Blood pressure alert

Every time I see Simon Chapman's head appearing on an anti smoking article (today, at The Conversation), I imagine an unhealthy rise in the blood pressure of Sinclair Davidson, and a mad rush to find something in it to nitpick about in a post that no one will care about at Catallaxy. 

It amuses me, somewhat.

The complicated radiation story

Is Fukushima's exclusion zone doing more harm than radiation? - BBC News

At the end of this article, which has one expert questioning why the Japanese government is setting such a relatively low level of background radiation as being needed before residents can return to land around Fukushima, there is this caution:

Of course this is a ferociously complex issue, and many will argue that I
am ignoring the dangers of "hot spots" and from ingesting radioactive
Caesium particles in food or water or dust. But five years after the
meltdowns at Fukushima 100,000 people are still unable to go home. That
is a massive human tragedy.

Yes, it seems to me (without knowing anything concrete about this) that the matter of how a background radiation level is being maintained is important.  If you live in an area where the rocks and minerals around you are naturally radiative, but are in a more or less solid state, wouldn't that be better than being in an area with a lower background reading that's come from dust that descended from the sky?   Because I would have guessed that getting that dust into your lungs is likely to do worse damage than standing near (say) a block of granite that has a naturally high reading.

But how do scientists take this difference (assuming I'm making a legitimate point) into account when declaring an area safe or not for long term residence?   Surely it's hard to measure the likelihood of dust ingestion?

Textor makes some enemies

Liberal strategist Mark Textor seems to have no love for the IPA, so he goes up a notch in credibility:

Wide-ranging changes introduced by Tony Abbott, such as the potential deregulation of universities, were the result of a broken political system where considered and experienced policy wonks were overlooked, Textor argued.

“During the time of great estrangement during the Abbott years, the reality is people who are close to the machine like myself thought that many of the reforms ... we were getting were completely out of step,” he said. “Don’t assume the government’s agenda and the political agenda are the same because governments aren’t political parties and their agendas are quite different.”

Instead, “21-year-old pimply theorists from the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] and the Australia Institute” with little real-world experience have been running the show, Textor said.

I'm guessing he must be grinding his teeth about James Paterson's grab of the top Victorian Senate seat then.

Satellite or surface temperatures

A really clear video here explaining why the surface temperature record is way more robust than the satellite record.   Information totally lost on the highly dislikeable Ted Cruz, of course.

Sounds promising

10 Cloverfield Lane Reviews - Metacritic

The story sounds a bit Twilight Zone-ish, and I think I want to see it.  (I've always liked John Goodman, too, so it's nice to see him being a lead actor with a lot of screen time.)

Runs in the family

Second Wachowski Sibling Comes Out as Transgender Woman - The New York Times

OK, surely we must be at Peak Transgender?

No, wait on...

When Donald Trump becomes President, and then uses an Address to the Nation to declare he cannot hide the truth behind his unmanly tiny hands any more, and he will forthwith be known as "Ms President Donna Trump" - then we will have reached the peak.

Noooooooooooooooooo!

By rights, I should refuse to publicise this study.  On the other hand, out of respect and love for the work of Steven Spielberg, I have been thinking of having an "ET on a flying bike" tattoo, positioned so that my butt can look like the moon it's flying over:*

There's no known cure for the common cold, but receiving multiple tattoos can strengthen your immunological responses, potentially making you heartier in fighting off common infections, according to research by a trio of University of Alabama scholars. 

*  I may not be being serious.

Weird blindness of the Right

What fun it is to watch the outrage of frustrated Abbott lovers (and Turnbull haters - he believes in global warming, after all) over the Niki Savva book.   (Which, it would seem, has been selling like hotcakes.  I'm even tempted myself.)

Rowan Dean, about the most obnoxious of right wing warrior commentators in Australia at the moment, is quoted by Bolt as writing:

Moreover, in interviews Ms Savva has repeatedly trotted out the claim that Ms Credlin attempted to have herself and Peter van Onselen fired from the Australian (an irrelevance given they are both still there), as an excuse for not following the normal procedure of putting allegations of an affair to her two subjects prior to publication.

Um, it's more than "a claim":  in the Australian this morning she has the communication from then editor Mitchell confirming that not only had Credlin demanded it, but Abbott was on the case too!

And, quite frankly, your average person might think it is a pretty damn good reason for a writer not to bother asking them about an affair, especially when the claim in the book is not even that there were having one, but that a large slab of their own party thought it looked that way and that it was causing problems within the government.  (And Abbott's - and I think Credlin's? -  denials to the messenger is in the book too.)    Working up indignation about her not asking them is therefore just piffle.

As for the hypocrisy of all of this - a word Bolt is flinging around with his lack of insight - I thought Righties considered it an outrage when Gillard did her nut at The Australian for running a Milne piece which contained a claim that had previously been nixed by their lawyers as defamatory.   We don't know if she asked for his sacking, but he got sacked, and then this was supposed to be the biggest outrage to freedom of speech ever.

Now, clear evidence that Credlin (and possibly Abbott) was specifically telling Mitchell to sack Savva for her reporting unfriendly stories, and we're supposed to feel sorry for Peta??

Gillard, as her reward for being uppity about a report she didn't like, got a plethora of Right wing purely politically motivated witch hunting lasting years over allegations involving her love life  20 years ago, which had already been aired and denied about (I think) 12 years ago, and which Bolt chose to help re-publicise.   The end result was always predictable - if none of her internal enemies had evidence 12 years ago, they were hardly likely to turn it up now.  And the relevance of this to how she was doing her job now - precisely nil.   (The relevance of the Abbott/Credlin relationship - huge within his own party, right now.)  The only good thing to come out of it was the utter humiliation of Michael Smith.

The right wing pundits are absurd.   (Oh, and to be fair, so is Bernard Keane on this.  He's way off mark on this.)

Filming has started

Star Wars redux: Send in the Clones . . . to Donegal

It would appear that the filming for the next Star Wars has started on the island where the last one ended.

How unusually chronological of them, for movie makers...

Heh

US pro-gun activist mother shot - by her four-year-old son

She's not dead, so it's OK to laugh.

Good Lord! Another columnist I wouldn't normally recommend...

...is Miranda Devine, but her take on the matter of Credlin/Abbott/various Lefty, feminist commentators' complaint that this is a matter of sexist attack is actually pretty good.   Also a bit funny (unintentionally, I think) in part:

She has denied the rumours and that should be the end of speculation based on evidence amounting to no more than Credlin feeding Abbott off her fork, buying them matching Tumi luggage, holidaying together, and various other tidbits, mainly unsourced, which have swirled around Canberra for years.

Yes, because a male boss and his female chief of staff holidaying together with matching luggage is never a reason to suspect something going on...

Anyhow, the bits I more-or-less approve of:

Savva’s book documents the avoidable trajectory of his downfall, with on-the-record recollections which fill in details about Credlin’s questionable behaviour and dominance of Abbott.

Despite the damage she was doing, Credlin remained in her job. Her response to criticism was to play the gender card. Abbott’s indulgence of this nonsense was surreal as he castigated his colleagues as sexist. “Do you really think that my chief of staff would be under this criticism if her name was P-e-t-e-r and not P-e-t-a?” he asked the ABC in 2014.

The week after Abbott was dumped, Credlin spoke at an Australian Women’s Weekly event and also blamed criticism of her on sexism. She also made the extraordinarily self-aggrandising claim that she “got them into government, from opposition I might add.”

Credlin’s harshest critics were women, not because they are self loathing misogynists, but because men are cowed into silence by exactly the arguments she mounts. Criticise a woman and it’s sexism. Criticise a man and it’s criticism.

Credlin continued to play the gender card yesterday in a column, saying she wasn’t the first woman to be attacked about the “nature of her professional relationships, and sadly I doubt I will be the last”. Abbott’s not the first man either, so it’s hardly a gender issue.

What a farce

Turnbull heckled by own party as NSW Liberals vote for climate debates - 9news.com.au: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has reportedly been heckled by parts of his party at a meeting where NSW Liberals voted for his government to conduct public debates about climate change and whether the science is settled.

An overwhelming majority voted in favour of the motion at the party's state council meeting on the NSW central coast following a speech by Mr Turnbull at the weekend, revealing the persisting level of climate change scepticism among the party, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

I am reminded of John Quiggin's "Parallel Universes" post of yesterday, too.

I think the right side of politics here is caught in the sort of credibility crisis that Labor suffered in the 50's and 60's, when (if I understand history correctly), it was hard to support a party that harboured too many with an intellectual sympathy to communism.

The climate change skeptics have to be purged before the Coalition can regain true credibility for political judgement.   As many of them are IPA influenced, and the nearest party to that mob is the LDP, they should be told to go join Leyonhjelm's outfit and follow him into electoral oblivion.

A Trump comparison

Boy, it's been many a year since I've recommended a Bret Stephens piece from the Wall Street Journal, but I think he makes many good points in this anti-Trump piece "The Return of the 1930s", which starts this way:

In temperament, he was “bombastic, inconsistent, shallow and vainglorious.” On political questions, “he made up his own reality as he went along.” Physically, the qualities that stood out were “the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth.” His “compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo.” He spoke “in short, strident sentences.” Journalists mocked his “absurd attitudinizing.”

Remind you of someone?

The description of Benito Mussolini comes from English historian Piers Brendon’s definitive history of the 1930s, “The Dark Valley.” So does this mean that Donald Trump is the second coming of Il Duce, or that yesteryear’s Fascists are today’s Trumpkins? Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the parallels with the last dark age of Western politics.

Stephens then goes to note how the current period of economic problems do not go anywhere near matching those of the 1920's and 30's.  In fact, he goes on to point to the positives in the American economy, as a way of deflating the Trump fanbase's feelings that the country needs a new, quasi-fascist,  style of leaderhsip.

But - and here's the big but - why doesn't Stephens then go onto to acknowledge that the Republican's own hyperbola about the economic crisis Obama was allegedly causing was not well founded, and it is their own behaviour that has caused the rise of the Trump base?

Typical Razer

Razer on Peta Credlin, Niki Savva and primordial female horror | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

This somewhat hyperbolic review of merely the extracts of Niki Savva's book displays all the qualities that I dislike in Helen Razor's writing style.   She's not even entertainingly bad, though:  she's just a self indulgent bore  whose clumsy sentences and allusions have to be re-read a couple of times to even try to follow her argument.   (Only to find it wasn't worth the effort.)

Does sound unusual for March

Mildura set to swelter - so supplier cuts power for scheduled maintenance work: Almost 200 households in Mildura will be without power on Tuesday thanks to scheduled maintenance work, despite temperatures forecast to hit 40 degrees for the eighth day in a row.

Age expired

I see that John Stone still writes trying to influence Australian politicians to cut, cut, cut:

That "fiscal path" comprised four components. First, "all ministers should now be put on notice that there will be no room for new spending proposals, no matter how 'worthy'". Second, existing spending needed to be cut hard. "The problem is not the absence of targets for cutting, but the government's faint-heartedness in approaching that task". Third, any and all tax increases should be firmly ruled out. Finally, as one carrot among these sticks, the government should legislate for a 5 (or preferably 10) percentage point cut in corporate taxation, introduced in five equal yearly stages beginning in 2015-16.

He seems to have been old forever, and indeed, I see that he is now 87.  Sorry, according to my rule of thumb, that is past the age where anyone is worth listening to.  (I'm really going to regret this age-ist approach when I'm 87 and still blogging - but by then I'll have had therapies that will mean 87 will be the new 67.  I hope...)

Anyhow, to stop being offensive about our elders, I suspect a 5% company tax reduction phased in over 5 years is probably OK.    But apart from that - the insistence that there is to be no new tax increases of any kind - that's just ideology put above good management. 

I wonder what he would have to say - if he was worth listening to - about the abject failure of the Laffer-isation of Kansas's finances.  That's working a treat.

Hedonism in the news, again

The poppers ban: will it criminalise gay users? | Society | The Guardian

I maintain my conservative line:  the self indulgent hedonism of artificial stimulation to increase the sensation of sex is not good for the individual or society overall.  

Dealer needed

Can very small doses of LSD make you a better worker? I decided to try it. - Vox

I see from the article, written by a man with a lot of previous drug experience, that all I need to beat an internet addiction is to "microdose" with LSD.  Huh.

Mind you, the article is probably best read to learn about some of the over the top pro-drug claims that are still made by later day versions of Thomas Leary.

The future of agriculture and climate change

Here are two stories that show how it's really hard to be confident as to what will happen to agriculture and climate change:

1.   A study looking at South America gives some concern:

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, focused on the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, an emerging global breadbasket that as of 2013 supplied 10 percent of the world's soybeans. The researchers used variations in temperature and precipitation across the state over an eight-year period to estimate the sensitivity of the region's agricultural production to climate change. Those historical comparisons can help in making predictions about the sensitivity of agriculture to future climate change.

The study found that, if the patterns from 2002 to 2008 hold in the future, an increase in average temperature in Mato Grosso of just 1 degree Celsius will lead to a nine to 13 percent reduction in overall production of soy and corn. "This is worrisome given that the temperature in the study region is predicted to rise by as much as 2 degrees by midcentury under the range of plausible greenhouse gas emissions scenarios," said Avery Cohn, assistant professor of environment and resource policy at Tufts, who led the work while he was a visiting researcher at Brown.

2.  An Australian study, on the other hand, notes some possible compensating effects:

Elevated atmospheric [CO₂] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves

PS:  don't tell the numbskulls at The Australian about that second one....

Transgender caution

Obviously, the politically correct name for sex change surgery is now "gender affirming surgery". 

Still, the article at that link is worth reading to see that a guy/woman who has had it noting that it is not the cure all that some hope for.