Too generous

Why Hockey will have to clean up Costello's superannuation mess in May budget

It's hard not to be convinced by Peter Martin's explanation here.  

Lincoln death details

After the Assassination: Images from HBO's Living With Lincoln Documentary - The Atlantic

A great article here with some fascinating photos and details about  Lincoln's death and aftermath.


I can't say I've heard of this before, for example:

After performing the inquest into Lincoln's death, U.S. Surgeon General Joseph Barnes cut off a lock of the dead president's hair and gave it to one of Lincoln's servants, a man named Thomas Pendel. Pendel, who became Lincoln's chief  doorkeeper in 1864, was noted for his striking resemblance to Lincoln: The doorman's lanky frame nearly matched the president's odd dimensions and his facial features were so uncommonly similar to Lincoln's that Pendel was sometimes mistaken for the president himself.

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It was this uncanny similarity that initially endeared the doorkeeper to Lincoln's son Tad. And it was Pendel who was ultimately left to comfort Tad after news of the president's death reached the family home and Lincoln's son came running to his father's lookalike, screaming, "Oh Tom Pen! Tom Pen! They have killed papa dead. They killed papa dead."

Later that May, Mary Todd asked the servant to put on her husband's black broadcloth coat and model his presidential office suit in a posthumous portrait painted by the famed Boston-based artist William Morris Hunt.

Though Pendel was later described as a "simple, uneducated" man, his possession of this snippet of hair, cut from the head of his dead presidential doppelgänger, along with the
elegant broadcloth, made him a person of particular interest for Lincoln's archivists.

 If this had happened today, there would be an online community of Lincoln assassination conspiracists who have the real Lincoln living in Argentina, and 25% of the population would believe it.  

The fattening

I mentioned my BMI last week, which I checked using a calculator on the Australian Heart Foundation website.

Using sliders to adjust weight and height, it's also accompanied by a graphic of a body that grows fatter as BMI increases.  The trouble is, it might have a bit of a problem with the gradation.

Here it is at a BMI of 25 which, at this morning's DNW (dry nude weight, a term of my invention with which I dismay female workers at the office), I have achieved, the illustration is this:

Yes, I can live with that image - seems pretty accurate to what I'm seeing in the mirror.




But move the weight scale up 1 kg, and at a BMI of 26. this is what the drawing becomes:

And to think I was that hideous only a month ago...

Making it up as she goes along?

I just noticed Judith Sloan making a comment in a Catallaxy thread that didn't sound right:

Could that line about Tasmania be true?

In 2013, the Premier was claiming 27,000 public servants, but the person who wrote this post said that if you add in employment in Tasmanian government owned bodies, it's more like 33,000.   Then someone in comments points to a 2010 report which said this:

New figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday show 40,900 Tasmanians were employed by the State Government in June, more than 17 per cent of the entire state workforce.
The wages bill for state public servants also leapt by nearly 19 per cent in the past year, gobbling up 53 per cent of the state’s limited Budget in salaries.
The State Government now provides more than one in six of all jobs in Tasmania, compared to an average of one in eight jobs being state government-reliant across the rest of Australia.
But when all public servants over three tiers of government federal, state and local government are taken into account more than one in five workers are employed by a government of some kind in Tasmania, compared to one in eight nationally.

And, by the way, this report from Tasmanian Treasury in February this year says there are about 241,000 employed workers in the State.

Seems to me that for Judith's claim to be correct, there would need to be at least 3 times more public servants there than there actually are.

Quite the gaff from an economist who is routinely rudely dismissive of all economics commentators she disagrees with. 

Update:  more facts and figures on Tasmanian workforce here.  Seems to me that, even if you were talking full time employees (about 145- 150,000), and also treating every public servant  as such, there is still no way her quip could be true.

I am failing to see how the mistake could even have been made...

Aging graphically

From a New York Times article that talks about European (and other countries') ideas about how to get people to have more babies comes this chart:

 

One suspects the situation in Japan just can't happen.   Immigration, at least, would have to increase, one would think.  There will be lots of empty houses for migrants to move into, anyway....

Maybe more time before there are no stars in the sky?

Accelerating universe? Not so fast

Let's hope there is no connection

Mass beaching fuels fears of impending quake | The Japan Times

The mass beaching of over 150 melon-headed whales on Japan’s
shores has fueled fears of a repeat of a seemingly unrelated event in
the country — the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed
over 18,000 people.

Despite a lack of scientific evidence linking the two
events, a flurry of online commentators have pointed to the appearance
of around 50 melon-headed whales — a species that is a member of the
dolphin family — on Japan’s beaches six days before the monster quake,
which unleashed towering tsunami and triggered a nuclear disaster.

The junk science Senator

David Leyonhjelm writing in the AFR last week:

The only losers would be the major wind-energy generators, which are eagerly waiting to build dozens of new wind farms in an effort to meet the target and get on the subsidy gravy train. Against that, many people are hoping these are never built, among them those who suffer adverse health effects from the inaudible infrasound they generate...

Krugman on laughing Laffer

The Laffer Swerve - NYTimes.com

The article in the Washington Post he links to is worth reading too...

Drug madness

Experience: my anti-malaria drugs made me psychotic | Life and style | The Guardian

I had heard that there was one anti-malarial drug that often gave people vivid nightmares; I assume it was Lariam as described in this interesting first hand account of how it sent one young guy completely psychotic for a time.   I didn't realise that it could have that drastic an effect.  Lots of people in comments tell of their bad experiences with the drug, too. 

Fat but happy?

Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests | Society | The Guardian

People who are underweight in middle-age – or even on the low side of
normal weight – run a significantly higher risk of dementia as they get
older, according to new research that contradicts current thinking.

The results of the large study, involving health records from 2
million people in the UK, have surprised the authors and other experts.
It has been wrongly claimed that obese people have a higher risk of
dementia, say the authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine. In fact, the numbers appear to show that increased weight is
protective.

At highest risk, says the study, are middle-aged people with a BMI
[body mass index] lower than 20 – which includes many in the “normal
weight” category, since underweight is usually classified as lower than a
BMI of 18.5.

These people have a 34% higher chance of dementia as they age than
those with a BMI of 20 to just below 25, which this study classes as
healthy weight. The heavier people become, the more their risk declines.
Very obese people, with a BMI over 40, were 29% less likely to get
dementia 15 years later than those in the normal weight category.

This will set the fat cat amongst the public health policy pigeons.

Good news for me, at least, with my determined effort to keep at the very edge of BMI of 25.  (Actually, it seems according to one calculator, a 1 cm difference in my height is the difference between 25 and 26.  I must measure myself, somehow, again.)

The blob discussed

'Warm blob' in Pacific Ocean linked to weird weather across the US

In other weather/climate news, there was a story last night on 7.30 about the drought conditions out in Western Queensland, with many properties around Longreach being completely de-stocked.   As this is happening with (at best) a weak El Nino, it is not a good picture if a strong one develops later this year, as I think some suspect is on the cards.

Making rice better with coconut oil? (And let's talk food poisoning)

New coconut rice cooking method claims to slash kilojoules - Health & Wellbeing

Well, this sounds all very preliminary, and as if it is sponsored by a coconut oil manufacturer, but the claim is that adding a small-ish amount of coconut oil to cooking rice, then cooling and reheating it, makes it better for you by increasing the amount of resistant starch.  (It's funny how making starch indigestible seems to be a good thing for the gut, but there you go.)

The article also makes some points about being careful with re-heating rice so as to avoid food poisoning.

I've always had the intuition that, of the things that could give you food poisoning, reheated plain cooked rice would have to be on the low end of the scale of risk.  But, I was told decades ago by someone who worked in the microbiology, water and food safety field, that this was not true.  It's one of the riskier foods for it, apparently, but I don't know why.

The story above says to not keep rice in the fridge for more than 3 days.  I'm sure we often go way past that, and there is not a time I know of when eating re-heated rice has apparently made me sick.  In fact, I have been thinking lately, it's been a long, long time since I've had a stomach upset of any variety.

Re-heated rice from the microwave is a marvel.  In fact, if you only had a microwave for melting butter, defrosting meat, and re-heating cold or frozen rice, it would still be worth it.

And speaking of food poisoning, in my other wanderings around the net lately, I have come across a blog that is absolutely chock full of food poisoning news - the Barfblog.  (It's a more serious site that the name suggests.)

The main author at the site, Doug Powell, appears to be a Canadian who worked in Kansas, but his blog entries make enough references to Brisbane to make me suspect he might live here now. Maybe he can tell me what has caused a repeated series of food poisoning outbreaks at the wonderful (well, provided you don't eat there) Brisbane Convention Centre in the last 6 months?  I have never heard if the cause had been definitely identified.

The good news and the bad news (about Mars)

So, it turns out there might be quite a lot of ice just under the surface over quite a large part of Mars, and not just in the polar ice caps. 

The bad news for future human ice miners:  the planet also seems to have high levels of the toxic to the thyroid chemical perchlorate.   Bummer, hey?

The Laffer experiment the IPA doesn't talk about

Kansas GOP Governor Sam Brownback Retreats on Tax Cuts to Close $600 Million Budget Deficit — The Atlantic

How disappointing of Australian journalism was it that Arthur Laffer, on his recent IPA promoted comedy tour here*, was not asked about the complete failure of his policies in Kansas?  


* well, I didn't watch all of the video of his IPA talk, but it certainly opened with a sustained string of jokes to an adoring audience.

The big smash

Puzzle of Moon’s origin resolved : Nature News & Comment

Would have been something to see - a Mars size planet smashing into the early Earth.  If time travel is invented, that event should be high on the list of "to do's".

The tax race to the bottom

Countries slow race to bottom on tax competition - FT.com

With the Senate asking questions about how the multinationals shift money around to minimise tax, the whole question of whether international tax competition is an ultimately harmful "race to the bottom" that countries ought to stop is of greater interest than ever.

The article above (which you may have to answer a question to get to) seems a decent summary of the controversy regarding the matter.   (Of course, seeing libertarians are of the view that tax competition is fine and dandy, I think its a very reasonable conclusion that of course tax competition has become harmful, and that it can all be fixed by war being declared on Ireland, Bermuda, Singapore and any other country that is getting rich by enabling companies to impoverish the rest of the world.)

In other tax musings, I see that many are talking about the advantages of increasing land tax for revenue, and reducing stamp duty and other taxes.

While Jessica Irvine did a good job the other day explaining the advantages, transitioning to such a system would surely be complicated, and the idea that people having attained the "Australian dream" of home ownership with no mortgage now having to pay for the privilege is surely a hard, hard sell politically.

How much easier from a fairness point of view is it to say that companies have to pay local tax in the country where they generate the profit?   Of course, achieving that result with international co-operation is the trick.  I think my warfare plan, as well as rounding up the libertarians as enemies of the State to be interned until the cessation of hostilities, might have trouble being endorsed by politicians:  although I may be in with a chance with the Greens.

The Muslim conspiracy issue - again

'Iraq Is Finished' — The Atlantic

I've asked this before on this blog, probably quite a few times over the years:  why is it that out of all the peoples in the world, Middle East Muslims seem to be the most extraordinarily prone to believing in persecutory conspiracy theories?   Take this, from the rather good article linked above about the situation in Iraq:

 The conversation soon turned to Daesh (known as ISIS in the West), and how the group had formed. A common view I’ve heard in the region, propagated by Sunni and Shiite alike, is that Daesh is the creation of the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq or
Islamic State before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Therefore, so the twisted reasoning goes, the United States must have deliberately created the group in order to make Sunnis and Shiites fight each other, thereby allowing the U.S to continue dominating the region. Local media had reported on alleged U.S. airdrops to Daesh. Some outlets even referred to Daesh's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as an Israeli-trained Mossad agent.

Anyhow, the article in total is well worth reading.

Update:  well, to state the obvious, isn't Google great?   Here's an article from New Statesman last year asking the very same question, and mentions some other "greatest hits" of Muslim nonsense, which the writer notes, extends far beyond the Middle East:

A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.

This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.

Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.

Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?

The explanations are limited:

I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”

The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.

Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.

It's all rather depressing.

And what about the irony of how in the United States, the biggest long term dangerous conspiracy going around (climate change is a hoax) is held by those on the Right who are most rabidly anti-Muslim?  Just thought I would throw that in for good measure.

Arnie doesn't like what bodybuilding has become

Has gay panic ruined bodybuilding?

Well, Arnie's not a complete meat head, then.   But gosh he looks old and so far past his prime in those real estate ads showing on Australian TV.

When defence technology doesn't work

The Pentagon's $10-billion bet gone bad - Los Angeles Times

A great, eye catching photo starts this article on the Pentagon spending billions on technology that doesn't live up to its promise.

The LA Times also has a story today about the Cold War era games of Putin:

U.S. F-22 fighter jets scrambled about 10 times last year — twice as often as in 2013 — to monitor and photograph Russian Tu-95 "Bear" bombers and MiG-31 fighter jets that flew over the Bering Sea without communicating with U.S. air controllers or turning on radio
transponders, which emit identifying signals.

The Russian flights are in international airspace, and it's unclear whether they are testing
U.S. defenses, patrolling the area or simply projecting a newly assertive Moscow's global power.

"They're obviously messaging us," said Flores, a former Olympic swimmer who is in charge of Tin City and 14 other radar stations scattered along the vast Alaskan coast. "We
still don't know their intent."

U.S. officials view the bombers — which have been detected as far south as 50 miles off  California's northern coast — as deliberately provocative.