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.)
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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."
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.)
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:
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:
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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:
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.
Monday, September 16, 2013
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Sunday, September 15, 2013
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:
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.
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.
Julia and I on the same wavelength
Julia Gillard's weekend essay is pretty good, I think, and I am particularly pleased to see that she agrees with what I wrong a fortnight ago about a key, disastrously bad, decision she made:
I erred by not contesting the label “tax” for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word “tax”. I wanted to be on the substance of the policy, not playing “gotcha”. But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly.Why aren't I paid a lot of money to be a political adviser?
Hindsight can give you insights about what went wrong. But only faith, reason and bravery can propel you forward.
Labor should not in opposition abandon our carbon pricing scheme. Climate change is real. Carbon should be priced. Community concern about carbon pricing did abate after its introduction. Tony Abbott does not have a viable alternative.
While it will be uncomfortable in the short term to be seen to be denying the mandate of the people, the higher cost would be appearing as, indeed becoming, a party unable to defend its own policy and legislation: a party without belief, fortitude or purpose.
Labor is on the right side of history on carbon pricing and must hold its course. Kevin Rudd was both right and brave to say this in the dying days of the campaign.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Hadn't thought of these before
Life-saving inventions, people, and ideas: Cotton, shoes, fluoride, the Clean Air Act. - Slate Magazine
This post in Slate's longevity series lists "14 oddball reasons you're not dead yet". Most of them I had heard of before, but I found two which were a bit new to me:
This post in Slate's longevity series lists "14 oddball reasons you're not dead yet". Most of them I had heard of before, but I found two which were a bit new to me:
Cotton. One of the major killers of human history was typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice. It defeated Napoleon’s army; if Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Cotton is easier to clean than wool and less hospitable to body lice.And:
Pasteurization. This should be an obvious lifesaver, right up there with hand-washing and proper nutrition. But the rise of the raw milk movement suggests that a lot of people take safe dairy products for granted. Contaminated milk was one of the major killers of children, transmitting typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. One of the most successful public health campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was for pure and pasteurized milk—so successful that we don’t really remember how deadly milk can be.(I didn't realise that so many diseases had been associated with unpasteurised milk.)
Detective Rat
From the BBC:
Five "sniffer rats" have been in police training in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, learning how to distinguish between scents - including blood, drugs and explosives.There's video at the link, but wasn't working when I tried it.
The brown rats are due to go into active service next year, operating under the names Poirot, Magnum, Derrick - TV detectives popular in the Netherlands - and Jansen and Janssen, the Dutch names for the bowler-hatted detectives in Tintin.
It means the Netherlands will be the first country to use trained rats in civilian police investigations.
Brie snobbery
Slate’s rules for entertaining: never bring brie cheese to a party, it’s clich, bland, and fake.
Seeing I haven't eaten American brie, I don't know how much truth there is in this article. But given that it appears that America has the same cheese making rules as Australia (pasteurised milk only) one suspects that its brie might be the same as ours, and the writer reckons its bland and should be completely avoided.
Yet how different is French brie, really? In the comments that follow the article (where a heated back and forth about whether the article is just food snobbery) someone says they didn't find the French cheese all that different.
One thing I do know for sure - if you want funky, overpowering cheese in Australia, all you have to do is buy some Blue Castello*, eat half of it, forget about the other half for a fortnight or so in the fridge, and try it again. It's always a matter of curiosity to me whether the yellowish, somewhat slimy looking patches that develop (and which taste very strong indeed) could actually put one's health at risk. (I usually try to cut off the worst looking bits, but the taste still lingers.)
* My goodness - the company has a very fancy shmancy website
Seeing I haven't eaten American brie, I don't know how much truth there is in this article. But given that it appears that America has the same cheese making rules as Australia (pasteurised milk only) one suspects that its brie might be the same as ours, and the writer reckons its bland and should be completely avoided.
Yet how different is French brie, really? In the comments that follow the article (where a heated back and forth about whether the article is just food snobbery) someone says they didn't find the French cheese all that different.
One thing I do know for sure - if you want funky, overpowering cheese in Australia, all you have to do is buy some Blue Castello*, eat half of it, forget about the other half for a fortnight or so in the fridge, and try it again. It's always a matter of curiosity to me whether the yellowish, somewhat slimy looking patches that develop (and which taste very strong indeed) could actually put one's health at risk. (I usually try to cut off the worst looking bits, but the taste still lingers.)
* My goodness - the company has a very fancy shmancy website
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)