Sympathy misplaced

Graham Richardson  this morning in the Oz:

I should also make it clear that I am appalled that the media in this country should give publicity to stories about a scholarship ­obtained by one of the PM’s daughters. The children of the famous can never win. Their achievements are too often belittled as if they would never get anywhere without the name and the good graces of the powerful mum or dad. I don’t know the young woman in question but I can imagine how she feels at the moment. The PM’s family should be off ­limits. They are not fair game.

A few corrections:

1.  Frances did actually win:  apparently a "scholarship" for which (it would appear - we are all awaiting any statement to the contrary)  she was contacted by the College to come and apply for, and with no other "applicants" competing.

2.  I don't think any of her classmates are actually criticising her achievements.  They're just annoyed that their College didn't give them any opportunity to compete for free money on offer.

3.  The story is about her father - a Prime Minister who has abruptly adopted a policy that will massively increase the cost of University courses, and give government support to the type of college his daughter attended, not declaring that his daughter's college seems to have gone out of its way to save him or her $70,000.   $60,000.

There is even evidence to suggest (see New Matilda - which also challenges in detail Abbott's understanding of the disclosure rules) that the money was thrown at Frances to curry favour with her father.

This is a matter that should be pursued.

PS:  we all know that the children of politicians and the famous will often be offered jobs through their family connections.  Nothing's ever going to stop that.   But there is a difference between being offered a position whereby you earn remuneration, and being actually given a gift, which is what this "scholarship" effectively appears to have been.  Frances was entitled to accept it, although if she is smarter than her father, she should also have realised that if word of this ever got out, it may well annoy the other students.  More importantly, her father should have disclosed it.

PPS:   further to my last point - the New Matilda article up today (saying Frances appears to have "no role" despite being on the Whitehouse payroll) is pretty irrelevant, and kind of petty, and came out after I made my last comment.    As I said, you are always going to have the "well connected" getting cushy jobs; maybe even positions created just for them.   Can't see that anyone can expect that to change...

Bacteria everywhere

Yet another case of bacteria turning up somewhere rather unexpected in the body:

The placenta, long thought to be sterile, is home to a bacterial community similar to the one found in the mouth, researchers report today. The microbes are generally non-pathogenic, but according to the authors of the study, variations in their composition could be at the root of common but poorly understood pregnancy disorders such as preterm birth, which occurs in one out of every ten pregnancies.....

The researchers also compared the placental microbiomes to those found in the vagina, gut, mouth and on the skin of non-pregnant women. They found that the placental microbiome was most similar to that of the mouth. The authors speculate that the microbes travel to the placenta from the mouth via the blood. The results reinforce data suggesting a link between periodontal disease in the mother and the risk of preterm birth, says Aagaard.

The scholarship story in more (anonymous) detail

New Matilda has more detail on the Frances Abbott scholarship story, and (as I expected) it has leaked from a college staff member who wasn't very impressed:

An account of how Frances Abbott came to be a student at Whitehouse, provided to New Matilda by a staff member, casts further doubt on the claims by the Prime Minister that her appointment was based entirely on merit.

The source told New Matilda that Frances Abbott was approached by Whitehouse Chairman of the Board - and friend of the Abbott family - Les Taylor, after Taylor became aware that Frances was looking to complete a degree with a competing design school.

“Les Taylor knew the Abbott family. [Frances] wanted to do something related to creativity and styling. She was going to go to one of our competitors. I think it was Billy Blue [a design school in North Sydney],” the source told NM.

“Leanne got the Chairman of the Board [Taylor] to tell [Frances] she had the offer of a scholarship.”
A few years later, in the run-up to the 2013 federal election, Ms Whitehouse became increasingly excited at the prospect of a Liberal win, the staffer said.

“She said to me something like, ‘Do you know what this could mean to Whitehouse if [Abbott] gets in?’

 The ambiguity in that last sentence could do with some clarifying.   If it means "this College stands to benefit heaps if Tony Abbott wins by virtue of changes to government policy" it is much more important than "this College will have a higher profile if Tony Abbott gets in and her daughter as a graduate."

In any event, if, as looks increasingly likely, this indeed was a special, one off invitation to come to the College for (virtually) free, of course it should have sent off Abbott's political antenna that it would look like a College seeking out political favours.  But it is hard to know how smart Abbott truly is.  Not very, has long been my judgement.

Yoo - hoo, Andrew Bolt, won't you do a post on this?

Update:   the story continues to develop:

Classmates express fury over Tony Abbott’s daughter Frances being awarded $60,000 scholarship to Whitehouse Institute of Design

Interestingly, it now sounds like Leanne Whitehouse personally funds and selects:

“The scholarship that Frances received was a direct scholarship from the founder and owner Leanne Whitehouse. As a private company, Leanne has from time to time awarded it,” Mr Tudor said.

“Originally it was called the MD’s scholarship and subsequently the chairs scholarship. It is a discretionary award made and funded by Leanne Whitehouse.”

The optics of this is so bad.  The "best" that Abbott can hope from this is (assuming that Frances was competing with no one to get her scholarship) is if he can claim that he didn't know she was getting such favoured treatment.   Because if he did - it is obvious that it would look like political favour being sought, and he should have declared it.

And remember - unlike poor old O'Farell - Abbott's government actually did change policy in a way which helped this College (and others.)

UPDATE:  As Junkee says, this shouldn't be about the results Frances got as a student.   (And, I would add, her current employment with Whitehouse.)  It is, however, all about Tony Abbott and the reasons he has not disclosed it (assuming it is the situation that the reporting is indicating - a specific invitation to Frances to apply for a scholarship that she got with no competition from anyone else).   The final paragraphs about his appalling hypocrisy (I hated the way he was always parading with his daughters during election campaign) are spot on:

Tone’s hypocrisy and cynical opportunism does, however, explain the particularly virulent strain of schadenfreude at play. Only this morning, Tone told Karl Stefanovic that “families should be kept out of the front line. That’s the way I’ve always tried to run my political operation – that we play hard but fair. Families should be [left] out of it.”

Given this principled stance, it’s weird how Abbott’s ‘not bad-looking daughters’ keep bobbing at politically expedient moments and for photo-ops. It seems inevitable that this habit would bite him on the arse at some point, and it looks like that point has arrived.

UPDATE 2:  I'm rather intrigued by the media outlets that are (and aren't) running with the story.   It's been the top one on The Guardian's website all day, but Fairfax seemed to quickly let it drop away in prominence.   And then News.com.au, from an article on The Courier Mail website, has been featuring it top of the page since (I think) around lunch time.  The Daily Mail on line is running with it too, but is giving more prominence to the stupid "wink" story.

The ABC is not running it at all, but is still talking about winkgate.

One might wonder whether the ABC is feeling a bit worried about further government attack if it is being seen to "go after" a politicians daughter - but surely this is a very newsworthy story about the PM, and can be run without pillorying the daughter.     

UPDATE 3:  Ha!  Karl Stefanovic smooches up to Tony Abbott when he asks him how Frances Abbott is coping with all the questions being asked about the "scholarship she deserved".  (He repeats that line twice, in fact.)  Abbott confirms she won it on her "academic potential".

Tony, the question is more about whether anyone else got a chance to put their "academic potential"  to the College.  And stop crapping on about how you "leave your family out of it".  Frances couldn't be pried off your side during the last election campaign, you user.

Rupert's excited

I've been curious to see if any words of wisdom would fall out of Rupert Murdoch's twitter account on the budget, or how Tony and Joe were doing.   Yet all I have today is this:  "Excited by X Men!". 

I'd be excited if we had an X Prime Minister.  (Come on, there wasn't much to work with.)

Sounds interesting

The abstract of a paper by Gerard 't Hooft which I haven't read yet, but must come back to:

When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, "quantum logic" is taking over from "classical logic" in the minds of almost all researchers today. Dissatisfied, the author investigated how one can look at things differently. This report is an overview of older material, but also contains many new observations and calculations. Quantum mechanics is looked upon as a tool, not as a theory. Examples are displayed of models that are classical in essence, but can be analysed by the use of quantum techniques, and we argue that even the Standard Model, together with gravitational interactions, may be viewed as a quantum mechanical approach to analyse a system that could be classical at its core. We then explain how these apparently heretic thoughts can be reconciled with Bell's theorem and the usual objections voiced against the notion of 'super determinism'. Our proposal would eradicate the collapse problem and the measurement problem.

Dispute over scientists creating deadly diseases continues

Scientists Are Creating New, Incurable Diseases in Labs - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
From the article:

That worries people like Marc Lipsitch and Alison P. Galvani, two epidemiologists who write in a PLoS Medicine editorial today that creating these types of new infectious agents puts human life at risk. They estimate that if 10 American laboratories ran these types of experiments for a decade, there would be a 20 percent chance that a lab worker would become infected with one of these new super-flus and potentially pass it on to others.

“The concern is that you're making something that doesn't exist in nature and combines high virulence for people with the ability to transmit efficiently,” Lipsitch told me.

I can't say that it sounds like a good idea to me.   Scientists don't always show a big enough interest in considering the worst case scenarios of their work, as I used to argue about the safety assessments done for large particle colliders. 

But long enough to send back Lotto numbers?

Physicist suggests some types of wormholes may stay open long enough to send a photon through

A charming bit of research

Wild mice actually enjoy running on exercise wheels | @GrrlScientist | Science | theguardian.com

The real problem: he doesn't wink enough

See, the problem isn't that Abbott winked for unclear purpose while taking a call from a woman with a surprising occupation for her age, it's that he didn't wink when he should have during the election campaign:

"There will be no new taxes"   Wink

"There will be no changes to pensions"  Wink

Etcetera

A friend on the board

Liberal donor personally recommended Tony Abbott's daughter for scholarship | World | The Guardian

It's not exactly a good look, is it?   A private  college which has been around for 25 years and has given out 2 "Chairman scholarships" in that time, and one of them happens to be for the daughter of a supported political friend who looks to be on track to become Prime Minister.

I wonder who the first recipient was?  And was there any other applicant other than Miss/Ms F Abbott in the year she applied?   The absence of answers to these questions give rise to suspicion that the Chairman scholarship applications might be made after personal invitation, and to very few people.  (Perhaps one?)   If this suspicion is wrong - why won't the Institute simply disclose how many applicants were competing for the scholarship that year?   A simple number would breach no confidentiality, surely.

And the reason why this is indeed a matter of public interest is really set out in the very last paragraph of the Fairfax report:

In the federal budget, the government announced that from 2016 it
would for the first time extend direct government funding to private
colleges.

The changes, which also extend support for TAFEs, and diploma
and associate degree courses, will cost $820 million over three years.
They follow a recommendation from a review of university funding by
David Kemp, who was education minister in the Howard government, and Dr
Kemp’s former advisor Andrew Norton.

If the delivery of a $3000 bottle of wine to a new Premier is a matter which should have been disclosed on a public register, then a direct $60,000 benefit received by a major politician's daughter should also have been disclosed unless it was clearly made on a competitive basis from a reasonable field of applicants (including some without obvious political connections.) 

Update:   I was most amused while watching The Drum last night to hear the media editor for The Australian ask whether The Guardian had been sitting on this outrageously unfair story for some time.   "Why would that matter?"  she was asked.  "It would tell us a lot about their agenda" she said.

Yes - a person who works at The Oz complaining about another paper having "an agenda"!   Hilarious.

Update 2:   Curious that Andrew Bolt has not had a post about this, despite his knowing that close Catallaxy buddy Sinclair Davidson (wrongly) thinks it's a case of "Lefties going after Lib family members", which would normally be right up Andrew's alley.   In fact, Catallaxy readers have lost interest in the thread already too.  How convenient.

Andrew Bolt does not like being in open disagreement with anything at Catallaxy.   He also will never call them out for offensive and highly sexist language in it's threads, even though he has now quoted directly a thread comment.

He's a massive hypocrite.

Update 3:  see new post above.

Rice is nice

Another China post.

According to a study which may not be convincing all that many people, rice farmers are nicer than wheat farmers.  More detail:

Researchers led by Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, found that people from rice-growing regions think in more interdependent and holistic ways than do those from wheat-growing areas.

Talhelm thinks these differences arose because it takes much more cooperation and overall effort to grow rice than wheat. To successfully plant and harvest rice, farmers must work together to build complex irrigation systems and set up labor exchanges. Over time, this need for teamwork fosters an interdependent and collectivist psychology. Wheat, however, can be grown independently, so wheat farmers become more individualistic.

Talhelm found that even people from adjacent counties on either side of the Yangtze River think differently if they grow different crops. "I don't see any other theory that explains why you find these differences between people in neighboring counties," he says....

Talhelm came up with his "rice theory" after spending a few years as a teacher in China and noticing cultural differences between the north and south. "People in the north seemed more direct, while people in the south were more concerned about harmony and avoiding conflict," he says.

Bazinga in China

Well, I didn't know this:  The Big Bang Theory is popular in China.  According to the New Yorker:

After seven seasons, the subtitled Chinese version of the show had achieved iconic status—all without the remotest involvement of the government’s vast media apparatus. By the time the show was banned, Chinese episodes had been watched online no fewer than 1.4 billion times. When the actors, such as Johnny Galecki, visit China, they are mobbed by fans. In Beijing, any tall, slim, dark-haired American male is likely to have been told once or twice that he looks a bit like Sheldon, the most Spock-like character on the show.

The article goes on to note the following:

Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way. When the government, for instance, breaks up demonstrations in the name of defending China’s stability, or blocks Web sites to protect China’s honor in the long-running divide with Japan, it is often the self-described “angry youth” who rise in defense of the flag. But in this case, the ban hit a nerve. In the city of Wuhan, in central China, student members of the Center for Protection for the Rights of Disadvantaged Citizens of Wuhan University issued the rough Chinese equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding to know why they had been deprived of their favorite show. 

And it then reaches this interesting conclusion:

It is a remarkable state of affairs: at the very moment when the U.S. and Chinese governments are moving in a direction of greater conflict, the slow, steady accretion of foreign pop culture on the Chinese Web has given people on both sides of the Pacific more in common than ever before. 

Let me be clear: sitcoms are not policy. The point is that the U.S. and China are in the curious position of facing a deepening rivalry at the very moment when their own citizens are sharing ever more of the same tastes, jokes, preoccupations, anxieties, and pleasures. The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)

[As an aside, I had not watched the show for a year or so, as the last time I had seen it I thought it showed signs of a sitcom in terminal decline.  But I recently did watch a couple of new season episodes, after reading about its extraordinarily high ratings in the States, and I did feel it had improved.]

I get to post about Spielberg two days in a row...

Godzilla and Spielberg: What Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot draws from Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters.

I'm not sure I want to see the new Godzilla movie.  It is, basically, a silly monster, and I don't understand the continual interest in reviving it.

More fun and games in "Defend the Budget"

Lenore Taylor writes that Prime Minister Credlin Abbott has ordered the troops into "attack" mode.

She writes amusingly of the desperate and clueless Alan Jones defensive line:

Radio announcer Alan Jones was truly bewildered while interviewing Christopher Pyne on Wednesday, astounded that despite the education minister’s “brilliant” advocacy skills the “blockheads” running state governments could not understand that the allegation of an $80bn cut was totally wrong. In fact, Jones said, “there hasn't been a more monstrous lie perpetrated since Julia Gillard said there'd be no carbon tax”.

Pyne somehow neglected to refer Jones to page 7 of the government’s glossy budget overview which clearly states that the government is changing indexation of state grants and “removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80bn by 20024-25.”

In other "Attack!" news,  Andrew Bolt (of course) is calling protesting students "totalitarians", following the Pyne line that they are out to "shut down democracy in Australia".  Actually, I think they would be quite happy to see democracy re-exercised within the next 6 months.

Look, student demonstrations are what they are - always chanting slogans and shouty and (usually) vulgar and self indulgent.   I have never liked or approved of demonstrations that unexpectedly block peak hour traffic, damage property, or push people around. 

But seriously, the scale and vigour of what has happened (so far) looks so mild compared to previous Lefty demonstrations.  The high water mark of violent and ugly (and spectacularly self defeating) protests was the union led attack on Parliament House in 1996.   Ten years later, and there were the intensely stupid G20 protests. What has happened with student protests since the budget just doesn't bear comparison, and going on about how "totalitarian" they are acting is just gilding the lily a bit too obviously, fellas.

And besides, what did Abbott and Pyne expect with the timing of these dramatic changes within 6 months of an election that was all about reassuring the people that no great shake up was on the cards?  Of course there were going to be protests.

Now I don't deny that there is a risk that there may yet be large protests that get out of hand and start eroding into any public sympathy, and although the students probably don't realise it, Abbott and Pyne pulling out of a university visit due to security concerns may well be helping their (the students') cause.   Abbott and Pyne have a fine line to walk here - going into the lion's den may well end up looking unnecessarily provocative, but not going to any university short of via roof top helicopter does make them look a bit weak.   I'm sorry, but given that I already have an intense dislike of this government on many grounds, it's the kind of dilemma that I take some pleasure in.

And as for Abbott's understanding of his own government's announcements:  ninemsn is reporting that he appears to not even know the date for changes set out in the budget:

Mr Abbott told ABC radio that only students who start studying in 2016 would face potentially higher fees when universities can charge what they like.

"If you start next year, your conditions of study won't change," he said.

But the budget papers clearly state that anyone who enrols after May 14 will face deregulated fees in 2016.

Peta, Peta, Peta.   All your effort into training him is not paying off, it seems.

UPDATE:  More errors, and quite large ones, by Joe Hockey and the PM in trying to sell the Medicare co-payment.

Is Peta crying into a martini somewhere tonight?  Her troops are letting her down something chronic.

First Dog recommended

First Dog on the Moon doesn't always get my approval, but with the target rich environment of a very unpopular budget made by a cigar smoking millionaire Treasurer (well, I assume he's worth millions - doesn't his wife make more than him, indicating a combined salary well over $600,000?), he's been pretty funny lately.

Anyway, here's today's cartoon that I find particularly amusing.

Also:   I suspect Hockey will not win his defamation case (in itself a rich man's game), and in fact risks losing politically for taking on the paper on one of the least egregious bits of commentary on a politician that has been seen in the Australian media the last couple of years.

Just keep the scheme

Ross Garnaut has made the point that just keeping the carbon pricing scheme (even with moving to a floating price, I think) pretty much achieves the same in terms of budget repair that the Coalition wants to achieve with its vast number of controversial changes.

Professor Garnaut, the architect of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ climate policies, argues that keeping carbon pricing and abandoning the $2.55 billion emissions reduction fund would reduce the budget deficit by between $12 billion and $19 billion over the next four years, depending on the European carbon price.

On Tuesday night, he told an audience at the University of Melbourne that is about the same as the $12 billion to $18 billion in budgetary savings that the Greens and Labor have pledged to oppose in Parliament.

“Retention of carbon pricing would more or less precisely fill the gap from Senate rejection of some budget measures,” Professor Garnaut said.

“To put it another way, Australia can stay within the boundaries of fiscal responsibility defined by the government in this year’s budget by retaining carbon pricing, rather than the array of changes that are at risk in the Senate.”

But of course, because the Coalition fed the public the line that the Labor carbon scheme would be an economic disaster (based on the support of the handful of economists associated with the IPA, pretty much) for so long, they cannot back down on that now, despite the lack of evidence that it is actually causing any great economic mayhem.

As everyone says, the problem with the budget is with its priorities as to how to go about the "repair" it wants to achieve.  And the problem comes back to the Coalition running policies on ideologically justified lines, regardless of evidence.

A premature declaration if ever I saw one

I see via Jason's twitter feed* that libertarian types are giving themselves high fives about legalisation of marijuana in some US States because it is said to be "hurting Mexican drug cartels".

The Lions of Liberty (wanky name: typical) cite this article in Vice (?) which quotes a Washington Post article that says Mexican marijuana prices have dropped far enough to make it not worthwhile for some farmers to grow it.

Amusingly, though, Vice does not repeat the other element in the WP report:  that the concern is that the recent increase in heroin in the US (about which I have posted before) is coming via Mexico, and in fact it seems Mexican marijuana growers are now switching to poppies.

It's pretty remarkable that the Vice article should not mention that, given that the headline to the WP article is: 
Tracing the U.S. heroin surge back south of the border as Mexican cannabis output falls

A more detailed look at how legalising marijuana would affect the Mexican cartels can be read in this WP article from 2012.  It shows that (although no one knows for sure) marijuana was perhaps only accounting for 17% of their revenue anyway.

Libertarians, who are supposed to be big on free markets, didn't think that there would be a substitution to the cartel's operations to make up for loss of marijuana profitability by beefing up their heroin, cocaine and meth production/trafficking?    While too early to tell the extent to which this unintended consequence may affect America, it is not really a surprise that it would happen, and taking into account the extra number of people with really serious drug addictions in the big decision matrix of legalising marijuana is probably something libertarians don't want to talk about much.  Of course, some of them will probably argue that this is a reason for legalising all drugs. 

And PS:  I condemn Mel Gibson and every movie he has ever appeared in or made.  He is not worthy to touch the sandals of the Spielberg.   [ ;) ] 

*Source disclosed as I don't want people thinking I regularly read American libertarian sites 

A must watch Foreign Correspondent

What a fantastic Foreign Correspondent show tonight, about the disputed Spratly Islands which have been causing grief between Vietnam, the Philippines and China for 25 years or so. 

I felt very sorry for some Filipino Marines, that's for sure.  And it makes one think how difficult it will be to maintain long term cordial relationships with China given their rapacious acts of self interest.

An irresistible topic for a post here

Here's why Steven Spielberg is such a great director.

No, honestly, it's informative and interesting.  (And yes, I agree, Always is easily the worst Spielberg movie.)  Here's the video:


The Spielberg Oner - One Scene, One Shot
from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

Harry does not like Henry

I'd back Harry Clarke over Groucho any day.  

By the way, if Ergas has spent much of his career on infrastructure economics, how come I hardly ever notice him writing about it in the Oz?   Does he have any concerns about how Abbott is just going hard on roads with (as I understand it) little in the way of assessment of their economic value?

And can Ergas allay my concerns that economic analysis of all but certain "obvious" infrastructure might not be that credible an exercise anyway?   As I have said before, I presume it's easy to work out some benefits of a port or railway that allows a new mining area to export efficiently.    But cutting down the time to travel across town by car by 10 minutes?  I have my doubts about the rigorousness of how you economically model that.

This is a topic Ergas could perhaps usefully enlighten me.  Instead, he just craps on with his political biases.