About 18C Racial Discrimination Act

I see that Tim "Selfie" Wilson continues his jihad against s18C of the RDA in a lengthy column in The Australian.

I also see that Mike Carlton has taken offence at his mention in the column, too.  I would have thought he has grounds for a defamation action, but I could be wrong.   I hope some lawyer volunteers to act for him, though, even if he is annoying much of the time. 

I don't really understand Wilson's ability to run around continually trying to drum up support for policy changes which are not entirely consistent with the policy position of his workplace, the HRC.   (Well, I think that's what's going on, anyway.)

The media attack on his boss, Triggs, has also been a disgrace.    Sure, her finding of compensation being warranted to a detainee kept confined for years after he served his criminal sentence sounded high, but the finding that his detention was in breach of international convention was hardly surprising to most lawyers who have commented on it.

The Right seems to think that you're an immigrant, you can be kept detained indefinitely if you have committed a serious crime, even after serving the sentence.  (They are displaying exactly the same nonchalance about the situation on Manus Island, which is likely to turn very ugly soon, by the looks.)  

But back to 18C:   one of the odd things about it is that I see no compelling evidence that Tim's buddy Sinclair Davidson is worried about its use against him for hosting a blog that becomes chock full of the most inflammatory comments about Islam and Muslims after every terrorist attack.

And as for Wilson's argument that he's worried that aboriginal attitudes against gays can't be discussed freely because of 18C - what a completely bogus point.   As someone at Catallaxy (how odd - something useful from that blog!) has pointed out - the topic of aboriginal tradition being used as a self justification for completely unacceptable sexual behaviour was thoroughly canvassed in The Australian in a column in 2007.  Did 18C prevent that being published?  

Wilson and his buddies selfservingly exaggerate the operation and effect of 18C - and they have little in the way of actual cases to point to where it has interfered with a topic getting discussed in the media.

But, that's right, Andrew Bolt got taken to court over a column and his paper had to print a statement to run with the offending columns.   (And we don't know who paid for Andrew's legal costs.  But it was stressful for him.  Very, very stressful.  And so s.18C must go.)

Poor Rupert

Rather unbelievable that Rupert Murdoch should tweet complaining about the tax he pays in New York, isn't it?   I take it he means 55% - and the outpouring of sympathy in tweets following is very amusing to behold.

Oh no it's Alan Jones

I don't normally listen to 4BC, but this morning it happened to be on in the car, just in time for me to hear its new morning host (Alan Jones on relay from Sydney - groan), but it was interesting to hear him telling the world that no one can believe a word the lying liar Campbell Newman says.  (Jones actually went through the campaign launch speech and mocked all of his promises.)

It's all to do with Jones being against farm land being lost to miners. 

I didn't listen long enough to get to the point of understanding who Jones thinks Queenslanders should vote for, though....

The problem of Tony

I missed the story yesterday that a leak shows that top ranking Ministers are dead keen to let the public know that they did not agree with the Abbott "captain's call" to get into the Medicare rebate.

Unrest within government ranks about the PM's competency must be running a lot higher than journalists seem to be letting on.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if the Coalition "does a Rudd" with Tone?  (Although, of course, I assume they would say it couldn't be done the same way, and they would just insist that he resign or the party faces certain defeat, and for all his faults, Tony doesn't have the personality of Rudd and would - I expect - accept such a rebellion.)

Atonement simplified (and other Old Testament stuff)

I've been slowly reading a book written in 1963 by a Swedish Biblical scholar, Helmer Ringgren called Israelite Religion.    (It was at a second hand book market at Kelvin Grove, and I bought it because I thought it might fill in some lack of knowledge about Jewish temple practices.)  Helmer only died in 2012, I see, at the ripe old age of 94.

It is quite a good read, actually, and although only half way through, there are a few curious points I consider "blogworthy":

*  tent sanctuaries, such as that originally described for the Ark of the Covenant, are clearly known to have been used by pre-Islamic Arabs, and by modern Bedouins,   Seems little reason to doubt, then, that Jews had one.   In fact, I see now that there is a book called The Kregal Pictorial Guide to the Tabernacle which goes into much detail about these.  Interesting.  I just didn't realise that they were likely many of these wandering the deserts of the ancient Middle East.

*  there is the curious story of Jephthah in the book of Judges which is a little like the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son, except in this case the daughter does actually get it.   I don't think I had heard of this before, although it is probably a favourite of the "New Atheists", as it is clearly not, shall we say, Sunday School friendly.  (It certainly didn't pay for kids in that part of the world  to rush out of the house to great their Dad after a hard day on the battlefield.)

 The Wikipedia article about it notes the various ways its meaning has been guessed, although Ringgren himself seems to think it may be an echo of human sacrifice undertaken by the Canaanites.  He thinks, however, that there are other parts of the Old Testament that more clearly indicate some Israelites at some times may have "borrowed" other Middle Eastern ideas of the sacrifice of children.

Update:  Wikipedia has a quite detailed entry about the controversy over child sacrifice to Moloch

*  As far as the matter of sacrifice and atonement in the Temple is concerned, Ringgren makes brief mention of a Babylonian atonement ceremony which involved putting dough on a person and washing it off.   Seems a lot simpler than killing a bull, goat or pigeon and sprinking its blood on the altar.  (I wonder if the size of the sin had to be reflected in the size of the animal?)

The chapter about sacrifice and its meaning is one of the most interesting in the book, but I haven't finished it yet.

Update:  the book has also reminded me about the "showbread" or "Bread of the Presence" which was left in the Temple.  I only had the vaguest recollection of this, but once again, there's a decent enough summary of this practice in Wikipedia.

As you may guess from this post, the Catholic Church has not, in my lifetime, shown much interest in teaching people about the Jewish precedents for Christian practices.   Catholics to tend to only know about a fairly narrow range of the OT through the first readings at Sunday Mass.   I guess the Catholic Church has more or less been motivated to distance itself from Judaism over most of history, and I presume that's the explanation...

A First World Problem, if ever there was one...

Our TVs at home are all a good number of years old now - in fact we still use in one room a plasma screen that must be pushing 8 or 9 years, and is a very "standard" definition screen that still somehow gives quite satisfactory enough viewing with DVDs.  The other big screen TV is LCD, but I think a fairly low end one.  It does night time scenes from DVDs particularly poorly.

At Christmas we were watching Guardians of the Galaxy on DVD on my sister's new-ish LCD TV, and while I was sitting there thinking how clear and crisp the image was, my wife pointed out that it was actually too clear - it was like watching very high quality video, not a cinema movie. Once it was pointed out to me, it did become a little distracting.

I noticed that this was also the case with all the HD TVs at the department store this afternoon too - they were all were showing a silly Avengers movie, and they all made it looked rather like video.

But I see on Googling the topic that this is a common issue people have when they first get their shiny new HD TVs.

An article in Wired from last August explains:

This annoying little phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “soap opera effect,” and it’s a byproduct of your TV’s motion-enhancing features. Thankfully, the effect can be turned off, and that’s probably a good idea when you’re watching movies. While these smoothing features can make a few things look better—scrolling tickers, sports, and HDTV test discs, for example—our eyes and brains expect something very different when we’re watching movies. A slower frame rate is one of them.

It then goes into a rather technical description of what's going on, and how to try to make sure your TV isn't making some sublime cinematography look like a high end Days of Our Lives.

I see that this was discussed in the SMH in mid 2013, but I didn't pay much attention to an article describing a problem I hadn't yet seen.

Anyway, now that I realise it's an issue, I'll know how to deal with it when we get a new TV.  We're kind of hoping that happens soon, as the LCD TV did an odd flicker out the other day, but revived itself.  It would be good to be able to watch movies with night scenes again...

Local and global heat

I've been meaning to comment here that it's been a hot and uncomfortable summer in South East Queensland.   When the temperature hasn't been high (it will likely reach 38 degrees in the Western parts of Brisbane today), it's been very humid*, but with little relief from storms.     (Oh yeah, but when they have come, they have caused damage pushing close to $1 billion.)

So with a hot summer, it will make the message that global warming is real more readily accepted by to many in Australia.

Amusingly enough, I see that when the Wall Street Journal runs a "straight" story reporting on the NOAA, NASA and JAMA findings that last year did set a global record (just), it does not go down well with its readership.   (Have a look at the comments.) 

Of course, the paper will probably run six follow up pieces by the likes of Roy Spencer, John Christy, Pat Michaels or Nigel Lawson all offering comfort to their deluded and gullible right wing readership that the paper hasn't abandoned them.

Anyhow, according to the stupid (or, more accurately, the ideologically motivated to disbelieve science)  this is what "AGW - Ha! What a crock!" looks like:

And this is what it looks according to the Japanese (using a different baseline):

And let's not forget - what does Richard Muller's Berkley Earth temperature independently calculated record say:

(Actually, they say that 2014 was a record, but by such a tiny margin it's hard to be sure it really did beat 2010 or 2005.   Seems they are very clear 1998 is not the king, though.)

We all know what the climate change "do-nothings" will say - look at the satellite records - even though they attempt to measure, via the most indirect and complicated means available, the temperature of the atmosphere above the earth rather than surface temperatures.  The two major satellite records have been increasingly diverging, and were shown to be clearly wrong for a protracted period in the past, but deniers will cling to them anyway, rather than believe thermometers on the ground.

That all said, the temperature rise is still running on the low end of model projections (gee, who would have thought that modelling and measuring heat distribution across an entire planet would be complicated...), but stepping back and looking at the big picture (literally, in the case of graphs), people have to be very determined to convince themselves there is not a big problem....

*  This weekend's high humidity (and temperatures - 38 near my house again, today) - noted here.

The secret life of vegans

I didn't go looking for this story, honest.  (I was in fact reading about The Box Trolls' Oscar nomination, and the Laika studio is based in Oregon - see.)

Anyway, this is one of more improbable headlines I've seen for a while:

Two Portland strippers sue vegan strip club Casa Diablo for back wages, unlawful deductions, battery


And the opening sentence:

Two strippers accuse Portland's Casa Diablo, which bills itself the "World's First Vegan Strip Club" of not paying them wages and fining them for such artistic transgressions as failing to disrobe fast enough.

I would never have guessed that a vegan strip joint would have an audience, but it seems to have been operating for a few years at least. 

Bee on being simulated

Backreaction: Do we live in a computer simulation?

Good post by the best active physics blogger that I know...

Update:  I'm sure these are not novel thoughts, but I guess the upside of being in a computer simulation which is running right now is that on death, it may make re-loading me immediately into another simulation a.k.a "the afterlife" a relatively straightforward process.  And, I guess, letting a person review their past life either as part of the dying process, or even at a more leisurely pace from the other simulation, should be easily accommodated too, providing there have been good backups made for "viewing." 

I don't really see that there should be much difficulty in allowing ghost like visits from one simulation to another, too.  Perhaps either the person/thing running the simulation could allow for it, upon request, or there could be viruses that allow for cross simulation incursions.

Of course, the downside is that if the simulation controller is a super advanced teenage gamer, he/she/it may find relocating people into randomly chosen varieties of afterlife a bit of a laugh.  "Put Hitler and all the other bad dudes into  into what everyone else thinks is Heaven, and see how they react?  Haw, haw, haw."

Or does something like Game Theory dictate that if you are running simulations, you do not mistreat your underlings for fear of being punished yourself in the simulation you might be running in?

No news deemed blogworthy

Heh...

Bitcoin revealed: a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another - The Washington Post

One month - shortest policy lifetime we've seen outside of an election?

So the government has given up on the bulk billing attack after all.  It must have been 9th (or 8th?) December that it was announced by Abbott as a 

"an intelligent and sophisticated response" from government to the "quite reasonable observations" of the backbench and the community"

and he was still defending it, what, yesterday?

Isn't he supposed to be on holiday at the moment?   Can't be a very enjoyable one, if all this reverse-coursing is happening while he's trying to fit in some surfing.

What a shambolic government, and leader...

Update:  one of the few commentators around who had been backing the government move was Terry Barnes, who was Abbott's policy adviser when he was Health Minister.  Barnes has been slagging off the AMA on twitter for attacking this, but I note that he got sidelined earlier this month into mentioning climate change, and he tweeted:

It's another case of disbelief in AGW being the most reliable sign there is of unreliability generally in someone's political and policy judgement.  Abbott should avoid them like the plague, but he's not the sharpest at knowing who to listen to, to put it mildly...

Perhaps I should switch my health inadequacies to obesity...

Lack of exercise responsible for twice as many deaths as obesity

More battery news

The Train of the Future Might Be Battery-Powered - CityLab

I'm surprised I had not heard of this before:

This week, the U.K. has been quietly making transit history: it’s just brought the country’s only battery-powered passenger train into service. The train, fitted with lithium phosphate and hot sodium nickel salt batteries, is now undergoing a trial run shuttling passengers on a 12-mile stretch to the northeast of London. You can see a video of it below (spoiler: it looks like a regular train). If it works as it should, it will be able to make its journey without any connection to electrification.

Sick videos on the rise

I was somewhat amused to see at JB Hi Fi the other day a display stand of new DVDs (one containing the kid's movie The Box Trolls, actually, which I was supposed to review but never got around to it) with a hand written notice on the surround that was something like this  "Must watch - sick videos!"

I blame Taylor Swift.  She's like, totally sick.

Makes some sense, I guess...

The math of one-night stands and long-term relationships

Maybe another round of climate change and economics commentary due on the 'net

I see that an article appeared at Nature Climate Change on Monday with this abstract:

Integrated assessment models compare the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation with damages from climate change to evaluate the social welfare implications of climate policy proposals and inform optimal emissions reduction trajectories. However, these models have been criticized for lacking a strong empirical basis for their damage functions, which do little to alter assumptions of sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth, even under extreme temperature scenarios^{1, 2, 3}. We implement empirical estimates of temperature effects on GDP growth rates in the DICE model through two pathways, total factor productivity growth and capital depreciation^{4, 5}. This damage specification, even under optimistic adaptation assumptions, substantially slows GDP growth in poor regions but has more modest effects in rich countries. Optimal climate policy in this model stabilizes global temperature change below 2 °C by eliminating emissions in the near future and implies a social cost of carbon several times larger than previous estimates⁶. A sensitivity analysis shows that the magnitude of climate change impacts on economic growth, the rate of adaptation, and the dynamic interaction between damages and GDP are three critical uncertainties requiring further research. In particular, optimal mitigation rates are much lower if countries become less sensitive to climate change impacts as they develop, making this a major source of uncertainty and an important subject for future research.

The only commentary I have seen about this so far is at The Atlantic   Its key point is this:

Researchers from Stanford University found that the current price of climate change is more likely six times as much, approximately $220 for every ton of carbon produced. Using a new model to calculate the number, the researchers took into account the economic damage that catastrophic climate events, like storms or crop loss, could pose to a country’s GDP over time. “If climate change affects not only a country's economic output, but also its growth, then that has a permanent effect that accumulates over time,” Frances Moore, co-author and environmental scientist, said.

 But then they go on to note that many others think that the study might be too pessimistic.

The other point made in the Atlantic is that the study emphasises how poorer countries are estimated to do worse:

Another intriguing aspect of this new model, however, is that it also incorporates the economy’s ability to adapt to damage from climate changes and acknowledges that warming temperatures will economically affect high- and low-income countries differently. "There have been many studies that suggest rich and poor countries will fare very differently when dealing with future climate change effects, and we wanted to explore that," co-author Delavane Diaz said. The researchers noted that because poor countries are on average hotter than rich countries and have less rigid infrastructure, they might suffer greater economic costs due to climate change. “If temperature affects economic growth rates, society could face much larger climate damages than previously thought” Diaz said. “This would justify more stringent mitigation policy.” 

I'm guessing then the "do nothing because I hate taxes and government generally" crowd will say something like "see, this means we must make poor countries rich as fast as possible so they don't suffer as much as if we keep them poor.  And that means - they should burn more fossil fuels!"

But the dog chasing its tail aspect of such an argument should be obvious, shouldn't it?  How could you ever work out with confidence that they can grow wealth to a sufficient level fast enough to make the future adaptation to climate change adequate?  (Short answer - you can't.  They want the globe to take a gamble on their mere, ideological motivated, hunches.)

The study does have the benefit of bolstering the Pope's likely position (in a coming encyclical) that climate change is a matter of crucial social justice, and that therefore Catholics should indeed take it seriously.

But back to the big picture of this entire exercise.   People who read me regularly will know that I am deeply skeptical of this whole economic forecasting on a scale out beyond (say) 20 or 30 years; especially so when the point is to try to factor in something about which the regional effects still remain rather uncertain.  (It is easier to be confident about the "big picture" than the regional one in climate change.)

It seems that at least part of this article bolsters my skepticism.  (Although they do continue to put enough faith in the whole dubious forecasting exercise to make one of their own.)

But I have another question:  can any economist type who reads this tell me if there is anything equivalent that has ever been attempted in economics?    And if so, was it successful?

Medicare backlash took a while

It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for the backlash against the government's attack on bulk billing to get into gear, didn't it?   (Well, a month anyway, even though I said at the time that the effect on GP practices was going to be big, and general patient bulk billing was surely going to go because of it.) I suppose Abbott and his advisers may have thought it was a good idea to announce it in the run up to Christmas, as people are too distracted getting ready for the holidays.

But you know a backlash against this government is strong when even Judith Sloan says she can't see the sense in the policy.  (And even she notes that Abbott as health minister used to think that policies that increased bulk billing services to the public were a good idea.)

And remember the Adam Creighton tweet where he said doctors deserved a pay cut because the AMA had opposed the co-payment?  Well, it looks like it won't  be happening at all, given the Senate.    So sorry, Adam:  your desire to see incomes cut to everyone except you seems to have not panned out in this case.

The tough French

Charlie Hebdo: No one in Europe is tougher on terror than France. That didn't stop the attacks.

Interesting article here on how France has long been using very rigorous surveillance and anti-terror laws. 

It's true, it didn't stop recent terror incidents, but the article notes that they had a pretty good run before that.

Lost heads in history

I've stumbled across a couple of reviews of a book that came out last year:  Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson.

While I hate the idea of decapitation as a method of execution or murder, it's always interesting to read some history about it.   I'm not sure that I had heard before that it was novelty seeking Westerners who helped create a market for the creation of shrunken heads:

Larson’s most telling case study is the saga of the shrunken heads that can be seen today in museums. Collected avidly by 19th-century explorers and scientists, they seemed proof of the bestial nature of native peoples, and the West’s superiority. Yet, as Larson demonstrates, the market was created by such collectors, who often unwittingly bought shrunken monkey-heads or caused murder to be committed. Whites themselves were seen as head-hunting ghouls by indigenous people, even as they supplied the demand.

I also hadn't heard before that the audience was somewhat displeased with the efficiency of the guillotine:

The guillotine, created during the French Revolution to be humane, terrifyingly accelerated the production line of execution and effected the Terror. The initial spectators felt cheated. Its action was too quick for the eye to see; there were no enjoyable writhings or screams.

I had not heard of Jameson, of the whiskey family, and the scandal caused when it was claimed he had paid for a slave girl to be killed by cannibals (I have read elsewhere that he - sort of - denied it, but in a way that left considerable doubt.) And as for skulls of the Japanese in World War 2 - I think I read in Chickenhawk that US soldiers in Vietnam were not above doing the same thing:

The most grotesque of Larson's anecdotes from this period concerns one James Jameson, a naturalist in Henry Stanley's equatorial party, who in 1890 paid African soldiers to kill and cannibalise a girl while he watched, sketchbook in hand. He was also said to have had the head of a murdered man shipped home and stuffed for domestic display by a taxidermist in Piccadilly.

Jameson's tale is emblematic, in part because of the public horror that greeted accounts of his grim antics. Mostly, people have found decapitation quite acceptable in limited circumstances, only objecting to the act or the spectacle when it seemed to be flaunted a touch too cruelly. The trophy hunting of American soldiers during the Second World War is a case in point. Larson has read numerous diaries and letters in which men serving in the Pacific admit to boiling Japanese heads in oil drums, bleaching skulls to make candlesticks or amusing themselves by tossing pebbles into the open cranium of a dead enemy. Many cleaned, painted or jauntily inscribed skulls ('This is a good Jap!') were sent home as souvenirs, but it was only in 1944, when Life magazine published a photograph of some GI's sweetheart with a skull grinning away on her writing desk, that the army and the government publicly deplored the habit.