The Entertainer, part whatever

This is the sort of paranoia that Andrew Bolt and the Murdoch media has recently decided, for whatever reason, to play up to.  Oh, and congratulations to Sinclair Davidson too for hosting a blog where Hansonite levels of racial and cultural insult are always welcome:

A lucky escape

I see that there was flash flooding in Toronto yesterday.   Not sure if it was a storm with rainfall of record intensity.  (I see that reports say 72mm fell in two hours, but the record daily rainfall is more like 97mm;  so it depends on how quickly the 97mm fell, I suppose.)

Anyway, two guys in the city had a very lucky escape from a situation you wouldn't think should happen in a modern building:

The Black Creek had certainly risen before, and the basement parking lot at 501 Alliance Ave., which backs onto the winding waterway, could flood.

Late Tuesday night, as Toronto saw a massive, rapid dump of rain, those left working at the eco-friendly commercial building were warned to check on their parked vehicles....

Freire, 34, and Gabriel Otrin, 27, an industrial designer working with Freire, decided to check on the Honda. They hopped into one of two elevators and rode down the top of the four-floor, loft-style building to the underground lot.

The elevator did not come to its usual stop. Rather, it splash landed, with a “whoosh.” And then began to fill with murky water....

There was a ceiling escape hatch that was apparently sealed shut. One mobile phone, with next to no service. An emergency alarm and intercom that proved useless, particularly once the water rose to that level. And two Toronto police officers, first to arrive, who plunged into water and managed to pry open the elevator doors, while the two trapped men stood on handrails and sucked air from about 30 centimetres of air between the elevator ceiling and their necks.

 

More greatest hits from Sinclair Davidson

The child abuse enquiry:

 The banking royal commission:

But an enquiry into Union governance, well that's all quite exciting isn't it, and here, everyone should watch:

Need I state the obvious:  the first two royal commissions have produced remarkable evidence of wrongdoing of great public interest and policy importance.  It would be hard to find any commentator in the land who thinks they have been a waste of time.   The last one - produced a string of failed prosecutions and is widely considered a dud.

He knows how to pick them.  [Sarcasm, of course.]

More reason to be highly dubious of climate change geoengineering

It's taken a long time for someone to think of this issue:  what effect would long term spraying of sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere as a climate moderating geoengineering attempt have on crops?

Looking at the examples of two volcanos, some scientists say that the decrease in sunlight hurts crop yields significantly, and in fact likely off setting the temperature moderating effects:  

Specifically, the research team examined what happened to maize, soy, rice, and wheat yields in the wake of the Mount Pinatubo and El Chichón eruptions in the years following their eruptions until the volcanic aerosols dissipated. They chose these plants because they are highly sensitive to light and temperature, so eruptions can have a big impact on their yields. The crops are also staples for billions of people — important if you want to estimate the potential societal consequences of geoengineering.

They found that the eruptions reduced the amount of direct sunlight hitting the earth but increased the amount of diffuse light. This led to a decline in edible yields from the crops they studied. Global average maize yields declined by 9.3 percent and the harvests of soy, rice, and wheat fell by 4.8 percent after the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Making a similar estimate of the consequences of the El Chichón eruption proved to be more difficult because the data wasn’t as robust. 

The researchers then simulated what would happen to crops if humanity tried to mimic the sulfur injection into the atmosphere by Mount Pinatubo. They looked at a moderate climate change scenario that projects global emissions will peak around 2040 and then decline.

The results showed that geoengineering using sulfate aerosols to manage sunlight would indeed increase crop yields by mitigating some of the losses due to rising temperatures. However, the changes in sunlight exposure would offset these gains, as less light means the plants produce less food.

The research team did not expect that the gains and losses from geoengineering would almost completely offset each other. And so “we were surprised by our own results in what seems like the simplest of relationships,” said co-author Solomon Hsiang, who leads the Global Policy Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

The overall effect is that solar radiation management would do little to reduce crop losses stemming from climate change.

In summary:

Though geoengineering can sometimes seem like an easy, tempting solution to a complicated problem, the results show that it could introduce its own complexities into the climate system. And creating an intervention that influences the whole planet is still a difficult and expensive proposition. 

Getting the requisite 20 million tons of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere would require a vast logistical network to send dozens of aircraft flights across the sky to spray these aerosols. The researchers estimated that keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C via solar radiation management would require the equivalent of a Mount Pinatubo eruption every year....

The study’s authors say there could still be other benefits from geoengineering — for instance, saving lives from extreme heat — that could outweigh the costs. But that requires further investigation. 

“We want to make it very clear and explicit that we’re not pro- or anti-geoengineering in any way,” Hsiang said. “We think that geoengineering in this case highlighted a potential side effect.”

Inequality discussed

Further to my previous post today about productivity and wage growth in the US, I see that missed this article at The Conversation from last month about the Australian situation:  How rising inequality is stalling economies by crippling demand.

Seems to make quite a lot of sense.  

Poor building decisions

The Washington Post has an article about the increasing cost of hail damage in the US.  

I don't think it argues that hail storms are increasing per se, but puts the blame in the rise in damage to expansion of cities prone to hail storms, larger houses, and (to my surprise) this:

Around the time that homes began to grow in size, vinyl siding was also invented. It has become increasingly popular over the past 50 years because of its lower cost, and it is now the most popular exterior for new homes. Unfortunately, vinyl siding is also notorious for being shredded by hail as small as quarter. This means even lower-level hail from severe storms could leave a home looking something like Swiss cheese.

Am I mistaken, or is vinyl siding virtually unknown as an exterior house finish in Australia?   I thought from TV that house construction in the US looked very similar to ours, but perhaps I am wrong.

[As an aside, the other country where a difference in common house construction methods is evident to the casual visitor is Japan.]

About hothouse Earth

Here's a worthwhile thread on Twitter about the "hothouse Earth" paper that has had a fair amount of media attention.

There's been a lot of back and forth on Twitter between climate interested scientists and journalists about whether it's a good or bad thing to highlight the paper - the downside being the risk that people perceive preventing disastrous climate change as a lost cause.  

But surely the point of the paper is that it encourages serious action to prevent a long term hothouse Earth.   The problem is more likely with some of the reporting rather than the content.

Better get Piketty onto this

Seems to me that Piketty might have something useful to say about this surprising graph from the US that turned up at Axios.   Because it would seem that productivity increases have become more or less uncoupled from wage increases - and that's not the story economists normally tell us, surely...

As anyone who reads Catallaxy knows...

Angry People Think They’re Smarter Than They Are

Don't tell the alkaline water nutters

Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have found new evidence in lab-grown mouse brain cells, called astrocytes, that one root of Alzheimer's disease may be a simple imbalance in acid-alkaline -- or pH -- chemistry inside endosomes, the nutrient and chemical cargo shuttles in cells.

Astrocytes work to clear so-called amyloid beta proteins from the spaces between neurons, but decades of evidence has shown that if the clearing process goes awry, amyloid proteins pile up around neurons, leading to the characteristic amyloid plaques and nerve cell degeneration that are the hallmarks of memory-destroying Alzheimer's disease.

The new study, described online June 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also reports that the scientists gave drugs called histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors to pH-imbalanced mice cells engineered with a common Alzheimer's gene variant. The experiment successfully reversed the pH problem and improved the capacity for amyloid beta clearance.

Link.

This Canada Saudi Arabia thing is very strange

It's hard to fathom the over-reaction of Saudi Arabia's hip new leader in waiting to what Canada did.  As an opinion piece at WAPO explains:

In the past 48 hours, Saudi Arabia seems to have mistaken Canada, a member of the Group of Seven and NATO, and a distinguished ally of many European nations, for the small Middle Eastern nation of Qatar, which Riyadh blockaded last June.

Last week’s arrest of Samar Badawi, the sister of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi, led Canada’s Foreign Ministry to issue a statement in Arabic on its Twitter account that urged “the Saudi authorities to immediately release” her, along with fellow activist Nassima al-Sadah. It was this tweet that sparked the ire of Saudi authorities and propelled them into taking action. Saudi Arabia responded by recalling its ambassador in Ottawa, freezing trade relations, withdrawing Saudi students from Canadian schools and even canceling flights between Saudi Arabia and Toronto.

When Canada’s embassy in Riyadh tweeted its government’s statement in Arabic, Saudi officials saw it as a challenge to national sovereignty on domestic social media, which has increasingly become the battleground to control national public opinion and promote hyper-nationalism. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials, MBS, is signaling that any open opposition to Saudi domestic policies, even ones as egregious as the punitive arrests of reform-seeking Saudi women, is intolerable.

The Turnbull disappointment

I've been thinking about all the ways Malcolm, who still strikes me as having a likeable personality, has nonetheless disappointed as a Prime Minister:

1.  Has failed to react to the revival of Hansonite racist panicking over immigration and culture;

2.  Has failed to directly confront climate change skeptics in his Party and the media - the true source of disunity and dysfunction within the Coalition for many years now;

3.  Has failed to show any real interest in reform of important tax matters such as negative gearing;

4.  Has ignored serious behavioural issues within his government, such as Deputy PM being (by his own confession now) a renowned adulterer, including with his own staff;

5.  Has devised a policy on energy that convinces no one, on the Left or Right, that it is worthwhile or meaningful (again, all as a diversion from the fact that he has failed to defeat climate change skeptics in his own party);

6.  Has presided over the appalling administration and treatment of people being punished by permanent confinement on Nauru and Manus Island;

7.  Has given away half a billion dollars to a small conservation foundation in an utterly non-transparent manner which, by rights, should be a bigger scandal than it currently is.  (Why - probably in the hope of walking the impossible tightrope of appearing environmentally friendly while doing nothing positive about renewable energy);

8.  Has used personality based attacks on Shorten in a manner which didn't impress me when Paul Keating did it, and doesn't impress me now.


He became Prime Minister perhaps about 7 years too early, before the climate change skeptics have been fully routed.   This Northern Hemisphere summer seems to be going a long way to achieving that goal.

Malcolm shows that personality isn't everything in successful national leadership (unless, of course, it is at an extreme such as with Trump).   

It is time for him and his party to be replaced in government, and it is a bit concerning to me that the Federal polling is currently so close.  There should, by rights, be at least 5 percent between the parties in TPP, so let's hope it drifts back to that soon.

Let them eat cake

A funny/serious sort of article about the effects of a bad Brexit:  How Brexit will kill the sandwich.

I like the name of this association:

“I don’t think consumers understand how complex and global our industry is,” said Jim Winship, director of the British Sandwich Association. “If we crash out of Europe, we’d have problems even if only at border control because our industry works on a fresh basis and our products have a low shelf life. Ingredients could rot in the docks before getting to us.”

Turns out that about the only thing the British are self sufficient in when it comes to a ham, cheese and salad sandwich is the bread.  Although, even then, they don't look at the question of where their flour comes from.  Here, I'll do it for you:

About 80-85% of the wheat used by UK flour millers is home-grown, although the precise proportion depends on the quality of the UK harvest. The main sources of imported wheat within the European Union are Germany and France, whilst Canada and the US are the main sources for the rest of the world. Canadian wheat is generally imported for bread-making purposes, because it has excellent characteristics and gluten strength which work well in a blend with UK wheats. French wheat is generally used in the manufacture of French style products where softer flours are required. German wheat usage fluctuates according to the quality of the British crop.

Yet more syphilis

Hey, I got to the end of the first season of The Frankenstein Chronicles, and I can summarise the final episode with the observation "well, that's one way to cure syphilis".    Netflix here doesn't have the second season, which I assume is full of characters who answer their front door and then start screaming.  (You will have to watch the show to understand.)

Anyway, I keep accidentally finding articles that reference syphilis, including this one from the TLS about the eugenics movement, particularly in the US.  Apparently, in the early 20th century, there was a remarkable push against women merely suspected of being promiscuous, all in the name of defeating syphilis:

A second book, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women by Scott W. Stern, looks at the same set of laws during more or less the same time frame, but through the particular experience of Nina McCall, one of many white working-class teenagers swept up by the state of Michigan’s over-zealous morality police, and whose life was upended by the ensuing nightmare. Suspected of having venereal disease seemingly for no reason other than her having been observed unaccompanied on a trip to the Post Office, McCall was, in 1918, detained for months without any semblance of due process. She lost her job and her reputation and became estranged from her family. Her vagina was probed endlessly and her body injected with mercury and arsenic, all in the name of “cure”. The relentless prodding of “suspected” young women was not accompanied by anything like scientific rigour, consistency of observation, accuracy of record-keeping, or coherence of diagnosis.

McCall, once forcibly tested, was arrested based on a supposed diagnosis of syphilis, but ended up being given anti-gonorrhoeal medications. What makes McCall unusual among the many tens of thousands of American girls also targeted is that she sued the state. It took two years for her to be partially vindicated by the Michigan Supreme Court, which recognized her right to a trial, and even so her small victory did not slow the ideological diffusion of the American Plan for moral purge. (Tellingly, the court only ruled that McCall’s detainment was unlawful because the grounds for suspecting her of infection were a little too weak.) McCall’s story is captivating as pure biography, but it is all the more remarkable documentarily: it stands as one of the few formal challenges to these laws, and one of the very few whose heart-wrenching traces were captured in a trial record.

More generally:

The American Plan (not to be confused with the anti-union movement of the same name) was a programme designed to control sexually transmitted disease. It was different from the earlier French Plan instituted by Napoleon, which sought to confine prostitution by semi-legalizing it. Known as “regulationism”, the French system required sex workers to register, submit to regular genital inspections, and confine their activities to particular (red light) districts. In contrast, the American Plan never completely bought the idea of prostitution as something that could or ought to be regulated; true to its more Puritan legacy, the US set about trying to eliminate “immorality” by outlawing it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, public governance tended to treat prostitution not merely as a moral failure but as a criminal act. “Waywardness” in a woman was deemed not only a product of socialization, but reflective of innate mental deficits associated with “imbecility” or “feeblemindedness”. Anti-corruption squads composed of police, sheriffs, social workers and religious leaders, combed the streets of cities and small towns, detaining women and girls en masse and conducting crude genital probes. And it did not necessarily matter whether these “tests” resulted in diagnosis of any sort, for the conduct of these righteous teams was itself often corrupted by greed, reputational gossip, and stereotype: black and immigrant women were presumed to be looser in their conduct. Poor women could be labelled promiscuous if they merely seemed so to a detention officer. A neighbour with a grudge could call the vice squad. In addition, police received bonuses in line with the number of arrests and detentions, and policies could be touted as “successful” based on volume alone. Although the Reagan revolution is remembered for its racialized nomination of “welfare queens” and “the undeserving poor”, these too are concepts that date back to the Progressive Era.

The mosque clip

I'm not sure if this extract from that Who is America trollfest of a show is going to stay up for long, but it's worth watching.

I'm not the biggest fan of Sacha Baron Cohen - he gets too immaturely crude in a lot of his material if you ask me - but I have to admit, the way he escalates the torment of this group is very funny:

Bugs and diet

As has probably been suspected for a long time, it seems gut bacteria can make a big difference to successful weight loss.  The way it works is pretty interesting, though.  NPR writes:

"We found that people who lost at least 5 percent of their body weight had a different gut bacteria as compared to those who did not lose 5 percent of their body weight," Kashyap explains. Their findings are published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The successful dieters had an increased abundance of a bacteria called Phascolarctobacterium, whereas another bacteria, Dialister, was associated with a failure to lose the weight. And, Kashyap says it's likely that there are other types of bacteria that might influence dieting as well.

So, how might bacteria influence weight loss? It turns out we can get a significant number of calories from our microbes.

Here's how it works: Consider what happens when you eat an apple. You digest most of it.
"But there's a certain part of the apple we can't absorb," explains Martin Blaser, a professor in the Department of Microbiology at NYU Langone Medical Center. "We don't have the right enzymes to digest every bit of [the apple], but our bacteria can."

Think of it this way: The bacteria eat what we can't.

And, in the process, they produce byproducts that we can digest. So these byproducts become another source of calories for us.

The new study suggests that certain bacteria — or mix of bacteria — may be more efficient at creating "extra" calories for us to digest.

"Somewhere between 5 to 15 percent of all our calories come from that kind of digestion, where the microbes are providing energy for us, that we couldn't [otherwise] get," Blaser explains.

This calorie boost could be beneficial if food were scarce. "If times were bad, if we were starving, we'd really welcome it," Blaser says.

But at a time when many people want to lose weight, these extra calories may be an unwanted gift.

Should not be surprised he can't get his facts straight

Robert Manne writes a good response to Bolt's appalling immigration column, noting how he got some numbers wrong.

I see that Bolt was complaining about Bernard Keane's take that his talking about the numbers of Jewish folk in Caulfield was anti-Semitic.   Manne says (reasonably) that Bolt was not trying to be anti-Semitic (given Bolt's anti Muslim attitudes, you can't credibly believe he was intending to suddenly take offence against Jews).  But you still have to wonder - what on Earth did Bolt think he was achieving in pointing out the number of Jews living in a suburb?   He may well like Jews (or at least, those who support their current Right wing government), but pointing to any group and implicitly complaining about how they like to cluster together still points to bigotry against a class - immigrants of any kind!

Mission Impossible 6

Saw it on the weekend.

I liked it, and it kept coming back to my mind on Sunday.   (That's generally a good sign of a movie getting under your skin a bit.)  I do have some minor criticism about it, though.

A number of times, I thought the cinematography looked a little murky, for some reason.  I read today it was shot on 35 film, not video.   I wonder why.   I thought the digital editing required to remove safety ropes was much easier on video?   Does this account for it not looking as sharp as I expect from movies now?  Was it just less than ideal projection in the cinema I saw it in?

As for the set pieces:  I'm starting to think that the series best visceral thrill sequence may always be Tom swinging on a rope on the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol.  I still think it's just great movie making every time I see it, and it plays extremely well with everyone's sense of vertigo.  MI:6 is more about chase and action, and while the climatic set piece was, of course, impressive in its way, I think as a sequence (particularly with the cutting back and forth to the situation on the ground) it wasn't quite as well constructed as it could have been. 

Interestingly, despite its references to events in the prior movies, the story also did not really feel like it was designed as the end for the series.   Which is good, because my dream would be that Spielberg signs on to director for the last one.  

As I say, gone completely stupid...

Andrew Bolt this morning:

I like the way he (or someone) takes the opportunity to re-publish the "foreigners are here to devour our country" cartoon that would not be out of place in a pro White Australia newspaper from 100 years ago.

Speaking of inane, unjustifiable posts, I see that Sinclair Davidson thinks "luvvies" are being hysterical when they complain about Trump's "enemy of the people" repeat line about the Press.  Note how he does not repeat the line:

The luvvies are outraged – how dare President Trump criticise the press? Our democracy is at risk! Although to be fair, their democracy might be at risk; however the democracy where people turn up on election day and vote for a representative is doing just fine.

Who knows what that third sentence qualifier means - lack of clarity is something I find he often specialises in.

Anyway, he then goes on to claim press "hypocrisy" because the media (and "luvvies" generally) didn't get up in arms a few years back when Bob Green was complaining about the "hate media" (being the Murdoch press) were running a constant campaign against a carbon tax, as they still, undoubtedly, would.

The clip of Bob Green shows a man who calmly complains about the Murdoch press, yet never calls it (like Stalin and Hitler did) the "enemy of the people".   There is nil comparison with the repeated rallying call of Trump, to which his dumb ass, heavily armed, cult followers respond with applause.    It's a false equivalency, a case of the Right's "whataboutism" which fails the test of history and common sense.

And speaking of Right wing politics generally, I liked Greg Jericho's column on the weekend:

A virus of odious ignorance has infected conservative thinking – and politics

But sigh, no. Conservatives have been rendered so bereft by climate change that anything carrying even the slightest taint of an environmental impact is viewed with distrust. And so the plastic bag ban quickly became a new focus of the culture wars.

It’s all rather odd, but fits perfectly within a strain of thought that has decided the way forward is to ignore evidence and instead pursue an ideology of wilful ignorance.

It has led to the point where there are barely any conservative commentators worth reading or listening to. It’s not that there are no intelligent conservative thinkers, but the lunacy of climate change denial and distrust of expertise has so infected the conservative media that prominence is now almost exclusively given to those for whom a worldwide conspiracy is more believable than reports by multiple universities and public agencies.

What’s more, their realisation that they can spout their views free of supportable evidence on this issue has also led to an unlocking of all manner of views they once kept hidden, but which now come forth with great delight. 

Exactly.

For people who like deadpan NZ comedy

I see that with little fanfare, SBS has started showing Wellington Paranormal, a TV series made in the same style as What We Do in the Shadows.

If you liked the movie, and a lot of people did, you will find this pretty hilarious too.  Here's the opening scene from episode 1 that someone has put on line.  It gives you a good idea of the style of humour:



I see some people are putting full episodes on Youtube.  I watched it on SBS on Demand.