Nutty Randians and paranoia

Sorry that I keep on going about the nuttiness of Catallaxy, but when reading this article about a convention for Randians in Las Vegas, I was struck by how this is exactly the same paranoid political philosophy analysis you see continually in threads at that blog: 

“The Left dominates our intellectual world,” Brook declared. And yet, despite its success, the stated aims of the Left are merely a pretext for an agenda far more sinister than anything contained in the Democratic Party’s platform or, for that matter, a Michael Moore movie. Take the professed concern for the growing disparity between the very rich and the rest of America: The liberal impulse to address this gap may seem rooted in a sense of fairness or even a desire to promote social cohesion, but viewing it as such is extremely naïve. Indeed, it takes at face value the rhetoric of the Left, which keeps one from seeing it for what it really is: the language of a decades-long con game. “What they’re really after is not the well-being of anybody,” Brook explained. “They want power. They want to rule us.”

It gets worse. For if “the intellectuals” use fear-mongering around the so-called problem of inequality to seize power, they wield it in favor of a nihilistic vision of the human condition. They aim to systematically undermine and annul the great achievements of heroic men and women, an effort that will not only corrupt the “American sense of life” but one that stabs at the very heart of Ayn Rand’s vision. “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” Brook said. “We need to reveal them for what they really are. We need to expose them to the American people for what their agenda really is. They’re haters. Their focus is on hatred. Their focus is on tearing down. Their focus is on destroying.” 

It would all be laughable if it weren't for the fact that there are scores of US politicians whose similar paranoia about the "real reason" for the UN wanting action on climate change (it's all a socialist plot, don't you know?) is actually affecting the future of the entire globe. 

On the "up" side; maybe the obese can market themselves as carbon sinks?

Breathing blows body fat away as carbon dioxide, Australian scientists find | The Australian

Cheap shots - (and Whoops! Milestone Reached!!)

US Navy laser cannon blows targets out of the water - at $1 a shot

I just watched the video that's been on line for a week or so about this ship board laser weapon.   It is amazing how pinpoint accurate it is, and the way it is controlled with a game console style handset.

I am also surprised at how cheap it is to run.  Not sure how rapidly it can fire, yet, though.

MILESTONE NOTIFICATION:   according to Google, my next post will be the 8,000th published.

What should it be about?   Let's see, here are some candidates:

*  I have been trying a new style of underwear lately, and I quite like them.

*  My wife was watching Love Actually when I got home last night, leading me to expound again upon its awfulness; but I think I've covered that enough in the past.  It did get me thinking, though, that I don't believe I have ever posted a list of my top ten most over-rated movies in history.   I have at least 6 in mind.

*  Just indulge in self congratulation?  

*  Commission my oldest regular reader that I know of, Tim from Will Type For Food, to write an epic poem to mark the occasion?   

UPDATE:   I have miscalculated.  This is

 PUBLISHED POST NUMBER 8,000.   

An extraordinary day in Australian Blogging History, I am sure you'll agree.

All my own work - not a guest post in sight.   Hours of dedication to the  task of producing a blog with a diminishing number of readers, but which satisfies me anyway.   As I have noted before, I've been writing here for so long that posts from years ago can be half forgotten, and on re-reading them, I am nearly always  pleasantly surprised by their quality.  Why the National Library isn't archiving it I'll never know. :)

Next year, it will be the 10 year anniversary.  I won't be up to post 10,000 by then, but it will be the next milestone nonetheless.

And as for the underwear:  it's those new-fangled (well, from 5 or 10 so years ago since they started appearing in numbers) boxer briefs.   They have been a pleasant surprise too.
 

Quiggin on nuclear

Tell them they’re dreaming • Inside Story

John Quiggin's take on the poor prospects of nuclear power for Australia sure sounds pretty convincing.

Death and torture

While mourning the innocent lives lost in Sydney over night, most Australians would be somewhat relieved to know that the perpetrator was a nutter well known to the police, rather than a previously unknown "lone wolf" inspired by IS to make a grandiose stand for their fetid view of Islam.  The latter would rightly raise the question "how many more are out there?"  and the media would not be able to get off the topic for days at a time.   It would also appear that the initial concern and rumour that this might be a widespread and co-ordinated terror event (with things like the Opera House being cleared) were unfounded.   The police appear to have acted very professionally, and were on the scene quickly.  So, despite the tragic outcome, there are some reasons for a sense of relief.

Not that it will be found in evidence at Catallaxy, where (as one would expect) the incident will end up with thousands of extreme comments about Islam.  You really have to wonder about how proud Sinclair Davidson, who (very, very occasionally) waves the flag of moderation towards the religion of some of his friends, must feel about his readership.

And, of course, the blog's same participants have had little to say about the US Senate report on torture, but what was said was pretty much fully in support of the "this is all a Democrat stitch up" line of most Republicans.

The Dick Cheney interview on Fox on the weekend showed what a moral vacuum he, and quite a few of the political Right, have become.  In this good article at Slate, the comparison is made between Republican complaints about how Obama is supposed to be "acting like Caesar" in making an executive decision about illegal immigrants, with their acceptance of the Cheney argument that it's  OK for the State to do "whatever it takes" to torture to the point of death some folk who were in fact innocent:

Still, if the immigration action is Caesarism—if, as Sen. Cruz has said, it’s the action of an “unaccountable monarch”—then the same is surely true of the torture program. In reality, it’s not even a comparison. On one hand, you have discretion for some unauthorized immigrants, rooted in congressional statutes. On the other, you have a secret and illegal program of kidnapping and torture, justified by wild claims of executive authority and defended in the name of “security.”

Barack Obama used his office to help illegal immigrants, and for this, Republicans have attacked him as a Caesar. That’s fine. But Dick Cheney used his office to claim dominion over the bodies and persons of alleged enemies, some of whom were innocent. If that isn’t Caesarism, if that isn’t despotism, then it’s something scarily close. But here, with few exceptions, Republicans are silent.

Indeed:  the Right has a long way to go to return to a sensible, moral, centre.

As readers know, I have been talking about the same despotism friendly policies of this Abbott government  in relation to boat arrivals - centralising decision making in the hands of one Minister; removing recourse to judicial review; justifying stopping boasts on the high seas, and imprisoning people from them on Australian ships for weeks at a time; returning them to their point of departure with no real review of why they are leaving.

This is much worse, in my view, than the libertarian hand wringing over government attempts to regulate data retention, because in fact the government proposals may end up with less access to the information for piffling reasons than currently exists anyway.  (And besides which, the information is already informally retained for some period - the internet has always been capable of leaking.  It is not as if the government is inventing some risk to individuals that is novel.)

Yet we have heard very little about the liberty abhorrent nature of the migration law changes in Australia, and both the media, and those who purport to be concerned about liberty in principal, should be ashamed.

Update:   talking of the morally bankrupt, Rupert Murdoch knows just the right thing to say about the tragedy.  [/sarc...and be sure to read the comments following.]

Update 2:   Tony Abbott this morning twice referred to it as "politically motivated" violence.   I would have thought, given this nutter's background, that most people would be thinking that's exactly what it wasn't.  Just because a nutter holds hostages and wants to talk to the PM (as was reported yesterday, although I know of no confirmation) I don't see that that makes it "political".   Once again, one has to question the smarts of this PM.   (Although,  for the most part,  he  and Mike Baird have deserve praise for seeking to ensure there is no general community backlash against the moderate Muslim community.)

Update 3:  I have to agree with Jason Soon, Brendan O'Neill, whose writing generally makes me grind my teeth, gets the reaction to this incident just about right.

Except that, perhaps, he might be playing down this guy's role in radicalising others if  Rachel Kohn's almost prophetic piece from 2009 is anything to go by.  She points out that he was actively promoting radicalism (she was a direct target of it!) and he should have been the subject of much more active condemnation from the broader Islamic community.   (And perhaps, even closer attention from the authorities - although, I guess we don't really know yet how closely he has been monitored over the years.)

I'm no expert, but...

I see that David Leyonhjelm had an article in the AFR in which he decried the Labor Party's re-regulation of Australian mercantile shipping.

Now I'm no expert on this topic, but nor do I suspect is Senator Blofeld.  The article reads very much as if it repeating information fed to him by a lobby group.  Yet that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't make some good points. 

Yet the reason I would take it with a grain of salt is that I had, for a number of years,  the acquaintance of an old former merchant ship captain, who I knew was a steadfast Liberal Party supporter and active in his local branch.  (He has, sadly, recently died.)   He was a great supporter of the Howard government, but was strongly of the opinion they got it completely wrong on the way they had deregulated coastal shipping.  The general gist of it was he believed the policy was severely undermining the nation's collective seamanship skills that would enable us to manage our own mercantile shipping fleet should the nation cease being serviced by those ships of other nations.   He essentially saw it as a long term national security issue.  (If I recall correctly, he also did not think that foreign shipping was up to scratch in safety or competency standards, either.)

Now, again, I have to say that I don't really know to what degree that the Labor re-regulation really improved this situation from his point of view.  But all I can say is that, from knowing this old sea captain with good conservative political credentials and a lifetime of experience in the industry, I do think there is something to be said for not completely deregulating this industry.

Weird

Isn't it more than a bit weird that some readers of Catallaxy can crack jokes during an actual hostage crisis underway in their own country?  People use black humour for disasters that have happened at some distance, sometimes, but during a hostage crisis in their own country?

Update:  not sure what the point would be of any Prime Minister doing a press conference only a few hours into a hostage situation, particularly a PM as prone to making gaffes as this one.   Leader of "Team Australia" trying to comfort the nation in fatherly manner?  Just issue a press statement, like Shorten did.

The partly correct Ergas

I have to admit that Henry Ergas comes across as almost balanced today in his column on health costs and the co-payment, where he agrees up front that the Australian health system actually seems to work well and at basically reasonable costs compared to international standards.

Where he goes more ideological than evidence based, though, is in the basic assumption that a "price signal" is warranted for GP services.

Economists may see increasing costs of providing services and instinctively say "price signal needed"; but obviously it is more complicated than that with health care, where treating a condition early may result in massive savings later.   And really, what is the evidence that people love going to a doctor to waste time?

There have always been people willing to go to the doctor for trivial matters (my own mother was inclined to), but it is not as if this resulted in much of the way of excess visits over the course of a year.  I think the great majority of people don't like going and only do so for what is usually a justifiable reason.  Putting a price signal to discourage a small number of people who might warrant it for a minority of their visits to a doctor may quite likely be outweighed by the problems caused by the larger number of people who may delay treatment due to the cost.

If the price signal is meant to be directed more to doctors (if, for example, there seems evidence that they are doing unnecessary and wasteful pathology tests - and I have a hunch there have been cases where that suspicion is justified), then putting the price signal on that makes some sense; but it seems to me the evidence that you need a price signal on the average punter going to the doctor per se is completely lacking.

That doesn't stop a government simply saying the co-payment is needed as another tax, and people can decide whether that seems justifiable or not.

The worst aspect of the government's latest changes, though, is not that it has a $5 co-payment, but by drastically changing rebates to doctors, purely bulk billing practices seem likely to disappear, and the working poor will actually face a very large increase in the cost of going to the doctor.   The "price signal" of their new policy is therefore dramatically worse for most people than the simple idea of $5 extra to go to a GP.   I would not be surprised if that results in more expense for the health system in the long run.

This is a hopeless government, full of crook policies, and without an ounce of sense that I can detect.

Oooh...does the IPA favour an inheritance tax now?

Fortune favours babes of boomers, and it all comes tax-free | The Australian

Adam Creighton comes out and argues that a modest sized inheritance tax would be a good idea. (But only if income taxes are lowered too, it seems.)

I had been wondering about this, as I think I saw Catallaxy a while ago run a bit by McCloskey in which she supported inheritance taxes too.  (It seems, now that I Google it, that she has supported them for some time.)

Given their general allergy to taxes in all forms, I am surprised to see IPA aligned economist types  tentatively suggesting a new one.

Next thing you know they'll be promoting a straight forward carbon tax as a sensible thing.

AH-hahahahahahaha

Update:   I see that the IPA's Novak is still against them.    Should I be congratulating Creighton for a having a view that isn't IPA endorsed?

Quick re-entry

I was in a hurry, OK?

More about the revised co-payment

GP co-payment 2.0: a triple whammy for patients

Good article here from Grattan Institute about the complexities of the changes to the co-payment scheme, and how it will hurt patients.

I tend to think that these problems need to be brought quickly to the publics attention by those opposed to it, because the headlines so far will not have given a correction impression of the consequences of the changes.

Ridley takedown

Matt Ridley, Anti-Science Writer, Climate Science Denialist – Greg Laden's Blog

Ridley is a favourite of the IPA style denialist set, and well and truly outed himself as having no credibility in his recent writings in which he endorsed Jonova's completely bogus complaints about BOM's work on temperature records in Australia.

Greg Laden does a good job at explaining how he is a denialist twit.   Hence, he will continue to be believed and quoted by Bolt and Catallaxy.  

Right wing torture

I said yesterday that it seemed to me that the American Right was not sure how strongly to respond to the Senate Report on CIA torture.  It now seems though that they have decided to push hard the CIA's line that it was all worth it and got heaps of benefit from it, and that this is all politic-ing by Democrats.

There are truly revolting Fox News clips  around, and I see that the Wall Street Journal is prominent in the "Go, CIA!" defence.

The Obama response - to sit in the middle at least on the issue of whether it was effective or not - seems measured and appropriate.

Despite the CIA's claimed justification, I just can't see the public accepting that the methods used, now that they are fully detailed, were acceptable in any context.  It also shines the strongest light ever on the genuinely Orwellian use of language in the phrase "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques."   The thing is, when you read a list of them described dispassionately, such as here, people might think "well, used judiciously, I can live with that."   (And who doubts that this is how the CIA sold it to politicians in briefings.)   But when you read the details of how they were actually applied - a prisoner freezing to death on the floor, being forced to stand with broken bones, rectal "feeding" that caused injury - well, that it puts the theory into ugly reality. It's no longer just the matter of "is waterboarding torture?", which was the main way the public perceived the issue 10 years ago (remember Hitchens writing about that?); it is much, much more.

Brains and religion

Finding God in a seizure: the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and mysticism - Encounter - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

 I heard part of this on the radio while in the car yesterday, and it did indeed sound very fascinating.

There is more in the full episode than appears in this article.

Why would anyone ever believe them again?

Even allowing for the normal way that parties, once they achieve government, will let some promises drop and reverse some others, it really is extraordinary the number of broken promises or reversals of position this Abbott government is making.  Why would the public ever believe anything anyone in this government says about their future intentions again?

The latest example of bold faced, direct reversals (and one with really no attempted justification at all) comes via Julie Bishop:

The Abbott government has denied international pressure forced its decision to commit $200 million to a global climate fund it had previously said it could not support....

The foreign minister also responded to criticism that the funds should not be drawn from Australia's existing foreign aid budget.

"This is our neighbourhood, this is where we are already using our aid program to assist developing countries in the Pacific," she said.

"This is money from the aid budget that would have otherwise been allocated to the Pacific for climate mitigation and climate related action to work against the impact of climate change."

In an interview with the ABC in 2012 while in opposition, Ms Bishop said climate change funding should not be "disguised as foreign aid funding".

"We would certainly not spend our foreign aid budget on climate change programs," she said at the time.

All you never wanted to know about "rectal feeding"

Controversial 'rectal feeding' technique used to control detainees' behaviour | US news | The Guardian

 I'm sure I wouldn't be the only person greatly surprised that the CIA torture regime could include "rectal feeding".  Rectal re-hydration I thought possible, but feeding?   What's more - look at what was fed:

Officers also administered a “lunch tray” enema to Majid Khan that
consisted “of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins [that were]
‘pureed and rectally infused’”.

Bloody hell...

The Guardian article at the link, though, does give a detailed background as to the idea of inserting real, minced food  there for medicinal purposes.  It includes this bit:

When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881, he was kept alive for several days with enema infusions of “fresh beef, finely minced, in 14 ounces of cold soft water”, along with egg yolk and a bit of whiskey.

Not surprisingly, the idea was abandoned by just about everyone not into torture about 60 years ago, apparently.

Now, this post may well sound as if it is making light of an odd aspect of the report.

It's not meant to - the activities detailed in the report are truly scandalous, and I find it hard to believe that the "pushback" by past CIA figures is going to wash with anyone other than the nuttiest figures on the Right.  I get the impression that parts of the Right don't really know how to play this -  Breitbart is not giving it much prominence, and is simply running with a "CIA defends itself" story. 

Update:   this Slate article gives a good summary of the report and how the CIA got into the torture game.

Just thought I would add a bit of information to a graph....

Hey, I thought removing the carbon tax and mining tax was going to make everyone feel fantastic and full of confidence and financial vigour?  [Sarc, of course]

We'll be hearing more from GPs soon, I expect

The GP co-payment trick that purports to save $3.5 billion

Peter Martin explains that a lot of the government's claimed "savings" from their new policy comes from some quite dramatic changes to the rebate to doctors:

Part of the trick is that it isn't the co-payment that saves the government money, it's the cut to the Medicare rebate. That cut was always going to be $5 per consultation. If doctors had had the ability to charge a $7 co-payment they would have got an extra $2 in their
pockets. Now they won't.

Another part of the trick is that the government will now cut some rebates by much more. Standard so-called Level B consultations of up to 10 minutes currently attract a $37.05 rebate. Under the changes they will classified as Level A and attract $16.95 for the young and
concession holders and $11.95 everyone else.

And the two-year freeze on Medicare rebates that was going to extend to June 2016 will
now become a four-year freeze, extending to June 2018.

That sounds a huge difference to me, and (I would have thought) both guarantees the end of practices that bulk bill everyone, and lead to significant extra payments to make up for lost revenue from the re-jigging of the rebates.   I mean, will a GP seeing 6 sick kids in a hour really take $102 for the pleasure?

A universe that runs forwards and backwards

Here's an interesting article on a new-ish idea about what causes the arrow of time.

Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.....

Although the model is crude, and does not incorporate either quantum mechanics or general relativity, its potential implications are vast. If it holds true for our actual universe, then the big bang could no longer be considered a cosmic beginning but rather only a phase in an effectively timeless and eternal universe. More prosaically, a two-branched arrow of time would lead to curious incongruities for observers on opposite sides. “This two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,” Barbour says. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

What’s more, Barbour says, if gravitation does prove to be fundamental to the arrow of time, this could sooner or later generate testable predictions and potentially lead to a less “ad hoc” explanation than inflation for the history and structure of our observable universe.

 

Interesting, but...

The Australian is delighting in running a story about how a couple of  Fairfax editors were out to get Hockey after having to apologise for errors in a previous story.

Two questions:

a.  yeah, it's all fun reading, but I'd love to see emails that circulated within News Ltd papers during the Gillard era.  Wouldn't mind betting that they would be the most incendiary since the Whitlam era, especially she got on the phone to them about the Milne article.

b.  the defamation case (as far as I can tell) turns on the question of how literally readers take headlines, rather than headlines read with the article itself.   Surely there is allowance for the fact that headlines routinely need explanation or elaboration in the body of the article?  I wouldn't mind betting that if one took the literal approach that headlines alone convey the story, there would be hundreds of cases of defamation of Rudd/Gillard from the Daily Telegraph alone.

Hockey is a big, rich sook, and a failure as a Treasurer.

As a man who formerly had ambitions to be PM, he's probably the government's number one loser, and the defamation case indicates he's feeling it.