Some commentary on the Irish gay marriage situation

It depends on what you want (and I note both of these were written before the vote):

*  some typical hyperventilating Brendan O'Neill commentary about how the forces of political correctness are evilly dominating and vilifying everyone against gay marriage;

*  an article in the Christian Science Monitor that suggests a combination of economic change and 20 years or so of sustained scandal about the past behaviour of the Catholic Church is behind it.  It's quite a good article, I think, noting that (contra O'Neill):

But on the whole, the Dublin campaigners are typical of the Yes effort: young, upbeat, and cosmopolitan – much as Ireland has become. Indeed, it resembles other EU nations, with its urbanization and a growing tech sector. This transformation runs from the silly – beards and boutique beers – to the substantial, with growing tension about the country’s traditionalist stances on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.

Hey, wait a minute:  there's nothing "silly" about boutique beers, although even I fear the micro brewing bar movement has become so popular that I might have to start to disdain the over-enthusiasm for them.  I'm too old to be a hipster.

I haven't seen Catholic commentary about it yet from The Tablet or the Catholic Herald.   I'm guessing one will be sorta pleased, the other not.

The tabloid economist

Gee, it's very tabloid of Sinclair Davidson to do a post that I find difficult to interpret other than as a dog whistle to the effect "Obviously pensioners and welfare recipients are getting too much money - look they are going on cruises!"

A few points spring to mind:

*  pensioners have friends and family, and sometimes they pay, or help pay, for them to go on holidays

*  the assets test runs from $200,000 to $433,000, depending on circumstances.  Does SD know how cheap cruises now are?    Even with Cunard, the website tells me you can get fares from as low as $2,539.   Clearly, any assets test with a level above even (say) $50,000 is going to allow for pensioners, who hold it mostly in cash, to have several cruise holidays, if they want.

*  SD has previously indicated he thinks the home should not be included in the assets test.   What does he want, then, pensioners to be asset rich but cash free, because they might choose to use cash for holidays?

*  What hypocrisy for a libertarian/small government type  to even imply we or the government should judge how much a pensioner should receive based on how they spend the money they do have.   Yeah, a real freedom endorsing position, that would be.

Twisty jet stream strikes again

Record heat roasts parts of Alaska, where it’s warmer than Washington, D.C. - The Washington Post

It's being caused by the jet stream buckling again, so that warm air stays over Alaska but cooler air heads further south (and across to the other side of the country.)

In other far Northern climate news, the Arctic Sea Ice extent has been tracking far on the low side for a few months now:

Dawkins and the foreskin

I had been curious as to the motivations of the father in this bizarre case from America about the mother who had agreed to her son's circumcision, then changed her mind, fled with the child, and eventually went to jail for her obstructionist efforts in which the courts had all sided with the father.

This article in Slate notes that the father believes the operation is needed for phimosis (a too tight, non retracting, foreskin.)  It appears one doctor suggested it, although the report notes:

Later, a urologist questioned that diagnosis, but agreed that Chase would benefit generally from a circumcision.

However, it is also reported elsewhere that the father thought circumcision was "just a normal thing to do", and that would appear to be consistent with his original motivation for getting it into the parenting plan when the kid was only 1 to 2 years old not being particularly medically motivated.  (You can't be sure that there is any problem with phimosis until  a boy is older than that.  I guess it might be put in as a mere precaution, but I would be surprised.) 

Anyway, as I say, all the courts have sided with the father, and the father is claiming medical support for having it done for phimosis at an age when it would start to appear the operation may be warranted.

So I would have thought that should be the end of the matter for smart people to leave the topic well enough alone.

But, I see from Slate that Richard Dawkins has been supporting the nutty, hyperbolic "Chase'sGuardians" group trying to raise money for the mother (and to scare off the judge and doctors with threats, including death threats to the father, at least.)

Here's some detail of the actions of the mother who Dawkins is specifically supporting:

Nebus also asked the court to have Hironimus stop allowing anti-circumcision activists to continue using their son's name and likeness on the internet. She had been ordered to do so in the past but has disobeyed that court order....

Nebus testified that three doctors who were supposed to perform the procedure on the boy had removed themselves from doing so after apparently receiving what he called "threatening letters" from activists calling for the father not to have the boy circumcised. Nebus claimed that he too had received death threats.

During his testimony, Nebus detailed an incident where Hironimus burst into a doctor's office where the child was being examined in order to schedule a procedure. Nebus said she "threw a tantrum" and yelled at the medical staff that she had not given consent for the boy to be examined by the doctor. Nebus said their son, who had witnessed the outburst, was "visibly shaken." He also claimed that the boy had expressed fear over getting a circumcision. Nebus hinted on the stand that this was due to Hironimus' using "scare tactics" on the boy, though he didn't make clear what those tactics might've been.

Nebus also testified that the mother had been allowing the anticircumcision activists to use the child's likeness and name on their websites, as well as on posters and picket signs during protests outside the courthouse as well as at CityPlace.

Seriously, who can doubt that it is the mother, pictured here in court, looking every bit driven close to insanity by her acceptance of the cult-like belief that circumcision is completely evil:

 is the one who is causing the most stress to the boy?

And as for those in the movement:

Supporting the mother's case is a band of so-called "intactivists." They're an army of special interest groups — Doctors Opposing Circumcision; Attorneys for the Rights of the Child; and Intact America. There's also a Facebook page called Chase's Guardians, and a petition with nearly 6,000 signatures at Change.org.

Amanda Petrillo said she heard about the case and decided to spread the word on social media and through the petition. She's the Broward-based director of Intact Florida, which is separate from Intact America.

"A forced circumcision at this stage will be extremely detrimental to not only the boy's physical well-being, but his mental and psychological well-being as well," Petrillo said.

Shame on Dawkins for getting involved with such a bunch of first world extremists with far too much time on their hands, undoubtedly causing harm to the boy psychologically by their contribution.

David's scary dream

Advanced toilet training

Amusing story (kinda) from America.

I've been thinking...

That story about developing yeast that could make opiates reminded me today of the recent story about geeks interested in developing yeast that could make milk proteins.  In that post, I speculated about such yeast proliferating in the wild and having the potential to ruin fermented products.   Well, rather than cheese tainted home brewed beer, opiate tainted ones could be even worse.

Yeast is easy to work with for such wannabe DNA tinkerers, but doesn't the fact that it lives happily in the wild, floating invisibly around us, make the potential for its accidental release more of a concern than the escape of other micro-organisms?

Well, my point is not completely unfounded.  In a Popular Mechanics article "Better Beer from Genetically Engineered Yeast":

The ecological concern is more nuanced, Verstrepen says. Here, his main concern is the prospect of introducing non-yeast genes into a yeast, with the worry that these new, human-picked genes could be bred or passed on across yeasts in the outside world. "And this is a serious concern. You need to understand what you're doing, and make sure you're not going to accidentally confer some ecological advantage to the outside population," he says.

Even if these new yeasts were to escape, he explains, the chances of them out-competing other, wild yeast species—given that beer yeast is tailored to perform in a very unnatural environment—is unlikely, but certainly worth watching for.

I see that anti GM advocates are ahead of me, and that genetically modified yeast has already been used for lots of purposes, including drug production.  This article speculates on the possible health effects on humans getting an accidental GM modified yeast in their gut.  ( I assume that they don't actually normally take up residence there, but I'd have to read more about it.)

Going back to a science journal, I see a link to a paper in 1994 about an experiment to see if a GM modified yeast did well in a "natural" environment.   I wonder if such tests are required on all GM modified yeasts before they are used?

Curious minds - well mine, anyway - would like to know....

Stay healthy, stay smart?

Infections can affect your IQ

A man who chooses to be gay against gay gentrification*

I've muttered before about the extraordinary amount of gay navel gazing that is hosted at Slate, and the most tedious writer they have, who is wont to take 1000 words to express what others could in 100 (OK, maybe 200), is J Bryan Lowder.

He recently wrote at length about gay as his adopted culture (as opposed to merely being homosexual), and while I am a part of that large section of the population that genuinely can't quite get its head around why a great many (but not all) men who like to sleep with men act gay, or camp, and share some odd and distinctive tastes in music and art,  I just couldn't be bothered staying with Lowder's boringly expressed attempt at explanation.   As someone in comments said:

....the title seemed to represent some interesting concepts. But I couldn't finish, in part because it became quickly evident that an essentially semantic argument had been overwrought and overthought. And in part because this article reads like a dissertation--one that lacked an outline.

This author clearly has writing talent, but loves his words more than he loves his story.

This week, Mr Lowder (a young man who writes as a young man) has an idealistic, no, actually naive, complaint:  that gay couples raising children in a now somewhat gentrified part of New York should not be complaining about gay sex shops and condom littered footpaths because they don't think these are good things for their kids to be walking past on the way to school:

I realize I’m being hard on these people, parents who I’m sure just want what’s best for their children. But they’ve got to realize that this campaign is a total betrayal of a history of sexually inclusive activism that has made it possible for them to even raise kids and build lives together in this now-fancy neighborhood in the first place. The desire on the part of many gays to assimilate into traditionally straight ways of living is not in itself a bad thing; the problem comes when that move is made as some kind of repudiation of other, gayer ways of living, particularly as manifested with regard to important gay spaces like bars and shops.

Lowder, deservedly, attracts quite a bit of ridicule in comments:

Take a pill, Lowder.   Preferably a horse tranquilizer. Jesus.
"I find condoms on the New York sidewalk a few times a week, and you know what I think, every single time? I’m glad someone decided to use this when they got laid."
No you don't.

And:

Stop prude-shaming gays and lesbians who do not wear their every sexual act and proclivity on their sleeves for their entire lives. The assimilation you criticize is likely the primary, if not only, reason for the sea change we have seen in heterosexuals' attitudes toward gays and lesbians this century. "Don't discriminate against me because of whom I love and build a life with" is a much easier sell than "Don't discriminate against me because all the people at my sex orgy are of the same gender."

And I like the sentiment, to a degree, although the reference to "perversion" makes one suspect the writer is perhaps just a little more intolerant than needed:

When it comes to raising children I would certainly HOPE parents are hypocrites! Boozers, should be hiding their boozing from their children, dopers should be hiding their dope from their children, abusers should be hiding their abuse from their children, perverts of any persuasion should be protecting their children from their perversions. America seems to have entirely forgotten the concept of 'discretion'.

Finally: 

It's not homophobic or prudish to shelter young children from constantly seeing things that they are developmentally unable to comprehend. And it begs the question, what should these parents do in the meantime until their kids are "old enough?" Change schools? Blindfold their kids when walking to school? There is a reason why most municipalities have zoning laws for shops that sell sex and adult-oriented products.

Ah, zoning laws!

That raises another topic on which certain commentators have an excessive obsession.  I've got a post coming about that too.

*  I felt bad about the earlier title, since I hate the sound of the anyone saying "oh, he's a gay" as if that was the crucial identifier for any personality.

The Letterman departure

Just finished watching the last David Letterman, and agree with the writer at Slate who said it was perfect.  

Sure, I think the show ran out of creative steam maybe, I am guessing, five or so years ago, and I had stopped watching it when it started being shown at erratic times.  But seeing so many clips of how great it used to be over the decades before its decline made for a nostalgic and very satisfying end.   He was clearly emotional but with no mawkishness, and his simple thanks to his family brought a tear to the eye.

And now, let's see how Colbert goes. It's hard to imagine his transition....

Far be it for me to criticise other people's taste in entertainment...

............................................

OK, have you finished laughing yet...no?   OK

.........................................

Alrighty.

But I am curious about why people like Jonathan Greene can merely "wonder" about the way rape (and violence) is used as entertainment in Game of Thrones, and not actually conclude that the show is unworthy of his, or other people's, support.  

He writes well, if a bit too overly flowery for my liking, on the topic, but merely teeters on the edge of that conclusion.

[In spooky voice heard inside his head]:  Join me, Jonathan.  Come over to the side of actually telling people a show can be a dangerous stain on the psyche of the public and should not be made or watched.  It is your destiny.....*  

(Not that I've ever watched it, of course.)

* And while we're at it, if you email me I'll tell you a few challenges I'd like you to put to Sinclair Davidson on air.

The big lego set in the computer

Minecraft Stars on YouTube Share Secrets to Their Celebrity - NYTimes.com

I have recently started fiddling with Minecraft, under instruction from my son.

Thus far, I have a cottage and a nearly completed house in "Steve is Great" world.   I think a temple to my magnificence is next called for.

As you were...

Squash the Tomato

Now at the risk of readers thinking I'm obsessing about Tomorrowland (which has now dropped down to 59% approval, making it a Rottentomato "miss") or George Clooney, I have been meaning to observe for a quite a while that the Rottentomatoes site has gone increasingly wonky over the last year or two.

First, the number of times the "key quote" seems quite contrary to whether the movie has been scored positive or negative seems to have increased, a lot.

Secondly, the number of well known movie reviewers who appear there has been heading down, down, down.  In their place are some folk who come from backwater sites most people have never heard of.

Thirdly, when you use the app version, you get a different bunch of reviews from the web version (I think.)  Or at least, last I looked, Australian reviewers got priority. 

I had forgotten about the Metacritic site, but it still seems to feature prominent critics only, and takes the immensely sensible approach of calling a mixed review "mixed" instead of trying to count it only as a "hit" or "miss".  Someone still gives reviews a number, and I guess if I read the site more carefully I might have a problem with some of those ratings, but still it seems a lot more sensible system than what Rottentomatoes has become.

And Metacritic still has Tomorrowland at 62.  So there...

Quantum weirdness under investigation - just down the road

Quantum physics: What is really real? 

I'm quite pleased to be reading an article about experiments to determine the true nature of quantum physics, particularly when it talks to physicists from two Brisbane universities.  

It's a little hard to credit that an incredibly important scientific finding that could change everything could come from Griffith University, or Brisbane generally, but who knows? 

You will all bow down and respect the intellectual greatness of the city when that happens, I'm sure...

That's weird...then the explanation found

I was scanning the largely unfavourable review of Tomorrowland at Variety, and then had a look at the comment thread.   Dominated by complete wingnuts: 

Clooney is generally one of the most over-hyped faces out of the lala land that is Hollywood. Wouldn’t waste my money. Tomorrowland will be free on Comcast soon enough…

I’ll never know….Clooney does not get any of my hard earned money no matter how good the show is.

Anything that the Liberal Loon Clooney stars in, is not worth seeing – Total trash!!

I knew the movie was crap as soon as I saw the calving glacier. This is just another shrill eco-whackjob movie with “stupid” as a plot and “even dumber” for dialogue. Only someone who wants their kids indoctrinated into the whacko Leftist theology of environmentalism is going to pay to let their kids see this propagandized drivel.

 Purge is coming says:

May 18, 2015 at 3:51 am

More pop psy liberal propaganda. Poor baby boomers. The world no longer wants you smelly hippies in the command chair.

Now who knew that American Tea Party nutters with their hatred for George Clooney would be big readers of Variety?  

I had to get down the thread a fair way to find the explanation:  

As suspected, it's a case of sending out the flying monkeys.

I expect a comment by avid Drudge reader Steve Kates might turn up there soon...

Heh

Just spotted at the New Yorker.

Update:  how could anyone deny this is a case of "it's funny 'cos it's true" when you read articles like this.

It's complicated

Colorado Marijuana Legalization 2015: Fighting The Black Market And The Everyday Challenges Of Selling Legal Weed

Interesting, detailed article here on how the Colorado legal marijuana experience is not wiping out the black market, nor raising as much revenue as forecast.  (Presumably, those two results are closely related.)

Not paranoid at all

Steve Kates, the Nutty (Associate) Professor of Economics at RMIT who posts at Catallaxy has long made utterly ridiculous statements about the United States and Obama in particular.  (He claimed recently not to watch TV at all, which is odd because he reads like the most gullible Fox News watcher on the planet.) 

I don't bother reading his posts in detail, but I did notice this in one of his shorter posts today, wherein he seems to have crossed the line into full blown right wing paranoia:

I am now convinced that Drudge has been gotten to in the US since there was one report yesterday and then nothing today about what you would think is the most disturbing event since the War in the Middle East began. This is “Nazis take Stalingrad”. Is the news now so suppressed that it can truly be said that we are at war with Eastasia in alliance with Eurasia, as we have always been, and no one notices a thing?

Meanwhile, Sinclair Davidson's contribution to the Right Wing War on the ABC has expanded to the sophisticated level of "I don't like the way she looked at him.  That's a real problem."   

Yet Davidson himself was one of the talking heads who appeared last week on 7.30 talking about the budget in a pre-recorded bit.   And he was on Jonathan Greene's Sunday breakfast show.  Do they treat him poorly or with contempt?

The real problem with the ABC is that it gives all IPA types - including Davidson - too easy a pass and too much time to appear in short bursts as "reasonable", when if you actually look into what they write and say elsewhere they are anything but.

Paying the price for blind opposition to harm minimisation

Fighting HIV where no-one admits it's a problem - BBC News

Quite an amazing story here about the rapid rise of HIV - mainly amongst the straight population too, it seems - in Russia; largely due to conservative policies which completely oppose harm minimisation:

In an interview this month with Agence France-Presse he was even blunter, saying the Kremlin's policy of promoting traditional family values had failed to halt the spread of the virus. "The last five years of the conservative approach have led to the doubling of the number of
HIV-infected people," he said.

When Pokrovsky argued for the introduction of sex education in schools - a step resolutely opposed by presidential children's rights commissioner Pavel Astakhov - the head of Moscow City Council's health committee, Lyudmila Stebenkova, called him a "typical agent working against the national interests of Russia".

Pokrovsky's approach, she told the Russian newspaper Kommersant, would only increase children's interest in sex and lead to a surge of HIV and other diseases

And as for drugs - there'll be no needle exchange programs or methadone in that upright country.

in Russia methadone is banned. The World Health Organization may see the synthetic opiate as essential in combating heroin dependence, but in Russia anyone caught using it or distributing it can face up to 20 years in prison.

Health officials rely instead on narkologia, a traditional form of treatment that dates back to Peter the Great's attempts to fight alcoholism in the early 18th Century. In essence, this
approach consists of isolating the drug user during a month of detoxification, followed up with rehabilitation - including lectures, self-help groups, physiotherapy, diet advice and so on.

Crumbling asteroids

[1505.03800] Quantifying hazards: asteroid disruption in lunar distant retrograde orbits

NASA has been toying with the idea of towing a small asteroid to a close Earth orbit, but as this paper explains, there's a risk any such asteroid may break up if you try to do anything with it.   (I like the term "loosely bound rubble pile": reminds me of a website I mention a lot.)  Would that end up being a problem for satellites in Earth orbit?  Maybe, at least for geosynchronous ones.