How anti-science moved to the Right

John Quiggin � The global party of stupid (slightly updated)

Interesting post from John Quiggin; this part in particular:

It’s striking in this context to recall that, only 20 years ago, the phrase “Science Wars” was used in relation to generally leftish postmodernists in the humanities, who were seen as rejecting science and/or promoting pseudoscience (while some of this stuff was rather silly, there’s no evidence that it ever did any actual harm to science). These days postmodernist and related “science studies” critiques of science are part of the rightwing arsenal used by Steven Fuller to defend creationism and by Daniel Sarewitz on climate science. The routine assumption that the analyses put forward of innumerate bloggers are just as valid as (in fact more valid than) as those of scientists who have devoted their life to the relevant field is one aspect of this, as is the constant demand to “teach the controversy” on evolution, climate science, wind turbine health scares, vaccination and so on.

In the short run, the costs of attacking science are small. Scientists aren’t that numerous, so their conversion into one of the most solidly anti-Republican voting blocs in the US has’t had much electoral impact. But, eventually the fact that conservatives are the “stupid party” gets noticed, even by rightwingers themselves.

Mind you, I would probably put anti-vaccination in the "mainly Left" side of the ledger.

Fear of wind turbines is, however, almost certainly a politically manipulated phenomena led by anti-climate change groups.  An interesting article at The Conversation about this is here.

As I suggested in a previous post....

Colorado's 'Biblical' Flood in Line with Climate Trends | Climate Central

Look, I know that not every flood is going to credibly be related to climate change; but when I read about a big flood these days, I go looking for reports as to whether the rainfall that led to it is record breaking, and by what amount.  

If the rainfall is of an intensity that smashes previous records, and given that we know the atmosphere is carrying more water now than it used, then the relationship to global warming is looking pretty good.

The most awesome medical condition, ever

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut : The Salt : NPR

This story is so remarkable, I want to re-print the whole thing.   But here's just half of it:

A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.

That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae , Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

This makes me wonder whether some college students will try some experiments on themselves.  Perhaps if you neutralise stomach acid first with an antacid, then take a tablespoon or two of freeze dried yeast, followed by some starch....

Michelle confirms what we knew

Public servants victims of long Coalition memories

 The story of Andrew Metcalfe, who is out of Agriculture, goes back quite a way. Metcalfe formerly headed Immigration. In 2011 he gave a background briefing to journalists (later attributed to him) in which he suggested that Abbott’s policy of turning back boats, while effective under Howard, would not work now, because the asylum seekers would scuttle the boats and Indonesia would not agree to the policy.

The two cardinal sins in Coalition eyes are believing in a carbon price and not believing in turning around boats.

Blair Comley, who went to Resources after Labor scrapped the Climate Change department, had a major hand in Labor’s carbon policy and was a stronger defender of it. Enough said.

Metcalfe also came up with the "Malaysia solution", so of course he couldn't stay, even though Amanda Vanstone worked with him under Howard and spoke highly of him.

And remember Maurice Newman and his "myth of climate change" article?  Well, doesn't this augur well for environment:

 There are two new heads. Gordon de Brouwer becomes secretary of the Environment department and Renee Leon will head the Employment department. Both have been senior in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (de Brouwer an associate secretary); sources say de Brouwer has a strong advocate in business leader Maurice Newman.

 What's the bet that if Maurice endorses him to head environment, he's a climate change skeptic in private?

You won the election, you can stop that now, Tone

Surely I can't be the only person in the nation who cringes every time I see one of these set up "Tony gives a pep talk" scenes on the news?   But he seems to think they're great.  Here's a hint Tone:  you won the election, you claim to want to just get down to work - we don't need to see your bumpf to a room full of colleagues about what a serious responsibility it is, and we're going to get down to work, and you're a great team that will lead the nation into the bright new future blah blah blah, blah.

One of the worst examples of this was, I thought, the meeting with the military last week.  Oh yeah, didn't they look comfortable being used as part of Tony PR, Inc on the evening news:

And is that Peta Credlin in some sort of ninja outfit?

Of course, it put me in mind of someone else who likes to be seen with the military as much as possible:

As indeed did this piece of pre-election "ooh, let's make Tony softer still - women like that" transparent PR:

Of course all politicians do stupid and cynically manipulative PR all the time - Rudd was rightly criticised for deliberately doing door stops leaving church in Canberra.   But Abbott with his daughters sticking to his side every freaking minute of the election campaign, all the "action man" shots (including the one with the army), and the use of the military like that post election - his team is full on Putin PR (except I am led to believe that Putin is more likeable than Peta Credlin, and he has a less compliant media than the Murdoch press is towards Abbott.)

An odd Hitler bit

Brian at Eli Rabett's blog has been reading Speer's memoir of his time with the Third Riech, and notes a few things he hadn't known before.  I don't recall this one myself (although, in the massive swirl of things one reads from time to time about H, perhaps I had seen it before and have forgotten):

Hitler is also a fan of alternative history. He wished the Muslims had conquered Europe, viewing Islam as appropriately martial and not "weak" like Christianity.

When trolling for sympathy goes wrong

I still don't really get the joke the Chaser did about Chris Kenny.  Sure, they wanted to make a point that he's a stupid right wing polemicist with crazy priorities for starting to talk even on election night about how the new government should de-fund the ABC.  But the way they did it seemed rather "meta", didn't it? And, of course, in dubious taste.

But what has made it funny are three things:

1.  the way Andrew Bolt trolled for sympathy for (I assume) his mate Chris, insisting that he is the subject of a scandalously insulting and offensive photoshop, by re-posting the picture.   Wait, wait, Andrew. If the picture is that bad, aren't you adding to Kenny's grief?

2.   The way many at Catallaxy threads urged Kenny to sue for defamation.  What, because people might think Kenny really does attempt what is depicted in an obvious photoshop?  Gee, those Catallaxy people seem to think even less of Kenny than what I do...

3.  The way Chris' own attempted trolling for sympathy (to paraphrase) "this photo will be around the internet forever; it'll be what my kids see when they Google my name" [I trust you've sent a note to Andrew thanking him for further raising it on the Google results list, then Chris], has been disowned by his own son. 

Yes, it's now very funny.

Update:  Catallaxy regulars are, predictably,  now huffing and puffing that Liam Kenny is the appalling one, even though he acknowledges that the attempted joke was "... crass, to be sure. A cheap shot. A dog act."

Liam makes the point that he happens to find his father's politics deeply objectionable, and the photoshop was a triffling matter compared to the serious offence he finds in right wing punditry.   This is an entirely defensible position.  Reasonable, in fact.

And it's hilarious, the way it shows up Chris' sympathy troll.

Update 2:  I think I have worked out what went wrong with the joke.  If they had said after Chris's clip "Well, that's ridiculous - it's not as if the ABC is the network that would show a photo of a right wing pundit doing this -" and then shown it anyway, it would have made more sense.  But if I recall correctly, they said "this is the network that shows photos of Chris Kenny, etc."

A food technology topic of interest

Inspired by the recent gift of a yoghurt making kit* that involves re-hydrating a mix that evidently contains freeze dried yoghurt making bacteria, I have become interested in the fact that you can freeze dry bacteria in the first place.

Isn't that a little surprising?

My self education, and yours, can perhaps begin with this paper.

I also am now wondering whether life spread throughout the universe via the accidental dispersal of freeze dried yoghurt mix from an alien spaceship that exploded.   Or perhaps they just littered and threw the empty foil packet out the hatch after making a batch of Xerthian Noobleberry. It's a theory...

*  (yes I know, Tim, you can make yoghurt just by breeding more of it from shop bought yoghurt.)

Of course, Andrew

The AEC should sue Palmer | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Andrew Bolt starts off a post about nutty Clive Palmer as follows:

Normally I am against defamation proceedings, 

Well, given that he's been successfully sued for defamation, and could likely have been further sued for defamation by at least some of the "white aborigines" who took him to court under the Racial Discrimination Act instead, why am I not surprised?

Four things you don't have to worry about much in Australia

1.  That your neighbour downstairs, who has complained you are too noisy, will "accidentally" shoot a bullet through your floor, and the prosecutors will believe it was just a gun cleaning accident;

2.  That your car will be shot by an angry man for being parked in the wrong place, and the said angry man will later be able to buy a shotgun, no problem-o;

3.  That an angry and mentally unstable person will kill 12 people at a workplace with  a legally purchased shotgun (and a couple of other guns, obtained from we know not where);

4.  That fools will rush in and complain that the problem with gun control in a city where a mentally unstable man with a legally purchased shotgun killed 12 people in a military facility with armed guards is that there are not enough legally owned guns being carried around by people in the city.

Oh, wait a minute:   scratch that last one.  We now have a Senator elect, basically there under false pretences due to the name of his party, who believes this:

"Sometimes people laugh at this comment, but the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he said.

"And in America, there are more good guys with guns than there are in Australia.

"So I would think the outcome would have been worse in Australia than it was there."

More "just appalling"

Climate change denial: Speak up, speak out.

Read the examples Phil Plait gives of the (mainly) American right wing echo chamber that is completely gullible and gets the science of climate change completely and utterly wrong.

It's depressing.

Just appalling

Yet another bad, bad sign about the Abbott government:

Maurice Newman, the former chairman of the ABC and the ASX who will be the chair of Tony Abbott’s Business Advisory Council, has launched an attack against the CSIRO, the weather bureau and the “myth” of anthropological climate change.

In an opinion piece written for the Australian Financial Review, Newman said much of the public service infrastructure would be resistant to change because of their “vested interests” in the status quo.

“The CSIRO, for example, has 27 scientists dedicated to climate change,” Newman wrote. “It and the weather bureau continue to propagate the myth of anthropological climate change and are likely to be background critics of the Coalition’s Direct Action policies.”...

Given Newman’s dismissal of climate science, one wonders why he sees the need for Direct Action of any type. The answer possibly lies in the government’s updated policy position: Abbott has conceded that the government will no longer seek to reach even the minimum 5 per cent emission reduction target if its reduced budget of $3 billion falls short of requirements.

Newman’s comments came a day after it was revealed that Abbott’s mentor John Howard would address one of the world’s most prominent climate skeptics think tanks, and the portfolios of science and climate change had been subsumed into other ministries.

Newman said money spent on pursuing the myths of climate change and global action was wasted, because they misallocate capital and add to unemployment.

Out of the 4th dimension

Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe? : Nature News

I like the sound of this idea:

In a paper posted last week on the arXiv preprint server¹, Afshordi and his colleagues turn their attention to a proposal² made in 2000 by a team including Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions.

Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

A prediction about the Abbott government

Warren Mundine is on Lateline now, running through the usual routine of what must be done to help  aboriginal communities (you know:  kids got to go to school and get education, then jobs, which leads to integration to the real economy, and less welfare dependence; more private enterprise involvement in economic development, etc.)

It's really striking how there is nothing new in what he is saying.  He is not suggesting anything specific or novel in terms of actual programs that will achieve these goals.  I do not see that he is really saying anything significantly different to what a present day Labor government would say, yet he is aligning himself strongly with Abbott.  It is my view that Labor has lost nearly all of the left wing gullibility they used to have on aboriginal matters, and just sees it as it really is - an awful, complicated mess in which it is extremely hard to make headway and it doesn't pay to believe everything aboriginal leadership may claim.  

Aboriginal politics is complicated, and aboriginal leaders who like to talk the right wing talk are not exactly riding high at the moment:  it appears that Noel Pearson (viewed as a hero by Tony Abbott) is on the nose with many who run aboriginal communities in North Queensland.  Alison Anderson, who has promoted private ownership of land as a way of improving aboriginal communities (and made comments about aborigines needing to get themselves off to work), has been dumped by the CLP government and is apparently thinking of joining up as an Abbott adviser.  So there you have two of the people Abbott thinks will shake up aboriginal affairs who are already showing signs of getting people they need to work with offside.

My prediction:  there will be no clear, or at least no clear substantial, improvement to the handling of aboriginal issues no matter how much Abbott has personal interest and experience in the field.  The problems of remote aboriginal welfare are essentially intractable, and activists who make statements that they know how they can turn it around are pretty much just repeating platitudes that are extremely hard to put in place given the complexities on the ground.

Boulder flood noted

Is there anything remarkable about the recent flooding in Boulder, Colorado?  Well, the 24 hour rainfall total that led to it seems a pretty big record breaker, even if it is not being much reported as such:

An all-time 24-hour record rainfall of 9.08” (as of 6 p.m. 9/12 MT--almost double the previous record) has deluged the city of Boulder, Colorado resulting in widespread flash flooding and the deaths of at least three people so far. 12.27" has accumulated since Monday 5 p.m. (September 9th). Needless to say, these are numbers that surpass most tropical storm events. Other locations in the Boulder and Rocky Mountain Front Range have picked up over 11” of precipitation in just the past 24 hours. The official Colorado state record of 11.08" for a 24-hour period set at Holly on June 17, 1965 might be in jeopardy. UPDATE A site near Eldorado Springs in Jefferson County has reported 14.60" of rainfall as of 9:40 p.m. MT on Thursday evening. It is not clear if this is a storm total or 24-hour total.

The Corrections

Anyone sensible would know that a Graham Lloyd article in The Australian with the headline "We got it wrong on warming, says IPCC" would be chock full of error and distortion.  (I'm particularly taken with the first line which refers to "its [the IPCC's] computer drastically overestimated rising temperature"  - yes "computer", as if this is worked out on one organisation's single computer in the corner.)

But in any event, if you want a read some immediate reactions to how it stuffs up, read here.

Brilliant move, Tony! Let's pretend science doesn't exist!

This morning I was longing to see Tony Abbott try on a bit of farce by appointing a climate change skeptic to be the Minister for Science.

He's done even better - he's pretending Science doesn't exist.

What a sign of the attitude and credibility of this government.   

Ha!

Bronwyn Bishop to be Speaker

While we're at it, can I please have a climate change denier in the science portfolio?  And give Nick Minchin that nice New York job?

The Gina Chronicles

The mother of all feuds

Wow.  This lengthy article that appeared in the weekend magazine of the Fairfax papers paints a fantastically unflattering portrait of Gina Rinehart.  One can't help but imagine that this does not please her, especially as owner of a fair slab of the company.

Gina does seem to be having a run of court action losses lately.  You would have to strongly suspect that she is about to lose her biggest case at the hands of her son, unless he suddenly decides to accept a compromise settlement before it goes to trial next month.  In fact, the article resolves one thing I had long wondered:  would Gina's argument (that extending the vesting date of the trust was in her children's interest because that way they would avoid a huge capital gains tax liability) hold up?   No, it seems not.  Apparently, within 12 months, her son had a ruling from the ATO that confirmed it would not attract CGT.  Once that was know, how did Gina really think she win the case? 

I haven't read all that much about Gina Rinehart's complicated life, and so I have also previously missed this bit of family bitterness:

Lang, noting the changes he saw taking place in his daughter after her second marriage, famously remarked in a letter to her: "At least allow me to remember you as the neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady of the 'Wake Up Australia' tour [when she was married to Greg Milton], rather than the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become. I am glad your mother cannot see you now."

Nasty, but somewhat amusing in a multi-generational soap opera sort of way.  (I never watched Dallas, but I wonder if the real life Rinehart saga indicates that the show may have been far more realistic than people imagined.)

High food

In defense of airline food: Airplane cuisine is a triumph of cooking, science, and logistics. - Slate Magazine

Yeah, I am with this guy:  I enjoy airline food, largely because it is usually palatable enough but also the end of a long chain of effort to get it to my little fold down tray.   

I also didn't realise until I read this article that no US economy domestic airline has a free meal service anymore. That's a bit surprising, given the length of some cross country flights.