Straight talking from John Quiggin

John Quiggin resigned from the Climate Change Authority with this bit of straight talking:

The government’s refusal to accept the advice of its own Authority, despite wide support for that advice from business, environmental groups and the community as a whole, reflects the comprehensive failure of its policies on energy and the environment. These failures can be traced, in large measure, to the fact that the government is beholden to rightwing anti-science activists in its own ranks and in the media. Rather than resist these extremists, the Turnbull government has chosen to treat the vital issues of climate change and energy security as an opportunity for political pointscoring and culture war rhetoric.

I do not believe there is anything useful to be gained by providing objective advice based on science and economic analysis to a government dominated by elements hostile to both science and economics.

As I've said before, there needs to a formal split between the climate change deniers in the Coalition, and the sensible.  I can't see how Turnbull can really keep pandering to the foolish within his government.

Yes, it is sinister

From The Guardian:

Donald Trump wants us to associate immigrants with criminality. That is the reason behind a weekly published list of immigrant crimes – the first of which was made public on Monday. Singling out the crimes of undocumented immigrants has one objective: to make people view them as deviant, dangerous and fundamentally undesirable.

The very idea is sinister.

Since the start of his presidential campaign, Trump characterized brown-skinned immigrants as criminals by painting Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. This fear-mongering has continued into his administration, and has expressed itself in unprecedented policies.

Trump has gone so far as to create an office called Voice – Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office. An expert on concentration camps has already pointed out that the weekly list of crimes bears deeply troubling resemblances to Nazi–era Germany, where Hitler published Jewish crimes...

Reading the report, one is struck by how the alarmist rhetoric of Trump and the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t quite fit the nature of many of the crimes that are listed. A high number of them are for non-violent offences such as drug possession, driving under the influence of liquor and traffic violations. 

No other Republican candidate was so brazen as to actually encourage xenophobia for political advantage, and it was pretty outrageous that they, and the media, didn't attack it more during the campaign.  (Or now.)

Stupidity runs in the family

Donald Trump Jr called 'a disgrace' for tweet goading London mayor 
The whole misleading tweet comes from The Independent running a somewhat misleading headline in 2016.   But it would seem someone in the Trumpworld dug this up and Donald Jnr ran with it.
Dumb, but lots of dimwitted Trump supporters will never bother going further than the tweet.

Update:  I see from Catallaxy (where CL is running with the story - of course, selective quoting and exaggeration is his rhetorical speciality) that the source of this is from Gateway Pundit.  

And in checking on what exactly Khan said in September 2016, it is clear that many English papers ran with "part and parcel" but without putting up the full sentence.   Even when you go to the Breitbart version of the story, they don't seem to have the full sentence, and their longest quote goes with the unremarkable:

“It is a reality I’m afraid that London, New York, other major cities around the world have got to be prepared for these sorts of things,” he said, the Evening Standard reports.
“That means being vigilant, having a police force that is in touch with communities, it means the security services being ready, but also it means exchanging ideas and best practice,” he added.

Ocean acidification continues apace, with hardly anyone noticing

From Nature Climate Change:

The uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the ocean decreases seawater pH and carbonate mineral aragonite saturation state (Ω_arag), a process known as Ocean Acidification (OA). This can be detrimental to marine organisms and ecosystems^{1, 2}. The Arctic Ocean is particularly sensitive to climate change³ and aragonite is expected to become undersaturated (Ω_arag < 1) there sooner than in other oceans⁴. However, the extent and expansion rate of OA in this region are still unknown. Here we show that, between the 1990s and 2010, low Ω_arag waters have expanded northwards at least 5°, to 85° N, and deepened 100 m, to 250 m depth. Data from trans-western Arctic Ocean cruises show that Ω_arag < 1 water has increased in the upper 250 m from 5% to 31% of the total area north of 70° N. Tracer data and model simulations suggest that increased Pacific Winter Water transport, driven by an anomalous circulation pattern and sea-ice retreat, is primarily responsible for the expansion, although local carbon recycling and anthropogenic CO₂ uptake have also contributed. These results indicate more rapid acidification is occurring in the Arctic Ocean than the Pacific and Atlantic oceans^{5, 6, 7, 8}, with the western Arctic Ocean the first open-ocean region with large-scale expansion of ‘acidified’ water directly observed in the upper water column.

Do us a favour and kick him in the shins?

Someone who worked for years in the Climate Policy area of the IPA does not deserve a friendly welcome from anyone connected with the CSIRO.  (The IPA thinks it should be privatised, by the way.)

And he is short, isn't he?  (He wishes he wasn't, so feel free to mention it anytime...)

Different stars, even..

OK, so of course I knew the first bit, and have told my children about it (although I'm not entirely sure they remember), but I didn't know the second part (about the different stars):

A theoretical physicist, Krauss proclaimed in a recent talk: "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust."

Wall Street Journal joins the "fake news" outlets

Even the WSJ is sick of Trump's "say anything" approach to the truth.

Their editorial starts with:

If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

and ends on this note:

Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

Good to see.

Let him rest

I take it from my twitter feed that there are perhaps two articles with respect to the late Bill Leak in The Australian today?  One of them is by his son, defending his father against the charge of racism, and I suppose I don't begrudge him having an opportunity to address that.  But still - the column space that has been devoted to him by that paper is just completely over the top.   (And I still say that a non-racist can produce a cartoon that racists take support from - and editors and the cartoonist himself should be sensitive to that.)

The Australian has a tiny circulation and seems to be under the impression that its relentless campaigns are actually of vital interest to the population at large.  In fact, they only matter to their hard core Right readership, including a limited number of Coalition politicians.  

And really, if the Senate is not going to pass amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, what is the value of Coalition spending so much time on this, apart from it representing Right wing virtue signalling?  

Hayek and morals

I really have little interest in Hayek - my assumption is that he is too much of a cult figure to be all that worthwhile studying.  (Cult figures are rarely worth the effort - it's a safe rule of thumb.  And no Jesus Christ jibes from you, thank you Jason.)

But I see there's an article that covers his attitude to morals, and it would appear that he was a proto Ayn Rand (maybe everyone already knows that, except me?):

To be sure, Hayek endorsed a wide range of laws that sustain public order, private property, honesty in business activities, making contracts and determining prices. No doubt, everyone would seem to benefit by adopting such standards, but they are minimal and beg for a more comprehensive approach. Instead, Hayek suggests that in the modern era a number of formerly esteemed virtues need to be abandoned. It seems that a Christian based moral outlook harbors several moral ‘instincts’ that are outmoded. Among those ‘instincts’ are solidarism (a concern for the overall welfare of a community) and altruism (a charitable and self-sacrificing attitude toward one’s neighbors). Writing in The Fatal Conceit, Hayek says, “It is these two instincts, deeply embedded in our purely instinctive or intuitive reactions, which remained the great obstacle to the development of the present market economy.” He contends that free trade and modern Capitalism emerged in the 18^th century only after such virtues were superseded by self-interest. This explains, he says, why Capitalism is maligned by ill-informed people who wrongly insist that it’s vital for a well governed society to actively promote policies that insure fairness, equity, and social justice.

Most traditional thinkers are convinced that such moral virtues underlie the concept of a moral order and of the common good. Solidarism and altruism, both forms of charity, are often rendered by the Greek word ‘agape.’ The two virtues are central to the Gospels, the Ten Commandments and have always been a core component of a Judeo-Christian culture. Nonetheless, true liberty for Hayek requires replacing them with self-interest and individualism.  ...

In public policy, Hayek did favor retaining long established institutions and was a persuasive advocate for private initiatives. Aside from minimal help for the destitute, Hayek repeatedly warned that all public assistance, welfare or social insurance provided by the state had to be quickly and efficiently phased out. Such endeavors, he wrote, not only destroy liberty by imposing a particular moral viewpoint on everyone, they will shepherd us to national bankruptcy! This austere philosophy has attracted many sponsors.

Yeah, nah.   This is where  I'll take Catholic social teaching on economics and government, with its balance between the extremes of free market economics and excessive  government control, any day. 

Empathy in the news

There's a book out with the somewhat provocative title Against Empathy, and the author explains it at Vox, and lots of sites discuss his argument, such as at Psychology Today.

In a similar vein, you can read how Too Much Emotional Intelligence is a Bad Thing.

I should drink more

Tea, that is.

My hunch from articles that continually flow about the health benefits of certain drinks is that the healthy lifestyle might involve:   one strong cup of coffee per day; one cup of tea per day; one glass of red wine every second day.  And then I can stand on one of those silly looking vibrating boards instead of exercising, because, surprisingly, they might actually be good for you too.

In other movie news

Who can believe the US (and international) box office for Beauty and the Beast?  

Just goes to show, too, that the publicity about a gay "moment" in the film has caused no significant conservative backlash, at all.   (Anyway, I see that the "moment" is exceeding brief.)

Excuse me while I have a fanboy moment

Good to hear, but maybe this one shouldn't be at the start of the film:

....it sounds like Mission: Impossible 6 is going to have a stunt so insane that Cruise has been training to do it for over a year. That’s according to Collider, which spoke with M:I 6 producer David Ellison about the film.
According to Ellison, this new stunt is going to be “the most impressive and unbelievable thing that Tom Cruise has done in a movie,” and he’s been preparing for it since “right after Rogue Nation came out.” He wouldn’t offer any specifics, but he explained that Cruise prefers doing real stunts like this because “the audience can tell when it’s you on a green screen or when you’re actually doing it live.”

Take that, Thiel

Oh.  Isn't one of Peter Thiel's policy ideas that the drug market should be opened up so that people can try them out before they go through all of the expensive testing?

Well, here's a short argument at Nature that there are good economic (and social) reasons to insist that drug companies show efficacy before they release drugs.  Some extracts:

Knowledge of the history is important. The 1938 US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act required only that drug safety be demonstrated. In 1962, new legislation demanded that marketed drugs also go through well-controlled studies to test for therapeutic benefit. More than 1,000 medical products were subsequently withdrawn after reviews found little or no evidence of efficacy¹. The free market that existed before 1962 revealed no connection between a drug's ability to turn a profit and its clinical usefulness. The same is likely to be true of any future deregulated market....

An overly stringent system will err by withholding or delaying safe and effective 'good' drugs from patients. Critics of existing regulations often point to the case of a treatment for Hunter syndrome — a rare, inherited degenerative disease in which the absence of a crucial enzyme can be fatal. Trials of the enzyme-replacement drug Elaprase (idursulfase) meant that, for a year, a group of children received a placebo instead of the drug that was eventually shown to be effective².

Conversely, a lax regulatory system will subject patients to 'bad' drugs that may be toxic. The iconic example is the more than 10,000 birth defects caused worldwide by the drug thalidomide, a late 1950s remedy for nausea during pregnancy. Even in the past dozen years, initially promising drugs, such as torcetrapib (for reducing cholesterol and heart-disease risk) and semagacestat (for improving cognition in people with Alzheimer's disease), were found to cause harm only after they had been tested in large, mandatory trials — effects that were not seen in the smaller trials³.

The most extreme proponents of deregulation argue that the market can serve as the sole arbiter of utility: if a medicine is selling well, it must be delivering value⁴. A more moderate view is that reliable information on efficacy can be collected after a drug goes on sale, through uncontrolled observational studies and other post hoc analyses.

There is a third type of error that these arguments neglect (see ‘The good, the bad and the useless’). Untested drugs can be reasonably safe but provide no benefit.

And here's the key point:

Arguments for deregulation fail to recognize that valuable information has a cost. Drug companies cannot afford to generate reliable evidence for efficacy unless their competitors are all held to the same high standards. Efficacy requirements level the playing field and ensure that the health sector receives the data needed to inform good therapeutic and economic decisions. The government, insurers, patients and others need to know whether medicines are likely to provide benefits. Patients and physicians must have access to reliable information to make educated and ethical choices.

Rigorous clinical studies are still the best way to learn whether a drug works, and regulation is essential to ensure that these studies are conducted. Pre-specified endpoints, controls, randomization and blinding cannot be discarded without sacrificing actionable clinical information⁵.

Once a drug is on the market, it is hard to gather solid efficacy data....

The FDA's gatekeeper role makes the medical marketplace function. The economic benefits of good research and a healthier population will be lost without incentives to find truly effective drugs.

Jason - that article is definitely tweet worthy, no?

Update:   I just Googled up an article at Vox from a couple of months ago that explained the pro FDA argument from a medical point of view.   A lot of this read like what John just said in comments:

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast. 

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves....

...I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

In Silicon Valley, humans have designed the hardware, software, and computer code they’re working with. In medical research, scientists do not have that advantage, Lowe said. “We have 3 billion years of spaghetti-tangled gibberish to deal with. And unless you’ve done [drug development], it’s very hard to get across how hard it is. I don’t know of anything that’s harder.” Biochemistry and cell biology are “like alien nanotechnology,” he added.

So the real hurdle researchers face when it comes to finding new drugs for people isn’t overcoming a stringent regulator; it’s grappling with that “alien nanotechnology” in the lab.

Update 2:  from another article, talking about the effect of having an FDA that insists on showing efficacy as well as safety:

Pharmaceutical executives complain about the drug approval process, but usually don’t want to go anywhere close to a safety-only path. In practice, what they want is for the FDA to return their calls, for bureaucratic delays to be reduced, and to find the fastest and least expensive way to prove safety and efficacy.

Many biotech entrepreneurs are actually fans of a tough FDA. Pharmaceutical billionaire Leonard Schleifer, the founder and chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, said that he was against “making it really easy to get your drug approved” at the Forbes Healthcare Summit last week, before news of that O’Neill was under consideration leaked.

Schleifer said that he couldn’t compete with companies like Pfizer or Eli Lilly, which have 10 to 100 times as many salespeople as Regeneron. But he can compete to get approved first, or to have a better drug that has more uses that the FDA allows it to advertise based on science.

“Having a high bar is a good thing, in my opinion, because it allows innovators to compete,” Schleifer said.

Krugman on infallibility

Heh.  Krugman writes:

This administration operates under the doctrine of Trumpal infallibility: Nothing the president says is wrong, whether it’s his false claim that he won the popular vote or his assertion that the historically low murder rate is at a record high. No error is ever admitted. And there is never anything to apologize for.

O.K., at this point it’s not news that the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military is a man you wouldn’t trust to park your car or feed your cat. Thanks, Comey. But Mr. Trump’s pathological inability to accept responsibility is just the culmination of a trend. American politics — at least on one side of the aisle — is suffering from an epidemic of infallibility, of powerful people who never, ever admit to making a mistake.

Quite true, and use of "infallibility" perhaps explains the psychological position of Trump's conservative Catholic vote:  they have already spent decades defending and being intellectually and emotionally invested in Papal infallibility - so it's a ready made mindset in which to move into arguments that, at heart, Trump is never wrong.   

Slow news day

Yeah, sure, the weird situation in Washington continues, with the investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia continuing, and confirmation that Trump prefers to make his baseless claims from what Breitbart and Fox News tells him, rather than his intelligence community. 

But all sensible people had already realised this, so it doesn't feel new.

Of course, what it means for foreign governments dealing with him is anyone's guess - they know they're dealing with a gullible, emotionally needy (jeez, how long is going to continue holding rallies just to cheer himself up?) idiot, so what hope do they have of negotiating in good faith with him, or his administration?   His behaviour with Merkel made him look like a misogynist who especially can't conduct serious negotiations with a woman he doesn't agree with.

We nervously await his first serious test from a foreign power.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the Coalition federally keeps fretting about a terribly minor issue as far as the big picture goes - s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.  And coming up with semi populist ideas that don't make any good sense (release superannuation to buy a house as an answer to the ridiculous house prices in Sydney and Melbourne.)

It all has the feeling of a government fiddling around the edges, casting about for ideas, and not really knowing where to find them.   

What about the one, big, unexpected one that went over well in the media last week - Turnbull's Snowy Mountain expansion?   I am not inclined to get too excited until the feasibility study comes in.  The last were done in the 1980's, apparently, and since then, I thought there was an issue with decreased precipitation likely due to climate change.  That's the first hurdle with any hydro scheme - enough water.  

Oh, here's something to amuse me - watching the build up to the release of the next Samsung phone.  OK, maybe it's a tad more pathetic than amusing, watching how companies and their PR staff go about trying to create intrigue and excitement over a product which is, in truth, probably only a marginal improvement over the last high end phone.  But really, it has been interesting watching the ad campaigns deployed by Samsung to overcome the fear of their exploding batteries.   And beside, I still love my tablet and my Samsung TV - I want this company to do well.

A bug you don't want

There's a fair bit I didn't know about the nasty MRSA (Staphylococcus) bacteria explained in this article from NPR.  

Back to the definition issue

I would have guessed that there was little to be added to the whole argument about the invention of "homosexual" as a category of person, given that it has been well publicised in recent decades. 

But this article at the BBC talks of the invention of "heterosexuality", which is a somewhat different take on the matter.  I thought it interesting, despite my low expectation from the title...

Not just me (again)

I see that Crikey has been keeping count of the extraordinary number of words The Australian has devoted to Bill Leak.

I guessed, in my last post about this, that Leak had been eulogised 49 times.  I was actually pretty close - I think it must be up to 44 now.  (Crikey cites 43, but there might be another one today.)

Surely Leak himself would be finding this over the top...

Spooky Spanish

Hey, finally I found a movie on Stan that I consider above a B grade.

It's the 2007 Spanish haunted house movie The Orphanage.

I had vaguely remembered that it had good reviews when released, and I see now that it scored 87% on the semi reliable Rottentomatoes.

I agree with most of the review extracts I can see at Rottentomatoes - it's frequently suspenseful, surprising, and so well crafted.     It's hard to describe the ending without giving anything away - but it hits with quite an emotional punch.

I think it's pretty rare to find a scare movie that is emotionally resonant - although, I must say, I think that that was the reason that Poltergeist was so successful.  You really did feel the emotion between the parents and the daughter in that film, too.  [And, I will add, that there is one sequence in the film which some might say is very derivative of Poltergeist - but I found it entirely forgiveable. In fact, now that I think of it, thematically  the movies are perhaps a bit similar in a more general sense, too.]