How's that Iraq going?

Mosul’s collapse is Nouri al-Maliki’s fault: Iraq’s prime minister failed to rule inclusively.

This seems like a straight forward explanation of what's going on in Iraq at the moment.  These  paragraphs at the end sum up the bigger picture:

The countries in the region have to form indigenous alliances to stave off these radical threats. The United States can help, but there is no way any American politician
is sending back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops: They didn’t compel or convince Maliki to adopt a smart policy before, and they wouldn’t be able to do so now.

But this could be yet another sign of a breakdown in the entire Middle East. The war in Syria, which can be seen as a proxy war between the region’s Sunnis and Shiites, is now expanding into Iraq. The violence will intensify, and the neighboring countries will be flooded with refugees (half a million have already fled Mosul), with few resources to house or feed them.

Depending on what happens in the next few weeks, or maybe even days, we may be witnessing the beginning of either a new political order in the region or a drastic surge in the geostrategic swamp and humanitarian disaster that have all too palpably come to define it.

Of course, for some on the Right it's All Obama's Fault.  (I see that John McCain is even taking that line, and I used to think he was a more reasonable Republican.)  But then again, for Tea Party types, if they nick themselves shaving in the morning, I'm sure they curse Obama's name.

An unhealthy look at plain packaging

Good Lord!   Is it actually a requirement to be gullible and ignorant about issues to be a writer for the Australian?  (As well as onside with Rupert's view of the world?)

I had not noticed til today that long time Australian media writer Errol Simper wrote a couple of days ago about why he thought plain packaging of tobacco was not working.   The funny thing is, (and to be bitchy for a moment), Simper's ghost like photo used by the Oz for years has always had an "unhealthy, prematurely aged smoker" vibe about it, and in this column he confirms he has long had issues with giving up the habit. 

But Simper's article contains all the lack of insight you expect from the ideologically motivated smoker or ex-smoker - no skepticism about tobacco company supplied figures or how to properly interpret them, and (most importantly) a complete ignorance of the fact that there has been considerable research on how people respond to ugly packaging, and that the view was always that a long term reduction in smoking involves discouraging young people from ever starting. 

As those who post at Catallaxy have shown, smokers (or ex smokers who delighted in the habit and bear ongoing resentment that they no longer do it) are about the last people to have objective ideas or understanding of anti smoking tactics.  But do they have to embarrass themselves by showing that off in the media?

What if Hedley ran a press campaign and no one cared?

I got the distinct feeling yesterday that Hedley Thomas is cranky because he's put all this effort into supporting those obsessed with trying to prove Gillard was right in on the dodgy deals that her boyfriend did as a unionist 20 years ago, and yet no one cares much about the politically motivated Royal Commission which is now looking into it.

As I have said from the start:   the basic details of what Wilson and Blewitt did has been known for years,  Gillard did discuss it in the press and no one cared. Including Andrew Bolt.   Almost certainly, journalists did not keep talking about it because, given her rise as a politician, there had been years for her enemies to leak discretely about her direct knowledge of Wilson's fraud, and as it had not happened, it was very unlikely that anyone did have such proof.  

Then, once she became PM, one journalist stuffed up in his attempt to revive the story, making a claim on a detail which he previously hadn't been allowed to by the paper's defamation lawyers.  He got sacked as a result when Gillard blew her top to his editor.

This lead to a radio shock jock journalist trying to pick up the story, falling out with his boss, getting the sack too, and then entertaining the sleaziest of all people involved (Blewitt) and running a web based campaign for right wing obsessives with a problem with a left leaning female Prime Minister.

Andrew Bolt decided to get his mouth involved in a quite disingenuous way, repeating all allegations, none of which proved criminality on behalf of Gillard, but working well as a general smear campaign (for the Right wing that cared what happened 20 years ago, at least).  The rest of the media didn't pay much attention because, well, it happened 20 years ago and no one - no one - had ever said that Julia had told them "Ha!  All that lovely money that my boyfriend conned out of Theiss!  Straight into my house reno!" 

Somewhere along the line Hedley thought he would join the campaign too.

At the heart of this, as always acknowledged by Smith, at least, was the personal efforts of a rich ex lawyer and (former) Labor associated entity  Harry Nowicki, whose appearance on 7.30 Tuesday night indicated he (and, according to Wilson) others have been bankrolling all this with, at heart, not much more than a political motivation to hurt Gillard:

SARAH FERGUSON: What's your motivation for your involvement in this?

HARRY NOWICKI: I think it's important for the facts of this story to come out, because it is a link in the chain of Ms Gillard becoming Prime Minister.

How is it possible that someone involved in... in, in questionable behaviour becomes Prime Minister? Now that's a political story, that's not my story.

There was a tantalising hint at the end of that interview that Ferguson knew Nowicki had spoken to Labor Party identities too, but he denied it. Yesterday, he suddenly "clarified" that he had "misunderstood" Sarah Ferguson:

Mr Nowicki said he misunderstood 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson's question last night when he was asked if he had ever discussed the case with members of the parliamentary Labor Party.

"I spoke to Robert McClelland, not in his capacity as a Labor minister but as a participant in court proceedings in 1995 and 1996 involving the AWU and Bruce Wilson," he said today.

Mr Nowicki said Mr McClelland suggested he contacted The Australian newspaper’s Hedley Thomas who was also investigating the case.

Mr Nowicki is not coming out of this as a disinterested investigator smelling of roses.

In yesterday's evidence, I don't think we heard anything significant that hasn't been publicised before by Bolt, Smith, etc over the last year or two.   Even the evidence of Hem is going no where - Wilson turned up at the office after pulling some sort of all nighter at the casino and asked him to deposit money to Gillard's account.   So how does anyone know that he wasn't just using the winnings from the night before?

The one thing I am not sure I had heard before was about the builder who remembered money changing hands at the house.   Is it just me, but I find it a little hard to credit that an 84 year old builder would maintain a clear recollection of money exchanging hands at a work site nearly 20 years ago.   There might be an explanation as to why it would stick in your mind - like if someone had told you shortly thereafter that it was stolen money.  But I don't think there was any such explanation given, and remember - Gillard was not even a politician at the time.

This has always been, at heart, a sleazy attempted political smear attack against a PM who, in any event, lost the job due to the poisonous internal politics of Labor resulting not from having a crooked boyfriend 20 years ago, but merely from the disastrous ascendancy of Kevin Rudd.

This makes people care even less about the Royal Commission, and Hedley, Smith, con man Pickering and Bolt are almost certainly going to miss any sense of satisfaction out of its results.   At least, one hopes, Smith has lost money out of being a complete jerk and all round tosser.  (Although with all the talk of the money floating around to fund it, who knows if even that has happened.)   Unfortunately, Andrew Bolt continues to make a pretty penny out of the same tactic.

But it is kind of funny watching him fume about the ABC not covering the commission in sufficient detail for his editorial standards.

A dinner to forget

Well, I never heard of this before:

Almost 50 years ago to the day, an unlikely dinner date took place between TS Eliot and Groucho Marx. Each a huge fan of the other's work, Groucho and Eliot corresponded for three years before their meeting eventually took place. In June 1964, a car took the star of A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races, from the Savoy to Eliot's home nearby for a much anticipated dinner with his hero, wives included. Eliot wanted to hear about what it was like to make those movies, but Groucho couldn't remember the desired scene from Duck Soup and preferred to quote to Eliot the vast chunks of The Waste Land that he'd memorised. Eliot couldn't be less interested in hearing his own poetry spouted back at him. The meeting was a disaster.

Death by dress in Victorian days

Here's a short but surprising article about the dangerous fashion for crinoline (go to the link to see what they are) in Victorian times.  The opening paragraph:

In addition to smallpox, cholera, and consumption, Victorian era denizens had to consider the perils of crinoline, the rigid, cage-like structure worn under ladies’ skirts that, at the apex of its popularity, reached a diameter of six feet. The New York Times first reported the phenomenon of crinoline-related casualties in 1858, when a young Boston woman, standing by the mantel in her parlor, caught fire and within minutes was entirely consumed by flames—an unfortunate incident that came on the heels of nineteen such deaths in England in a two-month period. Witnesses, impeded by their own crinolines, were forced to watch the victims burn. “Certainly an average of three deaths per week from crinolines in conflagration,” the Times admonished, “ought to startle the most thoughtless of the privileged sex.” A similar tragedy occurred shortly thereafter in Philadelphia, when nine ballerinas burned to death at the Continental Theatre.

Stop drinking from jars, trendoids

For all I know, it's been happening for years and I've only recently noticed (as I recently explained.); But here's a photo from a NYT article on the best iced coffee in the country - and it features at least two photos of them being served in jars:

Just stop it!

Mind you, an iced almond-macadamia milk latte does sound pretty tasty.

Tea Party thinks it's on a winner?

So, Tea Partiers are ecstatic that they got David Brat in, primarily on the basis that he is against immigration reform?

Yes, way to go to win over the Hispanic and Asian vote, Republicans. Sowing the seeds of long term demographic failure, more like it.

The Tea Party Right really isn't very bright, to put it mildly.

Update:  from a January 2014 look at Brat at National Review:

He chairs the department of economics and business at Randolph-Macon College and heads its BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program. The funding for the program came from John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T (a financial-services company) who now heads the Cato Institute. The two share an affinity for Ayn Rand: Allison is a major supporter of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Brat co-authored a paper titled “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand.” Brat says that while he isn’t a Randian, he has been influenced by Atlas Shrugged and appreciates Rand’s case for human freedom and free markets.

His academic background isn’t all economics, though. Brat got a business degree from Hope College in Holland, Mich., then went to Princeton seminary. Before deciding to focus on economics, he wanted to be a professor of systematic theology and cites John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr as influences.

And he says his religious background informs his views on economics. “I’ve always found it amazing how we have the grand swath of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we lost moral arguments on the major issue of our day,” he says, referring to fiscal-policy issues. 

 OK, an admiration for Ayn Rand of any form is a warning sign for - at the very least - unreliability in an economist  (cough *stagflation warning* cough), but as with Paul Ryan, a serious Christian who still admires Rand and takes economic hints from her is just ideologically nutty. 

Murdoch has dinner with our leader

Update:  today's Essential poll shows Labor reaching the magic 40% primary figure.   Coalition 37%.  TTP 54/46, pretty much in line now with all other polls.  (As an aside:  how do the Nationals manage to have so much influence with a primary vote of 3%?) Shorten now preferred PM by 4%.

Anyhow, monty and I should be off for drinks at Sussex Street again...

Foreign Correspondent recommended, yet again

Last night's Foreign Correspondent, about a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, was fascinating viewing.  In fact, every week since the show's return has just been fantastically well done stories about international politics, but always with a large element of human interest.

There is nothing that compares to this show on commercial TV.   In fact, serious current affairs on any commercial TV station has been dead for decades.   Perhaps 60 Minutes in it original incarnation in - what?, the late 70's or 80's? - came closest to being worthy.  But since then?

Just do a proper test

BBC News - Mobile phone effect on fertility - 'research needed'

I see from the side links to this story that there has been speculation for at least a decade that mobile phones might be affecting sperm cells, at least if the phone is worn close to their traditional mobile storage facilities.

Surely the way to get some definitive evidence of this is to recruit sufficient university students (cut out those who use marijuana or other drugs) who carry phones in their shirt, test their "boys", and then give them a belt pouch for their phone and get them to use that in the same front facing position for (I don't know?) 3 to 6 months, and re-test them.

That seems better than all this survey evidence, and laboratory testing of exposing samples to radiation, doesn't it?

Greg's getting annoyed

IR debate hijacked by the right - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Here's a good post, full of graphs, whereby Greg Jericho gets to blast away about how Coalition complaints about the state of IR and wages are pretty much fact free.  

A recent recruit to the Anti Tattoo League

I still get people commenting from time to time at my anti tattoo post (quite a few from the angry tattooed of the world, last time I looked), so it's of interest to note that The Guardian has a comment piece up by a young woman who has regretted getting a "sleeve".

I wonder how many people have the physical discomfit she describes:

Underneath my ink smears are raised scars; the whole thing bubbles up and itches in summer. Even in a tailored suit it peeps out like mould. Blue ink has seeped between the layers of skin and spread into my armpit. My generation will be at the NHS at 80 getting our gammy legs seen to while doctors try to find a vein under the faded, stretched, misshapen detritus of our unartistic body art; a postmodern mash-up of badly translated Chinese words, bungled Latin quotes, dolphins, roses, anchors, faces of favoured children or pets, and Japanese wallpaper designs.

Yes, I award her honorary membership to the League. 

The comments that follow the article are often pretty amusing, too; partly driven by the fact that the writer seems to be a child prodigy that few have heard of.

Still, she's on the righteous side of the tattoo issue, and for that she's OK in my books.

Somehow, I doubt he has the solution

Warren Mundine has a whine today about how money spent on aboriginal housing still hasn't made a difference and he'll see that cuts to "failed programs" and "eliminating waste" will make a difference.

It is amazing that cost effective aboriginal housing programs just never seem to happen.

But let's face it:  there have been decades of talk of the need for a different approach to providing appropriate aboriginal housing in remote areas; surely at least some of the new ideas have been tried and failed.  In light of this, I am very skeptical of anyone who comes along and suggests, like Mundine, that he can see where it's all going wrong and something new must be tried and wasteful administration must stop and it'll improve.   

In fact, it's hard to avoid the feeling that the problems with housing arise from some very fundamental issues which are near intractable unless there were to be pretty major movement towards changing these things:  settlements which exist in areas with next to nothing resembling an economic attachment to the rest of the nation; chronic drug and alcohol problems in those places, and the dire effects that has on child raising as well as engagement with what slim economic opportunities which may be nearby; and family arrangements which can led to overcrowding of housing and maintenance needs well beyond those of, say, the Western nuclear family.

None of these problems are easily addressed, and some suggestions (educating children in towns away from family) have sensitivities due to past aboriginal treatment.

So Warren's complaints and proposed actions are rather unlikely to represent any major change to what has gone on before, is my bet.

And see - for once I got through this topic without mentioning yurts.  Well, nearly. 

Hilarious

I noticed this morning The Guardian report that News Corp is accusing the Daily Mail Australia of plagiarism.

Yes, that would be the company that saw this Daily Mail site layout, which has been used for years:

 

and recently decided to start setting out its Daily Tele like this:

Oh I see - on the side bar the photo is on the left and the words on the right on the Tele version.  And they like pinky-red too.  That's OK then.

Good question

Someone at the Christian Science Monitor is wondering why the US media seems reluctant or slow to call the weekend Vegas shootings an act of domestic terrorism.

And of course, the guns will turn out to have been legally purchased, I bet.

Update:  looks like I was wrong on the legally purchased guns.  Mother Jones report indicates they may have received them in response to a plea on Facebook, of all places, for any gun "that can reach out and touch evil tyrant bastards."    Of course, it really takes a country with an unusual number of Right wing paranoid gun loving nutters for such a request to be made and receive helpful responses...

The blockbuster not doing so well at the box office...

Suggestions for lines for Peta to be saying welcome.

I think it's Twitter worthy as it is, though.

Update:  that was a hint to someone, anyone, with a Twitter account to post it to auspol.  :-)

BTW, I haven't seen the movie yet. Next weekend.

Update 2:   I have previously been critical of politicians who call a broken promise a lie.  (And yes, I don't give credit to Labor when they do that to Abbott either.)

But just on the radio this morning, I heard Abbott repeat what is a clear lie from 2011 when giving his press conference with (his only) international buddy on climate change, Stephen Harper:

“We should do what we reasonably can to limit emissions and avoid man-made climate change but we shouldn’t clobber the economy, and that’s why I’ve always been against a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme, because it harms our economy without necessarily helping the environment.”

This is a lie.   As Bernard Keane noted in 2011, Abbott tried to "un-lie" (my word, not Bernard's) the same claim he made back then by a later qualification:

 Oddly, despite the media attention, most missed Mr Abbott’s particularly risible remark. It wasn’t merely that Abbott claimed he had never supported a carbon tax or an ETS — a claim so demonstrably untrue even The Australian mentioned it. He belatedly qualified that by adding the caveat “as leader” hours later, the worst recovery since Basil Fawlty, learning his American guest enjoyed the works of Harold Robbins, pretended to be lambasting someone else. “Oh Harold Robbins. I was talking about… Harold Robinson.”

 Years later, and he's back with the same claim, with no qualification.

For all of the gigantic (and undeserved) kerfuffle from the public about Gillard (allegedly) breaking a promise when her general sympathy to the idea of carbon pricing was well known, Tony Abbott with his "say anything" approach to climate change and a host of other issues is truly the one who has earned the "liar" title.

Weekend update

*  I am happy to report that the chicken recipe as noted last week is quite nice.  But can someone explain to me why, for as long as I can remember, baking chicken always takes about 1 1/2 to 2 times longer than recipes suggest?

*  I didn't even want to go to the Lifeline Bookfest which is on again this long weekend at the Convention centre.  (I have probably 10 books from previous years' visits awaiting my attention.)  But my wife wanted to go, and while there, I remembered that I wouldn't mind reading a biography of Einstein.   Located! (And it was the only bio I saw about him in the whole place.)  Cost $6.  Also got a couple of short Graham Greenes I hadn't heard about before.   A successful visit.

*  Had a couple of nice craft beers at the Hoo Ha Bar yesterday afternoon.   A nice, comfy bar close to Southbank which one could imagine being happy at every Saturday afternoon.   (And the craft beer movement is a fantastic thing that I trust will never end.  Why did it take so long to happen, though, I wonder?)

*  Long weekends are good, aren't they?  They avoid that neither-here-nor-there feeling of a Sunday afternoon in a normal workweek.  I have never got the hang of Sunday afternoons.  Maybe it's because I used to do homework at that time when I was a student if there wasn't anything else on that weekend, but even as an adult it goes something like this:  Saturdays are a welcome break, and good for shopping and either eating out (if you are single or in childless coupledom) or cooking something that take more time; Sunday mornings are relaxing for a special breakfast and a political review on TV, followed by a relaxed lunch; but Sunday afternoons are just too close to Monday to feel entirely comfortable with them.

* I have not yet seen Edge of Tomorrow.  I might, tomorrow.  (Or maybe next weekend when daughter is on a sleep over.)

Always the same answer

Well, if you ask me, Adam Creighton's latest column is a complete schemozzle, and illustrates again why his type of analysis is best ignored:  it doesn't matter what the problem is, the answer is always going to be less taxes, less bureaucracy, and less welfare bludgers.  Oh, and suppress wages in the meantime too.  

Antarctic sea ice noted

What is the paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice really telling us?

Not a bad look at the question of why Antarctic sea ice has been increasing, while Arctic sea ice (in summer) has been dramatically decreasing.

By the way, the Arctic is well into melt season, and tracking at pretty low levels.  (I would paste a pic here, but the NSIDC site is currently down.)

A cultural change

Back on the Colorado marijuana experiment, it's interesting to read this:

In Colorado, reviews of pot are fast eclipsing fuddy duddy reviews of wine, restaurants, cigars and pretty much everything else. 

Since January, the Denver Post has been running a culture-of-cannabis website called The Cannabist. It reviews every conceivable variety of pot (recreational marijuana is legal in the state) but also pot’s accouterments, including pipes, vapor pens, cuisine prepared with pot and outdoor activities made more enjoyable by being high. 

Ricardo Baca, 37, the Post’s marijuana editor and founder of The Cannabist, tells ABC News the site has been a huge hit (no pun intended) since its January debut. He declines to quote numbers for how much traffic it has gotten, but says, “We launched three or four days before recreational sales of marijuana started in Colorado, and we came out of the gate strong. The traffic has been unreal.”

This suggests that legalisation of the product will have a significant cultural effect towards encouraging teenage use of it, which is exactly what you do not want.  

Ironically, I read elsewhere that the legalisation law requires that the first slice of government profit from it has to go to school funding.   Yet my prediction (which will take some time to see if it comes true) is that the major concern about the social effect of legalisation will come from its effects on teenage education (and teenage health effects generally).     We will see.