Jericho analysis wins me again

Joe Hockey: all's fair in welfare and budgets | Business | theguardian.com

Yet again, I find Greg Jericho's take on matters to be far better argued than the ideologically driven take of the Coalition and, of course, The (laughably biased) Australian. 

Adam Creighton spinning faster than a wind turbine

Adam Creighton says today:



A couple of questions for Mr Creighton - no where in the article can I see an explanation of where the losses come from. I would have thought a steady process of erecting turbines and building other renewable energy plants, as well as adapting the network to be able to cope with it, would generate quite a few jobs. But I guess the report works out some way that it won't be a net employment benefit - it would just be good if you would tell us how that works.

Secondly - isn't the proper response, even if the job loss figure is plausible and not a beat up  - "what, only 6,000 jobs for a very sizeable increase in renewable energy? That's a fantastic deal".

The Coalition is said to be cutting 16,500 jobs in the space of 3 years. No Right wing economist is claiming that this is going to be a dire crush on the national economy, are they? So why then are you pretending that 6,000 jobs up to 2030 is a drama?  There are presently about 11,500,000 people working in this country.  Who knows what the figure will be by 2030, but at the moment 6,000 is about .05% of the work force.  

Lenore rips into Tony on climate change

Tony Abbott is no action man on climate change | World news | theguardian.com

This summary last week by Lenore Taylor explaining how Abbott is not serious about substantial action on climate change was very good.

And since then, we have a story in Fairfax today that Greg Hunt got rolled, in a big way, on spending on solar.

I don't know how Hunt lives with himself, really.  Supposedly devoted to emissions trading schemes, he was forced to reject them just so that Abbott could differentiate himself from Labor, and now can't even get good funding for solar up.

Edge reviewed, and back to the 60's

So, I'm sure everyone's waiting to hear what I thought about Edge of Tomorrow?  Hello....?

Anyhoo, saw it yesterday, and yes it's a good, solid science fiction-y treat.  Cruise is fine, so is Emily Blunt, and the film looks a million bucks.  (Actually, about 178 million bucks, apparently.)   It is actually good to see that a movie involving extensive battlefield violence can do it without showing much at all in the way of blood or gore. 

But I have two reservations - it does involve one very  improbable fall that doesn't kill our hero; and the very end was a little too, I don't know, not quite clever enough?   In fact, from a time bending point of view, I'm not at all sure that the story makes that much sense if one examines the ideas carefully, but it doesn't really matter.  The pace keeps you from pondering it anyway. 

Cruise's last science fiction film, the (I think) under-rated Oblivion was, for me, actually a little bit more enjoyable.  (Virtually no one is going to agree on that, but it did have more originality going for it.)   But once again, Tom deserves to be rewarded for working in pretty intelligent and well made science fiction as often as he does.

Apart from the thematic similarity to both Groundhog Day and Source Code, and the somewhat Starship Troopers feel of the exosketons and the way they drop from the sky, the one connection I haven't seen anyone make is to Captain Scarlet.  Yes, the Gerry Anderson show from the 60's in which our "indestructible" puppet hero got killed near the end of virtually every episode.  This always seemed to me to be a silly and somewhat depressing set up for a kid's show, but I watched it anyway.   It seems nearly every episode may be on Youtube, as well as the awful looking later CGI attempt to revive it, which seemed to be based on the bizarre idea that computer generated puppet like characters would go over better than actual puppets.

Here's an episode for your edification.  If you do nothing else, you should go to the end credits, involving many scenes of our hero being killed, but over a very groovy song:



And from the somewhat ridiculous to the extremely silly, it was while looking at Captain S on Youtube that I found a link to something called Solarnauts, an atrocious looking British pilot that was never made into a full series.   It stars one familiar face - a young Derek Fowlds who later was famous for "Yes Minister".

The model work is spectacularly bad, and as for a British concept of what the well dressed lady astronaut of the future will wear, try this:

I sense that all actors involved were seriously happy that the show was never picked up.   Anyway, here it is:


  

Update:  by an odd coincidence, I read today that the actor who provided the voice of Captain Scarlet has died.  

Rugby union explained

Continuing my series "Pretty obvious things from a disinterested observer's point of view about various codes of sport (and why can't anyone else see these?)".

A game of union was on TV last night, and once again I just could not shake the old verdict I made years ago:   this sport looks exactly like a group of 4 year old boys playing rugby league.  

True, the ball did not stay out of sight under a group of boys blokes for as long as I have noticed in some previous (rare) viewings, but it's still a silly looking game.

That is all.

An interesting suggestion

The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth - NYTimes.com

Tyler Cowen writes:

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the
world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less
urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars
improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and
destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that
preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work.
Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments
on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or
simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a
nation’s longer-run prospects.

Here's the last few paragraphs:

There is a more optimistic read to all this than may first appear. Arguably
the contemporary world is trading some growth in material living
standards for peace — a relative paucity of war deaths and injuries,
even with a kind of associated laziness.

We can prefer higher rates of economic growth and progress, even while
recognizing that recent G.D.P. figures do not adequately measure all of
the gains we have been enjoying. In addition to more peace, we also have
a cleaner environment (along most but not all dimensions), more leisure
time and a higher degree of social tolerance for minorities and
formerly persecuted groups. Our more peaceful and — yes — more
slacker-oriented world is in fact better than our economic measures
acknowledge.

Living in a largely peaceful world with 2 percent G.D.P. growth has some big advantages that you don’t get with 4 percent growth and many more war
deaths. Economic stasis may not feel very impressive, but it’s something
our ancestors never quite managed to pull off. The real questions are
whether we can do any better, and whether the recent prevalence of peace
is a mere temporary bubble just waiting to be burst.

 Spotting a large, alien spaceship in the outer parts of the solar system, heading towards Earth, may give a good replacement sense of purpose.

Soccer explained

It has a very low scoring rate, making it a boring game to watch.

That billions of people can still nonetheless get excited about it tells us something about humans, but I don't know what.

That is all.

Ratgrets, I've had a few...

Been forgetting to post about this rather intriguing study that indicates rats suffer from regret. 

That is all.

A man who thinks like me

Could the demand for affordable housing be solved by going back to tents? - Architecture - Arts and Entertainment - The Independent

In a Culture Show special, Tents: The Beginning of Architecture, to be broadcast next week on BBC2, Tom Dyckhoff wonders whether tents could be a solution to today's housing crisis. The
presenter seems to think that tents – or at least more comfortable, more modern, and bigger versions – might be an option if we can't build enough flats and houses. Maybe one of architecture's oldest forms could have a life past festival season?

Cool.   My vision of a yurt led economic recovery of Australia might be shared by someone else...
 

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.