Journalist catches up with me

Over at Vox, German Lopez writes at length about how the American opioid epidemic has changed his opinion on legalisation of drugs.   (He now thinks free market legalisation is a bad idea, basically because the opioid problem shows addiction to hard drugs is a problem that doesn't readily self regulate.  And it kills people, a lot.)

I was making pretty much the same observation back in 2014.

Better late than never, German.

She's back...

The rather odd Helen Dale is back in the paper, because she's publishing a second novel.

I note that, in the non judgemental piece by Latika Bourke  (who, by the way, seems to lead the most extraordinarily peripatetic existence for a journalist - I find it hard to believe her boss pays for so much travel, and wonder if she is independently wealthy)  Dale notes another short term venture of hers in the past:

Her second novel will appear under her real name and there will be no pretences about its origins. Kingdom of the Wicked came about while she was studying at Oxford funded by a scholarship won through the US-based Institute of Humane Studies. When Dale realised she had six months left and there would be no 100,000-word doctoral thesis in the pipeline, but rather a follow-up to her vexed literary debut, she returned the remaining funds.

"I made sure I wrote to them personally and apologised for what I'd done. They weren't hugely happy but I did at least give some money back," she said.

She does seem to have moved from job to job an unusually large number of times, if you ask me...

Update:  The Australian is running a lengthy, though apparently edited, extract from her introduction to the re-issue of her first book.  I must say, unless it's the editing that has done it, but I don't think it is well written at all.

I don't think she has any idea how she sounds when she talks about herself:  self aggrandisement seems always to be lurking so close to the surface.  Yet she has her followers on the libertarian Right - Sinclair Davidson seems especially smitten with her and her writing.  I find her tedious at the best of times...

Health spending charted

NPR has a short article up about international health spending per capita, and its relationship to good health outcomes.

In the chart at the link, you can hover over each dot to see the spending in each country.  Australia is in the grouping just to the right of Japan and the UK.   (I see that Singapore is in the same grouping, too, right beside Australia actually.)

Once again, it seems abundantly clear that the US system is a ridiculous outlier which wastes money for no great results to show for it.

Kind of encouraging

Experts excited by brain 'wonder-drug' 

No proper trials yet, but one of the drugs is already used for depression, meaning that trialling it for dementia can happen quickly.

Can I just say...

...I don't understand British politics.  The Conservatives didn't really want Brexit, did they? - or at least the PM didn't want it.   But when it narrowly lost, they tossed the towel in and are acting as if a not quite 2% majority decision (in a country with non compulsory voting) is an overwhelming clear endorsement of "leave".   Now with a new leader seemingly wanting to be styled Thatcher 2, it's off to an unnecessary election to (seemingly) just rub it into the face of Labour that they've got a useless leader at the moment.   (As to how and why he is so poorly regarded - I don't really know.)  And as for high profile Conservative Boris Johnson - I don't think he has risen above the poor expectations that most people had of him in the Foreign Secretary role. 

Amusingly, I see that one economist writing at The Conversation claims that the election is being held now out of concern for a worsening economic outlook for Britain, yet people in comments were quick to point out that he was only predicting 6 weeks ago that the Budget and economic outlook meant there would not be an early election. 

Anyway, the Wikipedia entry on it fills in a bit of detail - including the way the country has swung from one side to the other over the decades about whether it wanted to be in the EU, or not.

I find it hard to believe that all of the energy that needs to be devoted to replacing current arrangements is not going to be a waste of time and effort compared to simply staying in and trying to make bones of contention better. 

The American conservative brand has a bit of a PR problem

What with Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes gone from Fox News in circumstances which sound like, if you saw it in a movie, you would find hard to believe (and along those lines, let's not forget Sean Hannity pointing a gun at a co-host), and a President who cheated on a wife and thought barging into women's dressing rooms was fun, it does seem as if American conservatives have a real image problem.   But do they care?   Probably not - culture wars, you know, means you can excuse anything as long as it is not the other side.

Update:   Good grief - look at this story - O'Reilly's replacement couldn't be bothered apologising to a spokeswoman for an appallingly sexist attitude shown by his brother in an email accidentally sent to her.

Back to normal

I noted a rare moment of agreement with a position taken by one S Davidson the other day.

Of course it wouldn't last.  The Last Blog in the World You Would Want to Consult on Issues of Racism (or economics, or climate change, or renewable energy) has its owner, one Sinclair Davidson, and most of the commenters, making the completely hyperbolic claim that the ALP is racist for questioning whether a black Kenyan Senator was technically eligible to take the seat vacated by her party mate.

Does he (and his team of decrepit minions) have any evidence at all to back up race as a motivation?   Of course not.  It's just a silly game being hypocritically played by people who dislike it when Lefties call them homophobic for arguing against gay marriage, for example.   And by a economist with apparent  cluelessness about "ape" being able to be used as a racist taunt.

 

A bit of over-reach

I'm referring to the headline:

Mark Zuckerberg just signed the death warrant for the smartphone

Having read the article, put me in the "not convinced" column.

(For one thing, the "screen door effect" when you try on VR googles seems not the easiest thing to overcome.  Certainly, I expect it's going to be quite a while still before watching a TV show via a VR device is going to be as clear as watching it on, say,  a 60 inch Ultra High Definition TV a few meters in front of you.  Or, I could be completely wrong...)

Not a case of "Always look on the bright side.."

This BBC article How Western Civilisation Could Collapse is not bad, I think.

This section is of particular interest:

According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception. By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the Empire in.

So far, modern Western societies have largely been able to postpone similar precipitators of collapse through fossil fuels and industrial technologies – think hydraulic fracturing coming along in 2008, just in time to offset soaring oil prices. Tainter suspects this will not always be the case, however. “Imagine the costs if we have to build a seawall around Manhattan, just to protect against storms and rising tides,” he says. Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity, as our ancestors did when they increasingly ran societies on fossil fuels.”

Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.

Meanwhile, a widening gap between rich and poor within those already vulnerable Western nations will push society toward further instability from the inside. “By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority,” Randers says. “What will collapse is equity.”

The black culture question

I see that a Slate column by Jamelle Bouie, criticising a recent bit of  conservative commentary by Andrew Sullivan in which he raised the the success of Asian Americans as a way of questioning the "social justice brigade's" take on why Black Americans are not so successful, is interesting and has attracted more than 4,000 comments.

The truth is, it's a topic I don't really know enough about to be confident of a strong opinion.  I mean, on the one hand, yes, sure, it does seem that Asian Americans reap the reward of hard work, close knit families and high emphasis on education; and it sure seems obvious that in a cultural sense, it's a lot better path than the single parenthood and drug and gangster culture that seems to have become such a norm in at least some American inner cities.  On the other hand, I guess self selection of Asian migrants already with a good education is a thing too; and do you remember that D'Souza clip that obnoxious Right wingers loved when he attacked the college student?  (My goodness, I saw even Nassim Taleb twitter linked to it recently - confirming he's a pretty obnoxious blowhard himself.)   Well, that college student raised a perfectly legitimate point - that blacks were facing clear governmental financial discrimination in the post World War 2 period, and shouldn't we expect that would have long on going consequences?  But then to swing around again - how long do you have to keep trying to compensate for the wrongs of the past before you should expect it to be having a clear effect?  And in any event, is our picture of American society really accurate?   After all, it seems its the struggling white Americans with low education who are killing themselves off now.  If the poorly educated rural white folk are getting desperate and depressed over the way the economy is treating them for the last 20 years, do we have much reason to argue that inner city black folk should just pull themselves up and get on with it despite a much, much lengthy history of being at the losing end of economic treatment? 

All a complicated issue, no doubt.

A foolish column

I was just about to write that I thought Adam Creighton's column in The Australian yesterday, in which he claims that he would vote for Le Pen if he were French, was very foolish.  Then I discovered that even Sinclair Davidson would seem to agree with my assessment.  (!)

Creighton seems to be taking the Peter Thiel line that things need a gigantic shake up, and hey! may as well let the ethnic/race baiting, fact challenged contender do it because who cares about their actual policies?   (As someone else on the net has suggested, maybe this means he would be a Pauline Hanson voter in Australia, using the same logic.)

Creighton even seems to indicate he doesn't care for a lot of what Le Pen would do, or if he does agree, he devotes no time to the question of how many people would get hurt in the process of her blowing things up (figuratively).

I'm routinely not impressed by Adam, but when the stars are aligned such that even Sinclair Davidson doesn't agree with him on this,  I'll take that as a sign I must be right.


 

To Redcliffe

What a nice Easter Sunday. Brisbane has finally left the sweltering summer, nights are cooler and sunrise is at a more reasonable hour, along with days of 26 or 27 degrees.  Lovely.

Yesterday we also took advantage of favourable tides and headed to Redcliffe to fish and have a look around.   I was recently told that they had opened a fishing platform at the mouth of the Pine River, on the Redcliffe end of the now demolished Hornibrook Highway (a long, extremely lumpy, bridge that connected Sandgate/Brighton to the peninsula.)

What a good job they've done with it, too.  Lots of shade, seats, two tables for cleaning fish, a sizeable car park, and two robo toilets of the type that self clean, play music while inside, dispense toilet paper and hand soap, and open automatically after ten minutes.   I think the platform has been open for a couple of years now, but these hi tech toilets are in good condition.  Do people respect the effort robo toilets put in?

And then there was the fishing.  Lots of little  bream and other species meant lots of bites and lots of fish caught, but all released.  Other people there, though, had caught bigger fish, so it didn't feel a waste.  Good fun.

Then we drove around to the Redcliffe jetty and the shopping area that fronts it.   Yes, Redcliffe is starting to look upmarket.   Sure, I think the area still has its fair share of car hoons and very cheap housing away from the water, but there is no doubt the gentrification is proceeding at a faster pace than I had realised.

As a particular example, we went looking for an afternoon beer, and went into the very old Ambassador Hotel.  I see from the website that it calls its front bar "working class", which is actually code for "has not been upgraded for 50 years."  It's really unattractive, but what's worse is the old, old fashioned selection of beer on tap - your basic XXXX and Carlton beer, not even a token nod to the craft beer movement by way of a James Squire.   It was like a bar teleported from 1970.

So, we had noticed a fancier place (the understatement of the decade) a block up the road, and went there.   Here's what it looks like: 

They had live music, James Squires in several varieties, an outside area with views of the bay, and looked liked it belonged more in the middle of the Gold Coast (or Noosa) rather than old Redcliffe.  It seems to be an apartment hotel.  (I've since checked - it is.  Called Mon Komo, it's managed by the Oaks chain, although it looks like it's also part residential. I don't think it's long been open.   One suspects it will at least corner the higher end wedding reception market for anywhere close to Redcliffe.)    Remarkably pleasant.

Friday, good

I've always felt it's best to let Good Friday be one of quiet contemplation, and simple food, at home - going out and camping or having fun of some type just doesn't fit in with the theme of the day.

So I had a particularly quiet day yesterday, and found on the shelf a book I bought at a remainder  place a few years ago and never got around to reading - Murder at Golgotha, by Ian Wilson.

Wilson is a historian (originally from England, but living in Brisbane for a long time now) who has written many historical books on Christian topics - most notably, he remains a defender of the authenticity of the Turin Shroud (yes, despite the carbon dating results.)

You may think his position on that hurts his credibility greatly, but I really find he still has a disarming writing style the makes him quite persuasive.   (I'm a bit of a fence sitter on the Shroud, as it happens.  I think it more likely a forgery, but there are quite a few oddities about it that really make me wonder about the extraordinary care that was taken in its creation to reflect what a real crucified body would look like.)

Anyway, Murder at Golgotha is an easy to read account of the Easter story, in which Wilson picks out the Gospel details which he finds most convincing, and the reasons why.  (He feels John gives the most authentic version, actually.)  He also spends quite a bit of time discrediting Mel Gibson's The Passion of the The Christ, a movie which I have only seen a bit of, but it was enough to make me think it was rather ludicrous in its depiction of the violence.

I learnt a thing or two, and it actually made it very easy to visualise the events in a more or less authentic fashion, in contrast to movies and art.

I thereby had an entirely appropriate Good Friday.  Wilson hasn't written anything for a while, and he would be in his 70's now.  I think he may actually live on my side of town, and he is a Catholic.   Would be nice to see him in a Church and say "hi, enjoyed your work..."  

Revolutionary fiction

Tariq Ali, who I hadn't heard of for quite a while, had an interesting piece in the Guardian recently, about the literature that influenced Lenin.

Apparently, it was a near unreadable utopian novel by one Chernyshevsky which influenced him most.  I guess its terrible reputation as literature is a reason I don't think it counts as a famous book these days.  Just goes to show the writing doesn't have to be good to be disastrously influential.   From the article:

The writer who had perhaps the strongest impact on Lenin – on, indeed, an entire generation of radicals and revolutionaries – was Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was the son of a priest, as well as a materialist philosopher and socialist. His utopian novel What Is to Be Done? was written in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, where he had been incarcerated because of his political beliefs. What Is to Be Done? became the bible of a new generation. The fact that it had been smuggled out of prison gave it an added aura. This was the book that radicalised Lenin, long before he encountered Marx (with whom Chernyshevsky had exchanged letters). As a homage to the old radical populist, Lenin titled his first major political work, written and published in 1902, What Is to Be Done?

The enormous success of Chernyshevsky’s novel greatly irritated the established novelists, Turgenev in particular, who attacked the book viciously. This bile was countered with a burning lash of nettles from the radical critics Dobrolyubov (regarded by students as “our Diderot”) and Pisarev. Turgenev was livid. Encountering Chernyshevsky at a public event, he shouted: “You’re a snake and that Dobrolyubov is a rattlesnake.”

What of the novel that was the subject of so much controversy? Over the last 50 years I have made three attempts to read every single page, and all three attempts have failed. It is not a classic of Russian literature. It was of its time and played a crucial role in the post-terrorist phase of the Russian intelligentsia. It is undoubtedly very radical on every front, especially gender equality and relations between men and women, but also on how to struggle, how to delineate the enemy and how to live by certain rules.

Vladimir Nabokov loathed Chernyshevsky but found it impossible to ignore him. In his last Russian novel, The Gift, he devoted 50 pages to belittling and mocking the writer and his circle, but admitted that there “was quite definitively a smack of class arrogance about the attitudes of contemporary well-born writers towards the plebeian Chernyshevsky” and, in private, that “Tolstoy and Turgenev called him the ‘bed-bug stinking gentleman’ … and jeered at him in all kinds of ways”.

Their jeers were partly born of jealousy, since the subject of their snobbery was extremely popular with the young, and born also, in the case of Turgenev, of a deep and ingrained political hostility to a writer who wanted a revolution to destroy the landed estates and distribute the land to the peasants.

Lenin used to get cross with young Bolsheviks visiting him in exile, during the inter-revolutionary years between 1905 and 1917, when they teased him about Chernyshevsky’s book and told him it was unreadable. They were too young to appreciate its depth and vision, he retorted. They should wait till they were 40. Then they would understand that Chernyshevsky’s philosophy was based on simple facts: we were descended from the apes and not Adam and Eve; life was a short-lived biological process, hence the need to bring happiness to every individual. This was not possible in a world dominated by greed, hatred, war, egoism and class. That was why a social revolution was necessary.

Well, I can't say that I had realised that a radical change in gender relations was so closely tied from the earliest days of  Russian revolutionary thought. I see the book is downloadable (all 488 pages of it!) in English translation here.   I've a quick scan - it does seem incredibly turgid, and to mainly be about relationships.   Amazing what people read before TV/movies/the internet....  

Mark it in your calendar

It seems the ageing Japanese Emperor would like to abdicate, and it looks like the government will let it happen, but not until December 2018:

The Japanese government is planning to hold a ceremony for Emperor Akihito’s envisioned abdication in December 2018, in what would be the nation’s first such ceremony in around 200 years, government sources said Wednesday.

The last time Japan held a ceremony for an emperor’s abdication was 1817, when Emperor Kokaku relinquished the Chrysanthemum throne. The government will consider how to materialize the plan by studying documents describing ceremonial manners for abdications in the past.

The abdication ceremony is planned to be held aside from a series of enthronement ceremonies for Crown Prince Naruhito. It may be treated as a state act that requires Diet approval for conducting, the sources said.

Mind you, I wonder whether one reason for the delay is the amount of time it would seem to take to prepare for the enthronement ceremony of his son.   The Wikipedia entry indicates there is a lot of perfection involved:

First, two special rice paddies are chosen and purified by elaborate Shinto purification rites. The families of the farmers who are to cultivate the rice in these paddies must be in perfect health. Once the rice is grown and harvested, it is stored in a special Shinto shrine as its goshintai (御神体), the embodiment of a kami or divine force. Each kernel must be whole and unbroken, and is individually polished before it is boiled. Some sake is also brewed from this rice.

Individually polished rice??

Wikipedia links to a NYT report on the enthronement of Akihito in 1990 (I really had forgotten that Hirohito had lived so long after WW2.)  It's interesting to see that some Left wingers in the country went as far as firebombing some Shinto shrines in protest that the ceremony seemed to be affirming the old idea that it made the Emperor a living Shinto god.  I wonder if the same controversy will happen again, or if Left wingers are less radical now than before.

And, of course, there is the fascinating question of whether the ceremony also implies some symbolic sexual congress with the Sun goddess:

Many articles, for instance, have put forth various theories of scholars about the function of a matted bed and coverlet in the inner sanctum. Some experts have suggested that the Emperor lies on the bed and transforms himself into a god or in some fashion communes, perhaps in a symbolically sexual way, with the spirit of the sun goddess.

In response to these theories, the ritualists of the Imperial Household Agency have said that the bed is used as a resting place for the sun goddess but that the Emperor never touches it.

Expect some similar coverage next year, then...

Increasing evidence the US did elect a 12 year old

Seriously, I keep saying that the way Trump speaks reminds me of a primary school kid, but it's also the content.  What adult goes into a diversion about how nice the cake was?  And as for the way this Fox News interviewer acts - she sounds like a high school journalist asking her bestie how that really important first date went.

The Quartz article headline has it right:
  
All the giggly, giddy weirdness of Trump and Fox Business News in one clip

As for what Xi Jinping really thinks of Trump - he's a tad concerned about Trump conducting foreign policy by Twitter, apparently.  As we all should be...

Update:  Furthermore, how do you square Trump's tweet about going it alone on North Korea if China doesn't help with what he said to the WSJ?:

Apparently, Trump came into his first meeting with the Chinese leader, in early April, convinced that China could simply eliminate the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program. Xi then patiently explained Chinese-Korean history to Trump — who then promptly changed his mind.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. ... But it’s not what you would think.”

It's like his incredible statement about  how "nobody knew health care could be so complicated."

A use for dragon blood

The BBC reports:

Komodo dragon blood contains an important compound which scientists think could offer a new treatment for infected wounds.

The reptile's saliva harbours many different types of bacteria, which somehow do not affect the dragon.

Scientists at George Mason University in the US created a synthetic compound based on a molecule in dragon blood that had antimicrobial activity.

They found it promoted the healing of infected wounds in mice.

Serial killers I had missed

I don't go out of my way to read of gruesome crimes, but I am a bit surprised that until yesterday, I don't recall reading about the "Bloody Benders", who bear the title "America's First Serial Killers".

A straight forward telling of their story, from 1870's Kansas, may be found here.  Wikipedia has a fairly detailed entry, too.  

What is particularly interesting, I think, is the link with Spiritualism, as well as the very "Sweeney Todd" aspect of victims being dumped into a cellar via a trap door in the floor.

As a medium, family member Kate was apparently giving out some rather unusual advice from the Spirit world.  From the book Psychological Consequences of the Civil War:

I have to say, if your medium is giving out advice like that, I don't think it's wise to accept an invitation to dinner at home.

Anyway, it seems to me that this would be great source material for a film - especially given that it is not clear as to what happened to the family.  Lots of room for speculation to be built into a screenplay "based on real events".

Is this why the American white working class is dying more?

From the New Yorker:

Case and Deaton published a second paper last month, in which they emphasized that the epidemic they had described was concentrated among white people without any college education. But they also searched for a source for what they had called despair. They wondered if a decline in income might explain the phenomenon, but that idea turned out not to fit the data so well. They noticed that another long-running pattern fit more precisely—a decline in what economists call returns to experience.

The return to experience is a way to describe what you get in return for aging. It describes the increase in wages that workers normally see throughout their careers. The return to experience tends to be higher for more skilled jobs: a doctor might expect the line between what she earns in her first year and what she earns in her fifties to rise in a satisfyingly steady upward trajectory; a coal miner might find it depressingly flat. But even workers with less education and skills grow more efficient the longer they hold a job, and so paying them more makes sense. Unions, in arguing for pay that rises with seniority, invoke a belief in the return to experience. It comes close to measuring what we might otherwise call wisdom.

“This decline in the return to experience closely matches the decline in attachment to the labor force,” Case and Deaton wrote. “Our data are consistent with a model in which the decline in real wages led to a reduction in labor force participation, with cascading effects on marriage, health, and mortality from deaths of despair.”

Runaway slaves

I think the Washington Post must have thought that this goes a bit with the Trump zeitgiest for hunting down illegal immigrants - but it is an interesting look at the advertisements that slave owners of America (including future presidents) would run in the papers offering rewards for returning runaway slaves.

[I think a satirist here could do a good one for Centrist Left looking for the recovery of Mark Latham.]