interview where he talks a bit about Talking Heads and how he views collaboration:



And finally - no, seriously, this time - his book published last year "How Music Works" sounds interesting and had some enthusiastic reviews too.

So much for self defence and guns

I haven't looked at the links provided, but I expect this is quite right:

IWF's Gayle Trotter testified at today's Senate hearing on gun safety, and unsurprisingly claimed that guns make women safer. She apparently seems to believe most violence against women resembles Buffy the Vampire Slayer facing down a gang of vampires: 

“Guns make women safer,” Trotter argued, because they eliminate the advantage violent criminals might have in size and strength. “Using a firearm with a magazine holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, a woman would have a fighting chance even against multiple attackers.”

The conservative claim, made by Trotter, that guns are an "equalizer" is about as serious a misrepresentation as you can muster when it comes to violence against women. Most violence against women is perpetrated by men the victim knows in situations that are intimate or social, where guns aren't usually out. If someone during a domestic violence incident scrambles for the gun, it's rarely going to be the person who doesn't want this situation to get more violent....

The fact of the matter is that more guns put women in danger. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found that states with more guns have more female violent deaths. Their research also found that batterers who owned guns liked to use them to scare and control their victims, and would often use the gun to threaten the victim, threaten her pets or loved ones, clean them menacingly during arguments, or even fire them to scare her. The Violence Policy Center's research showed that in 1998, the year they studied, 83 women were killed by an intimate partner for every woman who used a gun in self-defense. Futures Without Violence compiled the statistics and found that guns generally make domestic violence worse, both by increasing the likelihood of murder and also by creating situations where abuse is more violent, controlling, and traumatic.

People convicted of domestic violence aren't allowed to buy guns, a sensible reaction to the realities of domestic violence and guns. Unfortunately, the private sale loophole makes it easy enough for a man who wants to stalk or control a woman to get the weapon to do so. If Trotter were truly concerned about preventing violence against women, she would be demanding an immediate closure of this loophole that allows batterers to avoid background checks when trying to buy guns. But she's too busy imagining that women might have to fend off the zombie apocalypse to worry about the real dangers that ordinary women face in this country every day. 

As seen on Baden-Powell's bookshelf

This refers back to a 2004 Christopher Hitchens article on the "mildly Fascist" Baden-Powell.  If I had read it before, I had forgotten this bit:

If Baden-Powell had had his way, the Boy Scouts might have formed close ties with the Hitler Youth. In 1937, he told the Scouts' international commissioner that the Nazis were "most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the youth movement in Germany." Baden-Powell met with the German ambassador in London and was invited to meet the Führer himself, though the war prevented him from visiting the Third Reich. But he continued to admire Hitler's values, writing in a 1939 diary entry that Mein Kampf was "a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc."

As Hitchens reports, Baden-Powell also seemed to tacitly approve of the Nazi attitude toward homosexuality. When the head of his international bureau told him that a German scout leader had been sent to a concentration camp, Baden-Powell dismissed it by saying the scoutmaster had been taken away for "homosexual tendencies."

I know that the scout movement still contains some learning about their founder's life and good deeds.  They seem to skip over what was on his bookshelf, though.

A sudden bit of optimism

How Obama will deliver his climate promise - environment - 30 January 2013 - New Scientist

BARACK OBAMA is certainly talking the talk on climate change - promising to put the fight against global warming at the heart of his second term. What's more surprising is that the US - historically, the world's biggest emitter - actually seems to be walking the walk. It is on track to meet Obama's 2009 pledge to cut US emissions by 17 per cent, from 2005 levels, by 2020. The target could even be exceeded, which may give a boost to the long-stalled international climate talks.

Right wing commentary run amuck

Sinclair Davidson seems to have written a piece for the Conversation about the announcement of the Federal election date in a hurry and with nothing of importance to say.

The silliest thing it contains is this:

The date of the election is known, but the government is not in caretaker mode. Given the expectation that the government will lose the coming election, should it be in caretaker mode? Reasonable people can disagree on this point. After all, having the government in caretaker mode for eight months is a bit too long.

No, reasonable people cannot disagree on this point:  no one can credibly even attempt to argue that knowing an election date in advance (as in Parliaments with a fixed term) is relevant to "caretaker mode"; nor has bad polling  8 months from an election ever been suggested before as a reason for a government to stop governing.

Another thing I want to note is this:   I used to get really annoyed with Tim Dunlop when he was a paid blogger for News Ltd putting on the "voice of reason" approach in that forum, and then sneaking off to his own personal blog to make snarky, nasty and personal attacks on John Howard.

Sinclair Davidson is exactly the same on the Right side.   For the Conversation, the voice is Mr Reasonable.  Or when he turns up on Andrew Bolt's show to warn of "stagflation" more than a year ago.   (No sign of that yet, by the way.)  But at the blog he runs, particularly in comments threads, it's the abusive, over the top, voice: 

There is no role for “civility” in a free speech debate. Those who would steal our birthright are scum who deserve all the contempt they have earned. There can be no surrender, no compromise, and no meeting of minds.

Or in the gun control issue:

 Gab – don’t be nice about it. Steve and his ilk are happy to have children murdered to make political points about gun ownership.

And of course, he lets the blog threads run that way too.  Where else on the Right side of politics can we find such witticisms such as suggesting that the way to "deal with" Leigh Sales is to "kick her in the s__ts?"   Or people can tell hilarious [/sarc] jokes about the PM sleeping with her dog.  And Michelle Obama - she's so ug-ly (a theme repeated at various times by nice old conservative Catholics CL, nilk and the most annoying commentator in the world Mk50.)  I see that only today there's yet another reference to Obama as the "Magic Negro"; and who can forget Steve Kates, an economist with an absolute obsession with (what he says is) everyone else in the world not understanding Say's Law (and Keynesian economics being the root of all evil), blaming the Romney loss on "damaged women"?   (OK, that link is to his Quadrant article where the term appeared, but I'm pretty sure he linked to it from Catallaxy.)

Bizarrely, conservative Catholicism gets special protection from Davidson, and in fact the blog seems to be a special haven for them; absolutely rabid sweeping generalisations about Muslims on the other hand - well, they're OK.

I've noticed the blog - train wreck that it is - has been attracting more women commenters lately.  And, of course, Judith Sloan contributes posts, often blithely dismissive of things like climate change and matters in which I have my doubts she has any particular expertise.  (Yes, it's the branch of the right that most resembles the Tea Party.)    Ever a comment from her about how the threads deal with women on the Left of politics?  Not that I've ever seen.   Same with Quadrant writer (and conservative Catholic) Phillipa Martyr.  The threads were absolutely full of foul "slut calling" of Sandra Fluke last year; Rush Limbaugh was the voice of reason, according to them.

The only thing good about this is that it seems to me that Sinclair Davidson can't really have any friends or be influential on the Liberal Party, can he? given that he is so dismissive of them if they don't follow the line on matters he is over the top about, such as free speech.

But what is more annoying is the way that Andrew Bolt, Catallaxy and the opinion pages of The Australian have all become dominated by the same characters who cross reference each other continuously.  It's a mini version of what has gone on in the US with the right wing blogosphere and the Wall Street Journal (and Andrew Bolt's TV show counts as a mini Fox News too.)

What has happened to moderate and sensible right wing commentary in this country?  And why does a large part of the Right have to proudly display the same  (actually, worse) ugliness in discourse that those on the rabid left used to show under (say) John Howard?  

Just can't understand how it lost

National Review post-election summit: Conservatives descend on the magazine’s conference. - Slate Magazine

David Weigel opens his article on attending the National Review post-election "what went wrong?" summit with this:

Early on Friday evening hundreds of conservatives pack the room, stepping in and out of line depending on whether they’re thirsty or whether they’d rather talk to one of the available icons—Mark Steyn! Jonah Goldberg! Rich Lowry!

I get stuck between Steyn, a ring of his fans, and a bar, where I meet an Orlando dermatologist named Darrin. He’d volunteered for Mitt Romney’s campaign, “making calls from my office” when he wasn’t working or raising his kids, and he wasn’t surprised when Romney lost, because he doesn’t put any graft past Barack Obama. “I’m worried about a dictatorship,” he says—really, we have been talking for maybe three minutes before he lays this on me. “I mean, it happened in history. History repeats. Why couldn’t it? How about all the Muslim Brotherhood czars? He’s got like eight different guys in the administration who are members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

When I start to sound skeptical, Darrin pulls out his iPhone and forwards me an infographic. It’s titled “Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrates Obama Administration,” and it shows six Muslims who work in the administration and “enjoy strong influence.” Another way of putting it: Six mid- and low-level staffers in the administration have, in the past, appeared on panels staged by frightening-sounding organizations. But the evidence worries Darrin. “If I have to go to a freakin’ island to save my kids,” he says. “I’ll do it. I’ll leave the country.”

But, to be fair, over at MediaMatters, Eric Boehlert notes that some voices at the conference did acknowledge that the Fox News led perpetual outrage machine of the last 3 years had been counterproductive.

Baby steps back towards reality, I guess.

Update:  on the third hand, the Salon commentary on the summit thinks that too many Republicans still think the problem was just with the messaging, not their ideas.

About that election date

So, last Sunday Tony Abbott had an event that everyone acknowledged as being exactly like an election campaign launch.  Everyone knows an election has to be held by November at the latest.

This week, Julia Gillard announces the election date, and she's the one some commentators are saying has started the election campaign?

This was certainly the line Chris Uhlmann took, with questions like these in last night's interview with Wayne Swan:

CHRIS UHLMANN: Why you have decided to run the longest election campaign in Australia political history?

CHRIS UHLMANN: Treasurer, this is now a campaign, no matter what you say.

I still say Uhlmann is not very bright and routinely gives soft interviews to Coalition figures and aggressive interviews to Labor figures.  His interview technique rarely adjusts questions much according to the responses.  

I cannot see what the drama is about announcing the election date.   Journalists and political commentators probably find it annoying because it cuts down by about a quarter the normal content of their annual writing in an election year.

It is disturbing that Rudd supporters within Labor are still backgrounding journalists like Uhlmann with their dissatisfaction with virtually anything Gillard done.  Uhlmann noted last night:

So is this a stroke of political genius, or in the words of one disgruntled Labor MP, an "unmitigated disaster of historic proportions".

There is no doubt at all that, in the event of a Labor loss, they will have to take a large amount of the credit.

Single Mums/Moms

What does Ross Douthat blame Roe v. Wade for today? The rise of single moms.

There's an interesting argument put here in Slate as to why there are more single mothers these days:

 The dynamics among abstinence, abortion, contraception, and the decline of marriage are complex, but here we’ll give the short version of an argument that we’ve made in various law-review articles and will continue to make in our forthcoming book, Family Classes. We think the big story of the past 40 years is the disappearance of the shotgun marriage. The shotgun marriage used to hide nonmarital pregnancies. It has disappeared not because of abortion, but because it didn’t work. The shotgun marriage kept couples together only when women had no ability to leave. The sexual brinkmanship of the 1950s (as teens discovered the car and lovers’ lanes) increased the number of brides pregnant at the altar to highs last seen in the 18^th century and fueled the divorce revolution of the 1970s. Douthat is right that a young woman with a promising future preferred the security of the pill and abortion to early marriage to a man who happened to get her pregnant. He refers to a perceptive study by economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen that observed that once women took charge of their own reproductive futures, men no longer had to “volunteer” to marry the women they had impregnated. The economists, however, were referring to the combined effect of abortion and the pill; a more recent study by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that, between the two, contraception was a key development in the norm shift that began with college graduates. Douthat leaves that part out.

All of this, however, is so 1980s. In the era Akerlof and Yellen studied, men no longer had to propose to women who, after all, had the option of using contraception and had failed to do so. Something different is taking place today: The “Bristol effect” is that the women reject the men who do propose, and then they still have the child. They do so because marriage is no longer a good deal for women with more reliable incomes than the men in their lives. Blue-collar wages flatlined for white men in the ’90s (and did so a generation earlier for black men). During the same period, blue-collar jobs generally become much less stable. The men became less reliable earners at a time when women’s workforce opportunities continue to increase. And while wages alone do not determine marriage, the behavior that often accompanies the lack of a steady job is a turnoff. These trends had already begun in the ’80s for the worst-off portions of the population, but they accelerated for most of the working class in the ’90s.

So the issue is not whether we are going to use anti-abortion sentiment to bring back the scarlet letter. Certainly, not with Bristol celebrated on reality TV. Instead, the question is whether we are going to face up to the challenge of caring for the children who result and the pretense that abstinence can cure the problem.

In the Kansas heartland, the single moms we meet are in tears because the same politicians who oppose abortion are cutting health care and education funding, raising taxes on the poor to finance income tax cuts for the wealthy, and eviscerating protections that had helped keep single mothers employed. Let’s recognize that the celebration of the unintended birth comes with an obligation to care for all our children.

Certainly, the shotgun wedding has been around a long time, if some examples from my mother's family are anything to go by.  In fact, what went on in her rural, working class family in the 1930's and 40's dispels any idea that people held back from pre-marital sex at a time where contraception was extremely limited and - I presume -  abortion in country towns was not readily available.

The funny thing is, as far as I could see, the marriages that happened quickly due to pregnancy turned out to be long and pretty happy looking ones.   I don't really know why that should be - the economic arguments about stable jobs and income noted in the article above seems at first a bit improbable to me.  (It makes it sound like women are more into hard nosed calculations about what's best for them financially than I would have assumed.)  But then again, we are talking about marriages in the 40's and 50's to men with blue collar but long lasting and stable jobs, and limited opportunities for the women to make a good living.  (They also would have had to take much time off to raise children, as child care was not generally available like it is now.)   So, you could say, economics and limited options forced them into marriages.  That sounds unfortunate, except for the fact that they turned out to be happy enough,  long term marriages.  Arranged marriages are also often quite successful.  And there was that recent report about a study showing that people routinely underestimate how much they will change in the future.  

Of course, you can't credibly argue that women should go back to having less options, both economically and in terms of contraception.

But what about the attitude that children will likely be happiest - and have the best life outcomes  - when being raised with the stability of two parents who will be together for the long term?   Why does that have to get lost in the matter of more choice for adults?

And speaking of choices and consequences:  no one is going to put the genie back in the bottle of relatively reliable contraception encouraging fertile people into sexual relationships that are seen as convenient and experimental.  (In the sense that, at the start, people are not sure whether it would work long term.)  But the fact is, no contraception is 100% reliable, and if (unlike your grandparents) you cannot bear the idea of making a decision to live for the next 20 years with your bedroom partner if one of you falls pregnant, then you really should not be having the ongoing sexual relationship in the first place.  And besides which, stop panicking about how unhappy you might be if a partnering decision  is made in circumstances not entirely within your control.*

Well, that's how it seems to me anyway.    Kind of simple, really, yet I have a great deal of trouble seeing what's wrong with thinking that way.     

*  Of course, people will say I am taking no account of safe abortion as an option now in most Western countries.  The thing is, I am cynical about the number of not entirely committed relationships which actually survive an abortion decision.  I know that anti-abortion groups almost certainly exaggerate the psychological harm that abortion causes, but looking at some pro-choice pages, it seems most studies concentrate solely on how it affects women, and not so much on how it affects relationships in the long term.

This man does not deserve to be PM

Tony Abbott made a quasi campaign launch the other day.  It hasn't attracted that much attention both because of it coinciding with the Queensland floods, and the fact that he had no actual policies to announce.

I note, however, that he made this statement, indicating again his attempts at right wing ignorant populism which demonstrates he's just not a serious character when it comes to the serious matter of climate change:

We will have a cleaner environment. Isn’t it bizarre that this government thinks that somehow raising the price of electricity is going to clean up our environment, stop bushfires, stop floods, stop droughts? Just think of how much hotter it might have been the other day but for the carbon tax! We will bring in sensible measures to improve our environment. There will be more trees, better soils, smarter technology. There will be incentives, not penalties and there will be a Green Army marching to the rescue of our degraded bushland, our waterways under pressure. We will work with the Australian people, not against them.

This is childish and pandering to the Tea Party inspired rump of the Right in Australia.   As far as I can see, no economist of note thinks that the Liberal Party's policy, which is supposed to have the same goals in terms of emission reduction, is a more sensible way to do it than carbon pricing.  

Moreover, as this article notes, Abbott is proposing to have prominent climate change skeptics giving him advice. 

Abbott does not deserve the job of Opposition Leader or PM.  The Coalition does not deserve the job of running the country until it has purged itself of the element that is under the sway of the stupid wing of the American Right. 

Floods in the future

I've been muttering ever since the enormous floods in Australia in 2011 that I wasn't sure how well anyone could anticipate how much increased floods due to climate change could cause damage to the economies of countries so affected.

I've been poking around a bit and see that there certainly have been a lot of attempts to try to quantify this, but I guess I am just worried that predicting changed rainfall in regions is one of the less clear aspects giving current climate modelling, and while this may mean that current estimates may be overly pessimistic, they might also not be pessimistic enough.

I note this as an example of one estimate, from one IPCC page:

The impact of climate change on flood damages can be estimated from modelled changes in the recurrence interval of present-day 20- or 100-year floods, and estimates of the damages of present-day floods as determined from stage-discharge relations (between gauge height (stage) and volume of water per unit of time (discharge)), and detailed property data. With such a methodology, the average annual direct flood damage for three Australian drainage basins was projected to increase by a factor of four to ten under conditions of doubled atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (Schreider et al., 2000). 

That does sound serious.   I know nothing more of the paper; I should go looking for it.

Would prefer robot ones myself...

Soldier who lost four limbs has double-arm transplant (Update)

This guy has had some bad luck, to put it mildly:

Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been living with his older brother in a handicapped-accessible home on New York's Staten Island built with the help of several charities. The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

The weather report

Brisbane is having the cyclone you have when not having a cyclone.
It is currently very windy in the part of Brisbane where I live, which is not near the coast.   Funnily enough, on the evening news, all the reporters on the coast seemed to standing in calmer conditions.  

I hope it calms down in the suburbs soon...

Update:   It's gone 11.30pm and it's still a bit worryingly windy.   I see it's been gusting up to 90 kph earlier this evening, so its not just my imagination. Here are the BOM weather observations:

Update: Apart from a couple of leaks around windows which haven't happened before, everything was OK at home. Haven't even lost power.

As a child in the 60's and 70's, small-ish cyclones heading down the Queensland coast towards Brisbane were more common than these days, but my recollection is that they tended to peter out as a cyclone usually around the Sunshine Coast. Sure, they could turn into a rain depression, but I don't recall much in the way of wind in the suburbs. That's what made this ex cyclone unusual - the widespread wind across the city that started late yesterday and didn't end until late this morning.

The most remarkable video from this event which I saw on a News Ltd website this morning has turned up in several Youtube accounts. If you haven't seen "Surprise car", you ought to. (I think this happened up at the Sunshine Coast.)

As to how bad the flooding will get in Brisbane tomorrow - it seems all very much guesswork.  It seems that one small area near me might be affected again, but I am hoping the modelling is erring on the pessimistic side.  We will see.

Of course, there are parts of Queensland doing it much, much worse (especially Bundaberg, which appears to be facing an all time record flood.)

Interestingly, until this rainfall started in Brisbane, the city was having an exceptionally dry January.  Not sure how the figures will look now.  It did seem to be illustrating what a climate change paradigm of swings from one extreme to another might look like, and it's not pretty.   As I suggested after the 2011 flood, if climate change means one in a 100 year floods start happening (say) once a decade, it's going to be a change of big economic consequence.  

Cheese with an unwanted extra

Poisoning toll rises, 100 foods recalled

So, there's been a major outbreak of listeria from soft cheeses made by the Jindi Cheese company:

 In NSW, a further three cases of the bacterial illness have been identified, bringing the national total to 21. A 34-year-old woman in NSW has miscarried and two men - an 84-year-old Victorian, and a 44-year-old Tasmanian - have died. Each of the new cases have been in people aged over 65, and one of them is in a serious condition.

What I didn't realise before this was how long it can be between eating the contaminated food and getting symptoms - it has a 70 day incubation period!   

I am curious on another point - when you open a soft cheese but forget to finish it for a couple of weeks, you can get some pretty powerful stinky growths on it.  I always worry a bit about how safe it is to eat it, or eat the bits around it the worst bits which I cut off.  I am trusting that it can't develop into anything too dangerous.  After all, Francis Lam at Salon did tell us a couple of years ago about some extraordinarily strong French cheese that seemed it was trying to kill him:

Fromage fort translates as “strong cheese,” and is a bit of a Frankenstein — a potted mash of old bits and pieces, the Parliament-funky rinds of leftover cheeses, and left to molder together for a bit. There’s usually some kind of booze in there for extra kick (and extra protection from bacteria). Whether it’s a food or a dare is largely up to interpretation. You can only imagine what earns the title of “strong cheese” in the homeland of stinky cheese.

Hmm.  Maybe I should try mushing up the old soft cheese with a bit of wine or brandy and see what that comes out like...

Absurd Apple

Apple trademarks "distinctive design" of stores