Nasty virus news

So, scientists are pretty certain that the zika virus does cause microcephaly.    And even the Wall Street Journal is reporting about how the range of the mosquito that carries it can extend much further into America than previously thought.  (Of course, being the WSJ, they don't mention that scientists have been warning for years of the increasing range of this mosquito due to climate change.)  

In other unwelcome virus news, I see that ebola may be causing blindness in survivors of the disease.  Great...

States and taxes

Well, this potential tax reform is interesting because of the way it attracts both supporters and detractors from both sides of the political spectrum.

Andrew Bolt is against it, as are all of his cohort who now comment at Catallaxy, but it's hard to say how much of that is due simply to it being Turnbull's idea.  Turnbull hatred is a powerful force amongst the del cons . 

But amongst economics commentators, I see that both Peter Martin and Adam Creighton support it, even though they are not that often on the same page when it comes to economics analysis.

Creighton's column this morning is interesting because it raises one issue that Martin ignores:  how competitive tax regimes can lead to a race to the bottom.  (Not that Creighton wants to call it that.)

Of course small government types love the idea of competition tax regimes, because that suits their basic goal of seeing that government is strangled of ability to provide services.  But they don't like acknowledging that competition can lead to a race to the bottom.

It seems to me that it clearly can - with the best example being Kansas in America.  It's in serious fiscal trouble because of Laffernomics which Art promises will help them, eventually.  Maybe in 10 years?   Meanwhile, its universities lose funding.   So sorry, universities: Art says it'll all come good, one day.

Creighton notes a couple of things that happened under State competition in Australia:

But Egan sounds a note of warning. “I hope [this reform] wouldn’t mean states would compete their income tax rights away as they did with payroll tax,” he says.
Indeed, then prime minister William McMahon ceded states payroll tax in the early 1970s, to help restore their financial independence. But this was undone by an explosion of tied grants under the Whitlam government. Payroll taxes are theoretically efficient — broadly similarly to a consumption tax, in fact — but states progressively increased the turnover threshold to win votes from small businesses. This meant rate increased on a dwindling base — the very opposite of good tax policy. The same can be said for inheritance tax — a relatively efficient (and some would say fair) tax that Queensland premier Joh Bjelke Peterson effectively killed off in the 1980s. This prompted other states to follow suit.
In fact, states have access to the most efficient tax of all — land tax. They could in theory spurn all Canberra’s money and levy a flat rate percentage rate of tax on all land: business and residential.

Well, that land tax reform is unrealistically ambitious and isn't going to happen, but economists like to fantasize about efficiency.

But I will give credit to Creighton for noting these "race to the bottom" examples - even if he reluctant to name them as such.

Now for the nuance

Was Nixon's war on drugs a racially motivated crusade? It's a bit more complicated. - Vox

You can pretty much bet that any simplistic take on the history of the "war on drugs" is flawed; but pro-drug reformers love repeating them anyway.  

Such was my grounds for being suspicious of the internet story doing the rounds last week about Erlichman explaining why Nixon wanted the war.

As this article explains, it's not so simple, and Nixon's approach also encompassed a compassionate approach to funding rehabilitation for the drug addicted:

Let's start with what Nixon actually sought to do when he launched his war on drugs. The speech that started the formal war on drugs in 1971 did not focus solely on criminalization. Instead, Nixon dedicated much of his time to talking up initiatives that would increase prevention and treatment for drug abuse.

"Enforcement must be coupled with a rational approach to the reclamation of the drug user himself," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "We must rehabilitate the drug user if we are to
eliminate drug abuse and all the antisocial activities that flow from drug abuse."

The numbers back this up. According to the federal government's budget numbers for anti-drug programs, the "demand" side of the war on drugs (treatment, education, and prevention) consistently got more funding during Nixon's time in office (1969 to 1974) than the "supply"
side (law enforcement and interdiction).

Interesting.   And there's more:

Historically, this is a commitment for treating drugs as a public health issue that the federal government has not replicated since the 1970s. (Although President Barack Obama's budget proposal would, for the first time in decades, put a majority of anti-drug spending on the demand side once again.)

Drug policy historians say this was intentional. Nixon poured money into public health initiatives, such as medication-assisted treatments like methadone clinics, education campaigns that sought to prevent teens from trying drugs, and more research on drug abuse. In fact, the Controlled Substances Act — the basis for so much of modern drug policy — actually reduced penalties on marijuana possession in 1970, when Nixon was in office.

"Nixon was really worried about kids and drugs," David Courtwright, a drug policy historian at the University of North Florida, told me. "He saw illicit drug use by young people as a form of social rot, and it's something that weakens America."

So, treating it as a public health issue was high on Nixon's agenda.  As I have noted before, this was not unusual even within conservative governments in Australia - with the Bjelke-Petersen government having well funded methodone programs too, I believe.

Don't change, Japan

Let's discuss tourists and their tattoos | The Japan Times

The Japan Tourism Agency has asked spa operators to allow tattooed
foreign tourists into their facilities in a bid to get more overseas
visitors experiencing the nation’s onsen....

Akamichi said the current no-tattoo policy at many onsen
resorts had rejected people with tattoos indiscriminately, including
foreign guests who wear them for fashion, religious or other reasons.

The agency asked operators to take measures such as offering stickers
to cover tattoos and setting certain time frames for tattooed tourists
to bathe, so as to separate them from other visitors.

I think it would be a pity for one of the last reasons to give to children to never get a tattoo ("you'll never be able to enjoy onsen during holidays in Japan!")  passes.  Stay strong, Japan.

Krugman on global trade and politics

Trade, Labor, and Politics - The New York Times

As usual, he comes across as such a clear and balanced writer.   

Not going to go over well

Malcolm Turnbull says states should levy own income tax levels | afr.com

I can't see that the public is going to warm to the idea of varying levels of tax from State to State.   For one thing, it's easy for either side of politics to attack it, and hence Abbott has been against such ideas in the past, using the same arguments as Neville Wran, apparently*.  (Immediate reaction at Conservatives Who Think Sinclair Davidson is Nuts [Catallaxy] is also negative.)

Oh look - I've  found something useful at the IPA website about the history of this sort of proposal.

It's also a good sign that it should be rejected:  if the IPA is for something, it's a very safe rule of thumb that it's a bad idea.

* see link following.

Problematic study

Psychotherapy for depressed rats shows genes aren't destiny

I don't know:  it seems to me that what passes for rat "psychotherapy" is nothing much at all like psychotherapy in humans.

Still, I suppose that anything that shows beneficial changes to rats bred to be "depressed" can come from their environment gives encouragement to humans with a parent who suffers depression...

No wonder the studios make them

‘A stink bucket of disappointment’ – the most savage Batman v Superman reviews | Film | The Guardian

The link is to a handy list of some of the worst reviews of the movie, but the incredible thing is how superhero movies with high recognition characters are, to a large degree, impervious to poor reviews when they go out on global mega releases.  This one has almost made $500 million in a week.

One would hope the critical reaction might put a dint in the studio's enthusiasm for the genre, but all they can see is the money, I guess.

Still not at peak transgender...

Largest ever study of transgender teenagers kicks off : Nature News & Comment

Probably is about time they decided to study the effect of puberty blocking treatment in adolescents, if they are going to offer it.

You have to wonder though - some old cultures (Polynesian , for example) would have happily, in certain circumstances, let their effeminate boys dress and act as women, but there was no option for surgery in past centuries.  (Mind you, some boys were forced into the role, too, which was unlikely to please them.)

But if that group of genuinely "want to be a girl" boys weren't hurling themselves off cliffs because they were depressed about still having a penis, how has it become such a matter of crucial importance to Western men in the 20th century that it be whipped off ASAP?

(Sorry, my vast audience of transgender readers, no doubt I am not dealing with the topic sensitively enough.)

An Indian worry

Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? - BBC News

Running out of ideas, Chris?

The democratic case for splitting Queensland in two - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The way I read this column, Chris Berg is having trouble finding anything worthwhile to write about.

Perhaps it's easier to ask: "what don't gut bacteria influence?"

GI tract bacteria help decrease stroke

95% a great movie

I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane over the weekend.

It's a taut psychological thriller with much to recommend it, and I don't want to put anyone off seeing it.

But - there are two or three bothersome plot points which I haven't seen discussed anywhere.  (I know that one is not mentioned in reviews because it completely gives away the ending.)

Before I get to those, it's the sort of smaller scale Hollywood movie that makes me wonder why small Australian movies can't be as good as this.   The budget could not have been high:  about 90% of the film is set in the bunker, which seems to take only about 3 or 4 different sets.   It's just great because of the acting and screenplay.

Now for the plot issues, in increasing order of seriousness:

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

DO NOT READ IF YOU INTEND SEEING THE MOVIE (AND YOU SHOULD)

1.   Why would the bunker be designed so that there is no way to get to the air filtering system for maintenance, or "reset", except via the narrow duct?   There could have been an explanation given - I suggested to my son that maybe Howard had intended having a Hazmat suit that would allow him to go out the main door and get to the vent via its window, but he had accidentally left it in house?  But there is no explanation given, and the need for our hero to go down the vent is very important, plot wise.  With no explanation, the design just makes no sense, at all.  It deserved an explanation.

UPDATE:   I should have known, someone on Reddit would talk about this and explain it, if there was something to explain.   Yes, I overlooked something - or rather, didn't understand properly what was happening - that the thing Howard was pulling on was an access point, but it was covered by something and couldn't be used.   They could have made that clearer than they did.

2.  At the end, is it her car that she is in, and finds the bottle of spirits that she then (implausibly) puts to good use?  If so, is it sufficiently bashed up, and why would Howard bring it there anyway?  This may well be clearer on a second viewing, so I am not sure if this is a problem or not.

Now, out of kindness, I'll even reduce the chances of the main issue ruining the movie for someone who might have accidentally scanned this post:

3.  Do aliens really design ships that forget the fire extinguishers?   Come on, at least in War of the Worlds it took a handful of grenades thrown into the gaping maw to bring down a tripod: that had a bit more plausibility than a flaming bottle of scotch.   I know it must have been hard to come up with a good idea for getting out of this, but still, I was not convinced that this was the best they could come up with.UPDATE:  I see from the Reddit discussion that the green gas the alien ship was spraying around was shown as being flammable, hence the inside of the ship blew up easily.   Hmmm.  Maybe adds some plausibility?

Further Update:   I should explain - I liked the "twist" in a general sense - it was sort of nightmarish in a pleasing way.    I just didn't care much for one detail of the twist. 

Engineers and terrorism

I see that the Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a lengthy story looking at the matter of why engineers seem over-represented amongst terrorists.  No firm conclusions, but all very interesting.  There's much disagreement that follows in the comments, too.

Easter art

Everyone in the house has had a dripping nose and spluttering cough (except me, so far.)  Maybe I'll save my annual cold until it's actually cold - the days are still hot, humid and almost devoid of breeze in my part of the world.  (Well, OK, I started this post a couple of days ago now, and it was overcast and somewhat cooler yesterday - though still very humid.  I see we are in for another week of over 30 degree weather...)

In any event, I'm late to the party but it's Easter and I'm pretty devoid of religious commentary of late.

So let's do religious art instead.

Dali was a prime eccentric weirdo who made lots of money from cultivating that image.  Including, it seems, via endorsing an industry in semi-fake artwork.  From an article at The Independent:

According to Lauryssens – who was eventually tracked down by Interpol in the late Eighties and served two years in jail for selling forgeries – the more he indulged in fake Dali works the more he uncovered a world where fake prints, sculptures and lithographs were created by some of the people closest to Dali, even with the painter’s alleged approval. “From the 1960s everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle” he said. “He was living like a mini-maharajah.”

Dali himself frequently admitted he had made enormous sums of money by signing hundreds of quick sketches and lithographs which would then sell for thousands of pounds. He once famously remarked: “Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning $20,000.” The existence of several hundred thousand Dali lithographs has encouraged a flourishing, parallel global trade in fakes while by the time Dali died of heart failure in 1989 his estate was left with $87m.

Nevertheless, a technically talented and evocative artist he definitely was, in his prime, and I like most of his religious works, which apparently came after a public return to Catholicism in 1949.  (Mind you, that didn't seem to stop his libertine life, if this story by Cher - yes, Cher has a Salvador Dali story to tell - is anything to go by.)

Anyhow, to get to the point:  Dali's The Sacrament of the Last Supper, this one:

is the subject of an interesting article entitled "Misunderstood Masterpiece" from a few years back in a Catholic magazine, America.

A couple of Protestant theologians really disliked it:

Theologians, like the Protestants Francis Schaeffer and Paul Tillich, have also weighed in. For Schaeffer, Dalí’s image was a clear example of Christian meaning being lost to a vague existentialism: “This intangible Christ which Dalí painted is in sharp contrast to the bodies of the apostles who are physically solid in the picture. Dalí explained in his interviews that he had found a mystical meaning for life in the fact that things are made up of energy rather than solid mass. Because of this, for him there was a reason for a vault into an area of nonreason to give him the hope of meaning.”

Tillich’s view of the painting, conveyed during a lecture on religion and art, was reported by Time magazine: “Tillich deplored Dalí’s work as a sample of the very worst in ‘what is called the religious revival of today.’ The depiction of Jesus did not fool Tillich: ‘A sentimental but very good athlete on an American baseball team... The technique is a beautifying naturalism of the worst kind. I am horrified by it!’ Tillich added it all up: ‘Simply junk!’”

I have to admit, when you look closely at Christ's face (see below), it does seem a tad "Donny Osmond", who especially leaps to my mind because I was watching him in long wig in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a few days ago.  (Osmond was born a couple of years after the painting was completed, incidentally.)

Anyway, according to Michael Novak, the author of the above article, the headless torso is God the Father:

The Christ then directs our eye upward to the figure that would otherwise dominate the painting, a giant torso whose arms span the width of the picture plane. This figure is likely the intended focus because our eye is directed around the canvas to this spot; both figures are transparent. Christ gestures with his left hand toward himself and with his right hand points to the figure above. He looks like a visual representation of Jesus’ reply to his disciple Philip, who asked at the Last Supper, “Lord, show us the Father….” “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time?” Jesus replied, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:8-9).

The Father’s face is appropriately off the canvas; this is the transcendent God who warned Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Ex 33:20). 

I haven't thought about the painting for a long time, but the outstretched arms of the torso tend to remind me instead of Christ's crucified, or perhaps resurrected, body.  Certainly, we're not really used to representations of God the Father with a youthful body, half unclothed, are we?  The Wikipedia entry on God the Father in Western Art made me think for a moment that Michelangelo had gone there, as they show this detail from part of the Sistine Chapel:

But, no, the full picture shows that He's showing off his buff torso with some form fitting gear:

And zoom out further, who exactly is the bare butt exposing figure?:

This is well accepted as being God the Father again from a different perspective.  The matter of why Michelangelo would have painted him as going commando, in the modern parlance, is the matter of some conjecture, but I see that at least one blog writer thinks it's possible to find a scriptural justification, based on God's encounter with Moses: 

“And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’” (Exodus 33:21-23)

The term “my back” poses linguistic and theological challenges.  In the Hebrew, the term rendered by NRSV as “back” is plural (אָחוֹר ‘achowr {aw-khore’}).  The third century B. C. scholars who translated the Hebrew Bible for the Septuagint retained the plural into Greek (τὰ ὀπίσω μου).  In the fourth century A.D., Jerome did the same when he put the text into Latin, posteriora mea.  In 1611, the translators of the King James version followed the prior plurals, “..and thou shalt see my back parts.”  Some nouns in various languages can be grammatically plural though logically singular, such as Los Angeles, which means “The Angels” but refers to a single city.  Perhaps these translators merely intend such an understanding, and the NRSV regularizes that to a grammatical singular.  I don’t think that’s right; I think that those translators were a very well educated group.  The Jewish scholars of the third century B.C. knew Greek and Hebrew equally well (they lived back then); Jerome was no amateur; and James’s scholars went back to the Hebrew for their version.  I think that Michelangelo agreed with the scholars who retained the plural, for he clearly represents the butt-crack of God, with the two globes of the buttocks vividly distinct.  The NRSV is just being prudish for their contemporary audience.

I digress.

I'm happy to accept the interpretation that Dali's torso is the Father, especially as we get the Holy Spirit in the picture, too:

The full presence of the Triune God is made complete by the inclusion of an illusory Holy Spirit dove perched on Christ’s left shoulder, composed of the lines of his hair and jaw.

It took me a while to see this again, but when I spotted it, I remembered that I had seen it before:

Surprisingly, it seems no one on the net has gone to the bother of outlining it.  So I'll try:

Well, I think I've got that right.   Maybe this was shown in an old high school art book of mine, I forget. 

The biggest mystery of the painting, though, may be why the other figures around Christ are almost, but not quite, mirror images of each other.  Novak doesn't really have an explanation:

Assuming traditional symbolism, we would identify those at table as the Twelve Apostles. A second look makes us question that assumption. For these are mirror images of one another: six sets of twins around the table, not the historical followers of Jesus. The figures painted here are not important for their personalities, but for their actions: their reverent prayer and worship.

So it is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of the Last Supper;  I think that is right.

Novak says that the painting is very popular, even though it doesn't take pride of place in its home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.    I think I actually saw it myself, on one of my trips to Washington in the 80's;  I remember being impressed once with seeing a real live Dali in a gallery, but whether it was this one I can't recall.  

In any event, it's been worth considering.   It also raises to my mind the question of the modern image of God.   Old tribal understandings of Gods as embodied (if shape shifting) superhumans at least gave artists something "solid" to work with.  The more modern feeling of God as a force or pure intelligence or some such (a trend which CS Lewis decried as wrong headed, but then again, he was writing before the computer age),  presents the artist with a difficulty, doesn't it.  How is disembodied, all pervading intelligence best portrayed artistically?   I have no idea, but perhaps should think about it....

Ear worm noted

Strange as it seems
there's been a run of crazy dreams,
and a man who can interpret could go far
could become a star... 

Why do I like the first two lines so much?  I guess it's their combination with the music, but Tim Rice at his best really was a great and witty lyricist, no?  (Readers may think - what's so great about those lines? - but they are, for me, an incredibly persistent ear worm if I hear the song.  Which I just did.)

But, um, he does look unrecognizably old

Leave David Letterman alone: For a celebrity, “showing his age” means aging in public at all - Salon.com

Nick Pope sounding more or less reasonable

BBC - Future - My time as a UFO investigator for the government

Liberal intellectuals and criticism of Islam

Paul Berman and Michael Walzer in Defense of Kamel Daoud – Tablet Magazine

Interesting in light of the terrorism this week, especially.

Ryan sneaks away from Rand

Paul Ryan's bizarre speech was a de facto endorsement of Donald Trump - Vox

As this article notes, it may be considered something of a "plus" for Republicans to have one of them coming out and admitting that analysing poverty using Ayn Rand terminology is wrong (and politically stupid, too); on the other hand, Ryan can't bring himself to denounce Trump's offensive language re women and race/nationality.

And this reminds me, Krugman ripped into Ryan the other day, too; although it was largely a matter of  repeating a complaint  he has made many times before.