Meanwhile, in America

Not to mention the Dr Seuss kerfuffle - a decision made by the owners of the books, and under no particular "cancel culture" pressure.

Private high school boys sticking together?

I see Chris Uhlmann is still running with "Porter's been cleared and this is a disgraceful witch hunt" line (which is ludicrous, seeing the police never even properly started an investigation); and some are complaining that Andrew Probyn from the ABC sounded unusually sympathetic to Porter at the end of his press conference.  

Probyn went to Scotch College (all boy's school);  Uhlmann to a Marist Brothers college in Canberra.   Porter himself to an Anglican boys school.

Gives me an uncomfortable feeling that journalist sympathy is only possible if you've also gone to an all boys' high school, with their dubious reputation for seeing all girls as potential sexual conquests.  (An attitude I noticed had developed in guys I knew who went to Catholic boy's education after a mixed sex primary school.)

Update:  Peter van Onselen -

Went to - The Scots College, Sydney.  All boys.

(Also, lots of people pointing out he has openly said he's a friend of Porter.)

On TV this morning, every talking head said that you can't just leave it at this, there has to be a form of independent enquiry.   

And when you think about it, with all the uncertainty as to how the dossier sent to the police was compiled (it is apparently not even certain it was all done by the complainant), open questions about when she started telling friends about it, etc, it is possible that Porter could come out of an enquiry looking better "cleared" than merely by his own denial.   

He is being politically self serving by claiming it is so unfair because he can't prove that something didn't happen. 

Professor black and white

James Allen, the Right wing law professor that who I have long thought a twit, writes about Christian Porter:

And if you agree with me about this [the criminal standard of proof being beyond reasonable doubt, and the accused having the right to cross examine their accuser]  – to repeat myself, many do not – then you will see immediately (as I said) that on the facts of these allegations no legal system with any commitment to fair procedures would ever consider Christian Porter as anything other than wholly innocent.  End of story.  That’s how it should be.  Let me be unequivocally clear about that. 

What he does not want to mention, although being a lawyer he would be completely aware of it, is the civil law standard of proof of "balance of probabilities".    Hence, you have situations where a person is acquitted of a crime, but can still be found civilly liable to pay compensation.   Hello, OJ Simpson.

Questions of appropriateness of positions held in a government should not be decided on simple "did he commit a crime or not according to criminal burden of proof" - especially in a case where no complete police investigation is possible due to the death of the complainant.  

Quite disingenuous, just as Porter's "but no one told me any of the details" claims today.

Porter denial

Bernard Keane makes the point which I agree is the weirdest thing about how Morrison and Porter have chosen to deal with the historical rape allegation:

What has emerged from Christian Porter’s media conference this afternoon — where he vehemently and repeatedly denied the allegations made against him in relation to a sexual assault in 1988 — is a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of multiple parties about some of the gravest claims that can be made against any individual, let alone one occupying the position of chief law officer of the Commonwealth.

First is Porter’s own lack of curiosity about allegations he claims he was aware were circulating about last November — that he had “offended against” (his words) a woman in the past. Porter did not seek to obtain details of the allegations or see the documents involved. And, when asked by the prime minister last Wednesday about the allegations, Porter merely denied them, and did not ask to see the documents involved.

And as part of his insistence that he is the victim of a trial by media (and especially the ABC), Porter says no one has put the allegations to him — a claim that may yet be fiercely contested by others.

It has no bearing on the veracity of the claims made against Porter which, to repeat, he rejects completely. But it is peculiar behaviour for the first law officer of the Commonwealth to be so completely uninterested in claims that would be politically destructive, even to the point of not being sufficiently moved to ask the prime minister to hand a copy to him when asked about them.

But it enabled Porter to insist this afternoon that he had no idea about the claims made against them and to profess outrage that he had been subjected to such a “whispering campaign”.

Then there is Scott Morrison’s own lack of curiosity. The prime minister says he was “fully briefed” on the claims made against Porter but did not bother to read the relevant documents. Nor did he show Porter the documents — an incurious prime minister and an incurious attorney-general.

I cannot see how this attitude can play out well - it makes it look like a case of men protecting men on the part of Morrison in particular:   "I don't even have to read the full details of this matter - if Christian denies it, that's good enough for me."   

I can see no credible way out of this other than to have some form of enquiry - unless Porter just resigns "for health reasons".   While it certainly not impossible that the complaint was an imagined event from a person who suffered mental health issues, you can't have the freaking Attorney General the subject of such an allegation from a person he did socialise with and take the attitude "well, she's died before a police investigation could be started, so (whew) no need to look further into it."    

 

A random post

It's a little surprising, isn't it, that scientists are still working on ways to quickly generate genuinely random numbers.   Here's the start of an article at Science:

Human-made physical random number generators (RNGs) can be traced back 5000 years or more. Early examples such as knucklebones, two-sided throwsticks, or dice have been found in the Middle East, India, and China. RNGs were used for fortune telling and games of chance, with the oldest known board games of similar age as those of the number generators. Today, RNGs are vital for services and state-of-the-art technologies such as cryptographically secured communication, blockchain technologies, and quantum key distribution. Moreover, RNGs are needed in machine learning and scientific applications such as Monte Carlo numerical methods. On page 948 of this issue, Kim et al. (1) demonstrate an ultrafast RNG based on a broad-area laser with a multispot beam that is analogous to generating random numbers by using many dice at once.

Random numbers are often generated by using a software algorithm running on a computer, called “pseudo”-random because the sequence eventually repeats. Moreover, relations among the numbers can exist that reveal that the numbers are not uniformly random. Hence, true RNGs (TRNGs) are of great interest, providing random numbers based on physical measurements that involve some noisy or stochastic process. All TRNGs have some nonidealities, such as generating zeroes more frequently than ones for a binary-output device, which must be mitigated by carefully engineering the device and postprocessing the data to improve the randomness quality.

Some applications require generating random numbers at very high rates, such as encrypting data in cloud-computing data centers, high-speed communication networks, or massive simulations. Photonic devices are a natural fit for these applications because of their potential for high-speed operation, compact size for chip-scale devices, and low power consumption.

Recently, Marangon et al. (3) developed a TRNG that is based on interfering two different lasers on a beam splitter and detecting the resulting powers that emanate from its two output ports. The randomness comes about from quantum fluctuations in a laser due to a process known as spontaneous emission of photons.

I wonder if fortune telling is improved by using the very best form of random number generator - one involving quantum effects, for example.

 

We had a storm

A very tall gum tree fell over in the park near my house.  Honestly, the local birds sounded sad after it.

How long before an attempted repair to this hopeless attempt at political management?

Scott Morrison, and the entire Morrison government, just seem incredibly hopeless at dealing with serious rape and sexual assault claims which have the potential to be politically damaging.   It's like we are watching incompetence in management circa 1980:   I mean, seriously - my job in the second half of the 1980's saw some examples of workplace freak out over how to handle sexual misbehaviour, and I reckon the people I saw responding way back then had more of a clue than this government:

The Prime Minister received an anonymous letter last week penned by friends of a woman who told police she was raped in 1988 by a man who is now a minister in Mr Morrison’s cabinet. The woman has since taken her own life.

Mr Morrison told reporters on Monday he had spoken to the minister in question and he “absolutely” denied the allegations.

Mr Morrison said he had discussed the correspondence with the AFP commissioner, as well as Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary and deputy secretary.

“I had a discussion with the individual, as I said, who absolutely rejects these allegations,” Mr Morrison said.

“And so after having … spoken to the commissioner and to the secretary and deputy secretary at this stage, there are no matters that require attention.”

When asked if he believed the minister’s denial, Mr Morrison said it was a “matter for the police”.

“I’m not the commissioner of police,” he said.

“Allegations of criminal conduct should be dealt with by competent and authorised agencies.”

When asked whether he had read the evidence submitted with the letter, Mr Morrison said he was “aware of the contents”.

“I’ve been briefed on the contents of them. And it was appropriate, as the commissioner himself advised the parliament to refer any allegations to the properly authorities,” the PM said.

“That is the way in our country under the rule of law things like this are dealt with. It is important to ensure that we uphold that. That is the way our society operates.

“Now, these are very distressing issues that have been raised, as there are other issues that have been raised in relation to other members in other cases.

“But the proper place for that to be dealt is by the authorities, which are the police.

“That’s how our country operates. That systems protects all Australians.”

There is no conceivable way a sensible boss would think he could deal with it like this.

I reckon within a week we'll have an inquiry set up, and the cabinet minister standing aside.

It's bleeding obvious you can't tough this one out.

Update:  Chris Uhlmann, an idiot, thinks it would be outrageously unfair for the cabinet member to face any inquiry, because it would "reverse the onus of proof".    Pathetic.

Nostradamus never foresaw this one

Namely, international diplomatic friction over one country wanting to take anal swabs of other nations' citizens:

TOKYO: Tokyo has requested Beijing to stop taking anal swab tests for COVID-19 on Japanese citizens as the procedure causes psychological pain, a government spokesman said on Monday (Mar 1).

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the government has not received a response that Beijing would change the testing procedure, so Japan would continue to ask China to alter the way of testing....

China's foreign ministry denied last month that US diplomats in the country had been required to take anal swab tests for COVID-19, following media reports that some had complained about the procedure.

 

Weekend stuff

*  Like 95% of young women, my daughter thinks Apple is the only company to consider for phones and laptops, and so I found myself with her in the Brisbane Apple store on Saturday.   

Is it just me, or does the whole Apple store vibe strike other people as way too much like visiting a creepy Scientology outlet?   The uniform; the young, way-too-enthusiastic-for-just-doing-retail attitude; (dare I say) the invitation to part with more money than what more modest religions invite. 

I bet I am not the first to make the comparison, but it really struck me on Saturday.

*  Barramundi:   against my better judgement, tried cooking with it again on Saturday night.   It is a mushy, unpleasantly coloured, wildly over-rated fish, and I don't know why they bother farming it.

*  Watched The Green Book on Saturday.   It's enjoyable enough, and I think the two lead actors are both very good (Viggo Mortensen is ridiculously versatile), but I have criticisms.

I felt the screenplay gave very inadequate basis for understanding how Don Shirley (who I knew nothing about) came to be the way he was.  I mean, we already understand how an American Italian who grew up in the Bronx is the way he is; it's much rarer to find an upper class Black guy in the 1960's who disdains most of Black culture, so isn't that worth some detailed explanation?   

I also thought that it was a bit dramatically flat - I expected some greater racial insult to be the dramatic peak of the film than the refusal of service at the venue's restaurant.   And there was the YMCA incident which I felt was sort of inexplicably glossed over by Viggo's character:  it just seemed a bit implausible to me that an American Italian like that would (more or less) just shrug it off, and later share a hotel room with the guy.    

But it is, of course, well intentioned and handsomely made, so I wouldn't want to put off anyone from seeing it.   

But it you want to be concerned again about the liberties Hollywood routinely takes on true life stories, you can read this Time article which gives an explanation as to why some people who knew Shirley complain about the film, and others think it OK.    (They are many similar article around on other sites.)

COVID's odd effect in Japan

This article at the BBC notes that COVID in Japan seems to have caused an increase in suicide, but only amongst women, which is odd:

Professor Michiko Ueda is one of Japan's leading experts on suicide. She tells me how shocking it has been to witness the sharp reverse in the last few months.

"This pattern of female suicides is very, very unusual," she tells me.

"I have never seen this much [of an] increase in my career as a researcher on this topic. The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is the industries hit most are industries staffed by women, such as tourism and retail and the food industries."

Japan has seen a large rise in single women living alone, many of them choosing that over marriage which entails quite traditional gender roles still. Prof Ueda says young women are also far more likely to be in so-called precarious employment.

On a cheerier note, I hadn't realised that suicide rates had been improving as much as they have over the last 12 years:

In a country notoriously reserved about people talking about their mental health, the article does not explain what is behind this.   
  

An accurate forecast

It surprises me, watching my favourite vloggers, how much time they sometimes say it takes them to edit their videos.  But I also wonder, do so many of them have to follow that jumpy style of editting that is so common.  Less edits would cut down edit time. [To be clear - I know this Tik Tok works  because of the editing, and the Tik Tok format is often based on quick edits.   I am talking more about the way so many vloggers use the constant little edits on longer Youtube videos  when it's just a talk to camera.  Sure, some are cutting out mistakes, but I am sure it is used just as a stylistic device too.] 

I'm also getting a depressing B Ark vision of the future of humanity where in 200 years a tiny outpost of people survive in the Arctic circle, trying to grow crops and editing videos about it.  (And some intellectual will discover that ubiquitous masturbation is about to lead to extinction.)

 

[Having said that, I did like that guy's Tik Tok.  I don't have the app, but I think you can watch it via the Tweet here.]

Yeah, that'll work

In China:

So far, 2021 has been cruel to unhappy Chinese couples. The first blow came on Jan. 1, when a new law went into effect mandating a 30-day cooling-off period for those seeking a divorce. Then, in February, couples that were still seeking to split up found themselves struggling to find online appointments. In parts of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the calendar was backed up for weeks. In Guangzhou, appointments were so scarce that scalpers sold them.

China’s government isn’t apologizing. For years, it took a hands-off approach to marriage and divorce. But steep recent declines in the country’s birth rate are changing minds at the top. A government that once sought to discourage childbearing is now resurrecting traditional and often sexist notions of family and gender to promote it.

The article explains the history of government intervention there into marriage laws.  The concern with the birthrate has led to government badgering of women:

...the end of the one-child policy in 2016 had no meaningful impact on the country’s birth rate. In 2019, the number of births fell 4%, to 10.6 million, China’s lowest level since 1961.

That has left the government eager to find scapegoats as it abandons decades of anti-natalism for an increasingly coercive pro-natalism. Last week, the National Health Commission outlined the factors that, in its view, are impacting fertility in China’s economically depressed northeast region: “economic burdens, infant and child care, and female career development.” The commission is no outlier. About a decade ago, Chinese media began referring to working, unmarried women over the age of 27 by the derogatory term “leftover women,” expressing an anti-feminist (and pro-natalist) attitude that has persisted ever since.

I wonder how popular abortion is now in that country?   I mean, we know it was used to help enforce the one child policy, but now that they want more kids, wouldn't they just consider it making it harder to obtain?

Reports say that they are being, shall we say, unsubtle about its use for the Uighurs:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

 It's pretty incredible, their attitude to controlling society.

The continuing uncertainty over Planet 9

I didn't think it would be so hard to work our whether there really is Planet Nine - but it obviously is. 

Planet Nine is dead; long live Planet Nine? For some years, scientists have debated the existence of an unseen planet at least five times the mass of Earth in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Now, the hypothesis has been dealt a blow by a new analysis of distant, icy objects, which questions the evidence that they are under the gravitational pull of a huge planet.

The findings do not rule out the possibility of a ninth planet orbiting the Sun, and astronomers say more data will be needed to put the debate to rest.

 I would like it to turn out to be a captured black hole, actually.   That would allow for some good science fiction ideas.

A fairly complicated story about some possible new physics

It's not the simplest explanation, but it's worth reading:  How the Universe Remembers Information.

(I think they really should put "Possibly" at the end of that title.)

Still counting

I see via Twitter that Gallup has a new figure out for its survey results on American sexual identification, and the headline story is the (so to speak) rise of the bi:

More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.

Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

The other big thing is the increase in bi identification being mainly in the young, and mainly with women:

Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

I'm not sure that there is really anything too surprising about this - it's been pretty clear for some time that there it's been increasingly "cool" amongst the youth to identify as being something other than boring old straight, and we already knew young women were ahead of the curve in claiming sexual/gender diversity.  Identity politics itself has been on the up and up.  

But there are some interesting things said about the results on Twitter.  For example, I had never thought of this before, but I read a tweet (that I can't find again right now) that argued that the large number of deaths from AIDS in the 80's and 90's can partly account for why substantially fewer older men identify as gay.

The most dubious result in the survey is probably the transgender identification amongst the younger group, especially "Gen Z":

I'm with the middle comment:  it's a result that really raises questions about how young people are thinking about these categories when they answer the survey.   

Anyway, it all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2013 about estimates at that time of the number of men  who could likely be called gay or bisexual.    (See the comments too.)  At that time, I guesstimated that, if you looked at CDC survey evidence of men who said they had sexual experiences with men, you could probably get to 4 to 5% who could be identified as gay or bisexual, in America at least.*

The Gallup results would now back that up:

 Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

So, I think my guesstimate still looks good.

 

 

* The figure increases to 20% if you are talking about England.**

** A joke.  Although I am still pretty sure it's the gayest country on the planet.  

   

Cancelled Will is not letting it get him down

I really respect Will Wilkinson.   Arguably, he was the recent victim of one of the stupidest examples of "cancel culture" being mis-used by a boss against a quality, (now) pretty much mainstream liberal writer, but Wilkinson did not moan about it at all, and just went on to set up his own corner of the internet to pump out his great writing.

A recent example:  On the Defensive Prickliness of Anti-Woke Patriotism.  

It's about this:

Why is it so bothersome to admit that there are shameful chapters of cruel injustice in our nation’s history? Why is it so hard to simply accept that the historical record and publicly available comparative evidence suggests that the United States of America is pretty great in a lot of ways and really awful in a lot of ways?

He ends with this explanations of how conservatives "cope" with the dissonance that there is a lot to criticise in the history of the country, while it is also pretty great in many ways:

The easiest way to cope with the story that credible American historians tend to tell is to outsource your expertise identification needs to conservative commentators (they’re expert experts!) who say that you shouldn’t trust them — who say that these out-of-touch woke egghead elites sneering down on all of us from their ivory towers are intentionally spreading misinformation because they hate America, want to tear down what makes it great, and replace it with something bad, foreign and dystopian, like …. I dunno, functional democratic institutions or an adequate social insurance state?

However, dismissing inconvenient truths by impugning the messenger doesn’t fully meet the challenge of keeping on the sunny side. It remains that America has a lot of profound problems that simply cannot be denied. So the next step is to blame all our undeniable problems on the evil and incompetence of your cultural/political rivals while pretending that the places where most Americans live don’t really count as part of the country. This leaves conservatives in a position where they can say that America is unambiguously great … except for all the ways in which the left and “elites” have turned it into a tyrannizing garbage fire.  

This is how you end up with the truly baffling Calvinball of conservative national assessment. America is the greatest country in the history of the world! It is also “not great,” “crippled,” and the victim of “carnage” roughly in proportion to the extent that Republicans don’t control things. A meaty majority of the American population dwells in large metro areas, which are all run by Democrats. These places are thus unmitigated disasters. You might think that an ambiguous “part good, part bad” mixed judgment of America’s merits would be logically inescapable once you’ve committed yourself to the idea that half the country lives in one or another crumbling, corrupt, crowded, crime-infested hellhole. Indeed, it is logically inescapable.

But this isn’t logic; this is a coping mechanism. That’s why the problems that beset America’s cities, whether real or imagined, don’t exactly count against America because they count first against Democrats and Democrats aren’t really American. Or maybe it’s that multicultural Democratic-majority cities don’t count as part of “real” America, so the horrendous problems they are imagined to have can’t drag down America’s greatness score. Either way. 

At the end of all these intellectual and emotional gymnastics is relief. Really, there’s nothing to not be proud of. Because if American history makes you feel bad, it’s a lie. If the places where most Americans live are terrible it doesn’t count because those aren’t real American places that count. If there’s anything about our country that is seriously and undeniably bad, it’s because disloyal fake Americans are preventing us from being the greatest country on Earth by scandalously denying that we are.

I find that analysis completely convincing.

More connected but less...connected

So it seems Noah Smith just noticed an article from 2018 in The Atlantic that noted that young Americans were having less sex than before:

 which led to a couple of Tweets by a guy explaining it:

That sounds (a little depressingly) plausible.  Someone else throws this in:

This all sounds bad from an evolutionary perspective!

A disappointing summer

I suspected as much.  As this article notes, Queensland was (more or less) promised a wet summer due to La Nina, but apart from parts of the far North, it's been pretty dry.

This have been very noticeable around Brisbane, where it seems to me to be quite a few years now since we had a lot of summer rainfall.  Storms have brought just enough intermittent rain to keeps the grass green-ish, but we really haven't had the days of deep, drenching rain that used to be a regular feature of our summers.

It's still possible we may get a very wet autumn, I guess.  I certainly hope we are not heading into a protracted period of low rainfall again, though.   

Illiberal Left noted

Further to my post yesterday, I agree with this sentiment:

I also found via Twitter today this Jonathan Chait article about some of the silliness about "cancelling" people for using words when they are clearly just being quoted, rather than endorsed:  Describing a slur is not the same as using it.

It seems pretty surprising that such a thing needs to be explained in detail, but that's where some of the worst of "cancel culture" has taken us.  

 

A repeat problem

I watched Four Corners last night on management problems in Kakadu National Park.  

Jointly managed by traditional owners and Canberra based (I think) Parks Australia, apparently there has been a lot of argument from the locals that the latter is not listening to them enough.  One example they gave, and a major one for the tourism operators, was the closing down of a walkway to get to the top of a formerly very popular waterfall.   Apparently, traditional owners claimed it came too close to a sacred site, and they had warned Parks Australia.

The show, I have to say, as a piece of journalism, was completely unbalanced.  They did point out that a trio of Parks Australia managers had resigned, but there was no attempt at all to have any of them, or anyone else from Parks Australia, to respond to various claims of the local traditional owners.

You see, I find it hard to believe that Parks Australia would have built the stairway against clear and specific protest from the traditional owners about impact on a sacred site.  I strongly suspect there is more to it than that - unclear input from traditional owners; a expansion of a sacred site from what they had previously considered sacred; or a simple miscommunication.   

The problem seems to be a repeat one - that it is really hard working with aboriginal representative bodies, and I very much doubt that the problem is all (as aboriginal activists claim) on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.

There seems a very good chance that traditional owner expectations as to their opinion always winning on every management issue is going to lead to their own economic loss due to permanently reduced tourism.   One aboriginal community member last night was saying that in fact they shouldn't be putting all their economic eggs into tourism anyway - but he was completely and utterly non specific as to what other enterprises anyone had in mind:  

JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation are looking at developing tourism in Jabiru, there are a whole range of different options that Jabiru could become used for, rather than tourism. I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people. The education of our people, employment of our people. There is potential for economic growth in establishing enterprises for our people in the Park. But you have to see beyond the blinkers. Look outside the box, mate. What might be a potential. Tourism is not the be all and end all.     

I always worry that I am sounding too Right wing unsympathetic on aboriginal issues - but it's just that anyone my age has seen decades of claims that if only politicians and non indigenous Australians would listen more to what traditional owners want and need it will all improve.

But it doesn't.  Or not much, anyway.