History repeats - kinda

Why Did ISIS Destroy the Tomb of Jonah? | Mark Movsesian | First Things

From the post, a brief summary of the branch of Islam that ISIS represents:

ISIS is part of the Salafi movement, a branch of Sunni Islam that seeks to return to the practices of the earliest Muslims – the salaf—who lived at the time of the Prophet Mohammed and just after. The movement rejects the centuries of subsequent developments in Islam as
unjustified innovations–pagan accretions that adulterated the faith. In particular, the movement opposes the veneration of the graves of Islamic prophets and holy men. Salafis see this practice, which is associated most frequently with Sufi Islam, as a kind of idolatry, or shirk, that detracts from the absolute transcendence of God.

Salafi Islam prevails in Saudi Arabia, where it enjoys the patronage of the royal family. On the Arabian Peninsula, as now in Iraq, Salafis have destroyed the tombs of Islamic holy men. Indeed, when the Saudi royal family captured the city of Medina in the 19th century, Salafis
systematically destroyed the tombs of several of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions and family members, leaving only the Prophet’s tomb itself unmolested. There is some thought that the Saudi government plans on dismantling even that tomb, but hesitates to do so because of the uproar that would result in other Muslim communities.

In short, one should see ISIS’s destruction of the tomb of Jonah as an act principally directed at other Muslims, not Christians.

As someone says in comments following:

Can we just get this over with and acknowledge that ISIS is a 21st century version of Cromwell's army?

I initially thought that, given the images of heads on stakes in the media today, this may be being a bit harsh on Cromwell.  But I see that he was in fact ruthless, particularly in Ireland:

The first major town Cromwell and his army encountered when they landed in Ireland was Drogheda. He summoned the royalist commander and invited him to surrender. When he refused, Cromwell's model army seized the town and put the entire garrison of 2,500 officers and men to the sword. It was an act of ruthlessness which sent shockwaves of fear through the rest of Ireland. Other towns surrendered as soon as Cromwell's army approached, and their inmates were spared.

Only Wexford refused. During the siege there Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople and burning much of the town.

 If one is desperate to find an optimistic take on this, I can try this:   Cromwell was operating pretty close to 1,600 years after the death of the founder of his religion.  ISIS is operating 1,400 years after the death of their's.   On this trajectory, Islam is perhaps 200 years ahead of Christianity's timetable towards becoming "mostly harmless", and everything should be looking good by 2200*.

*  Climate change will have given the world something else to fight over by then, anyway.

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it...

I really think the sub editor coming up with the headlines at Slate is just trolling its readership with a title like this: 

Look Out Democrats.  The GOP's 2016 presidential hopefuls may be the best field in generations

I'll link to the article itself, not the headline.  The article seems to talk only about possible candidates we already know.  The headline is completely misleading...

Cell work not as careful as it should be

Contamination hits cell work

The article is all about the problem of mycoplasma contamination in laboratory cell cultures.

In fact, the problem is widespread. Hogenesch, a genome biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleague Anthony Olarerin-George have found that more than one-tenth of gene-expression studies, many published in leading journals, show evidence of Mycoplasma contamination¹. The infestations are undermining research findings and wasting huge amounts of money, Hogenesch says.

He should know. His lab quickly overcame an infestation last year, but a previous plague cost it some US$100,000 and a year of research. Mycoplasma takes hold quickly, he says. “All it takes is one person not to check, and — bam — you have it.” The bacterium often comes from lab workers, and is not killed by the antibiotics typically used to rid cell cultures of  contaminants. And unlike many other microorganisms, which turn the growth medium turbid, Mycoplasma leaves no visible signs of its presence.

I somehow thought they would already be more careful than this, but bacteria are hard to see, I guess.

Movie industry news, continued

I've had a few posts lately about how the international (especially Chinese) market is affecting Hollywood.

I'm surprised to read this morning that, within America itself, which is having a rather glum summer season in box office terms, the Hispanic market is really strong for cinema attendance.

You'd never know it from their presence in films, would you? 

For what it's worth, I'll repeat my criticisms of where the movie industry is at the moment:

*  Way too many comic derived superhero films.  Far, far too many.

*  A lack of particularly appealing young actors with clear star quality.

*  Comedy which has become too crude, made by men in permanent adolescent mode.

*  Too many sequels for films which barely deserve it.  More originality, please.

Why fly a stupid idea?

I heard Tony Abbott on the radio this morning saying that the "dole bludgers will have to apply for 40 jobs a month" was not firm policy - it was just a proposal and a "consultative" government does this to take on board public input before it decides, etc etc.

Oh sure.  This was the "consultative government" that gave us an enormous change in tertiary education, Medicare co-payments, and told the States that they're on their own to cover the increasing costs of health care, all without any consultation that I noticed.

This policy was a silly, over the top idea from the start, and it was stupid tactics of someone in this inept government to fly the kite just to watch it being shot down.

It again shows that the Coalition is, in large part, in a time warp when it comes to policy prescriptions.  (Mind you, any new ideas they do have are not that good either.)

What's the free marketeers' answer to this?

One problem with the world economy as noted by one Australian born OECD economist:

Another factor which Dr Blundell-Wignall says is holding back the recovery from the GFC is bank earnings.

"If you go back to 1980 the earnings of the financial sector of the S&P 500 companies was less than 10 per cent."

He says the proportion of Wall Street earnings by finance stocks is now more than 30 per cent, having risen above its share when the GFC hit.

"The financial sector is supposed to be the sector that intermediates between real savers and real investors. That's what greases the wheels of capitalism," he said.

"Where do we get of thinking that the financial sector can just rip one third of the earnings for themselves?

That does sound like a legitimate concern, and apart from letting banks and financial institutions fall when a crisis happens (and impoverishing millions of their customers in the process), I wonder what the small government, let business work itself out, types think about this.... 

An odd duck

Hans Christian Andersen’s painful fairy-tale life | TLS

I've never read much about HCA, but this review of a new biography of him is interesting.  I think I have heard of his disastrous meeting with Charles Dickens before, probably when reading a review of one of the latter's biographies:

Charles Dickens provides the best-known example of Andersen’s startling
capacity to misread the rules of social engagement (Sebastian Barry made the
awkwardness between the two men the subject of a thoughtful play in 2010).
Dickens and Andersen had much in common, both having worked their way from
unpromising beginnings to immense literary success. Dickens’s sympathy with
the underdog made him a natural ally for Andersen, and at first all went
well between them. But in 1857 Andersen went to stay with the Dickens
family, and failed to notice polite hints when several weeks passed, and it
was time to leave. Dickens was exasperated, while Kate Dickens called him a
“bony bore”. Binding passes over the embarrassment hastily, but he does
point out that Andersen must have found Dickens’s boisterous heartiness
baffling. Perhaps he was simply incapable of extricating himself from the
difficulties of the situation. He was an experienced house guest – in fact,
he never had a home of his own – but he was new to the rituals of
middle-class domesticity in England, and his grasp of English was never
strong. Andersen’s visit coincided with the final stages of Dickens’s dying
marriage, and Binding notes that Andersen’s unwelcome presence in the tense
household at Gad’s Hill may have influenced the preoccupations with class
and concealment in Great Expectations (1860), a novel crowded with
examples of people who can never quite fit in.

About the New York Times legalisation stance

The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests - NYTimes.com

This editorial piece in the New York Times promoting marijuana legalisation indicates what I have long thought is right - the overkill in drug criminalisation in that country (with severe compulsory sentences being one of the big culprits) is what is giving weight to the overly simplistic counter swing to the other "extreme" of complete legalisation.

The odd thing is, it seems that both of these two extremes spring from the two strands of the political Right - the conservatives are fond of the severe and disproportionate sentencing legislation, and the libertarian wing is only too happy to promote legalisation.

I remain highly skeptical that either of these approaches is right, and in particular, given the cultural climate in the country, find it hard to believe that legalisation will be good for the nation socially or economically in the long run.

Moving the sun

Cosmic Megastructures - The Shkadov Thruster or How to Move an Entire Solar System - Popular Mechanics

Just in case you want to leave the neighbourhood:

"Shkadov Thrusters are kind of awesome," says Anders Sandberg, a
research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute who
has studied Shkadov Thrusters amongst other megastructure concepts. "You
can use it to move the whole solar system."

The Shkadov Thruster setup is simple (in theory): It's just a colossal,
arc-shaped mirror, with the concave side facing the sun. Builders would
place the mirror at an arbitrary distance where gravitational attraction
from the sun is balanced out by the outward pressure of its radiation.
The mirror thus becomes a stable, static satellite in equilibrium
between gravity's tug and sunlight's push.

Solar radiation reflects off the mirror's inner, curved surface back
toward the sun, effectively pushing our star with its own sunlight—the
reflected energy produces a tiny net thrust. Voilà, a Shkadov Thruster,
and humanity is ready to hit the galactic trail.

Odd but interesting

ANZ: Consumer Confidence Has Fully Recovered From Its Budget Crash | Business Insider

Why would Australian consumer confidence be up, but voters are apparently not returning to the Coalition?

I'm guessing the explanation is that consumers are satisfied Abbott won't get much of his budget through the Senate; and they still want to punish him for coming up with the budget in the first place.

If that's correct - it wouldn't inspire confidence in Abbott to run a double dissolution.   Which is a pity, in a way.

The Right - for old, white men, and stupid younger people

Just as the US Republican Party has become the party for old white folk, and silly younger people who can't believe in climate change and think Ayn Rand had something useful to say about economics, the same dynamic is clearly operating here.

Adam Creighton writes today about some speech 84 year old Geoffrey Blainey gave:

AUSTRALIA’S greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has called for swaths of the Canberra bureaucracy to be farmed out to India or Hong Kong. 
 
“While protectionism has died in primary and secondary industries, it is still very powerful in tertiary,” Professor Blainey said in a wide-ranging interview that canvassed a socialist revival in ­advanced countries.

“There’s a lot of protectionism still in the professions: Canberra naturally is a protectionist city; there are so many tasks that ­Canberra could farm out to India or Hong Kong — but not for your life. They say if you can’t compete in manufacturing … you must close down, but if you can’t compete in Canberra you’re all right.”

 Well, isn't that weird.  Small government types usually go on a lot about privacy too, but governments shipping private information off shore to India is going to be AOK, is it?  Not to mention wildly popular with the public, who just love to deal with call centres when they are querying their phone/electricity/credit card account.  Getting government functions shipped even further offshore is going to be fantastic.

Julie Novak thinks it's a great idea too, I see from a tweet.  No common sense operating there:  just "if it means smaller government spending, it's great" as per usual.

The report of the Blainey speech indicates he went on about socialism being revived internationally, risks of war, and new States being deserved in Northern Australia.  (Funny, that; given that a new State would involve a new level of that dreaded bureaucracy that should be shipped off shore.)

Either the speech itself, or Creighton's reporting of it, seems to be a complete ramble with hardly any overarching theme.   

I haven't read him, but assume that Blainey's history work was good in its day.   

But it's a sad indictment of the current intellectual decline of the Right in the US, and probably everywhere, that their heroes are all well past their intellectual peak. 
 

Still learning about Kubrick

Well, I learnt quite a bit about how Kubrick operated by reading this post (which, despite its title, does not concentrate all that much on his last, kinda oddball, movie.)   It really paints a completely different picture of how one imagines a control freak must have worked.  Well worth reading.

The Australian and the magnificent Tony Abbott

How do the writers at The Australian maintain any shred of pride in their work in light of the way they (have to?) spin Tony Abbott?

Case in point:  Dennis Shanahan rotating faster than a neutron star this morning over Newspoll results which show absolutely no change in a  bad TPP vote for the Coalition, but nonetheless (apparently)  it represents a magnificent turning point for Abbott because his negative approval rate has dropped to only -17%!

It's absurd, and undignified in the extreme.   

More realistic take:  "If this is as good as it gets, Tony, you should be worried."

The stunning screen of Samsung

I was in a shopping centre on Saturday and surprised to see that the new Samsung Tab S model tablet is already here.  This is the one that has been getting pretty rave reviews, and being called the possible iPad killer.

And honestly, if you love ogling tablets in the shops like I do, you really must go and see one of these.  The screen is absolutely beautiful, being based on organic  LED's, and you can't help but be impressed.  As one review notes:

Once we switched to viewing photos, the Tab S's screen wiped the floor with both of its rivals. There is just no comparison in terms of shadow detail and richness of colour - the same applies to other graphics heavy content such as games. Backlit LCD displays, with their lower contrast ratios, just can’t compete with AMOLED for sheer visual punch. The iPad and Xperia Z2 Tablet have, by all accounts, excellent screens, so for Samsung's tablet to be so much more impressive is quite an achievement.

My daughter said the screen was hurting her eyes with its awesome ability to stop her looking away, and I know what she means.

Apart from the screen, the tablet has good battery life, plenty of memory and is very thin.

I would like one.  Negotiations with my wife have not yet started, but I hope they go well...

Premature positioning

I'm a bit surprised that political commentators are still staying united on the "Tony Abbott has been impressive in his response to MH17" line, when it is looking increasingly obvious that the number of people he has been sending to Europe (I'm not sure of the total figure now - at least 50 AFP, but seemingly 200 in other reports) to cool their heels while waiting to see if they can ever get to the crash site has been over the top and rather wasteful. 

Surely there are others who have been skeptical of his judgement in this matter, right from the start?

Pot calls out kettle

Judith Sloan, of all people, hates it when someone seems to have a one track mind on matters economic:

Thank God that Joe Stiglitz has left our fair shores: all that ill-informed, gratuitous advice was really getting out of hand.  And all complete tosh: Stiglitz has never come across a problem which is not solved by more government spending or regulation.

I assume it's a matter of great distress to her, then, that her fellow economic commentators at Catallaxy have never met a problem which is not solved by less government spending or regulation?

(To be fair - which is something she rarely is - there was that brief episode a few years ago where Sloan herself did promote the idea of increasing unemployment benefits.  I still don't think it was ever repeated at Catallaxy, as such a radical proposal would upset the small government luvvies no end.)

More significantly, Judith is promoting at that post some research that indicates income inequality in Australia is not increasing (at least if you look at the top 1%.)

Ha!  She says - take that in your pipe and smoke it, Joe.

Of course, what she fails to comment on is the rest of the graph indicating the trend is way different in most other countries, and the fact is, (if these numbers are right) it is something which the Abbott welfare changes look designed to change for the worse.

I don't see that citing this is any reason to ignore Stiglitz's warning that it is not a good idea to move in policy ideas towards the USA.

UPDATE:  

In the thread, I see that Sinclair Davidson comes on out and proud that income distribution counts for naught:

Can someone of more economic understanding than me explain why income inequality matters so much?

It doesn’t. Neoclassical theory has no view on income distribution. It will follow marginal productivity, so whenever you hear a neoclassical economist crapping about inequality they’re imposing their own preferences or a bolt-on to the theory.

Individuals with low marginal productivity impose costs on the economy through various other correlations with drug abuse and crime and so on. But it isn’t clear that inequality is the cause of those problems.

This is a case of devotion to economic ideology overwhelming common sense.

In anti tattoo news

I missed a piece in The Guardian last week by someone who notes reluctantly that "even nice people" are getting tattoos.  

As with any article that indicates a skerrick of disdain for the all encompassing trend for tattooing, there follows several thousand comments on the subject:  the "inked" complaining about people who criticise their fashion decisions, but a fair few people who seem to be relieved to be expressing their dislike of tattoos generally and their hope that this long lived fad will finally start to fade.

Of course it is true that "nice" people are getting many tattoos.  I think it is also beyond doubt that the artistic merit of what a huge number they choose to have (more or less) permanently inscribed on their bodies fits within the definition of kitsch.   As far as I'm concerned, kitsch is of interest in small doses - it's the ubiquity of it in the form of tattooing that is off putting, as well as the insistence now that it be on parts of the body which are pretty much on permanent display in a warm climate.

I don't quite understand why no one would have a problem with a column in which the number of (say) "dogs playing poker" prints being sold (I assume they hit some peak a few decades ago?) was ridiculed; but write about the number of skulls turning up on "normal" - and yes, quite nice - people's forearms these days and it's now considered somewhat off limits by many. 

In other anti tattoo stories from last week, Catalyst had an interesting one about how it, and laser removal,  works scientifically. 

The sensible Gittins

The "I'm an economist and you're not" folk of Catallaxy hate him, which is a pretty decent sign that he's probably right most of the time.

Ross Gittin's column this morning makes common sense on the budget.  For example:

There are many ways to skin the budget cat – some fairer or more sensible than others – and it's absurd for the government and its barrackers to pretend, Maggie Thatcher-like, that the measures proposed in the budget are the only alternative to irresponsible populism.

Anyone who knows anything about successful "fiscal consolidation" knows it invariably involves a combination of spending cuts and tax increases (including reductions in tax concessions – "tax expenditures").

And anyone who knows much about economics knows there's little empirical evidence to support the ideology that economies with high levels of government spending and taxation don't perform as well as those with low levels.

Yet Hockey and Abbott thought it sensible to propose a 10-year budget plan that relied almost exclusively on cuts in government spending – apart from the temporary deficit levy and much-unacknowledged bracket creep.

Keating points out that, combining all levels of government as a percentage of gross domestic product, Australia already has the lowest budget deficit and public debt compared with Canada, Japan, Britain, the US and the OECD average.

At 26.5 per cent, our level of total taxation seems higher than the Americans' 24 per cent, until you remember their budget deficit is 5 percentage points higher than ours. So the claim that we have a bloated, "unsustainable" level of government spending is itself unsustainable.

The parsnip post

Wikipedia gives a good background to the parsnip, and there are many things about this vegetable which make it rather intriguing:

1.  Cold ground improves it.   Every article I have read about them refers to their sweetness, but this apparently is mainly brought on by their going through frosts before being pulled out of the ground.  This may well explain why I have never considered them particularly sweet - I assume there are few grown in Australia that are held in the ground until a frost has sweetened them up.   I like their flavour in any case:  they have a spicier, earthier vibe compared to the fairly bland carrot (which, in Australia, I would generally consider sweeter than any parsnip I've eaten.)

This ability to winter over in the ground appears to have been a positive for their cultivation.  See this from a column in the Washington Post:

Nevertheless, nothing else does what the parsnip does: rest in the ground all winter with no need for root cellar storage. After a few fall frosts it develops a sweetness that no carrot has ever bested, and it sustains that all the way into mid-spring. You can dig it any time the ground is not frozen, but it is most treasured as the earliest fresh harvest of the year.

2.  Food of the Emperor - we think.   Emperor Tiberius, according to Pliny, took annual tribute from a part of Germany in parsnips.  The only confusion appears to be whether Pliny really meant parsnips, as the carrot of the day could be pretty pale too, and there seems to still be much uncertainly about which of these vegetables any writer of that era was referring to.

There was a detailed article on the philology of the parsnip written in 1958 which you can see in preview.   It appears certain that Pliny was at least sometimes referring to parsnips specifically, but whether the author throws doubt on the Tiberius story remains unknown to me.   Maybe some reader will pay the $4 for the full article and let me know.

In any event, this short explanation (from this book) of the expansion of the parsnip from ancient Roman times into the rest of Europe seems good:

3.  They are unduly expensive everywhere.   Parsnips cost about $10 a kilo in Brisbane at the moment, but if you Google the topic "Why are parsnips so expensive", you'll find that their high cost has been mentioned on the internet in many countries, including England, France and America.  As far as I can make out, they are a finicky vegetable to grow, with low and slow germination rates from seed, and perhaps slow growing generally.   I also guess that if people know them for their sweetness, they may not bother growing them if they can't be sure they will get a frost before harvest.

It's no wonder carrots are the ubiquitous root vegetable - they are frequently so incredibly cheap in the supermarket, I am often surprised that farmers make any profit from them.  I know from childhood that they are dead easy to grow at home too.   

4.  Parsnips lost out to the potato.   The parsnip made a successful journey across to North America, but you can Google up a chapter in a book Disappearing Foods that is called Parsnips - now you see them, now you don't, which talks about how the vegetable slipped out of popular use from perhaps the 18th century particularly in Italy and the Netherlands.  Much of the blame apparently goes to the potato, being a more reliable and easily grown crop.  Apart from this, the book does make this observation about the parsnip in Dutch art:

5.  In art, when is a parsnip just a parsnip?   In my previous post, I have examples of parsnips in various European paintings (although, to be honest, I haven't even looked up yet where the last two oddball paintings come from.)

But one of the more enjoyable posts about parsnips I have read was this one, which speculates whether parsnips were (at least sometimes) deliberately put in paintings to represent sex or lust.  As the writer notes, the carrot and parsnips both had developed a reputation as an aphrodisiac, one suspects for no other reason than their vaguely phallic shape:

In 1563 Culpeper states: "The garden Parsnip nourishes much, and is good and wholesome nournishment,but a little windy, whereby it is thought to procure bodily lust" which is pretty close to similar quotes I found on the net. Of course there are many earlier references, such as in the widely known "Tacuinum Sanitatis" of the 14th century where it attributes the stimulation of sexual intercourse to the Pastinace, a word sometimes used to describe both carrot and parsnip. An other reference I found from the materia medica (the Taylor-Schechter Genizah collection) dating to 11th to 14th century Cairo, depicted the parsnip as an aphrodisiac. What is amusing, as pointed out in much of the above references, is that it was also a wind producing food (it was said to make you fart), this apparently was connected to the excitement (blood flow) of certain areas.

Of course, there is more here at play than just medicinal qualities, it also had a phallic property which pops up in Florio's Italian/English dictionary, 1598, (cited in the OED) as the "pastinaca muranese", "a dildoe of glasse" ... or at least this is what I was able to gather from various sources. This is also brought to light in "Picturing women in late Medieval and Renaissance art" (Grössinger) where she describes parsnips and cabbages representative of male and female genitalia, and given much of what I have read today, am inclined to agree.

The post gives a couple of examples of paintings where the parsnip on the table does seem to fit in with the general lusty context.

She also wonders why they would turn up on the table at the Last Supper, but I guess I've solved that one already in my research - presumably, they are taken to be a symbol of the nails of the cross in that case.  (Either that or else Dan Brown will have some explanation involving sex.)

6.  Eat, but don't touch.   One of the stranger things about the parsnip as a plant is that its sap, on skin contact, can sometimes cause a serious "burn" reaction in sunlight.   Have a look at this woman from England who got bad blisters from her garden parsnips.

Articles from North America talk about the same problem with respect to wild parsnips.  The way the sap hurts sounds complicated:

Wild parsnip is of concern because humans develop a severe skin irritation from contact with sap from the plant. Wild Parsnip plants have chemicals called psoralens (more precisely, furocoumarins) that cause phyto-photodermatitis: an interaction between plants (phyto) and light (photo) that induce skin (derm) inflammation (itis).  Once the furocoumarins are absorbed by the skin, they are energized by UV light on both sunny and cloudy days. They then bind to DNA and cell membranes, destroying cells and skin.

Wild Parsnip burns usually occur in streaks and elongated spots, reflecting where a damaged leaf or stem moved across the skin before exposure to sunlight. If the sap gets into the eyes, it may cause temporary or permanent blindness.

 No wonder they don't seem to be all that popular in the home garden, although Wikipedia does say that this reaction does not happen to all that many people who grow them.

7.   That is all.

Update:   Actually, there was another parsnip story I read some weeks ago about a farmer (English, I think) who made a killing on the sales of parsnips from his field one winter, as they were one of the few crops still available due to their ability to "over winter".  I can't find the source for that now, but will keep looking.   Any story of a person who got rich from parsnips seems noteworthy.

The evolution of the parsnip in Art