In pictures

Australia, November 2019:

 

 

 Australian conservative commentary, November 2019:

 

Former thoroughbred racehorse gets into the Christmas spirit

Too soon?  I mean, don't get me wrong - I'd either ban or at least halve the horse race industry, if it was up to me as benevolent dictator.

Projecting Idiot watch

Yes, Steve Kates plays his favourite song again:

It is almost impossible to have imagined more destructive despicable people than those who now inhabit the left. They want power only for themselves because they see only themselves as having virtue and good will. Everyone else is an enemy, and not just an enemy, but immoral as well. I must confess that I find everything about the modern left disgusting and immoral if it comes to that.

This from a man who thinks climate change is a grand conspiracy of socialist scientists, and who has no concern about a President who laughs at the calls for his political opponents to be locked up, who bragged about grabbing women's privates, who lies and/or bullshits just continuously, who has blown out the deficit, etc, etc.

And get this - CL in comments is playing his old projection game of "I've lost interest, so everyone's lost interest":

The US networks have scaled back their impeachment coverage because nothing has happened and nobody is interested. 

I have said this many times before - my impression is that Sinclair Davidson personally does not believe such vicious political Manichaeism - he just runs a blog that is devoted to promoting it.  Same with anti-gay, misogynistic and racist sentiment - not for him, he just runs a blog that people full of it like to participate in.

Why do it? 

Things I'd like to do too if I was a mad authoritarian President...

I said "things", but the post is inspired by this one example:

Philippines' Duterte Says He Will Ban E-Cigarettes, Threatens To Arrest Vapers

Oh look, here's another mad thing it would amuse me to do:

All tattoos exposed within North Korea must show praise towards the Kim (leaders) family or otherwise have some kind of approved political purpose attributed to them.

Fantastic - I wouldn't ban tattoos, just legislate their content (and parts of the body they can be applied, of course.)   Let's see:  characters from Steven Spielberg movies permitted, but only on upper arms and chest, under the shirt line.   Neck and back tattooing completely banned.  Tattoo on the face means jail time.  

Update:  people who commute to work on bicycles wearing lycra - confiscate the bike.  If they were in the centre of a main road lane - a $10,000 fine too.   Groups riding on a road, in lycra, and not in single file - jail time.

Commuting cyclists should only wear ordinary clothes.  And stick to bicycle lanes.  

Noah argues

I've started following Noah Smith on Twitter, and boy, he tweets a lot and has a lot of opinions.

I am not entirely sure how much to trust him, but he at least argues his positions pretty well.  I liked a recent thread dismissing the "coming automation unemployment crisis" claim (of Andrew Yang, for example), and perhaps I will find it again soon amongst the ridiculously high tweet output he delivers.

He also did not much like that recent article by David Graeber "Against Economics" that I extracted at length.   His criticisms in this article at Bloomberg, however, seems a bit light on to me, though.  It's a bit "well, yeah sure, one absolutely key part of the field of economics is in an absolute shambles, and people have gone back to scratch to see if starting start all over again can help, but do we really need to say economics as a whole is in a bad state?"

Going well, then

Noticed on Twitter:

And from Axios:

• Volker testified that allegations by Ukraine's former prosecutor general against Joe Biden and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch are baseless, and that he knows both to be honorable people.
• Volker also said in his opening statement that he was not aware of a linkage between military aid and Zelensky's announcement of investigations, and that he opposed the hold on security assistance.
• In a major change from his closed-door testimony, Volker said that Sondland raised "investigations" in a meeting with Ukrainian officials in the White House, and that he thought it was inappropriate.
• Morrison testified that he recommended that access to the Trump-Zelensky call transcript be restricted, but that its placement onto a highly classified computer system was an "administrative error."

Cats smarter then we knew??

This really is a remarkable clip, the one shown in this tweet:

As a couple of people in comments say:

Some stuff

*  At the Conversation - an article about the limited effectiveness of controlled burns for preventing bushfires in extreme conditions contains this statement which conservative "it's all the Green's fault" ignore (my bold):

Evidence is mounting of increased bushfire frequency and extent in both Australia and the US - a situation predicted to worsen under climate change. Changing weather patterns mean opportunities for controlled burning will likely diminish further. Coupled with expanding populations in high fire-risk areas, Australia’s fire agencies - among the best in the world - have a challenging time ahead.

* JC, who occasionally comes here to make stupid comments, thinks US Attorney General Barr's intensely partisan speech on how wrong it is to restrain executive power is really important.   Yeah, it is important, if you want an AG endorsing the most clearly wannabe authoritarian President we have ever seen.   Here are a couple of articles ripping into Barr's pair of recent, disturbing, speeches.   As usual, he is an example of how conservative Catholics have made Catholicism deeply unattractive.

JC, I keep telling you - you're gullible and just swayed by the last thing you read, and you self filter to read mainly Right wing alternative reality .  You said you watch a lot of Fox News when you are in the US, I think.  Yeah, I can tell, because you make stupider comments while you are there.  Or am I being too generous - you do make stupid comments all the time.

* Rand Paul:    never liked him.  Now he's the libertarian most in the tank for Trump.  What a disgrace.

* On a Netflix note:   have been watching two French horror/supernatural series - Marianne, and the French/Belgium production Black Spot.

My son and I are pretty much enjoying both.   Both, curiously, feature eccentric and somewhat comic male police investigators, which keeps making me think how the Pink Panther series was ahead of its time.

Both also feature some really fast dialogue, with some really rapid subtitle reading required.   You do have to concentrate.  Lots of people smoking, too.

Marianne is often very creepy and somewhat disturbing, and also features the most aggro modern Catholic priest you are ever likely to see portrayed on TV.  The town where it is filmed is very odd looking - very exposed to the uninviting looking ocean, and it's one of the least pretty French towns I have ever seen portrayed.  This site begs to differ:

“Elden” is actually Doëlan, a quintessential French harbour town located in the commune of Clohars-Carnoët. And yes, Doëlan is as idyllic as it seems in Marianne. At the port of Doëlan, little multi-colored fishing boats float in green water, surrounded by charming thatched cottages. Each afternoon, fishermen sell their catch directly from their boats. A lighthouse – the lighthouse in Marianne — stands at the edge of the port. 

Unlike Elden, which is a nest of gloom, Doëlan seems like a good place to get an Airbnb. Just compare Elden’s foreboding motto, “You’ll be back,” with Doëlan’s simple “A port of two halves.” The former translates to, “Stay away!” and the latter to, uh, “A port of two halves.” 

Also, Doëlan is appears to be relatively untouched by tourists. According to Brittany Tourism, “There are also just one or two boutiques, but this place hasn’t been invaded by tourist shops to date.” Brace yourselves, fishermen of Doëlan. The Marianne fans are coming for selfies.

Maybe it's just the way it is filmed that makes it look unattractive to me.

Anyway, the show is pretty good, if you like this genre. 

Black Spot, especially the first episode, seems to have really lifted too much from Twin Peaks.  Again, it really doesn't look much like the Europe we are used to seeing, but it's good looking and I liked the second episode more, so we will keep watching.

Rumours - Part 2

Well, if only:

The world of woe

Speaking as I just was of the 1960's, I think it fair to note that the globe seems to be in a pretty unusually tumultuous political state at the moment, at least in terms of the number of countries having riots in the last month or so.

Let's see - there's Hong Kong; Iran; Iraq; Lebanon; Chile; Bolivia; France (at least Paris, anyway); Spain (or at least Barcelona); Ecuador; Haiti; Indonesia.  Have I missed any?

Some figures needed

I note that conservative twit James Morrow re-tweeted this yesterday:

The ABC reports this morning:

The burnt area statewide now covers more than 1,650,000 hectares — more than during the past three bushfire seasons combined.

Gee, sounds like it could be pretty much "unprecedented" going by those figures (and bearing in mind there is no way the current bout of fires is going to suddenly stop anytime soon.)

The downside of the 60's

Yeah, I do get the feeling that the drug experimentation outbreak of the 1960's is largely romanticised in hindsight.  I mean, there was excellent reason for social unrest, but did hallucinogenic drug taking really have to be part of that?  

You don't read too many accounts of people or families that were broken by the experimentation, but here's one that has appeared in the Washington Post.  All very sad.

The ultimate goal?

I'm sure everyone in the West feels sorry for Hong Kong and is broadly sympathetic to the protests going on.

But does anyone know what the (in particular) younger protesters think they can ultimately achieve?  

Rumours

So, Trump made a sudden trip to hospital on the weekend, and lots of people are sceptical of the explanation ("the first part of his annual check up - he's fine.")  

I don't see anything at all wrong with wishing his presidency end suddenly due to ill health.   (The funniest thing would be if he was compulsorily admitted for psychiatric assessment by White House staff, because I would love to watch GOP insiders have to deal with the "you're part of the Deep State" wildfire that would then erupt around them, despite their having benefited from conspiracy belief for the last 20 years).  But when his wife was in hospital unexpectedly, it turned out it wasn't due to a scandalous attempt at escaping her marriage, so I don't know that I should be getting my hopes up.

More oddly, I saw on Twitter that someone has started a rumour that Scott Morrison's almost complete disappearance from public appearances or statements in the last (what?) 5 or 6 days is due to a liberal leadership spill being underway, probably by the forces of Dutton (!)   That just seems so wildly unlikely that I can barely credit that someone would speak it out loud.  

Mind you, I suspect someone in the media knows what he's been up to, but they are just not talking about it.  This is usually what they do when a PM takes a plane to visit service personnel overseas, isn't it? 

David Roberts on the impeachment

There's a lot of praise on Twitter for this David Roberts take on the impeachment in light of his 2017 excellent take on what he calls the epistemic crisis in American politics.  It is very good.

In Australia, you see the epistemic crisis writ large in the conservatives (and that is what 99% of them now are) at Catallaxy.  Sinclair Davidson has handed over the keys to CL, the Catholic stuck forever in pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism and society, who is posting at such a pace that it now reads pretty much as his personal blog.  He posted at 1.39am (?) the Australian conservative Right's take on the impeachment:

To recap: the impeachment hoax was designed to cover up the crimes of the Biden family … which came to prominent public attention during the Ukraine hoax … which was conceived to cover up the Russia hoax … which was orchestrated to cover up the illegal surveillance of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The epistemic problem means it is essentially impossible to argue with these self-blinded twits.  

Also true...

Look, can you really blame any country for not wanting to let these two in...

I mean fair's fair; they're both annoying prats.  

If it was up to me, I'd have any person who has ever been to an IPA function on a watch list of undesireables I wouldn't want in my country.

Exactly

All about money, and the state of economics

There's a very lengthy review/essay at the New York Review of Books - Against Economics - all about the parlous state of economics.  I don't know the writer, David Graeber, but he makes reference to having written on economics before, and the book he is reviewing is by a Brit, Robert Skidelsky.

But it's all rather interesting.  There is so much I want to extract.  Here is the opening:

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

On the question of how money is created, I have not heard of this debate before; but then again, the reviewer suggests, that's probably because it has been sort of ignored by the mainstream media:

There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).

Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money, but only on the basis of a multiplier effect (so that your car loan can still be seen as ultimately rooted in some retired grandmother’s pension fund). Only a minority—mostly heterodox economists, post-Keynesians, and modern money theorists—uphold what is called the “credit creation theory of banking”: that bankers simply wave a magic wand and make the money appear, secure in the confidence that even if they hand a client a credit for $1 million, ultimately the recipient will put it back in the bank again, so that, across the system as a whole, credits and debts will cancel out. Rather than loans being based in deposits, in this view, deposits themselves were the result of loans.

The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers do not check their existing funds, reserves, or anything else. They simply create money out of thin air, or, as he preferred to put it, “fairy dust.”

That year also appears to have been when elements in Britain’s notoriously independent civil service decided that enough was enough. The question of money creation became a critical bone of contention. The overwhelming majority of even mainstream economists in the UK had long since rejected austerity as counterproductive (which, predictably, had almost no impact on public debate). But at a certain point, demanding that the technocrats charged with running the system base all policy decisions on false assumptions about something as elementary as the nature of money becomes a little like demanding that architects proceed on the understanding that the square root of 47 is actually π. Architects are aware that buildings would start falling down. People would die.

Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create. Almost all public debate on these subjects is therefore based on false premises. For example, if what the Bank of England was saying were true, government borrowing didn’t divert funds from the private sector; it created entirely new money that had not existed before.

One might have imagined that such an admission would create something of a splash, and in certain restricted circles, it did. Central banks in Norway, Switzerland, and Germany quickly put out similar papers. Back in the UK, the immediate media response was simply silence. The Bank of England report has never, to my knowledge, been so much as mentioned on the BBC or any other TV news outlet. Newspaper columnists continued to write as if monetarism was self-evidently correct. Politicians continued to be grilled about where they would find the cash for social programs. It was as if a kind of entente cordiale had been established, in which the technocrats would be allowed to live in one theoretical universe, while politicians and news commentators would continue to exist in an entirely different one.

 And then we get to a key question: what is the nature of money anyway?:

What it [Skidelsky's book] reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win—for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement? This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced. One important theoretical innovation that these new bullion-based theories of money allowed was, as Skidelsky notes, what has come to be called the quantity theory of money (usually referred to in textbooks—since economists take endless delight in abbreviations—as QTM).

The QTM argument was first put forward by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, during a debate over the cause of the sharp, destablizing price inflation that immediately followed the Iberian conquest of the Americas. Bodin argued that the inflation was a simple matter of supply and demand: the enormous influx of gold and silver from the Spanish colonies was cheapening the value of money in Europe. The basic principle would no doubt have seemed a matter of common sense to anyone with experience of commerce at the time, but it turns out to have been based on a series of false assumptions. For one thing, most of the gold and silver extracted from Mexico and Peru did not end up in Europe at all, and certainly wasn’t coined into money. Most of it was transported directly to China and India (to buy spices, silks, calicoes, and other “oriental luxuries”), and insofar as it had inflationary effects back home, it was on the basis of speculative bonds of one sort or another. This almost always turns out to be true when QTM is applied: it seems self-evident, but only if you leave most of the critical factors out.

In the case of the sixteenth-century price inflation, for instance, once one takes account of credit, hoarding, and speculation—not to mention increased rates of economic activity, investment in new technology, and wage levels (which, in turn, have a lot to do with the relative power of workers and employers, creditors and debtors)—it becomes impossible to say for certain which is the deciding factor: whether the money supply drives prices, or prices drive the money supply. Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand—which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

I've probably pushed the friendship with the magazine too far - go read the rest on their site.

Yet more doctors against vaping

Some European cardiologists really don't like vaping:

Prof Münzel and his colleagues investigated the effect of e-cigarette vapour on blood flow in the brachial artery in the upper arm in 20 healthy smokers before they vaped an e-cigarette and then 15 minutes afterwards. They also measured how stiff the artery became.

They also did a mouse study.

The conclusions:

They found that just one vaping episode increased heart rates and caused the arteries to stiffen and the inner lining of the arteries, the endothelium, to stop working properly in the smokers. The endothelium is responsible for maintaining the correct dilation and constriction of blood vessels, protects tissues from toxic substances and regulates inflammation and blood clotting processes. Endothelial dysfunction is involved in the development of cardiovascular disease.

Prof Münzel said: "The results of the present studies identified several molecular mechanisms whereby e-cigarettes can cause damage to the blood vessels, lungs, heart and brain. This is a consequence of toxic chemicals that are produced by the vaping process and may also be present at lower concentrations in the liquid itself. Importantly, we identified an enzyme, NOX-2, that mediated all the effects of e-cigarettes on the brain and cardiovascular system, and we found that a toxic chemical called acrolein, which is produced when the liquid in e-cigarettes is vaporised, activated the damaging effects of NOX-2. The beneficial effects of macitentan and bepridil indicate that e-cigarettes have the capacity to trigger constriction of blood vessels and to impair our cells' antioxidant and survival systems.

"Our data may indicate that e-cigarettes are not a healthy alternative to traditional cigarettes, and their perceived 'safety' is not warranted. In addition, we still have no experience about the health side effects of e-cigarettes arising from long-term use. The e-cigarette epidemic in the US and Europe, in particular among our youth, is causing a huge generation of nicotine-addicted people who are being endangered by encouragement to switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Research like ours should serve as a warning about their dangers, and aggressive steps should be taken to protect our children from health risks caused by e-cigarettes."

A limitation of the study was that no healthy non-smokers were included. However, the researchers point out that a strength is that they have received no funding from the e-cigarette industry. "Recent studies indicate that e-cigarette industry funding is more likely to lead to results that indicate that e-cigarettes are harmless," write the researchers in their paper.