Putin's narrow philosophical interests

From Philosophy Now:

Kremlinologists were granted a glimpse into Vlad ‘The Inscrutable’ Putin’s ideological motivations, when the Washington Post reported that he had ordered Russia’s regional governors to read three weighty books by 19th and 20th century Russian philosophers. The books are The Philosophy of Inequality by Nikolai Berdyaev; Justification of the Good by Vladimir Solovyov and Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin. Putin has quoted from these three philosophers a number of times in recent speeches. Commentators scrapped over what all this might mean. David Brooks of the New York Times said that the three philosophers shared three central ideas: Russian exceptionalism, devotion to the Orthodox church, and autocracy. He claimed that all three had lurid, grandiose visions of Russia’s mission in the world. Others (such as Damon Linker) claimed this to be an oversimplistic reading.

Simple operation, big benefits

Gawd, this will send some anti-circ nutters into a frenzy of attempted rebuttal:

A paper in Mayo Clinic Proceedings finds that the benefits of infant male circumcision to health exceed the risks by over 100 to 1. Brian Morris, Professor Emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney and his colleagues in Florida and Minnesota found that over their lifetime half of uncircumcised males will contract an adverse medical condition caused by their foreskin. The findings add considerable weight to the latest American Academy of Pediatrics policy that supports education and access for infant male circumcision.

In infancy the strongest immediate benefit is protection against urinary tract infections (UTIs) that can damage the kidney in half of babies who get a UTI. Morris and co-investigator Tom Wiswell, MD, Center for Neonatal Care, Orlando, showed last year that over the lifetime UTIs affect 1 in 3 uncircumcised males. In a systematic review, Morris, with John Krieger, MD, Department of Urology, University of Washington, Seattle, showed that there is no adverse effect of circumcision on sexual function, sensitivity, or pleasure, which dispelled one myth perpetuated by opponents of the procedure.

The rate of circumcision in the US is still quite high (81% overall, although much less amongst Hispanics.)   I am surprised - I would have thought the rate would have dropped a lot, as it has in Australia, once the medical bodies initially moved somewhat against it.

But Professor Morris is strongly pro:

"The new findings now show that infant circumcision should be regarded as equivalent to childhood vaccination and that as such it would be unethical not to routinely offer parents circumcision for their baby boy. Delay puts the child's health at risk and will usually mean it will never happen." 

 I don't think you can get it done in public hospitals in Australia.  I wonder if that will change?

Steve's simple guide to fiscal policy

As far as I can make out, this would represent a common sense approach to future taxation and spending by the Australian government:

*  broaden somewhat the GST and increase the rate modestly.

*  retain the mining tax - it is clearly not harming the industry (hello, new mine funding for Gina) and why give up even a couple of hundred million dollars for ideological reasons?   (Also, does anyone know what that might increase to in future, once the miners run out of fiddles to avoid it.)

*  scrap the Abbott parental leave tax - no one apart from Abbott and a couple of feminists who Abbott would not normally think had anything worthwhile to say believe it is necessary or good for the country

*  adopt the Labor plan for a floating carbon price.  It may or may not work, but it is better than government "direct action" spending which everyone knows has no chance of working and is bad for the budget bottom line.   The current level of tax is not hurting the economy in any substantial way;  the Coalition has done a disgraceful job of encouraging people to think their energy bill rise is only due to it (and that they weren't compensated for it in other ways.)

*  Push hard at all international forums for agreement to remove the ability of large, enormously profitable multinational companies to pay tiny amounts of tax.

*  Do not implement Abbott's mad promise to increase defence spending from 1.5% of GDP to 2%.   Defence is a permanent bottomless pit of desirable spending, all for a country which hasn't used its Air Force in anger for nearly 50 years now.   For an ocean surrounded country, having some submarines will always make some sense; always having the latest in fighter jets doesn't.  Sure, look to high tech (like drones), but it must be cost efficient.

*  Once a week, tar and feather an economist or employee associated with the IPA on TV (the ABC, of course).  It won't directly solve the fiscal problems, but would provide entertainment at very cheap cost, satisfy the IPA of its hypocritical desire to be on the government funded media which they hate, and raise the chances of more sensible economic, social and climate change policy from anywhere.

Update:  has anyone mentioned estate taxes yet?   I recently discovered that England still has quite a large one, and so does the US both at the Federal level and (often) at the State level.  Why are Australians declining a source of funding for useful things like health and aged care services from people who actually don't need money anymore?  A federal one which kicks in only at total estates worth (say) $1,000,000 or more may or may not be worthwhile, as I presume it would lead to avoidance measures which may be difficult to plug.  Still, I wouldn't want to rule it out prematurely. 

Above ground fish

BBC News - Hong Kong's fish farms in the sky

Interesting.  That's all.

Republicans stuck

John Cassidy writing in the New Yorker says the Republicans are stuck on stupid.  (Well, OK, that's my phrasing, not his, but close to the mark):

Here’s all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s effort to face reality, moderate its policies, and present a more coherent policy platform to voters in 2016. David Camp, the Michigan Republican who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and who in February introduced a sweeping tax-reform plan that, at least, recognized the basic laws of arithmetic, is leaving Congress. Paul Ryan, the conservative Moses of Capitol Hill, is sticking around. On Wednesday, he unveiled the latest of his right-wing manifestos, thinly disguised as a serious budget, proposing to repeal Obamacare, privatize Medicare, and slash spending on Medicaid and food stamps.

No, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. The Republican Party’s reform effort, which was heralded by a March, 2013, internal report that said that the G.O.P. was trapped in “an ideological cul de sac,” is over almost before it had begun. On issue after issue (gun control, immigration, gay marriage, Obamacare, climate change, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage), suggestions that the Party might revise its extreme positions have been stomped on. The ultras have won out. And nowhere is this more true than in the biggest policy area of all: taxes and spending.

A problem I am in no danger of encountering

Too much running tied to shorter lifespan, studies find

Saudi Arabia really, really, doesn't want tourists, does it.

A new terrorism law in Saudi Arabia targets atheists and dissent of all types.

Be warned Jason Soon, if your aircraft ever has to divert into a Saudi airport, your twitter account may be used in evidence against you...

The happy medium

In the debate about free speech and s18C Racial Discrimination Act, Jason Soon links to a pretty good article about the American attitude to free speech, which talks about the heavy emphasis of individualism in that country that colours many of its entrenched policies.

The article also makes brief mention of how in Britain, an offensive tweet can lead to police arrest.

(Here's a more detailed article on that topic.) 

These articles should, in my view, make people appreciate that in Australia, on this and other social matters, we actually have a happy medium between these two extremes*.   We don't have the spectacle of  a lawyer's picnic which leads to the Supreme Court having to decide whether to hear a case about the free speech right of 11 year old school students to wear T shirts proclaiming their love of "boobies"; nor do we have Andrew Bolt claiming (as much it would enhance his persistent martyr act) that he is in fear of arrest because of his columns. 

The Human Rights Commission and courts seem to have been working away on complaints under the RDA in a sensible fashion, seeking mediated resolutions of cases they deem not to be merely trivial.

This is good.

I see no need to change it.

*  I would argue we have reached the same happy compromise in our health system, for example.

PS:   I think it's pretty funny how The Australian seems to be on a desperate search to find aborigines or Jews who support amending the Act.  Every couple of days, there is a report that reads "See - here's one other person in a minority group who supports this amendment.  (We'll let you know when we find another.)"

The Right is the problem

From an opinion piece in the LA Times:

Thankfully, Americans don’t buy his [James Inhofe's] extreme take. They do believe global warming is a thing, but they aren’t persuaded just yet that it’s a critical problem.

One study found that that is partly attributable to conservative media's dismissive coverage of the phenomenon. The Gallup Poll finds that 81% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans think the seriousness of global warming has either been correct or underestimated, while 68% of Republicans and only 18% of Democrats think the problem has been exaggerated. 

And I see that, in Australia, the IPA is again hosting a tour of Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change contrarian scientists who makes a living from fossil fuel interests by claiming all other climate scientists are wrong.   As Skeptical Science notes, he's been singing the same song since at least 1992, and was wrong then, and is wrong now.

He's actually probably more objectionable than the IPA's previous guest, Monckton.  The latter is more obviously a buffoon. 

Now I'm worried

Sure, of the IPA crowd, Chris Berg seems the most affable, but he's still not to be trusted.

Here he is today arguing that cybercrime "is not the bogeyman it is made out to be."

Here he is in 2010 noting that pressure cooker bombs are "weak":

Then there is ''Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom'', which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed ''close to the intended targets''.

It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully.

Here's a photo of the aftermath of a couple of weak old pressure cooker bombs, which killed 3 and injured 264, which appear to have been made following instructions from the very same on line Islamic terrorist magazine, the articles of which Chris said "when they're not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal."




Yes.  Very banal.

Experiment in non censorship noted

The New York Times had an article  on the weekend looking at the question of what is known about the effect of internet pornography on teenagers.

The answer proposed is:  not much.

This is not surprising.  As the article says, it's not as if you can easily get ethical consent to do studies that compare one set of teenagers deliberately exposed to certain types of pornography with those who are not exposed.  And, for those who have seen some pornography, proving causal connections is particularly difficult:

After sifting through those papers, the report found a link between exposure to pornography and engagement in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or sex at a young age. But little could be said about that link. Most important, “causal relationships” between pornography and risky behavior “could not be established,” the report concluded. Given the ease with which teenagers can find Internet pornography, it’s no surprise that those engaging in risky behavior have viewed pornography online. Just about every teenager has. So blaming X-rated images for risky behavior may be like concluding that cars are a leading cause of arson, because so many arsonists drive. 

American scholars have come to nearly identical nonconclusions. “By the end we looked at 40 to 50 studies,” said Eric Owens, an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and co-author of “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. “And it became, ‘O.K., this one tells us A, this one tells us B.’ To some degree we threw up our hands and said, there is no conclusion to be drawn here.”

This is one of those areas where, regardless of the difficulty of drawing causal connections, there is good reason to take a common sense approach that limits on the amount of pornography available to teenagers be limited.  The availability of hard core pornography via the internet in virtually every teenager's house is a novel situation we have never really seen the likes of before.  It is not the equivalent of soft core Playboys being found in a secret stash.   And video and photography of real people engaged in the real activity is also rather different from fictional, written accounts - the latter is an act of imagination that everyone knows has not involved a real person using their body in a morally dubious fashion.

Thus, I have never had a problem at all with the idea that the "standard" household feed of internet access should make some attempt at filtering out what would be called x rated video and photographic pornography, even if it is a certainty that what's left will never be as "safe" as Reader's Digest, with an "opt in" choice to be made by those who want it.   Australian internet companies and libertarian types have always claimed that this was virtually impossible to achieve for technical reasons. Yet, as the NYT article points out:

Starting late last year, Internet service providers in Britain made “family-friendly filters,” which block X-rated websites, the default for customers. Now any account holder who wants to view adult material needs to actively opt in — effectively raising a hand to say, “Bring on the naughty.”

The initiative, which was conceived and very publicly promoted by the government, is intended to prevent what Prime Minister David Cameron called the corrosion of childhood, which, he argued in a speech last year, happens when kids are exposed to pornography at a young age.

Tech commentators who are against any form of filtering always argue that a determined teenager will be able to get around it.  That hardly seems the point when one is considering children under 13, who are not likely to be highly motivated to searching out pornography anyway. And even for your normal teenager, the (shall we say) low threshold for arousal probably means that we can acknowledge that the filtered feed may have enough material for their, ahem, purposes; but this is still better than full unlimited access to a world of demeaning examples of sexual activity. 

I am sure that it would be widely considered a bad thing if (hypothetically) all laws regarding access to adult shops were revoked and newsagents and bookshops were suddenly to open vast sections devoted to the most lurid and explicit DVDs and magazine covers, and could hand out sample copies to 14 year olds.  Why is reasonable, age related regulation of access to the physical thing accepted, but the cyber version is supposed to be completely open or it's painted as some sort of censorship crisis?    Opt in plans do nothing to prevent adults accessing what they want to access.

So, I am very interested to see how the English new scheme works out.  There is remarkably little comment on the internet about it, even though it has now been in place for a few months.   I would thought that it had caused some massive log jam on the net, we would have heard already.

If it works reasonably well, it should be taken up elsewhere too.

About that Roger Pielke Jnr argument

I'm rather busy at the moment, but just wanted to note this passage from a recent Real Climate post, as it is a good, short summary of why one key Pielke Jnr argument is a complete distraction:

The cost of extreme weather events

If an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming is hard to prove by statistics amongst all the noise, how much harder is it to demonstrate an increase in damage cost due to global warming? Very much harder! A number of confounding socio-economic factors clouds this issue which are very hard to quantify and disentangle. Some factors act to increase the damage, like larger property values in harm’s way. Some act to decrease it, like more solid buildings (whether from better building codes or simply as a result of increased wealth) and better early warnings. Thus it is not surprising that the literature on this subject overall gives inconclusive results. Some studies find significant damage trends after adjusting for GDP, some don’t, tempting some pundits to play cite-what-I-like. The fact that the increase in damage cost is about as large as the increase in GDP (as recently argued at FiveThirtyEight) is certainly no strong evidence against an effect of global warming on damage cost. Like the stranger’s dozen rolls of dice in the pub, one simply cannot tell from these data.

The emphasis on questionable dollar-cost estimates distracts from the real issue of global warming’s impact on us. The European heat wave of 2003 may not have destroyed any buildings – but it is well documented that it caused about 70,000 fatalities. This is the type of event for which the probability has increased by a factor of five due to global warming – and is likely to rise to a factor twelve over the next thirty years. Poor countries, whose inhabitants hardly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, are struggling to recover from “natural” disasters, like Pakistan from the 2010 floods or the Philippines and Vietnam from tropical storm Haiyan last year. The families who lost their belongings and loved ones in such events hardly register in the global dollar-cost tally.

Tony's dream....

Yong speaks

Ed Yong, whose blog "Not Exactly Rocket Science" was recently added to my blogroll, has a TED talk on line now.  His voice is very different from what I expected, and his talk on mind controlling parasites is good:

A spectacularly bad week for Right wing figures past their "use by" date

Let's list the losers from this week, in no particular order:

1.  Bronwyn Bishop.  It doesn't matter that she was always destined to win the vote (has a government ever voted against its own speaker, rather than simply asking him or her to resign?), the grim look on her face during the detailed and fairly put argument by Tony Burke was enough to hurt her, and Tony Abbott.  Michelle Grattan, who I think is generally pretty fair in her commentary on personal performances, has labelled Bishop as not even giving the impression of trying to be fair.  Bishop ought to protect whatever frail legacy she thinks she has ("a mile wide but an inch deep" rings true to this day) by resigning in light of Labor's declaration of no confidence in her.   I am guessing she won't.

And how ludicrous was it of Christopher Pyne to say that the fact the challenge was prepared meant it was a "stunt"?  If you take on a major and serious task like this, of course it has to be backed up with evidence.

By the way, in all the commentary about it, why has no journalist followed up on Burke's claim that Bishop lied about what was on a tape?   Isn't that a very serious allegation?

2.  Tony Abbott   Knights and Dames.   Did he seriously think there would not be near uniform ridicule from politicians and the public about this?   Was he trying to distract from something else, like his poor judgement with giving Sinodinos a job when he must have know damage was coming up?  He looked genuinely upset with Bill Shorten's ridicule in the House, helping ensure his self inflicted damage from this ridiculous exercise.

And how about his claiming that Bishop had handled the challenge to her with "grace and good humour"?  There was no evidence of humour on her part whatsoever.  

3.  Arthur Sinodinos.  Well, it's more than a week since his damage was done, but since then, despite the Commission saying that it was not really going after him, it still looks very likely he is not coming back.  I didn't think he was past his use by date until this came to light, but he is.

4.  Cardinal George Pell.   By all accounts, of course including the very detailed ones by Marr, a pretty terrible performance in that he agreed that the Church had acted appallingly in a crucial child abuse court case, but to quite a large degree sought to deflect blame for that to a string of other people, and tried to make up for it by saying the Church's door was now open to making large compensation payments.   All rather too late for those who have died, George.  The physical stoop he has developed in recent years has been like a living reminder of the diminishment of his judgement and character in the eyes of most Australian Catholics, let alone amongst people who don't care for the Church.

5.  George Brandis.   What a brilliant idea, when defending laws softening steps that can be taken by individuals the victims of racism, to point out in Parliament that people have a right to be a bigot!    He was arguing with Penny Wong, and also thought it a good idea to also call her "bigoted".  She apparently went livid, but managed to control herself.

I had heard years ago that Brandis has been an unpopular, abrasive figure with a large slab of the Queensland Liberals.   He's obviously not always great at thinker on his feet, either.

Reports during the week said that his proposed amendments were softened under Cabinet influence.  God knows what they must have been like before that.

Brandis' bigot comment is going to haunt him for a long time.  No one would be disappointed to see the back of him.

Warm water problem

A couple of weeks ago, there was a guy on Landline from (I think) the Bureau of Meteorology talking about a subsurface body of very warm water being tracked West East across the Pacific.  It was thought that if it surfaced, it would be the start of a clear El Nino.  He said it was about 4-5 degrees hotter than average.  I had no idea that large warm, subsurface (about 150 m down) bodies of water were tracked like this in real time.

The subject gets a detailed explanation at this blog post.   I don't know who the author is, but he seems well versed on the subject.  He says it has the potential to be a bigger El Nino than the record setting one at the end of the 1990's.

Let's see what happens....

Winding, windy moors must be good for your health

Kate Bush tour: Extra London dates confirmed - News - Music - The Independent

PS:  she's 55.

Make up your minds

Richard III expert: The skeleton in the car park may not be the missing monarch after all - Archaeology - Science - The Independent

Not all wet after all

That's a surprise.  It seems everyone was expecting a disaster (ha! another pun) but the reviews for Noah are quite strong.

Bickmore watches Steyn dance

It's been up for a week or two, but Barry Bickmore's "Flashdance" comparison to how Mark Steyn thinks he can conduct himself in a defamation action is really hilarious.