ISIS explained

Interesting article from December on the rise of this ISIS group of fanatics currently trying to take over Iraq. 

In record heat news...

Anger rises as India swelters under record heatwave | Reuters

Swathes of north India are sweltering under the longest heatwave on record, triggering
widespread breakdowns in the supply of electricity and increasingly angry protests over the government's failure to provide people with basic services.

The power crisis and heatwave, which some activists say has caused dozens of deaths, is one of the first major challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected
three weeks ago partly on promises to provide reliable electricity supplies.

In Delhi, where temperatures have hit 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) for six days straight, residents marched through the streets in protests organised by opposition parties on Thursday. In the north of the city, people enraged by night-long outages clashed with police and torched a bus, media reported.

I would be surprised if it has only caused "dozens" of deaths.  It's hard to imagine a worse urban environment to be in during a 45 degree heatwave...

Update:  reported yesterday from beautiful downtown Doha:

In the coming days, the Qatar Meteorology Department has forecast that temperatures across the country will reach highs between 44C (111F) and 49C (120F) by noontime, the highest the nation has seen during the month of June in almost 52 years.

The rising temperatures have been attributed to the “deepening of the Indian Monsoon” over the Gulf coast.  In a statement, the MET said that 49C weather during this month is relatively unusual.

Honestly, why does anyone live in that part of the world?

Agreed

An adviser to Pope Francis says Catholicism is incompatible with libertarianism. He's right. - The Week

Libertarianism and Catholicism are not compatible, and the weird thing is that it seems to be only very conservative Catholics who think it is. 

Where is it?

Gee, Andrew Bolt seems late with his daily post about how ABC News isn't identical to The Australian's news and is thereby totally out of control. 

Can someone please explain this to me?

Well this is weird:   Adam Creighton has written a column in which he sounds pretty convinced by Piketty's book, which is probably causing several Right wing economists to wonder whether he's suffered a recent bump on the head. 

But in the very last paragraph, he says:

The deeper question is whether all this matters. Inequality in all countries has been falling. Also, Marx’s premise — falling real wages — was being refuted at the very time he was writing Das Kapital in the 1860s.

Wasn't the point of Piketty's work that there is strong evidence of rising inequality in the West, at least?  And that the Financial Times efforts to claim he had made serious mistakes had pretty much fallen on its face? 

Colorado Govenor recognises the danger, at least

In a Washington Post report, the Colorado (Democrat) Govenor with one of those peculiarly American names (Hickenlooper) at least sounds alert to the danger of the legalisation experiment:

Hickenlooper’s office has been monitoring marijuana usage through public polls. He said Tuesday there has been no noticeable spike in marijuana use by adults; most of those purchasing marijuana for recreational purposes were buying weed illegally before Jan. 1. What concerns him most, he said, is that those polls show evolving attitudes about marijuana among kids.

“Our biggest fear with marijuana, without question, is that it’s going to get in the hands of kids. Most of our polling doesn’t seem like there’s a big spike of adults using it. Most of the people that are using recreational marijuana were using it before. But when you look at kids and whether they think they’re going to smoke marijuana in the near future versus the old days, they seem to think it’s a lot less dangerous,” Hickenlooper said.

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.