Shifty maids of "Hey?!"

Well, you try to come up with a worthy pun for a movie that I really wish people would stop writing about.

As far as I can tell, about 90% of people reckon the book was a poorly written heap of bollocks that nonetheless showed us something about women and eroticism and sex and money and power and gender relationships and feminism, or something.   About 80% of people reckon the movie is a mild improvement (by cutting out some of the more ludicrously written lines in the book) but nonetheless is still a filmed heap of bollocks that shows us something about women and eroticism and sex and ...etc.

However, given that few women in their 20's are ever going to be seduced by handsome young billionaires with fetishes and an even bigger obsession with contract law, I find it very difficult to conclude that the film really reliably tells us much at all.

And one of the more over-wrought bits of writing about it seems to have come from Ross Douthat, who takes the opportunity to propose that the sexual revolution:

...looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children ... and so on down a long, depressing list.   At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome — anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.

I'm distinctly unconvinced.

Look, the "sexual revolution" (a thing of unclear definition in itself) is tied up with changes in technology, economies, and feminism, and making it easier for men to have sex with a quite low risk of pregnancy is of obvious "benefit" to them - just that that benefit is surely spread around all classes, not just the rich, who I don't think have ever had that much of a problem finding lovers.

Sure, I'm sympathetic to the view that prostitution is inherently exploitative, and undesirable, and I dislike quasi-feminist justification of it as empowering; but I would have thought the sexual revolution has lowered its prevalence in most countries, rather than increased it.

And as for the young being exploited:  while there is no doubt more parent tolerated, open sex amongst teenagers today than 50 years ago, I can't say that I have noticed any big cultural move towards approving of guys in their 20's (or older) having sex with girls under 16. (Some changes which have been mooted to age of consent laws - making the age difference a key issue, rather than mere age of one partner - is actually  sensible in terms of what is deservedly criminalised.)

There are, no doubt, winners and losers in the recent changes in Western attitudes to sex.   I think culturally, there are clearly matters to regret, particularly on the issue of commitment in a relationship and the downgrading of marriage.

But to suggest it's turned back into pre-Christian Rome, where men could sleep with a slave (be it male or female) as part of his ownership rights:  I don't think so.....  

Bad neighbourhood

Drug abuse in Iran rising despite executions | GulfNews.com

This article says that drug addiction is a major, and increasing, problem in Iran:

Anti-narcotics and medical officials say more than 2.2 million of Iran’s
80 million citizens already are addicted to illegal drugs, including
1.3 million on registered treatment programmes. They say the numbers
keep rising annually, even though use of the death penalty against
convicted smugglers has increased, too, and now accounts for more than
nine of every 10 executions.

Living in a bad neighbourhood doesn't help:

Officials say Iran’s taste for illegal narcotics is certain to expand into greater abuse of heroin, simply because next door is Afghanistan, maker of three-fourths of the world
supply.

Abbas Deilamzadeh, whose Rebirth Society organisation runs dozens of rehabilitation centres, predicts that more people currently experimenting with meth soon will be
using heroin, simply because Iran is the main route for Afghan heroin dealers to export the drug worldwide.

The United Nations drug agency said the total area under opium poppy cultivation in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2014 was estimated at 224,000 hectares, a 17 per cent
increase from 2013, producing about 6,400 tonnes of opium. Most is grown
in the often-lawless Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south.

Regardless of what people think about "the war on drugs", surely everyone can agree that the world  would be better off if Afghanistan, well, didn't exist.   (Nothing personal, all nice Afghanis out there.  It's just that your country has been exporting trouble for a very, very long time.)

Much mirth ensued

I trust no one missed Chris Kenny's column in The Australian on the weekend which caused much mirth around the nation by opening thus:

FOR all the Coalition’s failings and missteps it is surely incontestable that Tony Abbott has provided the best 16 months of government Australia has seen in more than seven years.

So how is it that he seems to be on borrowed time?

Triggs sounding reasonable

Oh look - Gillian Triggs is in Fairfax sounding reasonable and making the point about numbers of children in detention that I always said would be relevant:

The year 2013 saw a peak in the number of asylum seekers globally – largely as a result of the unrest of the Arab Spring. This impacted on Australia, with asylum seeker numbers rising to a record high in July 2013. There were 1992 children in detention in that month. By October 2013, efforts to move children into the community had reduced this number to 1045.

In stark contrast, over the six months after the new government took office, it became clear that children were being held for significant periods and were not being released. While the boats were stopping, the children were being detained for lengthening periods of time. When the inquiry was announced in February, 2014 children had been held on average for seven months and 1006 remained in closed indefinite detention.

Of course, amongst her fiercest critics are pea-brained climate change "skpetics" who have never been able to get their head around understanding how changes in intensity in the water cycle can mean both bigger precipitation events and worse droughts. 

Richest company ever has trouble with work hours

Apple factories slip in enforcing work hour limits during iPhone blitz

Apple sold more iPhones last year than anyone could have imagined.
But the company found that a lower percentage of factories assembling
its products complied with a policy preventing excessive work hours.

The company's policy limits factory workers to a 60-hour workweek. Apple
said it had found that 92 per cent of the more than 1.1 million workers
in its supply chain worked no more than 60 hours a week last year,
compared with 95 per cent in 2013.

I assume that most of this work would also be of the highly repetitive, assembly line type; and as such, limited work hours of even 60 hours a week seems to be pushing the limits of reasonable.

I do not care for the Apple company...

Unstoppable Stoppard

Nature has a review up of a new play by the cleverest playwright of the last, gosh, 50 odd years - Tom Stoppard - about the "hard problem" of consciousness. 

Hey wait a minute - I see from his Wikipedia entry that Stoppard did uncredited work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  (!)   I hope he was uncredited because he thought the final product was not much chop.  I hold the film in very low regard indeed.  Yes - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was better!

Quantum time puzzle

The Future Affects The Past? Welcome To The Quantum Universe

This sounds quite a significant experiment, but it hasn't shown up on the internet much (yet).

It also reminds me of the experiments of John Cramer which I posted about years ago, but I don't recall reading how they turned out.  I have been meaning to check up on this for some time..  

It seems I missed a paper by Cramer last year (see the first link on this page, which also has links to other media coverage of his work) indicating that his experiments did not show a "nonlocal" signal, and he has now concluded that quantum nonlocal (and retrocausal) signalling is not possible after all.

How disappointing.  

Perhaps I haven't read it carefully enough, but I am not sure whether Cramer thinks this is reason to give up on his "transactional interpretation" of quantum physics, or not.

Hair removal discussed

Depilation: Hair-erasing | The Economist

Gee, it's a short review of a book about the history of hair removal, but there is a fair bit in there that I didn't realise before.  For example:

There is no finer example of this than the reaction of the
bearded Europeans to the smooth skin of the male and female native
Americans they saw when they arrived on their shores. George Catlin’s
portrait of the eldest son of Black Hawk in 1832 (right) reveals the
preoccupation that many colonists had with hairlessness. Hair was
political, too, and formed part of a debate about Indian racial
characteristics and whether natives were capable of being civilised.
William Robertson, a Scottish historian, said hairlessness provided
evidence of a “feebleness of constitution”.

Attitudes shifted after Charles Darwin published “The
Descent of Man” in 1871 and perspectives on the relationship between
humans and other animals changed. Although American theologians ignored
or rejected Darwin’s ideas, the notion of a connection between man and
ape had a great cultural impact on how hairiness was viewed. Freak shows
and circuses displayed “dog-faced men” and “bearded ladies”, and
unusual hair growth was even tied to various pathologies. By the start
of the 20th century, plentiful hair had been linked to signs of sexual,
mental and criminal deviance.

Hadn't heard this before, either:

Aversion to body hair spread rapidly, fuelled by the racially tinged
hygiene movement and less restrictive dress codes. Advertisements for
hair-removal products sprouted everywhere, and by the start of the
second world war body hair had become disgusting to middle-class
American women. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1938 was partly
provoked by a rash of injuries from depilatory creams. One of the most
popular creams contained thallium. Women were maimed by muscular
atrophy, blindness or limb damage after using it; some even died.

Get your act together, media

I reckon the Australian media has run oddly cold on some of the more outrageous behaviour of the Abbott government.

Sure, Fairfax, The Guardian and then The Australian ran the story of Brandis sending over a big wig to invite the President of the Human Rights Commission to resign - because they didn't like a report she has written.   No one in the government has denied it - it is clearly true.

But by today - it gets barely a mention on Insiders, and I haven't seen any TV doorstops with a journalist calling out to Abbott - "Do you really think this is appropriate?  How is it different to workplace bullying?  Why do it in secrecy - was the message that if she didn't go quietly you would rubbish her in Parliament?"

The behaviour towards her is, in my reckoning, a major scandal that the media seems not all that interested in pursuing.

Which puts in mind of the continuing scandal of the secrecy with which the whole "Operation Sovereign Borders" was untaken, including the imprisonment at sea of people for weeks at a time, and the lack of challenge to the weak justification given for it.

By the way, going back to the HRC - Tim Wilson played a "straight bat" on the matter in his Sky News brief interview on Friday.  Yet the hosts deliberately did not invite him to comment on the politics of the government asking his boss to resign.  

Weird.

A billion years to re-locate

The sun won't die for 5 billion years, so why do humans have only 1 billion years left on Earth?

Apparently, the sun will be hot enough in a billion years to boil off the Earth's oceans.  (And a few billion after that, it becomes a red giant that will expand out to the orbit of Mars.)

This reminds me, I was reading somewhere recently about how you could start moving the Earth's orbit outwards.  (You swing a lot of things past it, if I recall correctly.)   Can't remember where that article was, now.

I don't think it was this article from New Scientist in 2008, but it covers similar territory.

Excuse me while I have a fantasy

So, Abbott has dumped Philip Ruddock, and some Liberals are not impressed.

Is anyone running a book on how long Abbott has got left?   I mean, I would have guessed a few months; but after this week, I'm looking more at weeks I can count on one hand.  Days I can count on hands and feet.  You get the idea...

But I'm a bit impatient for this.   Can't we try a bit of Thai or Fijian style change of government for the good of the country?   I mean, Angus Houston is getting a knighthood, and seems a very restrained and well liked fellow on all sides of politics.   Who would really complain if he convinced the Governor General, who I am sure he knows well, to let him lead a delegation of soldiers to imprison Abbott until we can have an election.  It would be doing Abbott a favour, really; earning him more public sympathy for the way he lost the job than what he is going to get by waiting for the MPs to attack again.

Pity Canberra doesn't have something like a Tower of London for such purposes.

Wait - I know - lock him up inside the National Carillon.  It's on a island, although escape from it would hardly be the same as from Alcatraz.  Look - there is plenty of room inside - there is even a function room on the top with a kitchen.  (! - I had no idea.)   No sign of a toilet that I can see, however.  He can tip a bucket over the side.

Here is an illustration:

See - you get to enter into a Steve-grade fantasy, but still learn something in the process!

Seriously bizarre

The Guardian appears to have confirmed the "the government invited Gillian Triggs to resign" story, yet it appears no one from the government has commented on it yet.

The whole puffed up government and News Limited campaign of outrage on Triggs for not starting her enquiry while Labor was in power is truly baffling.   Isn't it obvious that the mere number of children in detention is but one factor - the other crucial one being how quickly they are coming out of detention. With the Labor/Liberal change of policy just before the election, it looked clear that getting children out of detention was going to start taking longer. 

Abbott's belligerent demand yesterday that Triggs should be thanking Scott Morrison for stopping the boats just sounded like the churlish attack of a man who can't handle any criticism, and who is crushed when he doesn't get the acclaim that he thinks he deserves.   He honestly looks psychologically more fragile (and more like Rudd) every day.  

The Abbott government (and Murdoch press) behaviour over this is plainly, completely, out of proportion to the offence of which they are complaining.

Why not simply respond to any alleged bias in the report (if they can point out to factual errors in particular) with a calm rebuttal?

Why not  express regret at the fact that children are still in detention?   Say that you know it is not good for them and you are doing your best to help alleviate their situation?

Instead, why present yourself as an needy psychological cripple who wants the sacking of a person in a statutory appointment because you don't like being criticised?  

The other curious thing about this is the question of Tim Wilson.   Could it be that the Abbott/Brandis plan really was to hope to get Triggs to resign so they could elevate the Commissioner for Selfies (and Gays) to the top job?   I mean, I think that would be a patently ridiculous plan, given Wilson's complete lack of qualification to be on the Commission at all, but this government looks so incompetent and stupid, who knows?

The other thing I wonder about is whether there is any Wilson connection in terms of the government reaction to Triggs - I mean, would he leak back to Brandis if she said something careless and stupid about (say) plans to hurt the government?   Could that explain their intemperate attacks on her?   I like to think that Wilson - although I make my disdain for him obvious here - is not so low as to do that; but it strikes me as odd the way this has all blown up since his arrival on the scene.

Wilson apparently spoke on the radio about the report yesterday, but I have found no comment on line about what he said.  He is also going to be on Sky this afternoon.  Given that his appointment was so blatantly political, he ought to be asked for comment on the obvious politics going on in relation to this report.

Twitter is really running red hot with outrage about the government conduct towards Triggs.  It is very clear that their attack is blowing up in their face, and making Abbott's destiny in the dustbin of history all the closer.

The ugly Coalition

The attack on Gillian Triggs by the Right, and the Murdoch press, is spectacularly ugly example of bullying and attempt at deflection, and is being carried out by:

I'll spare readers the ugly angry mug of Tony Abbott from yesterday, for now.

It's one of those odd cases where the people involved physically look like the ugly bullies they are. (Something about having a double chin also seems to make a Coalition man prone to Trigg hate.)

Update:   well, if true, this is absolutely a case of bullying - there's no mere rhetoric use of the word involved here.

The Abbott government sought the resignation of the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs two weeks before it launched an extraordinary attack on the commission over its report on children in immigration detention.
The request was conveyed orally by an official on behalf of the Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis. It was rejected outright by Professor Triggs, who saw it as an attack on the independence and integrity of the commission and herself.

Speaking of morons

Andrew Bolt's post today seeking to blame Labor for "letting in" a couple of Muslim guys who have been arrested for (what is alleged) to be their plan to commit a terrorist act is the most stupid attempt at opportunist attack he has ever made.  Or is Bolt's policy now just "don't let any more Muslims into Australia, ever"? 

The sickening PM

I find the behaviour of this Prime Minister and his government to have moved on from appalling to sickening.

Today's attack on Triggs and her Commission's report on children in detention is really disgusting.  It is exactly the same moral worth as those Catholics who, faced with evidence of decades of abuse and failure to take action, bleat on about "But what about the other churches?  What about teachers in the State schools?"

And I see that he is continuing to seek to get credit as tough on security by commenting in Question Time on apparent evidence to be used against the two guys who are alleged to have been about to go out and behead someone as a PR stunt for Islamic State.    Surely a politician shouldn't be carrying on like this when the matter is months away from trial??

I used to think he was just an incompetent out of his depth.

I am moving towards just considering him a disgusting moral pygmy who is likely to go down as the worst PM we've ever had.

Update:   at the end of Question Time, Abbott congratulated himself with a smirk on a "magnificent" answer.  (Before having to clearly re-visit his use of "holocaust" in his previous answer.)    What an absolute moron.

Only matched by the stupidity of anyone who thinks the government performed well today.

Update 2:   the Holocaust comment was crass and stupid, but probably counts as a slip - one that a normal competent politician would never make, but a slip nonetheless.   The deliberate reference to evidence that  may well be contested in a criminal trial was, however, calculated, cynically used for political benefit, and a much more serious issue:

Prominent barrister Robert Richter QC has accused the Prime Minister of using parliamentary privilege in an attempt to influence the judicial process for two men accused of a terror plot.

 Tony Abbott told Parliament one of the men arrested in Tuesday's terrorism raid in Sydney made a video threatening violence under an Islamic State (IS) flag.

In Question Time, Mr Abbott quoted detailed threats made by the man in the video that have not been aired in court.

Mr Richter said if the statements had been made outside of Parliament, Mr Abbott would have been in contempt of court.

"To make those sorts of inflammatory utterances is calculated to influence the judicial process and it's being done for a political purpose," he said.

Cuteness meltdown

Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica photos: Meet the world's cutest animals:

This will cause someone in my house, who is already somewhat fond of sloths, to have a cuteness meltdown.

Doing it safely

Lowering the Age for HIV Prevention - The Atlantic

I don't think I've ever posted about the issue of the use of Truvada, a drug that is quite successful as a "pre-exposure prophylaxis" for HIV.

This article gives a good background to it, while noting in particular the very depressing figures about how much HIV is still spreading amongst Americans, especially young black Americans:

 The number of new HIV infections in the United States has stabilized at around 50,000 per year, according to the CDC, but new infections continue to increase among gay and bisexual men. The trend is particularly acute among black men, and even more so among those between the ages of 13 and 19. New infections among young gay and bisexual black men increased by almost 50 percent between 2006 and 2009, a rate the CDC has called “alarming.”  An estimated 6 percent of black gay and bisexual men in the United States under the age of 30 are HIV-positive, according to data from a longitudinal study conducted by the HIV Prevention Trials Network.

It then goes on to talk about the question of whether it is a good idea to actually start letting under 18 year olds use it.   (Even though the issue of its use amongst adults is still controversial, including within the gay community, where some complain about being stigmatised by other gays if they let it be known they are on it. There was a very lengthy article about this in Slate a couple of months ago.  I think I have read that the Australian authorities are trialling it with a view to its possible use here too.)

I find this issue very confusing.

On the one hand, I think:   what the hell?  You really want to take a powerful (not to mention expensive - $1500 a month, apparently)  medicine continually so as to be able to sleep around instead of doing the following:   do not have casual unprotected sex.  If you want to have regular sex with someone, do it with someone who will have a HIV test, commit to you, or if you have any doubt at all about your or their commitment to monogamy, continue using condoms until you split.  That's pretty much how most straight people live vis a vis sex without condoms. Is serial monogamy such a difficult concept for the gay community?  

On the other hand, as I have posted many times over the years, I just can't understand how straight men over the centuries continually risked having sex with prostitutes and getting the incurable, horrible, deadly disease of syphilis.   If their example is any guide, it seems to indicate you just can't really trust men to be sensible about safe sex at all.  But then again, reliable and cheap condoms were not around for most of that time, so I suppose I should factor the difficulty of having safe sex into the equation.  

And if syphilis was still incurable, would I oppose men who insist on using prostitutes using a drug to prevent them getting the disease, or feel that they were also kinda pathetic for not being able to let reason put some control on their libido?

Or is there an argument that straight people have become more cautious about sex?  Given that (I think) a well regulated sex industry has pretty much stopped prostitution spreading disease, there's at least partial grounds for such an argument.  (I mean, I assume men just accept that a visit to a brothel means they have to use a condom, don't they?)   On the other hand, the rates of chlamydia amongst the young in Australia is truly startling, and a sign that straight young people really are careless about safe sex.  But is their carelessness more excusable if it's a disease that is pretty readily cured if it is caught?  And should I feel differently about a 16 year old girl who wants to be sexually active getting a hormonal injection so as to be able to do it with low risk of pregnancy, compared to a horny 17 gay dude (potentially) taking an antiviral to be able to have unsafe sex without condoms?  I don't think either of them are of an age that they should be regularly having sex, but the question of drawing lines here as to how "practical" we are to be is arguably pretty fine...

I do not know the answers.  It's hard to not get the feeling, though, that in the space of 60 odd years, Western society has swung from being too hypocritical and judgemental about sex to (in some respects) not being judgemental enough.    Certainly, any science fiction of the 20th century that assumed that sex would be completely safe, plentiful and without consequences in some sort of utopian, libertine future have proved very naive. 

Mini Rudd

Down periscope: Abbott torpedoes himself | The Australian

I'm sure Niki Savva's column this morning is being re-tweeted all over the place.   The amazing thing about it is how it really confirms the picture of Abbott as a mini-Rudd:  believing his own publicity; a lack of insight into his own problems; and an office run so as to insulate him from the internal party criticisms.

Perhaps the Parliamentary PM's office needs an exorcism before the next PM takes control... 

And another thing about this Abbott government

Since Parliament resumed, it is spectacularly clear that Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker is damaging the  Abbott government - there simply has been no more biased and witless Speaker who cannot control Parliament than her.  Sycophantic with the unpopular Pyne, their double act is routinely cringeworthy; she deserves no respect and gets little. 

She is a major contribution to the dire public image of an incompetent government.

Raymond is against it

NRC geoengineering report: Climate hacking is dangerous and barking mad.

Wow.  One of the most prominent climate scientists around,  Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, has come out swinging hard against even trying geoengineering. 

I think he is probably right - at least on the dubious prospects for ever deploying it in a permanent and useful way.  As to whether all forms should never be the subject of trial work - not so sure about that.