What the American (and Australian) Right must accept to regain credibility

I reckon there are perhaps three key things that a re-aligned American (and Australia) Right must accept to be credible again, and they are all related:

a.  that climate change is real, and a very serious long term economic and humanitarian issue that needs addressing by all governments, but especially by the US as a leading industrial and research nation. Accepting science is not being a socialist - the very nature of the problem means a globalist approach is necessary;

b.  that the idea that government must be minimal government (except when it comes to Defence - where the Right always wants more) has had its day:  driven not only by the need for clear government policy and intervention regarding climate change, but also by credible economic research, and simple common sense comparisons internationally, that government has a key and important role in a wide variety of areas important for maintaining a society's overall well being*;

c.  that provision of adequate government services and infrastructure requires realistic levels of government income, and globally, the world has been "gamed" by a race to the bottom by the richest corporations and individuals who now pay tax at levels that would have been thought laughable last century.  The Right must abandon the obsession with insisting that the only way to advance a nation's economy is to cut taxes. 


* I wonder how much blame can be borne by Rand and/or Milton Friedman for the persistence of  this Republican view?  On the latter, as Paul Krugman wrote in 2007, he was a good and important economist, when it came to his specialised field, but on matters of the size of government and regulation, it was pretty much just ideology:

In the decades ahead, this single-mindedness would become Friedman’s trademark. Again and again, he called for market solutions to problems—education, health care, the illegal drug trade—that almost everyone else thought required extensive government intervention. Some of his ideas have received widespread acceptance, like replacing rigid rules on pollution with a system of pollution permits that companies are free to buy and sell. Some, like school vouchers, are broadly supported by the conservative movement but haven’t gotten far politically. And some of his proposals, like eliminating licensing procedures for doctors and abolishing the Food and Drug Administration, are considered outlandish even by most conservatives.

The lesson the Right needs to learn:  "single mindedness" has had its day.  Pragmatism, common sense and recognition of complexity should all trump ideology.

Trump and the expected Republican break up

I thought this piece in the Washington Post, about the Republican Party's problems (and widely anticipated break up/re-alignment after losing at the election) being more than just about Trump, was pretty convincing. I'll make another post about the Right wing's necessary re-alignments.  (Although long time readers can probably guess one of them!)

Right wing cartooning

The best service cartoonist Bill Leak has provided to national politics is indicating that it (sometimes, at least) takes a really decent knock on the head/brain injury to convert a person into a permanent right wing ideologue.   That lesson hasn't been learnt well enough at Catallaxy, I see, where the controversial Bill Leak aboriginal cartoon (and self serving sequel) is now up as a banner.  (Even before this, the blog was one of the last places in Australia to go for moderate and intelligent commentary on race issues.) 

As it happens, I can see both sides of the Bill Leak cartoon - I certainly understand many aborigines finding it offensive; but I can also see that it fits within the type of graphic commentary whereby cartoonists frequently treat their targets with an unfair broad brush.

Leak's sequel makes his original offensiveness to large numbers of aboriginal fathers worse - indicating that he makes no acknowledgement that he doing anything other than "telling the truth", and that he thinks he was being funny.   If he had somehow acknowledged that he knew you can't accuse all aborigines as alcoholic, hopeless parents, he might have earned some sympathy.  But, no.

Hence, while I would have thought a complaint about the first cartoon under 18C Racial Discrimination Act should have been dismissed, taking both cartoons together makes it appear to me much more likely that he may be found to be in breach of the Act.  Am I concerned about that?   Not really - the Australian, if it was a decent newspaper of any standing, should not have run the cartoon in the first place; or, at the very least, offered an apology for offence caused once the complaints started coming in.  (Did they do that editorially?  I wouldn't know.) 

But then again, nor do I think that Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommanase did his position much good by inviting complaints about the cartoon.  While publicising the role of his organisation is one thing, doing it in such a specific context is unlikely to do more than re-invigorate the culture warriors in the Coalition and media, who have nothing better to do with their time other than hound Gillian Triggs and her organisation to death, and agitate on behalf of the likes of Andrew Bolt.

The HRC needs to have a high profile complaint (such as the current QUT student matter) fail in order to confirm in the public mind that they and its judges do take a hard headed approach to matters and aren't there for frivolous or ill founded complaints.  I strongly suspect that this is what will happen in the QUT case, and a decision on that cannot come soon enough.  The commission also then needs to review itself from a point of view of procedural fairness.

I will see this movie

Doctor Strange: 5 things to know about Marvel’s best-looking movie yet - Vox

Despite my complaints about Hollywood spending way too much time on comic book movies, I'll see this one because:

a.  everyone likes Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton, don't they? Count me in, too.

b.  articles talking about it seem to suggest there are quite a few jokes to be had.  Marvel needs humour to be bearable;

c.   movies that are noteworthy for unusual visual effects still have some appeal.  Merely well done disaster scenarios, whether on a city or planet-wide scale, don't hold any interest, but this movie sounds more innovative than that. 

Excuse me while I do some food blogging

Here's some boring food/family blogging for you:   on a Saturday or Sunday night, every few weeks, we have a "snack night" - a platter of food and bread that we all help ourselves too.

I'm not sure how commonly realised this is, but all meals that combine large elements of red and green foods will always be good.  For a platter we enjoy, the key ingredients tend to be:

a.  a wood platter.   Remember, wood platters make all food taste better.  They just do.

b.  oven roasted capsicum (peel off the burnt skin, season and and pour some good olive oil over it.)  This is a really, really popular food in our house.

c.  for green:  in spring - Australian asparagus.  Always tastes better than South American.   Fried in a bit of butter and olive oil is perfect.  Otherwise, just green  beans, either pan fried with a bit of garlic, or steamed in the microwave with a bit of garlic infused olive oil on them afterwards.  Have you tried Cobram Estate's garlic infused olive oil?   It's really great and convenient:

d.  Possible additional red:  ripe tomatoes.  Possibly served with cold mozzarella, or a bit of crumbed feta, olive oil and basil leaves if you have some.  Red and green on the one plate works well.

e.  Possible additional green:  avocado, just mashed up with lemon and salt and pepper.

f.   Further vegetable:  olives.   Whatever type you like.

g.  Other possible vegetables:  carrot sticks or celery, with which to each the semi-guacamoled avocado or (if you really need it) a dip from the supermarket.  I like beetroot dip.  Home made hummus is easy enough, too, as long as you have some tahini around.

g.  Protein:  smoked fish.   A whole smoked trout, which costs all of $10 or so, with the skin peeled off but otherwise just laid out on the platter for people to attack, does the trick.   Of course, smoked salmon, either of the cold or hot smoked variety, works fine too.  The trout laid out with the head and tail still on looks good, though.

h.  Protein:  brie or another soft gooey cheese.

g.  Bread:  whatever you like, but makes some garlic butter and grill half of it on a stove top griddle for those who like yet more garlic flavour and a crisper base for cheese.

h.  White wine.  May as well make it a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.  Goes well with the smoked fish.

Some of these meals are the most enjoyable we share at home.  And are not very expensive, given the pleasure derived from this tasty range of foods.

Alt.right losers

Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Supporters: Internet Abuse Must End | National Review

A remarkable account by David French of the intense abuse he and his family have had to endure for his opposing Trump.

The wedding gift registry includes Lego and Chupa Chups

Pictures of two Egyptian children engaged to be married trigger outrage — once again - The Washington Post

I'm tempted to post the garish photo of the "happy" couple, but it's not their fault, so why should I join in the pile on.  (Mind you, I'm not suggesting the pile on against the family is not deserved.)

Anyway, the article notes this:

The engagement of Omar and Gharam “will only lead to an early marriage in which the girl will be deprived of equal chances to education, growth, and will isolate her from social spheres,” he said.

But if history is any indication, it’s unlikely the complaints will stop Egypt’s child marriages, a practice that is also prevalent in many nations in the Middle East, Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dar al-Ifta, Egypt’s highest Islamic authority, has repeatedly urged state institutions to make concerted efforts to stop marriages among minors.

But that has either had little effect in many areas or has spawned efforts to manipulate the law. In Egypt’s rural areas, families marry off their children but usually delay the official registration of the marriage until the couples reach the lawful age of matrimony to avoid legal punishment. As a consequence, any children born of the marriage will not be issued birth certificates or be recognized until then, legal experts say.

Omar’s father, faced with the backlash of his decision, told local newspapers that he "is a free man and did nothing wrong."

He defended the engagement, saying that "Omar has always loved Gharam so much that he used to say he will marry her when they grow up.” He added that both children acted “beyond their years” and developed “strong feelings for each other” through Facebook and other social media and “wanted to get engaged.”

That’s why, Omar’s father said, he decided to announce their engagement now "before any other man asks for her hand in marriage when she is older".

"They will get married when they reach the legal age," he insisted.

This wasn’t the first child marriage in the province this year. In June, a 10-year-old bride in a pink dress sat next to her 12-year-old groom, celebrating their wedding.

Probably an instrument error...

Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us

I saw a report about this last week and forgot to post about it.   A couple of astronomers think they may have found an alien signal, but it seemingly is coming from so many stars, it's very suspicious.  

What happened in America in 2013? (And in the past)

There's been some surprising (or not so surprising - depending on where you stand on the pessimism/optimism scale, I suppose) figures out regarding increasing rates of STDs in the US:

So, what happened in 2013?  Everyone suspects Grindr, but then I see it has been around since 2009, and The Guardian was giving it publicity in 2010.  If it was that app, it took a while to hit the STD rates.

The Atlantic had an article about syphilis's re-emergence last year, which also mentions Grindr, but it notes (as does the previous article) that there is no well researched basis for blaming it.   (How hard can it be to research this?   Why can't STD clinics ask that patients answer a short questionnaire on their use of such apps, or the internet, to find partners?) 

As for other reasons:  how about the loss of fear of HIV amongst Western men?   Surely it counts for something; but it astounds me that even if they are going to risk that, men will still take a punt on a disease that looks absolutely horrible, and  can hardly be hidden from friends and loved ones, at least it if gets to the secondary stage.  (You can Google images of the rash yourself.)

But having said that, there still seems something odd about 2013, and it seems no one knows what.

To get back to something resembling optimism again, how do current rates of STD's compare to those in past decades?   It would seem good figures are available for the US since the 1940's, and one thing that is surprising about them is the huge surge in one STD that, I assume, was a result of the 1960's sexual revolution:

As for syphilis, here's the more recent rate trend:

But go back further, and you realise just what a serious problem it was mid 20th century:

Now, that last graph is total cases, not cases per 100,000.  Here's what we really need for a graph comparison:

But, these graphs are confusing if they are including congenital syphilis, and you are only interested in the number of adults catching it. 

You can avoid that by looking at this table - where it is plain that primary and secondary syphilis had a peak 1940's rate in the USA of nearly 71 per 100,000. 

The rate today (not that I am making excuses for it!) is 7.5.  Pretty close to a tenth of the 1940's peak rate. 

Yeah, so while I can understand why the CDC is dismayed that it is on the way up after nearly disappearing, it's remarkable to realise the extent of problem it presented in the past...

He knows nothing

That's a Sgt Schultz reference, by the way, and specifically made only in relation to the curious matter of Sinclair Davidson's invitations to talk internationally about his research that disputes the efficacy of tobacco plain packaging.

Look, it's good that he spoke to this Canadian journalist at all, but TimT - what on earth is wrong with a journo pressing Sinclair on the matter of whether tobacco company money is behind his appearances at such meetings?   I don't think her questions were disrespectful in tone at all, and if a journalist wants to put challenges to his research for comment, what's wrong with that?   If anything, I wish she had been more aggressive.

Because, let's face it, Sinclair shows a distinct lack of curiosity as to whether tobacco funding is involved, indirectly:

J: Was the tobacco industry involved in the visit in any way?
SD: Not to my knowledge.
J: The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies said that their event was held in partnership with Crestview Strategy, a lobbying firm that represents one of Canada’s biggest tobacco companies, so I would like to have some clarity around the involvement of the tobacco industry.
SD: I can’t help you there – I hadn’t heard of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies before I spoke there, nor have I heard of them since. I also spoke at the Economic Club of Canada meeting in Toronto and Convenience Store meetings in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. I have no knowledge as to how the meetings were organised. Beyond ensuring that each venue had a powerpoint projector I had no interest in the organisation of the meetings.

....I have had contact with people in Canada (obviously – at the talks I gave), the UK, and parts of Europe opposed to plain packaging. These people work in media, think tanks, and consumer rights organisations.

J: Can you confirm whether the institute currently receives any funding?
SD: I don’t know if the IPA currently receives funding from the tobacco industry – I have never been told that it does.

Here's the question that she should have asked as a follow up:

"Would it bother you if you knew that tobacco industry funding was behind the meetings you addressed, or, for that matter, part funding the IPA and its long campaign again plain packaging?"

Now, I presume his answer would be "no, not particularly.  I oppose plain packaging on libertarian grounds, and as such it matters little to me who funds the message."

And I can think of a couple of follow up questions from that.

But why does Sinclair even seemingly reject this proposition (in italics, which are mine)?:

As it turns out I had a long discussion with Garfield Mahood in Toronto during the Q&A session of my talk at the Economic Club and also again after the session. He put to me the same questions with the same underlying premise that somehow I am corrupt, or on the take, or that my motives are base, or that I am inadvertently benefiting the tobacco industry, etc. etc. that you have put to me. Mind you, he was very quick to back away from stating that premise when I asked him if that is what he was implying. In the end he seemed happy to accept that I am an academic doing research and publishing results, and my motive to come to Canada was to visit my relatives.

Oh come on.   How could he plausibly not be at least inadvertently benefiting the tobacco industry by not only doing this research, but going to meetings where they want to hear his "plain packaging hasn't worked" message?   Especially if he shows no interest in knowing whether there is tobacco funding in the background?

Seems to be an obvious over-reach there. 

Of course Trump lost

I happened to see the closing statements live on TV yesterday in the last Presidential debate.  Clinton sounded smart, relaxed and competent; Trump repeated his handful of memorised lines, starting (oddly, I thought) with a need to boost defence and spend more money on veterans, before going back to American cities being a disaster and how he'll do more for blacks than Hillary ever could.  (Seriously, he thinks he should even bother trying to appeal to the black vote?)

And right at the end, the Donald looked very unhappy, as his family approached him to comfort him in his failure, while Hillary headed into the audience, looking happy (and healthy).

On that last point, let's remember:  right wing conspiracy numbskulls have been telling each other for the last year or more that she's about to fall off the perch any day now.  And Trump personally bought right into it, the shallow  and stupid conspiracy monger that he is.    How easily they gloss over their ridiculous failed predictions. 

As for some other ridiculousness:  Scott Adams is trying to wake up to America to the realisation that all people who dislike Trump have been hypnotised by Democrat Svengalis.   Because only he, the Most Knowledgeable Man in America in the Matter of Persuasion, can see the truth:

Here I pause to remind new readers of this blog that I’m a trained hypnotist and a student of persuasion in all its forms. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to learn the tricks for discerning illusion from reality. And I’m here to tell you that if you are afraid that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist clown with a dangerous temperament, you have been brainwashed by the best group of brainwashers in the business right now: Team Clinton. They have cognitive psychologists such as Godzilla advising them. Allegedly.

I remind you that intelligence is not a defense against persuasion. No matter how smart you are, good persuaders can still make you see a pink elephant in a room where there is none (figuratively speaking). And Clinton’s team of persuaders has caused half of the country to see Trump as a racist/sexist Hitler with a dangerous temperament. That’s a pink elephant.

As a public service (and I mean that literally) I have been trying to unhypnotize the country on this matter for the past year. I don’t do this because I prefer Trump’s policies or because I know who would do the best job as president. I do it because our system doesn’t work if you think there is a pink elephant in the room and there is not. That isn’t real choice. That is an illusion of choice.

Hmm.   How odd it is the Team Clinton managed to get Trump to make hundreds of ridiculous, false and offensive statements in scores of televised appearances over the last 12 months that convinced me (and a huge number of fellow Australians)  that he's a dangerous idiot.  They really are all globally powerful, that Team.

Despite the fact that he (in a subsequent post) actually gave the debate to Clinton on points, Adams remains (arguably) the biggest self disclosed fool as a result of this election campaign.

Attack of a sea monster

Well, this is an odd headline:

Wreckage of U-boat sunken by 'sea monster' found off UK

And the details are quite bizarre:

Incredible sonar images show the 100-year-old wreck to be mostly intact, and the find has led to the resurfacing of nautical folklore. Experts say the wreckage may be the infamous UB-85, which, legend has it, was attacked by a sea beast during the war.

According to the old tale, the U-boat commander -- Capt. Gunther Krech -- said the submarine had been cruising on the surface of the water to recharge its batteries when a "strange beast" rose from the sea with "large eyes, set in a horny sort of skull." Krech said the animal had a small head, but with "teeth that could be seen glistening in the moonlight," according to a statement from Scottish Energy News...

Hey - how about a better source for the "legend" than the company that found the wreck. Is this just a clickbait story that's fooled me? Because here's the rest:  

The story goes that the sheer size of the beast was so immense that it forced the U-boat to list and the crew began shooting at the monster until it dropped back into the sea. The captain said, however, that during the course of the fight the forward deck plating had been so badly damaged that it could no longer submerge.

The British military had a slightly different take on the incident.  Official reports suggested that when the UB-85 surfaced on April 30,1918, it was spotted and destroyed by a British patrol boat -- HMS Coreopsis -- not by a mysterious sea monster.

Yes, until I hear more about how Capt Krech's story came to light, I will assume I've been clickbaited...

Rats in the news

Sounds like a ridiculously generous amount of money for a rat: 

The Indonesian capital will pay residents to catch rats as part of efforts to curb diseases transmitted by the rodents, local reports say.

Jakarta deputy governor Djarot Syaiful Hidayat says residents will be paid 20,000 rupiahs ($A2) for every rat caught and handed over to authorities, the Kompas daily reported.
"Just collect the rats, count them and we will pay," Djarot was quoted as saying.
Rats were rampant in densely populated areas, potentially causing diseases such as leptospirosis, salmonellosis and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, he said.
Some Jakartans are opposed to the idea.
"Mr governor, please don't go ahead with the plan," a resident pleaded on Twitter.
"People will farm rats, just like what happened in Hanoi."
French colonisers in Hanoi, Vietnam, introduced a program in which people were paid for each rat tail caught, prompting people to start breeding them.

And this reminds me, I was reading an article about new studies on rat intelligence on the weekend, but I have forgotten where it was.   Maybe found via Flipboard?   I'll get to this later...

More than you ever thought you needed to know

Bacterial Vaginosis and the Secrets of the Vagina's Microbiome - The Atlantic

This is a really long article about a not so pleasant subject, but I did like the title on the website:  "The Superhero in the Vagina", as it lets me make a joke about how it sounds like a rejected Marvel movie title.

Anyhow, the matter of the complicated bacterial balance in the average vagina is kind of interesting.   I wonder whether this is covered in teenage health and sex ed in schools these days?  Sounds like it should...

Fooling your animal

BBC - Earth - How a dog's mind can easily be controlled

It's all about the placebo effect in animals, which seems to be a real thing, even if this article is mainly about the difficulty in studying it.  

Political persuasions of US academia

From a Nature News article about scientists who support Trump (how on Earth did they manage to track down that handful of people?), there's a graphic showing how the political leanings of academics breaks down:

I guess most of this is pretty much what I would have guessed, except I would not have been surprised if engineers had a greater number of conservatives, and I don't really know why mathematicians lean more heavily conservative, too.  (Also, astronomers don't do conservative politics, for some reason.)

Yet more MOND

Hey, I see that my favourite physicist blogger Sabine H has a post up about the new paper which I've been posting about - the one that seems to support the unpopular MOND theory for gravity.

Now, Sabine can be hard to follow when she gets into details, but if you read the post (and the lengthy comments, which get into a bit of an almost philosophical argy bargy about when you give up on a science theory), you get an idea as to why MOND is viewed suspiciously by many. 

Interesting.

Planning for lunar living

An Astronaut Gardener On The Moon - Summits Of Sunlight And Vast Lunar Caves In Low Gravity

Yay - someone who thinks, like me, that it's more sensible to be planning on lunar colonies being the first off Earth permanent colonies for humans, rather than distant, extremely hard to get to, Mars.

This long, long post talks about many aspects of living on the moon.  I haven't read it all yet, but I'll get back to it.

One thing to be curious about - the long term health effects of lunar (or Martian) low gravity.   How can that ever be guessed at until you get people living there for a year or more.  Even more curious - would babies gestated there end up taller, weaker, or what?  I would guess that one of the first things to do on a lunar base would be to raise generations of mice or rats there, and see what happens.   (I also remember some telemovie from - I think - the 1990's that had a mining outpost on the Moon, and the pregnant mother getting spun gently in a centrifuge to provide some artificial gravity to her fetus.  I think she was then heading off to Earth to give birth?  I don't remember much about it - I didn't watch the whole movie.)

Update:  I know that studies have been done with rats raised in centrifuges to simulate a high gravity life, but short of having a centrifuge running permanently on the ISS, the equivalent studies of them raised in low gravity are hard to envisage...

American election comments

*  Donald Trump and his "rigged election" rhetoric is clearly dangerous in a country full of armed-to-the-hilt, conspiracy minded nutters who are encouraged to believe (and easily convinced) that Clinton is a dangerous criminal who wants to take their guns from them.   The mildly worded counterclaims by Republicans (such as Pence) don't seem to be anywhere near enough of a rebuke, and if Trump keeps this up, he really deserves calling out and complete repudiation from the highest levels.  It's much more serious, in its way, than the groping allegations.  (And none of this "he doesn't mean voter fraud - he means the way the media is against him" excuse making I've heard from some of his supporters.)

* There is so little appreciation of the matter of government security classification of communications in the general public that is it easy for them to think that Clinton's classified emails that ended up on her private server were really important stuff.  This is distorting the public perception of her "wrongdoing", and Trump and Republicans are taking full advantage of that.  But even the liberal media is not really helping to clarify public understanding.  This article from back in July sets out this basic point:

An important thing to understand is that the determination of what information is classified is subjective. This means reasonable people can disagree about the relative sensitivity of particular information.

Before coming to academia, I worked for many years as an analyst at both the State Department and the Department of Defense. I held a top secret clearance and worked on issues related to weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation. Debates and arguments about whether certain information should be classified were frequent. More often than not the debates centered on why something was classified in the first place. This is why determining whether Secretary Clinton was careless is not a cut and dried issue.

Well, it's fair to say she was careless - but the consequences of the carelessness are something that is not at all clear, and it is quite possibly very inconsequential from a national security point of view.   

Some pretty incredible work here

Mouse eggs made from skin cells in a dish : Nature News & Comment

Some very science-fictiony stuff here that, I guess, really could make sex redundant for reproduction.  Still need a womb for growing a baby though - I don't think any science is being done on replacing women entirely.  As far as I know...