He's probably upset he won't get to make a Senate speech about gun rights for gay marsupials...

The Australian notes:

“I hope Bob Hawke doesn’t die soon, otherwise we’ll never get any work done,” Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm told reporters in Canberra on Monday...

Senator Leyonhjelm said he had no fond words to say about Mr Fraser, other than he defeated Gough Whitlam in 1975.

“My mum said if you can’t say anything good about someone don’t say anything at all. So I’ll be totally silent today."

I trust Julia Gillard will send Michael Smith a sympathy card?

The Michael Smith led smearing of Julia Gillard over 20 year old matters already exposed at the start of her political career, fully endorsed and promulgated by News Corpse figures such as Hedley Thomas, his editor at the OZ, and Andrew Bolt, was in my view a real scandal of extraordinarily protracted political much racking;  and why the Victorian police even entertained Smith's complaint about the witnessing of a Power of Attorney when he was not involved, and those who were lost no money from its use, is something that has been sorely lacking a deserved investigation of its own.

As I wrote of Smith back in 2012:

He makes stupid, bush lawyer comments continually about anyone who signs a false statutory declaration "exposing themselves to perjury", as if this gives more credibility to evidence in a stat dec which is merely reporting rumour.

Smith's courting of Blewitt is ludicrously over the top - playing up to Blewitt as an ex Vietnam vet on Smith's website, etc.

This fake matey bonhomie persona of Smith annoys me no end - he's a dill and a nasty bit of work with an unhealthy obsession with a female Prime Minister.  ..

He claimed many weeks ago - possibly months ago - that he had spoken to Bruce Wilson more than once - that he considered him a "mate" I think he went so far to say.  (Everyone is a "mate" to Smith if they don't tell him he's an asshat.)

Etcetera...

Well, while Julia Gillard seems to be enjoying an early forced retirement, the Australian this weekend (presumably with Smith's co-operation - he is looking for sympathy, I expect) recount how his asshattery has ended anything resembling a career, as well as his marriage to his "Czechoslovakian Princess".

It is in fact quite peculiar:  how Michael Smith got into any of his post police force/defence jobs, or managed to marry an attractive woman:

A former police constable, army corporal, Telstra executive and symphony orchestra managing director, he got his break at another Fairfax-owned station, Brisbane’s 4BC, in 2007. 

Well, actually, to be honest, I did hear him on 4BC occasionally when he started his radio career there, and first impressions were that he was something of a "natural" for that line of work.   But his political views and personality soon enough started to grate.  I presume that it is a great talent for displaying self-confidence in interviews that has got him in executive positions in novel fields - but never for very long, it seems - as well as quickly into some women's beds, I expect.

This Crikey profile actually indicated a flighty, obsessive man with possibly quite serious "personality issues," as Jackson alleges.  (Although I had also picked her as an attention seeking prima donna early in the piece too - I'm sure she has "issues" of her own.) 

My 2012 post was titled "Prepare to backfire".  For Smith, it well and truly did.

It may not be very Christian to gloat over his current circumstances - but if ever someone's life shows evidence of karma, his seems to be it.   (At least for now.)

Update:   I had forgotten about this, but this report was about Brandis and Barnaby Joyce both attending Smith's wedding (only in 2011 I see) at the cost of the taxpayer.   Moreover, if you can believe Smith, there were some quite nausea inducing scenes at the reception:

''Fair dinkum, he was tearing up the dance floor and every young chick there wanted to dance with George,'' Smith said at the time.

Yes.  Brandis has long been known as a chick magnet.   [Insert Julie Bishop eye roll emoti here].

Speaking of Julie, wasn't she happy to talk to Blewitt when Smith would put him on the phone?  That's right, she was.

Yes, the Coalition was up to their eyeballs in giving Smith moral support in what they thought was very politically useful slime.    

I wonder if any of them are offering him a place to sleep now?   Julie's single, I think, so I presume she has a spare room for a friend in need...

 

Sunday with physics and aliens

A fun article has appeared in Physicsworld.com talking of a novel way to look for extraterrestrial intelligence:

Has an advanced alien civilization built a black-hole-powered particle accelerator to study physics at "Planck-scale" energies? And if such a cosmic collider is lurking in a corner of the universe, could we detect it here on Earth?

Brian Lacki of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, has done calculations that suggest that if such an accelerator exists, it would produce yotta electron-volt (YeV or 10²⁴ eV) neutrinos that could be detected here on Earth. As a result, Lacki is calling on astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to look for these ultra-high-energy particles. This is supported by SETI expert Paul Davies of Arizona State University, who believes that the search should be expanded beyond the traditional telescope searches.

Oddly, one possible way of detecting such high energy neutrinos would be via an array of ocean hydrophones.   But the article indicates that they might also be detectable via radio signals when they hit the moon, and that experiment is underway in the NuMoon project, although how actively I can't really tell.  Here's a .pdf list of articles about it. 

All sounds rather fanciful, and as Paul Davies says, once the aliens find what they are looking for in this high energy experiment, why would they keep it operating anyway?

But speaking of detecting aliens, it just occurred to me that another possible explanation for the odd bright lights on Ceres (instead of the current speculation that they are natural ice plumes from solar heating) might be that they are the exhaust from an alien industrial process going on inside.

We like to think big on Sunday mornings....  

John Howard

Gee, on Insiders this morning, John Howard (there to talk about about Malcolm Fraser) was looking very healthy, and sounding articulate, generous and pretty reasonable.

At least, of course, until it came to the his "loyal to the party" line that Tony Abbott has great political skills and will make a recovery in the polls.   (He's also been sucked into climate change skepticism;  but I still suspect that he is persuadable out of the Dark Side on that issue in a way about 50% of Coalition parliamentarians are not.) 

The thing is, hearing Howard talk just reminds us how pathetic Abbott is in comparison when it comes to sounding genuine and reasonable.

Malcolm Fraser

I think even hardened Laborites felt some sympathy for Malcolm Fraser when he broke up in his election concession speech in 1983. His continued active role in the matters of human rights and justice then rehabilitated him well and truly from the Left's point of view.

As for how he acquired the top job - if the Whitlam government was happening now, I would certainly  be attuned to the way the Murdoch press was campaigning against him (I was only a teenager at the time!); but despite that, nothing has come out since then to challenge the view that it was (even when viewed from the Cabinet room) a genuinely shambolic government.

While I understand why the Left was so upset with the Dismissal and Kerr's role, I still find it hard to feel that the nation was badly done by, given that it quickly got to express its views at an election.   As far as I can tell, there is little to suggest that the government could have righted itself, given just a bit more time.   And while no one wants to see Governor-General's dismissing governments as a matter of routine, once or twice a century, provided an election is promptly held, is not a great problem for democracy.   It's one of those cases where practicalities trump principles; sorry.

I know that Fraser's period in government is seen by some as a lost opportunity for economic reform and advancement, but really, my impression is that the whole world was in a confused post Vietnam War/oil shock funk.   Criticisms about Fraser based on economic grounds just seem to be made with too much benefit of hindsight.

And I was thinking that yesterday before Fred Chaney turned up on Lateline and, after praising Fraser for all the humanitarian aspects of his leadership and post political career, he said more or less the same thing:

 But, can I say something, Emma, about the economic thing, which is the great criticism that's levelled against Malcolm: he didn't undertake economic reform quickly enough. It seems to me that Malcolm governed at the most difficult time, a time of change between the Federation settlement that ran from 1910, from the time of Deakin, right through to the 1970s when we'd had high protection, we'd had centralised wage fixing, we'd had a sort of certain pillars - what have been described very well by people like Paul Kelly as the standard pillars of Federation up to that point. Malcolm was there when the big debate was on: did we need an entirely different approach to economic management? There was a huge debate in the Liberal Party under Malcolm's leadership. That debate between the wets and the dries was quite a bitterly-contested one, but by the end of Malcolm's prime ministership, the soul of the Liberal Party had moved to a more open economy, the heart and the mind of the Liberal Party had moved. And part of the success of the - the great success of the subsequent government, the Hawke Government - the Hawks and Keating Government, was that we as an opposition understood that we had to have a more open economy in Australia. So, I would say that Malcolm was there at that most awkward of periods, the period of change, he was on the cusp, and I think that his government and the party that he led at that time was an honourable part of moving into that new space.

 EMMA ALBERICI: And yet, Malcolm Fraser was more inclined to allow the budget to - the deficit to blow out, whereas his Treasurer was a much more fiscal conservative-style Liberal, wouldn't you say?

FRED CHANEY: Well I think we see this battle in every government. I went through the papers that were released for the 1978 government, a government that I - I only became a minister at the end of that year, so they were new to me, and all the arguments about debt and how you would deal with the debt, all the arguments about immigration, refugees, are rehearsed in those documents so long ago. These are almost perpetual problems for government. I think that, as you'll see, any government is always having to moderate the pure economic arguments in favour of what the public are prepared to stand. I think that the Fraser Government could have moved the economic changes along more quickly, but that's the wisdom of hindsight. What I can recall is that in 1983, after we'd lost government, I remember reading in The Australian that Malcolm Fraser had been too tough on the unions. History gets rewritten all the time and I think that there was more movement and economic movement at the time of Fraser than is currently being admitted.

Another bit of praise for Fraser, this time from a rather unusual source (about whom I will post more soon) is at Michael Smith's blog.

As good an explanation as any..

Philosophical humour

'Kant Is a Moron': Vandals Mark Philosopher's Former Home Near Kaliningrad — The Atlantic

There is fun to be had in the comments (which suggest the writer got his anti-Kantian philosopher wrong, too.)

Further topic suggestions for Senator Leyonhjelm

The Senator continued his needy, "look at me!" Parliamentary tactics yesterday by suggesting that Australian native animals be kept as pets.   (Unfortunately, he seems to have overlooked the fact that most Australian marsupials have rather small brains and/or quite selective taste buds that go with their cute, furry bodies.  Hasn't he ever heard the makers of Skippy talking about what it was like trying to work with a 'roo?)

He's probably going to run out of libertarian themed topics soon, so I think I'll have to make some suggestions:

a.   Introducing the LeyonBit.  A novel private currency David mints in his basement, featuring 6 different breads of moggies on the back side, and available for paying for IPA membership and lectures, as well as catnip.

b.   Come visit Free Leydonia - created by lashing together a few left over oil platforms from Bass Strait, relocated to Sydney Harbour.  A grand new basis for innovative society, unleashing the power of freedom and ammunition from government regulation and clothes (see next point.)

c.   Relax the nudism laws - seriously, do you know how much wealthier both the poor and rich could be if we could be free from the tyranny of buying  pants - or underpants for that matter.   Wearing cats can keep you warm, anyway.  And if you're offended by wrinkly old testicles on public display, that's your problem, not David's.   There's far too much of this offence taking these days anyway.

I'm working on others...

What about Kansas?

It was disappointing to hear Fran Kelly on Radio National yesterday having a jolly interview with Art Laffer in which she did not raise the matter of Kansas and its disastrous, on going, tax cutting experiment.

Unemployment in Kansas - lagging badly.

Lost revenue in Kansas - credit rating lowered, roads and school funding cut.

Art Laffer - still defending it.

No warning first?

BBC News - Judges sacked for watching porn

I can understand the public service, and private companies for that matter, having policies against use of work internet access to distribute pornography in any fashion, or the watching of any that is illegal, or in circumstances where any other staff could possibly see or know that a person was watching or using it.   And a blanket approach certainly avoid any issues of trying to categorise less or more acceptable breaches of the rule.

But surely, everyone recognises there is a scale of seriousness in which such a blanket rule could be breached?

And it's not as if the access costs to the internet are likely to raise the issue of these judges wasting public money by (say) watching 5 minutes of vanilla porn when everyone else in the office has gone home, as against downloading some recent case law.

So one would imagine a detected breach should result in at least a warning first, and not an instant dismissal.  

Will the media stop reporting it seriously, now?

Mars One Is Broke, Disorganized, and Sketchy as Hell

Ice plume explanation for Ceres?

Bright spots on Ceres could be active ice : Nature News & Comment

“What is amazing is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in the line of sight,” said Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Nathues, who leads the team for one of the Dawn cameras, showed
the images on 17 March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

At dawn on Ceres, feature number 5 appears bright. By dusk, it seems to fade. That could
mean sunlight plays an important role — for instance, by heating up ice just beneath the surface and causing it blast off in some kind of plume r other feature.

Ceres is believed to be made of at least one-quarter ice, more so than most asteroids. Dawn’s goals to figure out where that ice resides and what role it plays in shaping the asteroid’s surface. One idea is that the ice is blanketed by a very thin layer of soil. The ice may occasionally squirt up in towering ‘cryovolcanoes’, thanks to internal pressures within the asteroid.

An asteroid made of 1/4 ice?   Might be a good place for settlement then, except for the fact there is next to no gravity, I suppose.

Taking nutters seriously?

EPA debunks 'chemtrails,' further fueling conspiracy theories ( video) - CSMonitor.com

I suppose it's better, on balance, that a government agency actually addresses conspiracy nutters; but it's a shame in a way that they are being treated as worthy of even addressing.

Perhaps the EPA's statement should have been more "calling a spade a spade"; something like "if you genuinely believe this global conspiracy, there's a good chance you need psychiatric help."

Have to agree

Joe Hockey outclassed on Q&A, by an economist

Mind you, it's not hard for Joe to be "outclassed".   He's just a windbag who shows no consistency in painting an economic picture.  A poor ministerial performer out of a government full of them.

Update:  Ha!  Judith Sloan thinks Peter Martin is an idiot for saying Daley was more credible than Hockey, in a ranty, shouty, straw man and nonsense filled post at Catallaxy.  (Why is she never this ranty on TV?   Why won't she repeat some of her more ludicrous claims there, but adopt a pretence at being more moderate than she really is?)

Her argument that abolishing negative gearing would be "double taxation" is particularly hard to follow, and I had to search the internet to remind myself how she even comes up with it.  In this takedown of her arguments, we get this explanation from JS:

To eliminate negative gearing would be to introduce double taxation. The flip side of an investor taking a loan to buy an asset is a lender providing the loan. And that lender pays taxation on the associated profit.

As the article notes:

Sloan’s argument that “the flip side of an investor taking a loan to buy an asset is a lender providing the loan” and that to disallow the cost of borrowing by investors would amount to “double taxation” is ridiculous.

Using this logic, the private health insurance rebate is not really a cost to the budget, since it is income in the hands of health funds that in turn pay tax to the government. Using the same logic, childcare should be made tax deductible, since childcare centres would earn higher profits, part of which would also be remitted back to the government via company tax (not to mention the extra income taxes paid by childcare workers). To do otherwise would amount to double-taxation, according to Sloan’s twisted logic.

It is plainly nonsense, involving Sloan creating what amounts to her special meaning for the phrase "double taxation".

In other of the collection of her "Greatest Hits of Nonsense":  she won't read The Economist because it is "deeply Green, deeply Keynesian".   (Belief in climate change as a serious issue is an automatic disqualifier for 'seriousness' for dear Judith.)   And let's not forget, Australia's compulsory superannuation "is a tax".   (Again, a completely individual use of terminology, as far as I can tell.) 

Douthat on the poor

For Poorer and Richer - NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat makes a brief contribution to the debate about whether the "social crisis" amongst the American poor is a problem of economics or culture.

He seems to think both sides have some valid points, although (not to my surprise, given his constant Catholic angst about the sexual revolution) he leads more to blaming culture change.

He does make one point which, I think, has some validity, and it's one that has surfaced from time to time in the threads of the Catallaxy blog, before their permanent decline into name calling tedium and obsession:

But recognizing that culture shapes behavior and that moral frameworks matter doesn’t require thundering denunciations of the moral choices of the poor. Instead, our upper class should be judged first — for being too solipsistic to recognize that its present ideal of “safe” permissiveness works (sort of) only for the privileged, and for failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainments it produces, the social agenda it favors) for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the television or firewalling the porn.

It's a worry, my giving quasi-support to the uber Catholics of Catallaxy who think the world started all going wrong in about 1960;  but Catholicism and economic libertarianism were always  philosophically incompatible.  Bigger fool the Catholics for staying in that marriage of convenience, just because they think a mutual hatred of a third party should keep them happy together.

Hello, Thomas

Edison Worked on a Spirit Phone to Record Voices of the Dead | Mysterious Universe

I think I've heard about this before, but I didn't recall that he had been happy to explain all about it in the first edition of his memoir.

Probably a good sign that the policy is OK

Rupert Murdoch blasts Malcolm Turnbull over media reform

But, seeing I have trouble keeping fresh in mind the arcane world of media ownership and broadcast rights in Australia, maybe I'm wrong...

Unintentionally amusing comment

'Horsewoman of the Apocalypse': Liberals defend Peta Credlin against text attack

Julie Bishop commenting on this story:

"It's very colourful language," Ms Bishop told Sky News.

"It's deeply unfortunate it has been said and been made public.

"The less the internal workings of the Liberal Party are made public, the better off for everybody."

When even Cory Bernardi is against it...

Remarkable news this morning that even Cory Bernardi is against Christopher Pyne's threat to cut (not very expensive) science funding if he doesn't get his way on massive University reforms which came out of the blue after the election.

What's not so surprising is Senator Leyonhjelm's predicatable and purely ideological driven support of no government funding for science:

But Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm said he had no qualms about cuts to research because government funding crowded out the private sector.

"I'd wind back government-funded research in a heartbeat, it's hard to justify in a climate of big deficits," Senator Leyonhjelm said.

Doofus.

Keynesian pursuits

Last week Jason Soon linked to a review of a new biography about Keynes that appeared in the (UK) Telegraph.  That review only paid short attention to the parts of the book about his tangled love life, noting as follows:

Keynes’s love of ballet was strengthened through his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, but in the decade prior to his marriage, Keynes had been an active homosexual – even keeping statistics on his sexual encounters. The tangled and overlapping love lives of the Bloomsbury set is as confusing as it is salacious but if this section drags, this is only a small eddy in a book which otherwise flows freely. 

Well, there's no fun in that lack of detail, is there?

Over the weekend, I found a review by the aging, Lefty turned Conservative, Paul Johnson, who was happy to expound more upon this part of the book:

Universal Man contains a fact-packed chapter entitled 'Lover', which contains a good deal of new (to me, at least) information. Keynes's letters chronicle 'the initiations, experiments, risks, sprees, settled confidence and ultimate stability of his sexual history'. Keynes first had sexual intercourse with another male in 1901, when he was seventeen. He discovered (or said he did) that at Cambridge 'practically everybody ... is an open or avowed sodomite'. Apostles divided their activities into 'higher sodomy', which was non-physical but intense, and 'lower sodomy', which was anything else. Keynes performed both, using his persuasive powers for what he called 'flirtation', and his affairs embraced a formidable number of people. Sometimes merely the intimate exchange of ideas was involved - for Keynes intelligence was a major sexual component. Thus he conceived of Einstein, whom he met in 1926, as 'a naughty Jew-boy, covered with ink, pulling a long nose as the world kicks his bottom; a sweet imp, pure and giggling ... I had indeed a little flirt with him.' In the same vein, after a meeting with Lloyd George he wrote, 'I had a terrible flirtation with Ll. G. yesterday.' After Cambridge he transferred his activities to London, writing to Lytton Strachey in 1906, 'I am off to dine at a low sodomitical haunt in Soho ... where guardsmen offer their services at half a crown a bottom.' He compiled, in 1915 or 1916, a list of his sexual partners, identified by their initials and years, showing the wide range of his conquests, from 'lift boy of Vauxhall' and 'sixteen year old under Etna' to 'stable boy of Park Lane' and 'the Chemist's boy of Paris'. The social mix was striking, and included 'the clergyman' and 'Grand Duke Cyril of the Paris Baths'. 

It's rather strange a century later to read about the way the English intelligentsia became so enamoured of the idea of homosexual love as (potentially) a thing of purity and beauty, and intellectualised it so much.* I'm sure I've read that the blame goes back to a 19th century revival of scholarship into ancient Greece.  (The ancient Romans thought the Greeks were so enthusiastically gay because they spent too much time wrestling nude; little did anyone see that naked male pastimes 2,300 years ago would lead to betrayals of Western values to an evil brand of socialism in the 20th Century.  I'm referring of course to the Cambridge spy ring,  not Keynes.)

This guy (I have no idea who he is, writing in Forbes in quasi defence of Niall Ferguson's silly comment that Keynes' homosexuality influenced his economics) at least explains the culture of his times in (what sounds like) an accurate way:

He [Keynes] was not ‘gay’ in the modern sense of the world, fighting against prejudice and bullying from a bigoted establishment. Keynes and his circle were the establishment, whose prejudice led them to bully others. The Cambridge Apostles is the definitive book on the group in which Keynes lived and moved and had his being. He and his circle embraced what they called ‘the higher sodomy’ which was based on the idea, not just that sodomy should be tolerated, but that everything else was inferior. The philosophy of the higher sodomy held that the highest form of human relations was one in which men of refinement, intellect, class and aesthetic superiority combined their male friendships with sexual relations. To go to the club and converse with men of high intellect and then to have to go home to the little woman is a lower life, a falling short of the higher sodomy.

As Strachey’s biographer put it:

“They thought that love of young men was a higher form of love. They had been brought up and educated to believe that women were inferior —in mind and body. If from the ethical point of view . . . love should be attached only to worthy objects, then love of young men was, they believed, ethically better than love of women.”

We have to avoid anachronisms here: Keynes was not the friend of the bride in a modern rom-com, who loved to gossip with the girls. He was drenched in, and in some ways intensified, a culture of misogyny which was characteristic of both his particular era and of his academic milieu. The movement to sexually integrate British universities was a matter of great debate during Keynes’ time at Cambridge. The intensity of feeling is hard for modern people to imagine: Dorothy Sayers’ excellent mystery, Gaudy Night, uses this as the backdrop to a series of crimes and provides Sayers, a Christian feminist (and the only female member of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien’s famous Inklings literary society,) with the opportunity to make the case for women’s equality. Keynes himself actively criticized integration, at least in his own case, opposed having women in his classroom. He went so far as to say that he found female modes of thinking repellant:

“I think I shall have to give up teaching females after this year. The nervous irritation caused by two hours’ contact with them is intense. I seem to hate every movement of their minds. The minds of the men, even when they are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellent”

Interesting.  I suppose you could argue that the rise of feminism has meant the fall of homosexual intellectual elitism, which is a good thing all around.   Funny too, given that both feminism and the gay lobby now are considered allies, especially in some dubious identity politics. 

Anyway, Paul Johnson seems very enamoured of the book, and for a crusty Conservative, he actually seems to hold Keynes in high regard.

*  If only TV and Australian Googlebox had been around at Cambridge back in the 19th century, perhaps everyone would have giggled away the idea of gay couples as having the higher attainment of intellectual purity.