A PM with scant authority in his own party room

Given all of the turmoil that Gillard had to face with disunity, along with an opportunistic policy windvane of an Opposition Leader, it's quite ironic to see from this report by Phil Coorey that Abbott seems to be having a lot of trouble convincing his own backbenchers to follow his preferred tactics.

Even more amusing was the last bit:

The party room discussion comes amid growing unrest in the Coalition over Mr Abbott's leadership just six months after he survived a spill.

News of the push leaked while the party room meeting was underway. This caused angry scenes inside the party room as to who was leaking, according to further leaks.

I tell you what:  when Abbott goes, he's not going to be feted on the talk circuit by those on his side of politics as a basically good PM thwarted by circumstances, like Gillard.   He is, undoubtedly, going down in history as one of our worst Prime Ministers by the reckoning of all sides of politics.

Economic scare campaign considered

How to make sense of big, scary climate costs

Mad film noted

Hard to Be a God review – mud, blood and holy hell | Film | The Guardian

This film seems to be in the category of "so bizarre, it might be worth seeing":

This monochrome dream-epic of medieval cruelty and squalor is a
non-sci-fi sci-fi; a monumental, and monumentally mad film that the
Russian film-maker Alexei German began working on around 15 years ago.
It was completed by his son, Alexei German Jr, after the director’s
death in 2013. If ever a movie deserved the title folie de grandeur
it is this, placed before audiences on a take-it-or-leave-it basis:
maniacally vehement and strange, a slo-mo kaleidoscope of chaos and also
a relentless prose poem of fear, featuring three hours’ worth of
non-sequitur dialogue, where each line is an imagist stab with nothing
to do what has just been said....

It is set in what appears to be a horrendous central European village of
the middle ages, as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, where grotesquely
ugly and wretched peasants are condemned to clamber over each other for
all eternity, smeared in mud and blood: a world beset with tyranny and
factional wars between groups called “Blacks” and “Greys”. In the midst
of this, what looks like an imperious baronial chieftain called Don
Rumata, played by Leonid Yarmolnik, walks with relative impunity: this
sovereignty is based on his claim to be descended from a god....

Each shot is a vision of pandemonium: a depthless chiaroscuro
composition in which dogs, chickens, owls and hedgehogs appear on
virtually equal terms with the bewildered humans, who themselves are
semi-bestial. The camera ranges lightly over this panorama of bedlam,
and characters both important and unimportant will occasionally peer
stunned into the camera lens, like passersby in some documentary. 

More atomic musings

The BBC has some pretty good material on the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:  I thought this piece on "the man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb" (apparently, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had visited the city several times in the 1920's and may have honeymooned there) was interesting; as was this time line of the countdown to Hiroshima.   There was a popular book about the Enola Gay's mission some years ago which I think is still on my bookshelf somewhere - I may yet get around to reading it.

One thing that I thought about today was how long it may have taken for photographic evidence of the extent of the devastation in Hiroshima to reach the fractured government in Tokyo.  I mean, it's easy for us to look at the photos now and think it's amazing it took any more than a day or so to end the war after that scene of instant devastation, but visual communication then was not what it is now.

I guess someone has written about when the first photos of it were to be seen in Tokyo, but I haven't found the definitive answer. Certainly, Wikipedia indicates that at least eyewitness reports were being received pretty quickly:

On August 7, a day after Hiroshima was destroyed, Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists arrived at the city, and carefully examined the damage. They then went back to Tokyo and told the cabinet that Hiroshima was indeed destroyed by an atomic bomb. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging "there would be more destruction but the war would go on."^[164] American Magic codebreakers intercepted the cabinet's messages.^[165]

On that point about the limited number of bombs that the Japanese thought America might have, another Wikipedia entry notes this:

Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, argued that even if the United States had made one, they could not have many more.^[78] American strategists, having anticipated a reaction like Toyoda's, planned to drop a second bomb shortly after the first, to convince the Japanese that the U.S. had a large supply.^[62][79]

 I hadn't heard before about this possibly influential lie told by a captured US pilot:

The full cabinet met on 14:30 on August 9, and spent most of the day debating surrender. As the Big Six had done, the cabinet split, with neither Tōgō's position nor Anami's attracting a majority.^[88] Anami told the other cabinet ministers that, under torture, a captured American P-51 fighter pilot had told his interrogators that the United States possessed 100 atom bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be bombed "in the next few days". The pilot, Marcus McDilda, was lying. He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project and simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear to end the torture. The lie, which caused him to be classified as a high-priority prisoner, probably saved him from beheading.^[89] In reality, the United States would have had the third bomb ready for use around August 19, and a fourth in September 1945.^[90] The third bomb probably would have been used against Tokyo.^[91]

 The Atlantic had this story which gives some details of the attempted coup and efforts to protect the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast.   Many military leaders were killing themselves, and unfortunately taking others with them:

In the days that followed the emperor’s radio address, at least eight generals killed themselves. On one afternoon, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the Fifth Air Fleet on the island of Kyushu, drank a farewell cup of sake with his staff and drove to an airfield where 11 D4Y Suisei dive-bombers were lined up, engines roaring. Before him stood 22 young men, each wearing a white headband emblazoned with a red rising sun.

Ugaki climbed onto a platform and, gazing down on them, asked, “Will all of you go with me?”
“Yes, sir!” they all shouted, raising their right hands in the air.

“Many thanks to all of you,” he said. He climbed down from the stand, got into his plane, and took off. The other planes followed him into the sky.

Aloft, he sent back a message: “I am going to proceed to Okinawa, where our men lost their lives like cherry blossoms, and ram into the arrogant American ships, displaying the real spirit of a Japanese warrior.”

Ugaki’s kamikazes flew off toward the expected location of the American fleet. They were never heard from again.

Well, for the airmen following him, I wonder if crashing pointlessly into an empty ocean might have felt a particularly embittering way to end their war.

Anyhow, back to the atomic bombings.  The Wikipedia entry spends a bit of time on the debate had at the time about whether a demonstration bomb should be attempted, which is good to see.  (Jon Stewart should have read about this.)   

While the great uncertainty around whether the airborne bombs would even work, and the very small number available, makes for a convincing argument as to why it would have been extremely risky to make the  first one an advertised demonstration,  I wonder if a decent case can be made for the second bomb being a demonstration: one (say) within obvious sight of Tokyo.   I suppose you would never be sure how many people would see it unless you warned them, and the mountain is not within easy sight of all parts of the city, but I speculate that seeing the spiritually important Mount Fuji under an atomic cloud (but at the relatively "safe" distance of 130 km) might have been psychologically very damaging.  (Whether the subsequent number of people sickened by radiation around Tokyo would have been worse than the number sickened at Nagasaki remains guesswork,  I suppose; but I presume there would have been comparatively few immediate casualties.)

Oh, and here's another thing I read about today - the extensive underground space known as the Matsushiro Underground Imperial Headquarters that was intended to be the last refuge of the Japanese government.  Now in the suburbs of Nagano, it was no small undertaking:

Construction began on November 11, 1944^[2] and continued until Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945. Construction was 75% completed at the end of the war, with 5,856.6 square meters (63,040 sq ft) of floor-space (59,635 cubic meters (2,106,000 cu ft) of volume) excavated. Between 7,000 and 10,000 Korean slave laborers were used to build the complex, and it is estimated that 1,500 of them died.^[3] Forty-six Koreans disappeared on August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered. 

 It was supposed to house an underground Imperial Palace: 

The original purpose of the complex was to serve as an alternative headquarters for the Imperial General headquarters. However, in March 1945, secret orders were issued to add a palace to the complex.^[5] Yoshijirō Umezu informed Emperor Hirohito about construction of the complex in May, but did not tell him that it contained a palace. The plan was to relocate the Emperor to the complex in an armored train. When informed about the existence of the palace in July, Hirohito twice refused to relocate.^[5] It has been suggested that he refused because going to Matsushiro would have isolated the Emperor and allowed the army to rule in his name, effectively guaranteeing they would pursue the war to "suicidal extremes".^[6]

And finally, just as I linked the other day to photos taken of the resilient Hiroshima only two years after the bombing, here is a great series of photos from last year's The Atlantic of Japan in the 1950's, complete with its rapid industrialisation, Americanisation, and transistor TVs.   What an incredible transformation the country made in such a small time...

Update:   here's a lengthy article at Politico about the US's less than fully helpful research into the health effect of the victims of the bombings.    Makes it all the more remarkable that US popular culture took off in the country within a short space of time.   Here's some particularly sad information:

By the 1960s, long after Dr. Yamazaki had left Nagasaki, a study examining the effects of radiation exposure in utero in Nagasaki and Hiroshima grew to 3,600 children, including their control groups. As these children grew older, the ABCC’s outcomes confirmed radiation exposure as the cause of most of the children’s health conditions, including high incidences of microcephaly and neurological impairments. The studies revealed the particular vulnerabilities of timing as it related to in utero radiation exposure. Children who had been exposed at eight to 15 weeks after conception demonstrated significantly greater risk of developmental disabilities because fetal brain cells are more susceptible to radiation damage in this stage of pregnancy. In a Nagasaki substudy published in 1972, eight of nine children (89 percent) exposed before the 18^th week of pregnancy were diagnosed with microcephaly—compared to two of nine children (22 percent) exposed to the same levels of radiation later in their gestational development.

Update 2:   see here for a post about the important symbolism of Fuji, including information about the way Allied propaganda "targetted" the mountain in leaflets, and considered bombing it. 

Fascinating science

RealClimate: Ice-core dating corroborates tree ring chronologies

Here's an interesting story of work done to resolve apparent conflict between tree ring temperature chronologies and those from ice cores.

The one thing I would like to know more about is this part of the story:

In 2012, Miyaki et al. discovered a rapid increase of radiocarbon (14C) in Japanese cedar, precisely dated to AD 774-775. The cause of this increase was possibly due to a very high energy solar proton event (Usoskin et al., 2013), and its effect on radiocarbon has been observed in tree ring chronologies in both hemispheres (Güttler et al., 2015). Another rapid, slightly smaller (~60%), radiocarbon production event has been dated to AD 993-994 (Miyake et al., 2013).

Do we know what causes "very high energy solar proton events"?

A Richard Tol thread of note

Personal attacks on Met Office scientists | …and Then There's Physics

Wow.  Richard Tol gets involved in a thread and really takes a credibility battering at the link above.

Reality TV cooked

I'm not surprised that Restaurant Revolution has been a complete ratings failure.

The host is bland; the judging team is little better, although it is a little fun being scared of the Serious Asian Woman; and as the teams competing never spend much time together in the same spot, you just don't get the interest of face to face snide comments like you get in My Kitchen Rules. 

As for "Hotplates":  I've seen only 15 minutes, but it was during that time exactly identical in format to MKR.   Oh alright, there was one difference:  the teams wrote their scores on a piece of paper, as well as saying it out loud.  It's a shameless rip off, as far as I can see, but with charmless hosts and more intensely annoying contestants than MKR can manage to find.  It seems to me it should be liable for some form of breach of intellectual property....

Heat in the North

While (I think) much of Australia continues to have a colder winter than normal, I see that in the Northern Hemisphere, it's been hot in Japan, America (ironically, with Rick Perry's State perhaps about to set some records) and the Middle East.

As this story notes, Iraq has a huge number of displaced persons, many living in camps while the country hits highs of 51 degrees.  

I really wonder how people in temporary shelters (not sure, but are many tents?) survive in that heat.

Hiroshima not forgotten

7.30 last night did a good story about high school girls in Hiroshima taking part in recording the previously untold stories of survivors.   (The 88 and 90 year old sisters looked very sprightly, and sounded as sharp as a tack.)  

I've been trying to find some other, less well known, photos with which to remember the 70 year anniversary, and perhaps these will do - a series of photos taken for Life only a couple of years after the bomb, which show both the horrifying wounds on survivors, but also signs of the resilience with which the city was (surprisingly rapidly) re-establishing itself. 

Tracking down the conservative/liberal gene

Can genes make us liberal or conservative?

If Jason Soon doesn't tweet this story, I'll eat my metaphorical hat.

The one thing I don't quite understand about the apparent genetic component to political beliefs, however, is how it explains the not uncommon phenomena of former quite extreme Lefties who convert to being extreme Righties.  (It sort of happens in the reverse direction too, I suppose, but not as often.)  The ranks of Catallaxy threads are full of people who claim they made the conversion, for example.   Is there just a genetic element to "it doesn't matter what I believe, I just must believe it 100% percent"?

Update:  my "hat" is safe.  I spent a while yesterday wondering whether I had correctly referred to it as "metaphorical" or not, and found it hard to work out a definitive answer from Google.

Beautiful Antarctica

Readers will know I like photos of Antarctica, and there is a beautiful set of them up at The Atlantic, for some reason.

More care needed

Crucial ocean-acidification models come up short : Nature News & Comment

Interesting article here, noting that a lot of the uncertainty in working out the ecological effects of ocean acidification  comes from experimenters (especially those at the start of research into this) not being careful enough with the experimental set up. 

I had noticed myself that, over the years, after the initial flurry of reports about the dire effects on different organisms, there followed a lot of considerably more ambiguous reports from tank experiments.   And, yes, it had been noted before that how the water chemistry is altered is important.

But do the researchers writing this paper think this means there is not a serious problem for the oceans?  Nope:

Cornwall says that the “overwhelming evidence” from such studies of the
negative effects of ocean acidification still stands. For example,
more-acidic waters slow the growth and worsen the health of many species
that build structures such as shells from calcium carbonate. But the
pair’s discovery that many of the experiments are problematic makes it
difficult to assess accurately the magnitude of effects of ocean
acidification, and to combine results from individual experiments to
build overall predictions for how the ecosystem as a whole will behave,
he says.

 This article also notes that not enough experiments have looked at the combination of warming water and decreasing pH together.

Climate change, algal blooms, poison crabs

Toxic algae blooming in warm water from California to Alaska

This coastal ribbon of microscopic algae, up to 40 miles wide and 650 feet deep in places,
is flourishing amid unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures. It now stretches from at least California to Alaska and has shut down lucrative fisheries. Shellfish managers on Tuesday doubled the area off Washington's coast that is closed to Dungeness crab fishing, after
finding elevated levels of marine toxins in tested crab meat.

So-called "red tides" are cyclical and have happened many times before, but ocean researchers say this one is much larger and persisting much longer, with higher levels of neurotoxins bringing severe consequences for the Pacific seafood industry, coastal tourism and marine ecosystems.

Dan Ayres, coastal shellfish manager for the Washington Department of  Fish and Wildlife, said the area now closed to crab fishing includes more than half the state's 157-mile-long coast, and likely will bring a premature end to this year's crab season.

"We think it's just sitting and lingering out there," said Anthony Odell, a University of Washington research analyst who is part of a NOAA-led team surveying the harmful algae bloom, which was first detected in May. "It's farther offshore, but it's still there."

The survey data should provide a clearer picture of what is causing the bloom which is brownish in color, unlike the blue and green algae found in polluted freshwater lakes. Marine detectives already have a suspect: a large patch of water running as much as 3 degrees centigrade warmer than normal in the northeast Pacific Ocean, nicknamed "the blob."


"The question on everyone's mind is whether this is related to global climate change. The simple answer is that it could be, but at this point it's hard to separate the variations in these cycles," said Donald Boesch, professor of marine science at the University of Maryland who
is not involved in the survey. "Maybe the cycles are more extreme in the changing climate."

Come on.  It's hard to imagine how warming ocean waters won't lead to more extensive and longer lasting poison algal blooms.

"Classic liberal" and its modern, crypto meaning

If you ask me, "classic liberal" has become something of a cover for "short-sighted rich libertarian asshat primarily interested in increasing his or her own wealth and influence."

Here's Charles Koch, for example:

Q: How important is it to you to see a Republican in the White House?
A: It depends on the Republican. I am not a Republican. I consider myself a classical liberal. I believe in certain principles and I am looking for candidates who are advancing those principles....

Q: How is it fair that people who have more money have more of a voice in politics? Isn’t that an imbalance?
A: Well, voice, what does that mean? I mean, the government is largely influenced by people who advocate corporate welfare and advocate these policies that create this two-tiered society … So I mean, a voice, yeah, we get more press. You all are interested in what we say. But are we really having an influence?...

 Q: Are you worried about climate change?
A: Well, I mean I believe it’s been warming some. There’s a big debate on that, because it depends on whether you use satellite measurements, balloon, or you use ground ones that have been adjusted. But there has been warming. The CO2 goes up, the CO2 has probably contributed to that. But they say it’s going to be catastrophic. There is no evidence to that. They have these models that show it, but the models don’t work … To be scientific, it has to be testable and refutable. And so I mean, it has elements of science in it, and then of conjecture, ideology and politics. So do we want to create a catastrophe today in the economy because of some speculation based on models that don’t work? Those are my questions. But believe me, I spent my whole life studying science and the philosophy of science, and our whole company is committed to science.

Holding my breath

Day three, and yes, I'm still talking about things Mission Impossible 5 made me think about.

Today:  holding your breath.   It's not something I keep in my mind, the matter of how long those insane free divers can hold their breath.

So, from a story about them at the ABC:

The current men's world record holder is Stephane Mifsud of France with a time of 11 minutes and 35 seconds and the womens' world record is held by Natalia Molchanova of Russia with a static breath hold of just over nine minutes.

The sport doesn't allow pre-breathing of oxygen, I believe, but for divers who do that they can get up to 20 to 30 minutes, it seems. 

The claim that Cruise once held his breath underwater on set for 6 minutes is therefore not completely ridiculous, after all. 

Update:   Oh.  The female champion diver I mentioned here has been claimed by her nutty hobby.

The Senate stunt team is back

They're useless, being there mainly for the purpose of self-promotion:  Leyonhjelm/Day to introduce Bill to remove penalty rates.

And yes, I am aiding their "look at me" effort, but if I do so while pointing out that they are actually useless, I don't care.

Bolt backs the Republican intellectual wasteland

Cruz missile could save the US from Obama’s legacy | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Tragic.

Sounds complicated...

Panasonic moves closer to home energy self-sufficiency with fuel cells - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

I'll just quote this story in full, and note again that Japan seems the most advanced country in terms of use of domestic fuel cells:

Panasonic Corp. said it has developed a catalyst that uses sunlight efficiently to extract hydrogen from water, a technology that could lead to energy self-sufficiency in homes powered by fuel cells.

The company said it tested photocatalysts consisting of niobium nitride that can absorb 57 percent of sunlight, a rate far more efficient than the titanium oxide photocatalysts used today that absorb only ultraviolet rays, which constitute 4 percent of sunlight.

Using this catalyst, Panasonic plans to develop products, such as panels similar to solar cells, for installation on rooftops.

These products in turn will create the hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity.

“Commercial application will be 2020 at the earliest,” Panasonic Managing Director Yoshiyuki Miyabe said. “We want to achieve this as early as possible.”

Panasonic has already started selling home-use fuel cells to generate electricity from hydrogen.

Good cancer news

Pancreatic cancer urine test hope - BBC News

I've known at least two people who have died of pancreatic cancer in my life, and it is one of the worst ones for being undetected until it is too late.  So this is good news.

When conservatives with agendas fall out

It seems Andrew Bolt is very, very upset with Chris Mitchell, editor of the Australian.  Which is funny, given their mutual interest in mudslinging Julia Gillard over events 20 years old and which Bolt never thought important until she was PM; their disgraceful campaign against Gillian Triggs;  their mutual undying support of Abbott in his fascistic campaign to do anything he likes at sea and in offshore detention centres and keep it secret from the public under threat of criminal charges; and (of course) their mutual contempt and wilful ignorance of the science of climate change. 

Update:  I just remembered, isn't News Corp actually paying the production costs of Bolt's TV show?  I suppose that makes Bolt's attack "brave"; but then again, I guess Mitchell may well have no influence at all on whether Bolt's show maintains a budget.

Amusingly, I see that a few Catallaxy threadsters are saying they will end their Australian subscriptions over the paper's support of Adam Goodes, and the aboriginal constitution amendment.   They're very upset that the entire media universe has turned into leftists.    Hahahahahaha.

I also note that it seems to me that the only commentators on the web who supported Bronwyn Bishop were at Catallaxy.   Steve Kates, the lone economist in the world who understands it properly because he knows what Says Law really means, was adamant she should never resign.   Sinclair Davidson said she had been an excellent speaker (again, a view virtually unique on the World Wide Web.)   Alan Moran, banned from the IPA, still has a gig at Catallaxy claiming global economic catastrophe from reducing CO2. 

What an extreme and nutty corner of the interwebs it has become....