On being optimistic enough to have children

I strongly agree with the argument set out by Ezra Klein in the New York Times:  climate change is a very serious and urgent issue, but it is nonetheless lacking perspective to think that it is such a dire problem that adults who would otherwise like to have kids should decide not to have any.

Hurt ego

I saw that Tim Wilson was trending on Twitter, and found out that this is why (from The Age yesterday):

Wilson, who before parliament was a policy director at the free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, and a human rights commissioner, plans to go hiking in Yosemite National Park with his husband Ryan. He also plans to set up his own climate and energy advisory business, utilising his experience as a junior minister for industry, energy and emissions reduction.

“I’m very open about the journey that I’ve gone through, from foetal position crying on Sunday morning through to seeing a psychologist yesterday,” Wilson told an energy efficiency conference in the week after his electoral defeat.

There is, shall we say, not an awful lot of sympathy for Ego Boy being shown on Twitter.

Crazy old women

Jeez, how absolutely loopy is Bettina Arndt, not to mention ungrateful to a government which thought they were on her side of the culture wars and gave her an AM.

The crazy old Cassie, at the blog for ageing Australian wingnuts and Putin admirers, has extracted a part from an email Bettina sent out to her subscribers after the election:

It wasn’t that the Morrison government didn’t listen to women. This pussy-whipped crew sniveled, and groveled, like a cuckolded man clutching desperately at the ankles of his departing wife. Remember the appalling apology to Brittany Higgins? Or Morrison’s forced smile when Grace Tame insulted him with her infantile side-eye. Or the cowardly act of allowing Christian Porter and Alan Tudge to be pushed out of their ministerial roles over unproven sexual assault allegations. Or the cringing over the parliamentary harassment report, denying the very low incidence of actual harassment and high rates of female bullying.

Beautifully put Bettina.

Ha!   Yes, if only the Morrison government had talked tougher to the women appalled at an apparent cover up of an alleged rape at Parliament House.   If only Morrison had refused to have any type of enquiry into a historical rape allegation against the nation's top law officer.   Wait - he did!  

You have to be extraordinarily stupid to think that Morrison (or, of course, Porter, who folded his defamation action) handled it appropriately or well.  

I like the way she uses the sexist term "pussy whipped" too - and when I Google that, I see she used it against the Shorten government - but she still got her AM from Morrison - what an embarrassment.  

Earlier this year, Arndt wrote a bizarre piece at online Quadrant about the inquest about the Hannah Clarke murder case - the one where the husband burned alive his wife and 3 young children - in which she claims to condemn his actions (well, duh) - but then criticises the attitude of the police officer that the murderer's nightly demand for sex was a domestic violence warning sign.   Yes, it's all feminism gone mad, pushing a man beyond his limits.  [Sarc].  Ridiculously, Bettina lists a string of other appalling and extremely controlling behaviour by the father that came out of the inquest, including threats to kill a previous partner - but she still concluded "I will now write an article about how this man was not given enough help."    You know someone has pushed the line when a reader of Quadrant responds in comments:

It’s not often I disagree with anything Ms Arndt writes, but she’s lost me on this one.

But that's Bettina for you.  She's absolutely nuts.  (As is Cassie - whose hyperventilating climate change post I might copy one day too.)

Some good news

Whoops, I originally copied a tweet that Sky News Australia was going to no longer on the WIN regional network, but it from last year and came into effect July 2021 by the looks.  Have to pay closer attention.

By the way, I wouldn't mind betting that, despite being as Trumpist as all hell, the Sky News at Night right wing blatherers do not like touching the guns rights issue in the USA, given that everyone in Australia would think them idiots if they promoted the Wingnut pro-gun views...

Christofascist watch

 

Must be time for some...Friday physics (dark matter edition)

This video is a fantastically clear and concise explanation of the search for dark matter, and pleasingly, has an Australian connection.  (I think I had heard about a new dark matter detector being set up in Victoria before, but here we get to see what stage it is at, and a super clear explanation of how dark matter detectors work.)

Waiting for the Republican "too many doors" analysis

Tulsa police confirmed that a shooter killed four people at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Okla., on Wednesday.

"Four innocents and one shooter" are dead, Jonathan Brooks of the Tulsa police department said at a news conference on Wednesday.

The link.

Update:  So now we know.  A guy upset with his back surgeon goes out and buys a rifle and shoots up the doctors, a receptionist and an innocent by-stander.  No discussion of security in the building, although I would suspect most large medical centres in the US would have an armed security guard.   

Anyway, I thought this Trevor Noah piece, made before this latest shooting, effectively satirised the "it's anything but guns" pathetic Republican arguments.

Details becoming necessary to maintain long term political support

I wrote this in November 2021, and in light of the change of government, I think it has become even more relevant:

The transition to clean energy - time for specifics, isn't it?? 

I mean, there is a strong tendency for the media to jump to catastrophic predictions about what may be (relatively) short term energy problems:

Australia is on the "precipice" of a UK-style energy crisis that could send many of its power retailers broke and fuel a surge of households unable to pay their bills, a leading expert has warned. 

And:

I also do not doubt stories that the easily scared - like old pensioners - will take such headlines as a sign that they need to risk ill health by not turning on any heat in their homes out of fear of the cost.

But part of the reason for such stories having legs is the impression (well justified I think) that while governments are busy committing to reduce emissions, there is scant detailed explanation of how we are going to get there.

But with the timelines being talked about, that's just not good enough now, surely?  

I don't think that everything can be worked out right now, but my post made suggestions as to what I think government could do to help, but seemingly isn't.

 

More on that Sussman trial

This was written back in September, when the indictment was first brought:

While lying to the FBI is a serious crime, deserving of attention and in many cases prosecution, this charge looks dicey. The entire case comes down to Baker’s recollection. But Baker himself testified to Congress in October 2018 that he did not recall whether or not Sussman had represented himself as representing Clinton or the Democratic Party. The entire case turns on the allegation that Sussman lied to Baker. Yet Baker — essentially the only direct witness to the purported lie — testified three years ago that he could not remember what Sussman said about the key issue in the case.

As troubling as that is, it’s not even the biggest problem for the prosecution. The indictment discloses that, when Baker spoke to an FBI assistant director about the meeting with Sussman, the assistant director’s notes state that Sussman “Represents DNC, Clinton Foundation, etc.” So the crux of the indictment is that Sussman didn’t disclose to the FBI that he represented Clinton — but the FBI knew he represented Clinton anyway. That, folks, is what we prosecutors call a problem.

You should read the whole article.

Oh, and Bill Barr calling the Russiagate investigation "seditious" - he is going down in history as the worst Attorney General the nation has ever had, no doubt about it.  

Update: 

AR-15s discussed

Here's Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent talking about AR-15s in the Washington Post (and I'll gift link again, so you should be able to read it all):

Indeed, among some Republicans, the rationale for doing little to restrict access to AR-15-style weapons seems untethered from any real-world considerations. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) recently opined that people need AR-15s to prepare for a future doomsday in which law and order breaks down entirely and police protection essentially vanishes.

Meanwhile, as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reports, AR-15 variants have appeared in numerous GOP ads of late, and they are often brandished as little more than cultural signifiers. Assault-style weapons have taken on a kind of “own the libs” cultural life of their own: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) website recently enthused that such weaponry “TRIGGERS the Fake News Media and Democrats all across the country.”

Federal law seems decades behind this cultural shift. “The concept of what a long gun is in American culture has changed a lot in recent decades,” Mark Follman, the author of “Trigger Points,” a new book on mass shootings, told us.

Follman noted that the long gun was once understood as being primarily about hunting. But now, he said, rifles are increasingly marketed as a weapon of aggression and an “object of masculinity,” with a deliberate eye toward encouraging the “militarization” of gun culture.

In this sense, federal law is trapped in something of an anachronism. “The law may need to catch up with the way these weapons are perceived by 18-year-olds,” Follman said, citing massacres in Texas and Upstate New York.

There’s still another layer of perversity here. As Follman notes, mass shootings were historically carried out by semiautomatic handguns. “But that’s begun to shift in recent years,” he said. “More and more of these attacks are being carried out with AR-15s.”....

Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive who has emerged as a fierce critic of the industry, notes another absurdity: The age was set at 21 for handguns, Busse says, in part precisely because they were deemed more likely to be used by criminals against human victims than rifles would be.

“Now we have the AR-15,” Busse told us, which is the “most lethal, offensive thing out there.” Yet it isn’t treated as on a par with handguns, Busse notes, adding: “This demonstrates how behind-the-times our gun laws really are.”

The article is too softly worded, really:  I would prefer if it more directly said that Right wing political paranoia and culture warring, encouraged by money grubbing Right wing pundits and the gun industry itself, is what stops reasonable gun control measures in the USA. 

 

Yes, this does worry me a bit

Institute full of Right wing kook influencers

Ross Douthat had an interesting column recently about the Claremont Institute, the conservative think tank which (I had forgotten) published the absurd Flight 95 Election essay in 2016, that tried to argue the country was on a catastrophic course unless loon Trump took over.  

Today, I see that one of its publications has an article by Jim Troupis in which he makes mad claims that the 400 2000 Mules movie shows that the courts failed in not taking the election fraud cases seriously.  Jim Troupis is discussed in this article.   

The problem is, of course, that the internet so easily spreads such material into a Right wing disinformation echo chamber audience that finds it convincing.   I mean, these guys sound serious:  they are "influencers" who the gullible see no reason to question.    (And when other Right wing influencers think they are wrong - Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro have refused to endorse the 400 2000 Mules theory - they don't want to actually spend time telling their audience that one of their Tribe is wrong and misleading them.)      

PS:  don't know 400 got stuck in my mind as the number of Mules.   Just like how I keep thinking "Coorey" is spelt "Cooroy" I guess!  I do write most posts pretty quickly these days, so sue me...:)

 

So much for the Durham investigation

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine has a clear, concise take on the failed Sussman prosecution, well worth clearing cookies to read:  

John Durham Tried to Prove Trump’s Russiagate Theory. Instead He Debunked It.

Trump’s prosecutor face-plants.

From a conservative site point of view, even  Ed Morrissey seems to acknowledge there was always reason to suspect the prosecution would fail.  

Update:   Here, I will gift link to Greg Sargent in the Washington Post:  John Durham's flop is only the latest of many Trump cover-up failures.   Let's extract some of it too:

To appreciate the significance of this moment, you have to remember that Trump and Republicans have spent years working to show that there was never any serious cause for concern about the idea that Russia went to extraordinary lengths to try to swing the 2016 election to Trump.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not find evidence that Trump criminally colluded with Russia. But he found that Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion” and that Trump’s campaign expected to “benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller also refrained from explicitly exonerating Trump of criminal obstruction of justice....

 

“The Durham probe has turned into what conservatives always accused the Mueller probe of being: a politically premised fishing expedition that has failed to discredit its original target, namely the Russia investigation,” prominent national security lawyer Bradley Moss told us.

None of these efforts have been able to disappear a fundamental truth: The stubborn facts show that Russiagate actually was an extraordinarily grave and disturbing scandal.

Among them: the well-documented Kremlin effort to gin up support for Trump and opposition to Clinton on American social media. Their hacking of Democratic Party systems, resulting in data dumps by WikiLeaks to aid the Trump campaign. The copious contacts between Trump, his family and his advisers with Russian officials. The fact that his own campaign chairman was secretly sharing confidential campaign information with a Russian intelligence officer. And so much more.

Sargent then lists the other ways in which the Trump team has tried to undermine "Russiagate" as a scandal.   But go read the whole thing.

Hurry up and retire, Chris

 

Voting systems and their effect on policy

Forgot to post this yesterday, but it was great to see on the weekend that Michael Mann (with the help of Malcolm Turnbull) pointing out that the features of the Australian electoral system - independently set electorate boundaries, compulsory voting ensuring none of the ridiculous US effort just to get people to vote, and a preferential voting system - are a key reason why you can get a significant centrist cross bench that is likely to be very significant in forcing faster action on climate change.  

The harm in first past the post voting seems really underappreciated - and I don't buy that James Allan argument in an article I linked to last week:

The least conservative Liberal (and National) government in Australia’s history lost last weekend.

There was no enthusiastic move to Labor. In fact, both major parties scored woefully low first preference counts. In any country with a first-past-the-post voting system both big parties would be reeling. There’s a reason why only Australia and one small South Pacific nation uses preferential voting; it’s because it works as a protection racket for the two big parties.

Which is why, I suppose, James, we see such influence of independent members of Congress (and Presidential candidates) in the USA?

Children in America - some remarkable figures

From an eye opening NPR article "The US is uniquely terrible at protecting children from gun violence", this table:

What are the equivalent figures in Australia, I wondered.  I can't find a site that lumps all children up to 19 together, but there is this:

You would have to suspect that an awful lot of the third column is made up of 20 to 24 year olds.   I strongly suspect that the Australian death rate for up to 19 year olds might be around 3 to 4 per 100,000, and therefore below that of the US.  But how substantially below - I don't know.

PS:  on another positive note (for Australia, at least), it's surprising to read of the reduction in youth deaths overall in the period 1999 to 2019:

Between 1999 and 2019, among young people aged 15–24:

• the death rate fell by 44%, from 72 deaths per 100,000 young people in 1999 to 41 deaths per 100,000 in 2019
• the rate fell for both males (down 46%, from 105 to 57 per 100,000) and females (down 39%, from 38 to 23)
• the rate fell by 45% across both age groups: for those aged 15–19, from 59 to 32 deaths per 100,000; for those aged 20–24, 86 to 48 deaths per 100,000

 I don't know the explanation for that.... 

Update:   I just thought to look up the rate of children killed by firearms in Australia.  Haven't found it yet, but there is a study showing the rate of childhood injuries from firearms (not deaths) in NSW in a recent period is .8 per 100,000 population.   The rate of actual death from those injuries would, of course, be substantially lower.

Things I learnt on the weekend

1.    Someone had told me in January that the Harris Farm Markets shop in West End was terrific, and my wife and I finally got there on Saturday.   It is great, and I wondered if this was a new company.  But Googling it, I see that it has been down south for a long time, although I don't know whether every store is as big and impressive as the outlet at West End.   I particularly liked the somewhat steam punky contraption you could use to select your sourdough loaf from -  well, actually, it is excessive, but shows a certain dedication to fancy shop fit out you don't often see.   The West End markets down the road are still better for cheap fruit and vegetables, but parking is usually impossible unless you pay $4.

2.    I knew that some ancient Greek dude had used shadows in wells and trigonometry to work out the size of the Earth, but I don't recall knowing before that they had even used it to work out the distance between the Earth and Moon.   Dr Becky explained, as well as showing how you can do it yourself:

3.  Something I didn't learn:  how humans get used to this sort of motion without getting dizzy or sick:

 

I have mixed feelings about a woman making a living this way: doing dangerous and silly things is something the more expendable male of the species is more suited to do, no?

Thinking about influencers

Gee, there's a real lack of stories that make me feel happier today. 

Even before the terrible event this week in Texas, I have been thinking about how the wingnut Right maintains its beliefs in America.   

It seems impossible to overestimate the effect of hyperpartisan Right wing media in this.   Ted Cruz ludicrously decides to run with "too many doors" as the main thing to be addressed to reduce school shootings (oh, and mental health, while his Republican governor cuts funding for mental health services), and he can be assured that his "ideas" will be run for hours Fox News with no scepticism at all - with full endorsement, in fact.

When independent news challenges him, he accuses the media of "hating America" and retreats, and he will be fully supported on Newsmax, Fox, and the scores of Right wing podcasts which are devoted to selling a story of everything the Democrats say is part of an evil conspiracy to kill freedom and institute socialism.   Tucker Carlson gets to encourage paranoia that "they're coming to take your guns" again - a line that, by no co-incidence at all, was ramped up to the max when there was a black president - and gets to mutter about "civil war" if they try it.

Basically, the country has been ruined by "influencers":  media and media personalities that make a living by promoting one, politically hyperpartisan, view, and the way Right wing supporters cocoon themselves in that information environment.   

It's awful, and so hard to see how it is going to change.... 

Astounding lack of common sense

So, from this BBC report, it looks like there is going to be a blame laying argument over whether a school door was locked or not:

After crashing his truck into a ditch near the school, the gunman emerged and began firing an AR-style rifle at two people who were exiting as funeral home.

The suspect then jumped a fence and began firing "multiple, numerous rounds" at the building, Mr Escalon said.

As he approached the entrance to the school he "was not confronted by anybody", the ranger said.

According to Uvalde County Independent School District Officers protocol, campuses are required to have staff "who patrol door entrances, parking lots and perimeters". Teachers are told to keep doors locked at all times.

"We will find out as much as we can why it was unlocked," Mr Escalon said. "Or maybe it was locked. But right now, it appears it was unlocked."

 Yet the media has been full of photos of the school, like this:

I mean, seriously:  do they think a door is the only way into a ground floor classroom with windows?

The new government vibe: flim flam has been replaced with quiet substance

This is humour, of course:

But really, I'm sure much of the public much be sharing the feeling that it really does look like a serious government of substance after a lost decade of Coalition time wasting.   Morrison's big thing was meant to be marketing, except that he was pretty woeful about it with foreign nations.

PS:  Phil Cooroy, in a column in which he sounds glum about the election result, says it has a very Kevin Rudd vibe, where he and Wong rushed to a climate conference within day of his election.

The difference, the way I see it, is that Rudd was always into self promotion in a way that suggested more style over substance (in a Morrison-esque sort of way.)   I always thought he was a bit of a poseur.  The thing that I find appealing about Albonese is that he has done the minimum in terms of that kind of self promoting PR.