6 dimensional chess?

What is going on in Australian political reporting?

The Murdoch tabloid press has decided to run prominently the fact that Barnaby Joyce is the subject of pretty clear Twitter suggestions from his enemy Tony Windsor that he's been sexually harassing a young staffer who has since departed the scene.   (Seems the Weinstein publicity has been used as reason to bring it up now.)   Right wing bloggers Bolt and Blair are happy to draw attention to it too.

But Fairfax and the Guardian are steering clear of it (so far - I think.)

What interest does the Murdoch tabloid press - apparent friend to the Nationals - have in promoting such rumour?  Do they think a pre-emptive airing of the issue helps Joyce in the long run, rather than letting it slip at the start of a likely by-election campaign?   I've seen someone on Twitter suggest that it was actually part of a plot to discredit both Turnbull and Joyce so as to let Team Abbott (precise membership - about 3 as far as I can tell) make a leadership move and start all over again!  Surely that can't be right.  But look at the reaction of Bolt - saying that if its true (even though we have such scant detail) - then Joyce is a goner.   Seems a premature assessment to me. 

The news in any event does make some sense, in that Joyce seemed exceptionally glum after the citizenship issue came to light.   Sure, that was embarrassing for him, but it did always seem to me that his appearance of having slipped into depression over it was a bit of an overreaction.  

Euthanasia arrives in Australia, soon?

This Victorian push for euthanasia laws seemed to arrive pretty much out of no where, didn't it?

Oddly, I notice that opponents have included some unusual bed fellows, such as Paul Keating, and Sinclair Davidson.   (They wake up screaming in the morning.)   The former thinks it's a case of "sending the wrong message", and the latter says he doesn't like slippery slope arguments, but it's a slippery slope.  The state will be coming to encourage him to drink the hemlock soon, apparently.

 In any event, I am pleased that some notably non religious people have, for once, made an argument that aligns with religious views, but using secular arguments.   I find it surprising that (as far as I know) not one prominent non religious person has made a similar approach on same sex marriage.  I find that rather irritating, because I actually think my lack of support* for SSM is not particularly religiously motivated.   (In fact, I think that Catholicism is in the throes of coming to terms with a modern understanding of sexuality whereby homosexuality as a practice is not going to be viewed as inherently sinful.)

As for the Victorian law, it does seem from this description of how it would work to be relatively conservative, as far as these types of laws go.   It doesn't appear to enough to allow relatives wanting the suffering of an uncommunicative loved one ended early by euthanasia if said patient has not already asked for it:  even though I guess that is actually probably the circumstance in which most people would like to see it able to be deployed.  

It's a bit like SSM  - I don't support the law myself, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it being introduced in as "safe" a form as possible.   Certainly, the type of "anyone should be allowed to top themselves with help whenever they want" nuttiness of Philip Nitschke should be rejected thoroughly.  His involvement with the movement probably set it back politically a decade, at least.


* I am simply not voting in the current flawed exercise.

In other religion news..

The good reviews for Thor: Ragnarok, which indicate it's pretty much a comedy, make me inclined to see it.   (Many reviews note that Jeff Goldblum is at his peak of Goldblum-anity in it, and perhaps that alone may make it worthwhile.)  

This led me to Google the topic of modern Thor worship, and to a slew of articles from 2015/16 about an Icelandic religious group about to build a modern Norse temple in Reyjkavik.  It would appear that it is was supposed to be finished this year, but isn't yet.   In fact, I can't even see what it is meant to look like, although one of the links notes:

The temple will be circular and will be dug 13 feet down into a hill overlooking the Icelandic capital Reykjavik, with a dome on top to let in the sunlight. It will host weddings and funerals.

It goes on:

Iceland's neo-pagans still celebrate the ancient sacrificial ritual of 'Blot' with music, reading, eating and drinking, but nowadays leave out the slaughter of animals.  

Can't they make mock sacrificial animals out of tofu, with beetroot juice standing in for blood?  (Just trying to be helpful).

Anyway, perhaps these guys, who appear to like to dress in quaint fashion, didn't have enough money to get the temple up as fast as they would have liked. 

100 years ago in Portugal

Non Catholics may have missed the fact that this month marks the 100th anniversary of the Marian apparition at Fatima, but Catholic media has been reminding its readers.

I have written before that it is rather odd (or just a sign of advancing age) that in my own lifetime, the diminution of devotion to Mary has been such a clear evolutionary change in the Catholic Church:  at least in Australia, and, I suspect all English speaking countries.     All tied up with feminism as a broad movement, I guess.

The events at Fatima remain about the strangest Marian event of all.  The prophesies have sort of lost their mystery and significance, but the "Miracle of the Sun" is one of the oddest cases of an alleged multiple witness miracle ever recorded.   I was creeped out in my teen years by reading a book that noted that many accounts of it sounded like a UFO disk obscuring the sun, and suggesting that the whole event was a case of trickster aliens messing with poor Portuguese kids minds.   (Readers with long memories may recall I mentioned this 8 years ago.)

In any event, here's a post which sets out some more background information to the events in Portugal which I don't recall reading about before.  Apparently, a spiritualist circle in Portugal was predicting the day of the first Marian apparition (in May) as one of great significance.   Peculiar, or pure coincidence?

A lot of killing

NPR has an interesting story up:

Declassified Files Lay Bare U.S. Knowledge Of Mass Murders In Indonesia

which is all about the ruthless killing in the mid 60's of communists/ communist supporters by the Indonesian Army under Sukarno (and then Suharto?):

At the time these memos were sent, from the closing months of 1965 through the opening months of 1966, the Indonesian military was engaged in a brutal crackdown on its communist party and suspected supporters. Prompted by an alleged coup attempt, the military collaborated with Muslim militias in the systematic murder of at least 500,000 people and the imprisonment of even more.

I wonder which side the modern wingnut wants to take, given the choice between Muslim militia and communists.   Anyway, more detail:

The CIA would later describe the atrocities as "one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s."

And while it's been known for some time the U.S. was aware — and was reportedly at times even an active supporter — of the crackdown as it unfolded, scholar Brad Simpson tells NPR the newly available documents "show in even greater detail how the U.S. Embassy was receiving a stream of updates and intelligence information about the scope and extent of the killing from the very start."

Simpson, director of the National Security Archive's Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project, says the U.S. maintained a policy of public silence, even as he says Washington quietly began supporting Indonesia "in the form of financial assets and communications equipment" in late October 1965. This was around the same time one Indonesian official told embassy staff "that the Army had already executed many communists but that this fact must be very closely held."

One month later, another declassified consular dispatch from the city of Surabaya reported the scene there: 25 bodies spotted floating in a river by a missionary, 29 more spotted in the river by another, at least five railway stations closed, with employees afraid to come to work "since some of them have been murdered."

One of the missionaries "heard largest slaughter had taken place at Tulungagung where reportedly 15000 Communists killed," according to the cable.

Late in December, less than a month later, the embassy told the State Department of the "striking Army success" in consolidating power: Despite Indonesian President Sukarno's protests against the military's "jolts" against the PKI, those jolts had continued, resulting "in an estimated 100,000 deaths."

At least the killings were being carried out "evidently on lesser scale and in more discreet manner," the U.S. consul in Surabaya observed at the end of the month. "Generally victims are taken out of populous areas before being killed and bodies are being buried rather than thrown into river."

 It's easy to forget how much mayhem there was in South East Asia in that period, even without considering Cambodia and Vietnam...

Kiwi Labour's turn

I don't think many people were expecting Winston Peters to side with Labour forming the government in New Zealand.   

A case of the writing on the wall for Malcolm Turnbull, I'm afraid.

Malcolm is in such a long run of  bad Newspolls, legislative failures in the Senate, and sniping from Abbott, that it really feels like Australia has already been treading water for a long time while waiting for a change of government that is still so far away.

But then again, I suppose in theory, if one B Joyce has to go to a by-election, we could see an earlier than expected change of government.  Not holding my breath, though.

Fusion woes

Would be sort of funny for any libertarian techno-optimist who supported Brexit ("these regulations, they're just holding back our glorious techno future utopia") if this comes to pass:

Europe’s largest fusion reactor, the Joint European Torus, could be shut down in the wake of Brexit.

(Mind you, I'm a fusion skeptic, myself.  Still....)

Just an observation...

Tim Blair does go on, and on, and on, about how much TV and radio stars make, doesn't he?  Or rather, about how much TV and radio stars that appear to be of Left-ish persuasion make.

I don't know that I have ever seen much interest expressed in how much Bolt makes, nor the other Sky News mini Fox News wannabe hosts.  

I think it sufficient to say - all media stars get paid what seem to nearly everyone to be ridiculous amounts of money.   Fights over who gets paid what, and the fairness of it, have been around for many years.  

The current Wilkinson wars are pretty uninteresting, if you ask me.

More on China and its international loans system

The Atlantic notes that China finances poor countries' development projects in a way that America has a problem with.   America probably has a point - but I can't see that the protectionist mood of Trump will in any way help change it.

A lava tube called home

Hey, I only recently mentioned lava tubes on the Moon as the obvious place for a future Moon base, and here's one that's been identified. 

What cheering news ....

Vox notes that Young Adult dystopia fiction is "out" (which is a bit of a pity for that long delayed final movie in the Mazerunner series), but it's been replaced by something worse - teen suicide:

In the early 2010s, young adult dystopias were so prevalent as to be a cliché. They were major best-sellers, and the basis of major film franchises. The Hunger Games made Jennifer Lawrence a household name. 

Those are not the stories that are making waves now. After the election of Donald Trump, as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale climbed the best-seller lists, the emerging consensus was that the American people craved fiction about the destruction of the world to help them express the terror and uncertainty they felt about the future. But YA dystopias — the books that just a few years ago appeared to grant publishers a license to print money — have not experienced the same sort of sales bump. And no new YA dystopias have emerged to take the place of old stalwarts like Divergent and The Hunger Games.

Instead, a new kind of story is filling the niche in pop culture that YA dystopias used to occupy: the teen suicide story. Throughout this year, a new obsession has formed around books and TV shows like 13 Reasons Why, and stories about the spread of the (likely fictional) Russian game Blue Whale. The fatalism and self-destructive fantasies that our culture once expressed in teen dystopias have begun to come out in teen suicide narratives.

It's a pretty good article, if rather depressing.

Lots of adults of my vintage have been complaining for decades that most young adult fiction published (and studied in high school English) is depressing - concentrating on broken families and relationship crises of one kind or another.   I suppose, though, that most of it was meant to be ultimately about surviving it.

I don't really understand why there isn't some concerted pushback by authors or publishers to try and deliberately revive optimism and adventure in YA fiction.   (As young adult science fiction used to be in the 50's and 60's.)   But fantasy should be given a break - it doesn't teach realistic optimism for the world as it is.

Rather ironically, the way to be optimistic now regarding the future of the planet is to actually hope that the social conservatives who complain about fictional pessimism are defeated in their stupid, stupid conspiracy fantasy that the world isn't heating.   It's an odd situation - the way to be optimistic is to kill off those who claim to be anti-pessimists.   (Not literally, of course.  Kill off their ideas.   Gulags may or may not be necessary.)

Update:  just thought of another irony -  there seems to be a good case that it's the ageing white social conservatives who are disproportionately dying in the US from the opioid epidemic, and that it is their psychic pain of being left behind that makes them willing users of the drugs that often kill them.  So young people are dying because they are pessimistic about the world the oldies are leaving them (well, that and the damaging effect of social media);  older people are dying because the world is changing too much for them in other ways.   It's like a perfect storm of national discontent.  

A clean energy question

Given that it seems you can now get solar panels and battery storage at useful levels for around $12,000 to $15,000 (perhaps cheaper, if you don't use the Tesla powerwall), and that the cost of an average-ish house build here is (I would guess) around $250,000*, why doesn't it make sense for government to mandate it in house construction?    I mean, it's like a 5% increase in the cost of building, but with the money paid up front coming back in saved power costs to the owner-occupier anyway.

And while we are at it, what about compulsory solar hot water too?

There might be some locations and house positions where it would not work - but I suspect if you are putting it in from the start, you can make it work well enough in most cases. 

*  Update:  actually one site puts it at $300,000, which only helps my argument

In some optimistic, "we can do it" clean energy news...

*  NPR has an article about how Alaska actually has a lot of experience at running successful mini grids to buffer power outages (not always with clean energy, but still.)   One thing I was surprised to read in it was the successful use of flywheel technology to buffer demand:

In 2007, the utility set a goal of 95 percent renewable power. It built a handful of wind turbines, plus a bank of batteries to supplement the community's hydro power. That worked for a while. But then came a new challenge: the Kodiak port wanted to replace its old diesel-powered crane with a giant electric one.

The 340-foot tall shipping crane would be a massive power hog. Demand would spike every time it lifted a container off a cargo ship. When Rick Kniaziowski, the terminal manager for the shipping company Matson, first asked about getting it, the head of the local utility said no.

"His eyes got really big," Kniaziowski says. He was told, "Everyone's TVs are going to brown out, and they're either going to hate you or they're going to hate us.'"

But the utility looked around for a solution, and it found a European company, ABB, that offered a new kind of energy storage: flywheels.

There are two here now. From the outside, they look like a couple of white trailers behind a chain-link fence. But inside, they're cutting edge sci fi. In the corner of each trailer is a "six and a half ton of spinning mass," says KEA's Richcreek. "It's in a frictionless vacuum chamber hovered by magnets."

Here's how it works: When there's excess power on the grid, it spins the flywheel. The flywheel stores that energy as motion, and then pumps it back out the second a big surge is needed. When the crane isn't operating, the flywheels respond to fluctuations in wind power, working with the batteries to stabilize the grid. Kodiak is one of the first places in the world to use flywheels this way.

 *  The BBC has a short video up about the benefits of floating solar power.   I want someone to push my idea that part of the Snowy Hydro 2 project be powered by floating solar panels on the upper dams, powering the pumps that will bring water uphill for later release.   Send me the money now for this great idea!

*  Over at MIT, they are working on very high temperature ceramic pump components, with the idea being that super heated metals (rather than lower temperature molten salts) can be used to store excess renewable energy.

*  In the US, they are finding that improvements in wind turbine efficiency are so good it makes sense to refurbish some wind farms well ahead of their original estimated 30 year life.

It's all too complicated

I have a confession to make:   I feel I don't understand Australian energy issues enough to be able to write about them.

I didn't really get my brain around the Finkel proposal for a Clean Energy Target and how it was meant to work.   The main sign that it probably wasn't a bad idea was the fact that Tony Abbott, Alan Moran, Judith Sloan - all ideologically motivated climate science deniers - didn't like it.   But the problem is, the well intentioned environmentalists have come up with not great ideas before (emissions trading schemes instead of simpler and transparent carbon taxes), so energy policy just has this aspect that you can't always trust anyone to have the best idea.

Even today, with a vague sounding Turnbull energy plan, we have the mismatched pairing of Tony Abbott (poisonous shallow policy windvane) thinking it a win, as well as Peter Martin (moderate relatively reliable economics journalist).  But Greg Jericho - who I think would agree with Martin's takes about 90% of the time, tweets with apparent approval a Renew Economy post that is scathing of the policy.

I need more time for more commentary before I feel I can have a strong opinion.

In other TV viewing

I watched the first episode of the ABC's new attempt at a movie (and now TV) review show - Screen Time.

I have issues with it.

The main one is that, while I know any review/arts show on ABC or SBS is not going to have any reviewer who is  not of the left/liberal persuasion,  you at least had the feeling with Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton that they did not always see eye to eye on certain things such as acceptable levels of violence in film, and sometimes on feminist or other issues too. 

But this panel, perhaps because they are all so close in age, give no real sign at all of ever disagreeing seriously on anything.  There was perfect unanimity, for example, that shows depicting women talking frankly about sex (going back to Sex and the City, but also as reflected in Girls, and a recent show I haven't seen) were all great, groundbreaking stuff that was always refreshing and so well written, etc etc.  No one tried to slip in the (truthful and common) critique that Sex and the City was produced by a gay man and routinely felt more like listening to a circle of gay men talking sex than realistic mature women.  Sure they have the Pakistani male comedian on too, but he appears as liberal as they come.  Sort of a version of Waleed Aly - someone who viewers might ostensibly think by virtue of cultural background might occasionally express a conservative-ish view, but who can be safely relied upon never to do so and upset the happy panel vibe.   

Benjamin Law is on the panel too - a guy who can talk intelligently when he's not continuing his tweets about poo and gay sex, but whose own talent as a sitcom writer is, in my opinion, vastly overrated in a similar way as is virtually all comedy done by gay people working at the ABC and SBS.  The problem is, I think his views are going to be forever predictable.

I also really had a problem with the clips they showed from TV and movies in a time slot between 8 and 8.30 pm.   One from Girls in which a guy masturbating was made exceptionally clear, with the organ itself just barely out of shot?   A ridiculous pool sex scene from Showgirls?    Why did this think this was a good time slot to be showing these?

So, yeah, I did have a problem with the format, the people involved, and the selection of clips used.   

I don't think it is going to work.

Uh oh

I was half watching the Australian Story on Monday night about boxer Jeff Horn and his hard won fight with Pacquiao in Brisbane a few months back.  

First, I didn't realise until I saw more video of the fight that Horn did look so close to collapsing in whatever round it was.  Didn't realise there was so much blood flowing either.

But - the main thing of note was the concern his wife and family has that he doesn't cause himself brain damage by sticking around the ring for too long.   And then, Horn himself said something like "some nights I find I can't remember what I did during the day, and I worry is it just because I am so busy?"   He said he has "had himself checked out" and he is fine,  but really, it seemed to me that he and his family do indeed have something to worry about. 

It was not disclosed how much he made from the fight, but really, I think it would be a good idea if he went back to teaching...

Wrong accusation not corrected

I find it hard to believe that any politician or public servant takes Sinclair Davidson seriously any more (well, maybe public servants never did), when he makes an accusation that they have done something wrong, he is quickly corrected about facts in comments, and then never puts an update in the post to alert readers that, yeah, he wasn't aware of something that negates his original claim.

This is yesterday's example.  

But there remain posts on the blog from years ago that were clear cases of plagiarism by a "guest" poster, and that has never been the subject of an update in the post itself. 

It's a strange way to run a blog if you want to be known as someone careful about facts,  or integrity in publishing plagiarism.

PS:  still waiting for stagflation to arrive, 6 years on, too.

China lends money

In The Atlantic, an article about China's rise as an international infrastructure developer:

Now it’s China’s turn. The scale and scope of the Belt and Road initiative is staggering. Estimates vary, but over $300 billion have already been spent, and China plans to spend $1 trillion more in the next decade or so. According to the CIA, 92 countries counted China as their largest exports or imports partner in 2015, far more than the United States at 57. What’s most astounding is the speed with which China achieved this. While the country was the world’s largest recipient of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans in the 1980s and 90s, in recent years, China alone loaned more to developing countries than did the World Bank....

Most of its funding will come in the form of loans, not grants, and Chinese state-owned enterprises will also be encouraged to invest. This means, for example, that if Pakistan can’t pay back its loans, China could own many of its coal mines, oil pipelines, and power plants, and thus have enormous leverage over the Pakistani government. In the meantime, China has the rights to operate the Gwadar port for 40 years.

Doesn't it seem to Americans that "America First" protectionism in terms of trade under Trump is only going to help China in its task of achieving world economic dominance?

Kimmy continues

I'm still watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (first series) on Netflix, and found last night's viewed episode "Kimmy Rides a Bike" particularly funny.

It is definitely an oddball show, and one where the unrealistic silliness of some (most?) of the jokes sometimes doesn't work, but at other times, it does to hilarious effect. 

This episode I refer to features heavy satire of incompetent lawyers (based on the OJ Simpson case); gulliby religious mid-Americans; and the Soul Cycle fitness chain which (as far as I know) has not yet extended its tentacles to Australia (correction: not very far, at least).   The over the top unveiling of the true nature of the cycling guru was so, I don't know, audaciously silly I am still thinking about it today...

The case for Titan (which doesn't convince me)

At NPR, a planetary scientist writes about the advantages of colonising Titan rather than Mars (or the Moon.) 

But the one clear benefit - a thick atmosphere that means protection on the surface from space radiation, and no need for a pressure suit as such - seems to me to overly offset by the freezing atmosphere which keeps water ice frozen solid and makes lakes full of frozen methane.   (Also - it's a long, long trip.)

Until you have great constant thrust rocket engines, I just can't see the value of talking about colonisation of such a distant part of the solar system.

And, as I have argued many times before, if the Moon turns out to have enough ice near the poles or elsewhere, and you have to wear a space suit on either Mars or the Moon on the surface, you may as well live on the closer neighbour, especially if there are convenient lava tubes in which to build underground. 

Oddly, the one thing the Trump administration and I agree on is a desire for a Moon base.    But the wishes are like those we have seen made by Presidents over many decades since Apollo:  all rather pie in the sky unless Congress pays for it and NASA is given a clear direction that isn't about to be overturned by the next administration.  Slate had an article recently against the idea, and that is the first sign that it won't happen.  Not yet, anyway.