The strange death of the Turnbull government

The bizarre thing is that it seems that no one other than half of the Liberal politicians in Canberra, and the LNP organisation in Queensland, thinks well of Peter Dutton.

I mean, can't they read preferred leader polls?   And lots of people say that for every seat in Queensland that Dutton may hypothetically save, there'll probably be a seat in Victoria or elsewhere that he'll lose.  As I noted yesterday, there's not even obvious support for him in the bitter, aged white male world of Catallaxy.  For many of them, he's not even conservative enough!

And then there's the doubt over whether he is entitled to be in Parliament at all.  What nutty challenger tries to take over leadership when there is that cloud over their head?

Finally, there's the matter of the Coalition polling actually having risen to 51/49 in the last couple of Newspolls.  I couldn't see why this had happened, and it worried me that it put Turnbull in range of another scrappy win at the next election.   So, obviously, what does the party do?  Tear itself apart.

My big hope, that this would cause a proper split in the Party to rid it of climate change denialism once and for all, is seemingly not going to happen.   Turnbull seems to love the top job too much to tell a chuck of his parliamentary supporters to leave the party - but there's no doubt that a new conservative party would form some sort of coalition with the Liberal/Nationals rather than support Labor, which is not going to give up support for higher reduced emissions targets.

Anyway, one of the best discussions I have read about this means for the future of the Liberals is from Ben Eltham, and appears in New Matilda.  A few key bits:

As Tim Colebatch noted this week in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential, even ontological. Colebatch notes that “in most of Australia, the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians they had when national development was the issue.”

As I pointed out in an article about the rise of Australian far right, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly in recent years. Amongst the contemporary conservative base, the onrush of tribalism has resulted in the abandonment of enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise. 

As a result, movement conservatives quite literally live in a different reality to moderates and progressives, a world where conspiracy theories flourish, climate change is a myth, and western civilisation is under threat from immigrants, feminists and university lecturers. 

In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over the party machinery and melding it into a much more muscular, far-right apparatus – just as movement conservatives have done in the United States? Or will the party split apart?

In mainstream Australia, the endless culture war has so far been going very badly, as the marriage plebiscite showed. But the culture war within the Liberal Party has been another matter altogether: in the party machinery, the far right is winning.

As out of touch as the conservatives are with mainstream Australia, they are extremely in touch with the active and increasingly radical right. Indeed, it could be argued that this weeks’ events represent the logical conclusion of the radicalisation of the Liberal right.

t’s no coincidence that energy policy proved the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows just how radicalised the right of the party has become. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift that a section of the party is more than willing to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony. 
 
Such actions do not augur well for a sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.

 Actually, I don't agree with that last paragraph - I think the nutty Right of Australia is just having a temporary confidence boost by the Trump ascendancy, but that is going to crash in a screaming wreck very shortly.  Besides, my feeling is that wingnuttery is not as big in Australia as it is in the States, and is artificially boosted in prominence and influence by the Murdoch media.  

While we're on a theme...

I'm a bit amused to read about how, in times past, professional poets to Irish kings and chieftains had to give some pretty extreme, um, lip service to the boss:

The cult seems rooted in the notion of the poet’s relationship with his royal or chiefly patron being equivalent to a marriage, the two sharing the same bed. The following English translations from the original Irish may be cited. One poet tells his patron that it is no act of adultery towards his wife to “lie with me and my kind”, while another who has fallen out of favour seeks reconciliation by urging: “Let us not refrain any longer from lying on one couch, O fair one.” A 14th-century poet calls on his patron to “proffer your red lips to me, give me a fervent kiss . . .” The same states: “To him [the poet] is due loving favour, the primest [sic] liberality, precedence in counsel, the king’s counsel, the sharing of his bed . . .” Some of the language employed is even more extravagant. Thus, an elegy by Brian Ó Gnímh over the spiked head of Alasdair Mac Donald (1586) runs: “I love the still-unbleached red mouth/Head of silk complexion . . ./ . . . smooth delicate cheek/ . . . fine soft abundant curling tresses/ . . . gaze-holding green eyes . . ./ . . . perfect tresses”.

Whether this should be seen as really, truly gay or not seems to be a matter in dispute:

However, we are cautioned by Prof Pádraig Breatnach that “the guise of ‘spouse’ could be adopted by a poet towards several patrons at once”. The poet’s “full assumption of a feminine role” occurs within terms of an established literary “conceit”, and “we must be wary of drawing hasty conclusions as to his psychology...” A parallel study by Prof Katherine Simms draws attention to the contemporary “traditional role of the poet as in some sense his patron’s spouse or lover”. However, “the bard has no intention . . . of implying a homosexual relationship with his patron . . . Bed-sharing was a general mark of esteem and trust in this society, peculiarly appropriate between a king and his poet.” Both the foregoing base their observations in large part on the earlier work of Prof James Carney.

 The guy who wrote the article goes on to argue "yeah, nah", but who is right I don't know.

I do think it kind of funny though to imagine a 100% straight poet having to gush like that to keep his job.

Just when you thought Malaysia was making sudden improvements...

..The Guardian reports that:

The general election in May has been celebrated for ushering in a new era, but the new government’s first 100 days in power have been marked by increased discrimination, harassment and violent hate crime against the LGBT community.

Which is pretty odd, given the anointment of Anwar Ibrahim, alleged sodomite, by Mahathir as the next leader.   Anyway, some particular incidents behind the report:

In the early hours of Saturday, the police and government officials raided a small nightclub in Kuala Lumpur.

The venue, Blue Boy, was known to be popular with the LGBT community, but for years had been relatively left alone by the authorities. Until the weekend. Twenty men were detained and ordered into counselling for “illicit behaviour” by the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Department of Malaysia (JAKIM).

Government minister Khalid Samad later released a statement on the motivations behind the raid. “Hopefully this initiative can mitigate the LGBT culture from spreading into our society,” he said....

Just two days before the raid, a trans woman was brutally beaten on the street in Seremban while seven others watched. The attack left her with broken ribs, a broken backbone and a ruptured spleen.

In the same week, a sharia court ordered a lesbian couple to be caned after they were caught having sex in a car, the first time in years such a punishment had been handed out in Malaysia. The judge said it was “a lesson and reminder to not just the two of you, but the members of society”....

The minister for religious affairs, Mujahid Yusof Rawa, has said the government would “take proactive measures to curb the growing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender issues, and help them to return to the right path and lead a normal life”. The deputy minister for public affairs, Dr Lee Boon Chye, stated last week that LGBT people have an “organic disorder”.

Not a great day for Trump

Just don't do it

Here's conservative Catholic Philippa Martyr's remarkably un-detailed assessment of how to respond to the Catholic Church's crisis with regard to sex and sexual behaviour:

I don’t know a soul, clerical or lay, who hasn’t been damaged by the sexual revolution. But I also know there’s no point in saying, ‘It’s always been like this.’

The solution is not married clergy, gay clergy, or even married gay clergy. It’s the same solution it’s always been: a renewal and restoration and re-catechesis of the Church’s complete teaching on sexual morality, and practical advice on how to get it right, at least most of the time.

For the last 40 years we have had Catholic marriage promoted, explained, and supported at every level of the Church. Perhaps it’s time to look at the chaste and/or celibate state in the same way.

We all know many faithful Catholics who can’t marry – or re-marry – for a whole range of reasons. All of us could benefit from some help to live lives that are just as holy and as countercultural as faithful married Catholic couples.

What, exactly, does she see as a system of helping those who can't have sex?  

[Update:  and, I might add - I would love to know her "practical advice on how to get it right".   I'm looking forward to Dr Philippa Martyr's book "The Joy of No Sex": richly illustrated with some hairy, clothed dude getting distracted in novel ways from sexual thoughts?   I think cats would likely feature a lot, somehow.]

The whole problem with her approach is that it really is only looking at the historical context as far back as the 1960's.   Yes, it's true, the 1960's did invoke a challenge to the Church's authority in the matter of sex and sexuality, but the true historical context needs to go back at least a century earlier - to the turmoil of the 19th century, and the scientific, philosophical and theological challenge of modernity to the Church, and the way people understand the very nature of humanity.    

Poor old Philippa seems to think you can just set the clock back a few centuries and that's that.

You can't.

Update:   I said in comments I would link to a piece that appeared recently from a guy who had been a seminarian in the 1960's, but left and didn't become a priest.   As he says:

From my personal experience, I would guess that obligatory celibacy plays an important role. To paraphrase Saint Paul, for some people the burning sexual energy cannot and should not be contained. The effort often infantilizes men, subverting normal sexual urges into strange pathways, blocking sexual maturity.

For a few priests, celibacy appears to deepen devotion to God; many simply ignore it; for others it is a source of malaise and unhappiness. For far too many men, it has led to criminal depravity.

The Catholic hierarchy has primary responsibility to find the answer and to make the indispensable cultural and institutional changes in the priesthood. Prosecution of abuses has become more common, but it’s not enough. I don’t see evidence that the clergy — priests, bishops, the Vatican or even the much admired Pope Francis — are willing to address the elephant in the room: What is wrong with the institution of the priesthood and how can it be fixed?

Or how about a former priest, writing in 2010, who puts it this way:

No, celibacy does not “cause’’ the sex abuse of minors, and yes, abusers of children come from many walks of life. Indeed, most abuse occurs within families or circles of close acquaintance. But the Catholic scandal has laid bare an essential pathology that is unique to the culture of clericalism, and mandatory celibacy is essential to it. Immaturity, narcissism, misogyny, incapacity for intimacy, illusions about sexual morality — such all-too-common characteristics of today’s Catholic clergy are directly tied to the inhuman asexuality that is put before them as an ideal.

A special problem arises when, on the one hand, homosexuality is demonized as a matter of doctrine, while, on the other, the banishment of women leaves the priest living in a homophilic world. In some men, both straight and gay, the stresses of such contradiction lead to irrepressible urges that can be indulged only by exploitation of the vulnerable and available, objects of desire who in many cases are boys, whether prepubescent or adolescent. Now we know.

Update 2:   Here's a point I may have missed before.   Even though (as I noted in an earlier post) Philippa loves to blame homosexuality as at the core of the problem, the irony is that the proportion of gay priests in the priesthood has almost certainly increased over the last 50 years before of the outflow of straight priests who leave to marry!:

In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s. 

So even if it was fair [it isn't, in the broad way she does] of Philippa to, um, blame the gays,  the fact that celibacy has caused heaps of straight priests to leave the priesthood would still pretty much be consistent with "celibacy is a factor in the sexual abuse crisis."  

How politics now works

Hey, I think this is a pretty good explanation of how Labor (and Liberal) politics now works from The Conversation - Labor now does politics better than the Liberals - here's why.

American politics gets a mention too.

It doesn't get into the whole culture war/climate change issue that has poisoned the American Right and bled into Australian Right too, but the big picture it paints still seems sound.

Psst...it's all about climate change

It was a bit frustrating listening to Fran Kelly interview a couple of Liberals this morning about their leadership crisis and not have her or her guests get to the crux of the divide between the conservative and moderate split within the party.

It's obvious:  it is climate change.   The so-called conservatives in the party deny reality on this,   commentators should be not shy about calling this out as being at the heart of the Liberal crisis.

Update:  yes, Graham Readfearn said the same thing yesterday: 

Climate change denial is at the root of the half-baked policies and outright wrecking that have blighted the past decade

Why aren't more commentators saying it?

And why isn't there anyone calling for an outright split in the Liberals over it?   

A positive look at New Guinea

I've missed a lot of Foreign Correspondent this year, but caught last night's remarkable show in which ageing and ill former New Guinea correspondent Sean Dorney returned to the country where he worked (and found his wife) many years ago.  

It was good to see such a personal story, incorporating a rare positive look at village life, get an airing.  

A particularly good time not to be in Cairo

It's Eid, the holiday dreaded by sheep.   I see that Cairo is trying to get on top of a street slaughter problem:

Faced with scenes of blood flowing in rubbish-strewn roads and of streets littered with animal entrails, authorities in the Egyptian capital say they aim to crack down on the outdoor slaughter that marks one of Islam’s main holidays.

Eid Al Adha, or the festival of sacrifice, is marked by Muslims sacrificing animals according to religious traditions at the end of the Haj annual pilgrimage.

Ahead of the holiday, which this year starts on Tuesday, temporary sheep markets have sprung up amid the exhaust fumes and garbage heaps of the sprawling metropolis.

But the governor’s office in Cairo insists it is on a “cleanliness” drive to stop the widespread slaughter of animals in the distinctly unhygienic surroundings of the city’s streets.

To prevent the “barbaric and unacceptable” spectacle, officials in each neighbourhood have been ordered to “strictly” enforce laws prohibiting the practice, city spokesman Khalid Mustafa said....

Traders like Hussain Abul Al Aziz say they welcome the push to eliminate the killings in the streets and claim they don’t engage in the practice.

“It is unacceptable to slaughter in the street, it must be done in an abattoir with a veterinarian who examines the animal and under the supervision of the health ministry,” Aziz said, standing among his well-fed beasts.

But it is clear that the message from the authorities has not reached most people.

Local resident Ahmad Ragab shops around for a sheep for Eid Al Adha.

The father in his fifties confides that he has not heard of the official sanitation drive and was planning to slaughter his animal in the street outside his house.

India is...a bit of a worry

Spotted in Gulf News:

Malayalam actress and fashion designer Poornima Indrajith and award-winning music composer Shaan Rahman, who have been at the forefront of Kerala flood rescue efforts, on Monday slammed haters who were spreading bigotry and hate in the wake of mass destruction.

While the majority of civilians and officials have stepped up to help the rain-ravaged Kerala to return to normalcy, there is a section of people on social media who displayed bigotry by claiming that the South Indian state had invited the floods due to their beef-eating habits.

Another hate-spewing comment was that an Indian deity was showing its fury on the state, when a section of its residents demanded that women be allowed in the temple that housed the idol.

More broadly, from a recent editorial piece from the ANU based  East Asia Forum:

Modern Hindu nationalism is not mere traditionalism, says Arun Swamy. The Hindu nationalists seek not so much to preserve existing social hierarchies in Hindu cultures as they do to rewrite social orders fascistically to the benefit of Hindu populations. The Modi government appears to be actively pursuing ‘history rewriting’ and ‘historic romanticism’ agendas and has appointed what seems to be a historical revision committee to ‘prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth’. Other concerns include Modi’s pick for Uttar Pradesh chief minister, a Hindu priest who has incited violence against Muslims, and legislative developments in BJP-controlled states that presume guilt until proven innocent in cases of cow slaughter and urge the enforcement of archaic laws against cattle slaughter (even in Muslim-majority communities).

‘The Hindu nationalist rhetoric was played down (at least by Modi)’, as Adeney explains, ‘in favour of a development narrative. He put himself forward as a normal man, contrasting his humble origins with the “little princeling” Rahul Gandhi, presumed to be prime minister-designate of the Congress though never officially named as such’. The long-term electoral project of the BJP is rather to showcase right wing majoritarianism as the natural force synonymous with the welfare and development of India — hence perhaps that choice of chief minister in Uttar Pradesh.

Events since 2014 raise the question of whether the BJP is the new dominant party of Indian politics. It has captured a raft of state legislatures, and although it did not manage to win a majority in the recent state election in Karnataka, it did win the largest number of seats.

Mr Potato Head thinks he's PM material?

I am surprised that Dutton made a run for the Prime Ministership.   Surely was too early.   Surely was too presumptuous that any voters actually like him.   (A quick survey in my office confirms - no one does.  There was even little support at Ratbag Central - Catallaxy.)  The Murdoch press has adopted an "anyone but Turnbull" line - Bolt and Blair are so convinced that Malcolm is rotten - rotten I say - that they obviously set aside any concern about how the public really dislike the decade's old Prime Ministerial chocolate wheel selection system that the Federal democracy has become.  Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.

But that 35 Liberals went with Dutton??  As Annabel says:

I'll keep saying it - the Liberals need a split.    It can't stagger on for another decade with climate change denialism poisoning everything.  

What a decent human

As The Guardian writes:

The son of murdered New South Wale police accountant Curtis Cheng has called for an end to political “scapegoating” of Muslims in Australia following last week’s speech by senator Fraser Anning calling for a ban on Muslim immigration.

Alpha Cheng’s father was shot in cold blood by a 15-year-old Muslim boy, Farhard Jabar, outside the NSW police headquarters in Parramatta in 2015. Two others were jailed for planning the attack and supplying the weapon.

But he said that was no reason to victimise a community.

“I am tired of needing to explain to adults that the actions of these individuals cannot be attributed to an entire group of people. If I, of all people, can think this way, then sure as hell our ‘elected’ representatives can think this way too,” Cheng wrote in an opinion piece in Fairfax Media.

How not to legalise marijuana

Both The Atlantic and Vox have articles up talking about marijuana addiction, and explaining the concerns of experts that the method of legalisation of marijuana being followed in most American States is pretty much asking for trouble.  (Basically, just by letting capitalist interests promote and drive the market, and with next to no control over the strength or form of THC sold.)

I think the point made is obviously true.

A historical knowledge gap

Someone on Twitter linked to a 6 month old, very extensive critical article about Ben Shapiro, who I find pretty easy to ignore.   [He has said stupid things about climate change - my rule of thumb means he's unlikely to be reliable on any topic.]

But in the article there was a reference to the very big death toll from the expulsion of German speakers from Eastern Europe in the first couple of years after World War 2.   Here's what it says:

There is only one problem with the precedent cited by Shapiro: it is actually a forgotten historic atrocity, which was characterized by mass rape, torture, and murder, and left at least 400,000 people dead. Germans were interned in concentration camps and endured horrific journeys in which pregnant women froze to death. As Tara Zahra explains in a review of R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War:

This is indeed not a subject I was at all familiar with, and I have had a look at the book review linked to above.  Some extracts:

It was one of many ugly episodes in 1945. On a summer day in Horní Moštenice, a small town in central Czechoslovakia, 265 people, including 120 women and seventy-four children, were dragged from a train, shot in the neck, and buried in a mass grave that had been dug beside the local railway station. It was a common enough scene in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II, when Nazi extermination policies threatened entire ethnic groups. But despite the similarity of means and ends, the massacre in Horní Moštenice was different. For one thing, it occurred on June 18, after the war in Europe had officially ended. Moreover, the perpetrators were Czechoslovak troops, and their victims were Germans who had been a presence in the region for centuries....

After the Nazi defeat, the Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled to the West, and were stripped of their citizenship, homes and property in what R.M. Douglas calls “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Douglas amply demonstrates that these population transfers, which were to be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner according to the language of the Allies’ 1945 Potsdam Agreement, counted as neither. Instead, he writes, they were nothing less than a “massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures.”  .....

The so-called “wild” or spontaneous expulsions in Czechoslovakia began almost immediately after liberation, in May to June of 1945. But there was nothing “wild” about this first wave of what Czech officials referred to as národní ocista (“national cleansing”). These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps). But the “wild expulsions” were justified as self-defense on the basis of exaggerated or invented reports of ongoing resistance activity by Nazi “Werewolf” units. One of the most infamous postwar pogroms was sparked by the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem in northwestern Bohemia in July 1945. Most of the victims of the explosion were themselves German, but local workers, Czechoslovak Army units and Soviet troops wasted no time blaming Werewolf sabotage and taking revenge. Germans were beaten, shot and thrown into the Elbe River; many observers recall a baby carriage being thrown into the river with a baby inside. The massacre resulted in at least 100 deaths.

During the “wild” expulsions, lucky expellees were given a few hours’ notice and taken on foot by force to the closest border with only the clothes on their back. The unlucky were interned in concentration and forced labor camps organized explicitly on the Nazi model. At least 180,000 ethnic Germans were interned in Czechoslovakia as of November 1945; another 170,000 were interned in Yugoslavia. The internees included many women, children and even several thousand German-speaking Jews. In many cases, former Nazi concentration camps and detention centers like Terezín/Theresienstadt were converted overnight into camps for ethnic Germans. At Linzervorstadt, a camp administered by a former Czech internee of Dachau, the motto “Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth” replaced Arbeit macht frei on the camp gates. Inmates were stripped naked and shorn of their hair upon arrival at the camp, forced to run a gantlet while being beaten with rubber truncheons and then, during their stay in the camp, systematically flogged, tortured and made to stand at attention in all-night roll calls. Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”

Update:   while I feel I should have known more about that, it did, after all, fall into that part of the world that I have long considered to be:

The necessary Party purge that never arrives

What's been clear for more than a decade is that the Coalition needs to purge itself of the climate change denying rump that cannot be reasoned with because they disbelieve the science underlying a really important policy area, and cannot be placated unless policy endorses their disbelief.

My impression is that the climate change denialists have lessened in number and overall influence,  but their dimwitted supporters in the Liberal base are feeling energised by the temporary political win of their nonsense in the US.   And besides, it's incredibly easy to cause destabilisation in a government with a wafer thin majority.

It's disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull cannot bring himself to instigate the necessary purge, at least for the Liberals. I'm a bit torn as to whether I would prefer to see him stagger on, or resign on principle.   Neither are satisfactory, and he will never be  viewed as a very significant Prime Minister unless he does come out swinging and tell the wrecking denialists (and their backers in the Murdoch press, talkback radio and the Rinehart front known as the IPA) that they are simply wrong and need to get out of the Party.      

Japanese population getting smaller in more ways than one

I didn't notice this story getting any attention in the media a couple of weeks ago after it appeared in Science - which is a bit surprising.  Because I, for one, did not know that it was well acknowledged that the Japanese have started getting shorter!:

Japan's obsession with slender women may harm unborn children and create long-term health problems for the Japanese population. Already, a high proportion of Japanese women is starting pregnancy underweight, and many scientists have criticized the country's official guidelines for weight gain during pregnancy as too strict. Now, a survey shows many pregnant women strive to keep their weight gain below even those targets. This combination of factors has led to an unusually high percentage of low-weight births, which is likely the reason that the height of the average Japanese adult has declined every year for those born after 1980....

The shortening of the Japanese is subtle, but unmistakable. An international study published in 2016 found that since the late 19th century, the average Japanese adult male height rose 14.5 centimeters, peaking at 171.5 centimeters for those born in 1978 and 1979. But by the 1996 birth cohort, it had dropped to 170.8 centimeters. Over the same period, average female height jumped 16 centimeters, topped out at 158.5 centimeters, then dropped by 0.2 centimeters. Some other countries have also experienced height declines, which the study variously linked to economic privation, an influx of shorter immigrants, or—in the United States—poor diet quality, which can impair growth both in the fetus and in newborn babies.

In Japan, experts say the evidence for a link with lower birth weights is strong. As the country recovered from World War II, the percentage of low–birth weight babies—those weighing 2.5 kilograms or less at delivery—declined from 7.3% in 1951 to 5.5% in 1978–79. As babies grew heavier, however, doctors worried about preeclampsia, a complication that can put the lives of both mother and baby at risk. In the late 1970s, some Japanese obstetricians suggested a low-calorie diet could lower that risk, a view incorporated into 1981 guidelines from the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Previously, mothers-to-be were told to ‘eat for two’; now, the ideal is to ‘give birth small but raise a big baby,’" says Hideoki Fukuoka, an obstetrician at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Don't normal politicians get into trouble for this sort of thing?

I mean, the jury is still deciding after a trial in which the judge appeared to be a cantankerous anti-prosecution interferer, and I saw somewhere on Twitter (and confirmed in the WAPO*) that the defence got to put up a type of chart which it seems is not uncommonly used in the US: 

That's really misleading if you ask me - it is clearly designed to suggest that it is only a tiny minority of prosecutions which can possibly be found to have been proved "beyond reasonable doubt".   I am surprised American courts allow it - but they do have the weirdest outcomes there.

There's no doubt that juries do struggle with the meaning of the phrase - see this report on the New South Wales Law Reform Commission view on this a few years ago.  But I would hope that all sensible people in Australia would see the potential for that visual "aid" to only confuse the matter more - and unfairly in favour of the defence.

*  The burden the prosecutors have to overcome, he explained with a thermometer-like chart, is not that Manafort “possibly,” “probably,” “likely” or “even highly likely guilty,” but that he is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Research fraud from Japan

Science seems to have the full article from its magazine available on line about the remarkably extensive fraudulent medical research of one Yoshihiro Sato in Japan.  (He has since committed suicide, as did another researcher found to have committed fraud in stem cell research.)    This is not a topic I normally follow, but the way other researchers detect problems in this field, and sometimes just accept improbably explanations initially, is interesting.   For example:

Avenell's own quest began in 2006, when she was combing through dozens of papers for a review evaluating whether vitamin D reduces the risk of bone fractures. In two papers by Sato, she stumbled on a weird coincidence. They described different trials—one in stroke victims, the other in Parkinson's disease patients—but the control and study groups in both studies had the exact same mean body mass index. Looking further, she quickly found several other anomalies. She decided not to include Sato's studies in her analysis.

She wasn't the first to notice something was off. In a 2005 Neurology paper, Sato claimed that a drug named risedronate reduces the risk of hip fractures in women who have had a stroke by a stunning 86%. In a polite letter to the journal, three researchers from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom noted that the study was "potentially of great importance," but marveled that the authors had managed to recruit 374 patients in just 4 months.

Two years later, a letter in what was then the Archives of Internal Medicine was less polite. A study of male stroke patients published by Sato had managed to enroll 280 patients in just 2 months; another one, of women with Alzheimer's disease, recruited a staggering 500 in an equally short period. Sato claimed to have diagnosed all of the Alzheimer's patients himself and done follow-up assessments of all 780 patients every 4 weeks for 18 months. Both studies had very few dropouts, and both showed risedronate, again, to be a resounding success. "We are deeply concerned whether the data provided by Sato et al are valid," Jutta Halbekath of Arznei-Telegramm, a Berlin-based bulletin about the drug industry, and her co-authors wrote. Sato apologized in a published response and claimed the study had been conducted at three hospitals, not one. "The authors did not describe this fact, the reason being that these hospitals were reluctant to have their names in the article," he wrote. He didn't name the other hospitals or explain why they wanted to remain anonymous. The journal apparently accepted the explanation.

The letter's authors also spotted a troubling pattern. In addition to the two papers in the Archives of Internal Medicine, they found 11 further studies by Sato, published elsewhere, that tested whether sunlight, vitamin D, vitamin K, folate, and other drugs could reduce the risk of hip fractures. All but two reported "extremely large effects with significant results," they noted. But the Archives of Internal Medicine didn't want to point fingers at other journals. "You may allude to your concern that other papers have similar concerns," its editors warned Halbekath, "but we cannot allow you to mention those other papers by journal name."

By now, several researchers had raised red flags and waved them for everyone to see—and then everybody moved on. "The trail just went cold," Avenell says.

Remarkably, the article goes onto note that Japan is an unusually popular country for bad medical research, and the culture of respect seems to be part of the problem:

Sato's fraudulent work has propelled him to No. 6 on Retraction Watch's list of researchers who have racked up the most retractions. At the top is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 183 retractions; his frequent co-author Yuhji Saitoh, also from Japan, is at 10th place, while Japanese endocrinologist Shigeaki Kato is No. 8. Iwamoto is at No. 9. That means half of the top 10 are Japanese researchers. Yet only about 5% of published research comes from Japan. What explains the number of prolific Japanese fraudsters?

Michiie Sakamoto, who is leading another investigation at Keio University, into Iwamoto's studies in animals, says it has to do with respect. "In Japan, we don't usually doubt a professor," he says. "We basically believe people. We think we don't need strict rules to watch them carefully." As a result, researchers faking their results may be exposed only after they have racked up many publications.

Outside researchers may also be less likely to question anomalous results from Japan. Several early critics of Sato's work say they thought at first that his unusual results might be due to something uniquely Japanese. One case in point: In 2003, Sato published a study on data from 40 patients with a very rare affliction named neuroleptic malignant syndrome, collected over 3 years. In a letter to the journal, a U.K. neurologist said he and his colleagues "could only recall two such cases in living memory"—but instead of casting doubt on the study, they said it was interesting that the syndrome seemed so prevalent in Japan.

But none of that explains why Sato decided to embark on his fraud—and nobody seems to be able to shed much light on that question. "Given the number of papers he published, he must have spent a very large amount of time on them," Bolland says. "I don't understand what his gain was. … There must have been some reason to do it." The Keio University panel is just as puzzled. "We discussed this a lot in the committee," Saya says. It might have been like a hobby, he suggests. A thrill. Saya uses the word "otaku," a Japanese term often applied to people who read manga obsessively.

The article also explains how big a problem such bad research is - it has a real cascading effect on other studies and policies.

Pretty fascinating...

The speech Malcolm Turnbull needs to give

So, climate change denying conservative numbskulls like Bolt and Blair are getting excited about the prospect of Turnbull getting rolled in the leadership over his energy plan, and now Ray Hadley claims there will be a move against him "in the next two weeks".   [That sounds very implausible - moves on leadership these days aren't on a such a flexible, forewarned timetable.]

While I doubt there is much truth to this, especially given that Mr Potato-Head-Without-the-Charm Dutton seems very keen to distance himself from challenging, it would be a good opportunity for Malcolm to at least attempt to clean out the Party by making a speech that goes something like this:

"It would appear that those within the Coalition who do not accept either climate change, or the seriousness of it, are again trying to cause a political crisis over a matter which should have been resolved in this country, and indeed internationally, at least a decade ago.

Here's my message to those politicians, and their supporters:   you are wrong.  There's no beating about the bush on this - you're simply wrong.   You always have been:  taking your science not from the vast and detailed literature that has convinced beyond doubt all but a tiny handful of contrarian scientists - literally, you can count them on on one hand - that dangerous climate change is real, is happening, and is a very grave threat to the global environment and humanity.    

Your rejection of science has been based on culture war ideology and you are routinely conned by dishonest contrarians - more often than not amateurs with overinflated self regard  -  who cherry pick and repeat ludicrous arguments no matter how many time they are debunked by scientists.

I've had enough:   no political party can rationally support policies that deny the reality of climate change, and the Liberal Party does not.

My message to Tony, Barnaby and their small number of fellow travellers in the Coalition -get out of the Party or the Coalition if you can't get over the fact that climate change is real.   You have done enough damage to the credibility of our side of politics on this issue, and given the evidence of climate change harm we see daily on the TV, you are only to do worse harm to your party's credibility if you continue this wrong headed, spiteful path.

And I say the same to any media commentator - be they journalist, economist, or mining magnate, it doesn't matter - who thinks they know more than the scientific bodies and governments of all political stripes:  you are wrong.   You and your inspiration which comes only from a segment of the American Right are daily being proved wrong, and we can't wait another decade for you to admit it.   Shut up, get out of the way, or go form your own party on the basis of your eccentric, factually wrong, convictions.   

Thank you."

Yet more "Nazis were socialists"

So, the wingnutty Right is really getting into this "Nazis were socialists" meme - even extending it to "America defeated communist Japan" on Fox News, because, I suppose, every enemy ever has always been a socialist/communist.

But the latest local victim is Peter van Onselen, who, for some reason, decided to come to Paul Murray's defence for saying on his show that World War 2 was all about fighting socialism (and suggesting that the youth of today didn't know this like their forebears who fought the war did.).

Peter is widely considered a mild mannered political soft centrist out of place on Sky News, so it was with some surprise that people read:

This comment has received, unsurprisingly, a lot of pushback.  And, sad to say, I don't think Peter's response has been honest:

Yours is the only tweet I'm responding to, I said I'm no longer using twitter for more than posts bc the vile abuse I've received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That's all I was saying. Signing off

 As Ben Pobjie quite correctly says next:

No it’s not. What you we’re saying was “Nazism is considered a branch of socialism”. This is factually incorrect. You know this.

 Later, Andrew Wright says to Peter:

 Some pretty severe nuancing required here for ‘branch’: you can argue that European Fascism drew to a significant extent from socialism, especially given Mussolini’s pre-1918 career - but it’s ultimate trajectory was a complete negation of socialism

And Peter replies:

That's true

Well, if that's true, just admit your initial post was a blatant indefensible overstatement, and stop whinging about people correcting you on Twitter.

Update:   Ben Pobjie, no doubt frustrated at Van Onselen's refusal to just say his first tweet was wrong, goes with: