And about time, too

Evangelii Gaudium: Pope Francis vs libertarian economics.

One of the creepiest combinations on the right of US politics is the mix of Catholic conservatism on social issues with libertarianism on economic issues.   The US Bishops have not exactly been on board with the latter, but have been so keen to have the support of conservative Republican Catholics on matters such as abortion and (for goodness sake) the contraceptive mandate, they don't want to be seen to be too aggressively critical of their perceived allies on matters of economics and social justice.   If it weren't for this dynamic, there should have been sermons across the land condemning Ayn Rand when Paul Ryan's admiration for her was being discussed in the media.

Anyhow, it seems that at last we have a Pope prepared to do some straight talking on this issue, and it'll fun to watch how the American Right spins this:

....some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.

 While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.

In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.

Still awful

I feel a need to make this observation:   after using it for (what?) a couple of months now, and giving yself time to try to used to it, there is still no doubt:  Slate's last re-design was the most awful news magazine re-design in internet history.

Digging up Oswald

Exhuming Lee Harvey Oswald: JFK’s killer’s corpse was raised based on a conspiracy theory.

OK, maybe one last anti-conspiracy post about the Kennedy assassination.

The Slate article above tells the story of a little remembered conspiracy theory: that the Oswald who shot Kennedy was not the Oswald who went to Russia.

I didn't realise, or didn't recall, that the idea was taken seriously enough that Oswald's body was dug up and examined to confirm it matched Marine dental records.   Amazing.

Odd Russian thoughts to sympathise with

Russian resurrection | TLS

Quite an interesting book review here on the work of Nikolai Fyodorov in Russia, who seems to be credited with starting a peculiarly Russian semi-mystical approach to the potential for science.   The article starts:

According to Tolstoy, Nikolai Fyodorov was a saint, whose programme for the universal resurrection of the dead was “not devoid of sense”. “It is amazing”, he told his sons’ tutor, how Fyodorov “believes in science and the unlimited capability of the human mind”. But what does it mean to believe in science, and what happens to science when it is so dependent on belief? Fyodorov’s legacy in Russia raises a number of questions, including how to explain his attraction and continued appeal for some of Russia’s best minds.

 He was born in 1829, and his key idea is described as follows:

“The common task” was the physical resurrection of the dead. All mankind, Fyodorov wrote, was under a moral obligation to identify and collect the dust of its ancestors; this was a duty every son owed to his forefathers, a duty constantly under threat from the blind forces of nature, by which Fyodorov meant the elemental forces outside and within man: not only the climate but also human sexuality. The hunt for these lost particles was to be an act of gigantic filial labour and “positive chastity”. Motivated by piety, sons and daughters were to devote themselves fully to scientific discoveries that would make the task of resurrection possible. These discoveries would entail not only bringing the dead back to life, but finding space for them to dwell. The deserts would have to be made fertile; other planets would need to be made habitable, and modes of transport to other worlds developed. In effect, Fyodorov was providing a scientific basis for religious myth, the way other nineteenth-century scholars traced the historical existence of Jesus Christ. 

Actually, this reminds me of the approach of Frank Tipler, in that he tries to justify his Christian God and resurrection via science.  And as I have argued before, Tipler's weakest idea was always to do with resurrection - he had to invoke the Many Worlds to get there, which seems extraordinarily untidy.

Fyodorov's idea seems more akin to what I have speculated about - whether the information stored written by a person (particularly on the internet) could ever form the basis in future for the resurrection of personalities.   OK, it's a silly idea, but no worse than some of Fyodorov's speculations:

It is easy to pick out passages that are both moving in their conviction and absurd in their flirtation with literalism: one can see his entire project as born of distrust of the symbolic order. The anthropocentrism occasionally takes striking turns, as when Fyodorov envisions an evolutionary process in which sexual attraction would be replaced by heightened consciousness, a transformation already signalled by the fact that higher animals, as opposed to plants, do not have sex organs on their heads: “If progress will continue in this direction, then the time will come when consciousness and activity will replace birth”. Fyodorov’s worldview betrays a distressing repugnance for physiological function and femininity: maternal attachment is bad because it betrays the past in its attention to the future, but a lack of maternal attachment (in mothers) is even worse. Women who want to act like men are a “teratological phenomenon”, perhaps because they parody the only positive form of femininity – “daughterliness” – as represented by Antigone or Cordelia. Fyodorov fought against decomposition but may have loved dust more than flesh, the way some of Dostoevsky’s heroes love mankind but have difficulties with man.

 Anyhow, his line of thought is said to be behind Russian "Cosmism" which has been influential in their science. I guess it would appeal to those who have to do science under an officially atheist regime. Here's the part that explains a bit about it:

The lineage of Russian Cosmism begins in the eighteenth century with a meteorologist and some metaphysical poets, moves through nineteenth-century speculative fiction, and then blossoms out in religious and spiritual thought of the fin de siècle. Young details the points of contiguity and difference between Fyodorov and some of his better-known contemporaries in Russian religious and spiritual thought: Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky. He finds resonances with Fyodorov in the work of some of the leading figures in Soviet science – Tsiolkovsky; the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, with his concept of the noosphere, a kind of ideal superstructure gradually superseding Earth’s original base; the polymath Alexander Chizhevsky, with his theory of the influence of sun spots on history; the botanist Vasily Kuprevich, with his campaign to extend longevity to the point of immortality. The result is a series of thumbnail sketches, linked by “a highly controversial and oxymoronic blend of activist speculation, futuristic traditionalism, religious science, exoteric esotericism, utopian pragmatism, idealistic materialism – higher magic partnered to higher mathematics”.

Uniting many of the Cosmists is an insistence on universal connectivity, on the fluidity of the border between organic and inorganic matter, and confidence in the ability of man to shape his own evolution.

I'm not sure if the "noosphere" of Vernadsky is like the "noosphere" of Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas I find very appealing.  I'll have to look that up later.

All kind of interesting....

Who gives a toss?

I am surprised that anyone can get excited about the fact that a Governor General with a short time remaining in the job said she was pro Republican and for gay marriage.

Neither issue is going to be a matter she has anything to do with.  There is no prospect of a constitutional crisis in the next few months.  She has already offered to resign because of her Labor connections, and Abbott said it wasn't necessary.

Andrew Bolt has gone over the top about it, but then again, he seems determined to make himself the Human Headline continually full of puffed up outrage about his pet issues. 

Safe as cars

Man survives after car struck by lightning in Newcastle: video

If ever there was proof needed that the inside of a car is a pretty safe place to be during a thunderstorm, this must be it.

Still wouldn't like to be in one struck like this, though...

How not to regret

Last week, as I observed elsewhere on the internet, I immediately thought that Tony Abbott's response to the Indonesian phone tapping story was very peculiar when he started regretting the embarrassment "caused to" the President.   Why, I said, would we be suggesting that the President has anything to be embarrassed about - he has reason to be angry, not embarrassed.

I see from this weekend's press that my reaction was not alone:

Certainly, Abbott rankled Indonesia in the aftermath of the revelations by not only failing to provide an explanation or an apology, but the manner in which he conveyed his sentiments. Abbott said that the Australia's intelligence activities were to ''help our friends and our allies, not to harm them''.

This was no doubt an attempt to remind Indonesia about the crucial assistance the signals directorate provided in apprehending scores of terrorists. But, given he was responding to the furore over the surveillance of Yudhoyono, it was taken quite differently. As Marcus Mietzner, an analyst of Indonesian politics from the Australian National University, observed: ''To say 'we are spying on [Yudhoyono] for your own good' is outrageous.''

Then there was Abbott's well-intentioned expression of regret for the ''embarrassment'' suffered by Yudhoyono due to ''media reports'' of the spying.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa retorted it was Australia that should be embarrassed. Even so, Abbott repeated the comment in Parliament the next day. A few hours later, Indonesia announced the suspension of military and people-smuggling co-operation.

What I also find odd about this is that I have been assuming that Abbott has been careful to use words crafted for him by his Foreign Affairs specialists.   But if that is right, what is the explanation for the "tin ear" for diplomacy the words illustrate?   Has anyone important from that Department already left after the election?   Does Peta Credlin get to re-work suggestions they make?   Because I think it is pretty clear something has been going wrong here...
 

The Lewis legacy

It's good to see the 50th anniversary of CS Lewis' death is also being widely remembered, and his legacy analysed.

There's an very lengthy article about him up at the ABC.   The best part of it, I think, is it describes his revival in influence, after the somewhat silly cultural milieu of the 1960's:

Intellectual historians have noted that the cultural trends of this turbulent period reflected an assumption that the prevailing cultural trends represented permanent changes in western culture. Tom Wolfe's essay "The Great Relearning" (1987) captures the Promethean aspirations of this age, in which the past would be discarded as an encumbrance, and the future reconstructed from ground zero. Yet historians such as Adrian Hastings have suggested that this period merely witnessed a temporary change of cultural mood, which some were unwise enough to treat as a fixed and lasting change in the condition of humanity. Hastings remarked that the "dominant theological mood of that time in its hasty, slack, rather collective sweep reminds one a little painfully of a flight of lemmings," propelled forward by "a sheer surge of feeling that in the modern world God, religion, the transcendent, any reliability in the gospels, anything which had formed part of the old 'supernatualist' system, had suddenly become absurd." For Hastings, it was as if the bright new ideas of the 1960s were doomed to implode, incapable of sustaining serious reflection on the deeper questions of life.

He seems to have been right. In the 1970s, the disillusioned began to search again for meaning and existential depth. Lewis bounced back, securing a growing and appreciative readership which kept growing in the final decade of the twentieth century. The reasons for this reversal in Lewis's fortunes are not totally understood. However, there are a number of straws in the wind which help us understand this remarkable resurgence of someone who had been written off by many as a relic of the past. Let me note three.

In the first place, the cultural upheavals of the 1960s gradually gave way to a fresh engagement with some of the deeper questions that Lewis had championed, and to which he provided engaging and winsome answers. His relentless championing of the ongoing relevance and validity of the cultural heritage of the past offered stability in the midst of what many regarded as cultural chaos and anarchy. Lewis's rejection of what he termed "chronological snobbery" opened the way to a revalidation and reappropriation of the religious and cultural legacy of the past.

The rest of the essay is good too:  Rowan Williams has written very favourably of aspects of Lewis too.   (In some very convoluted language, I expect.)

Williams also made an appearance in an article in The Guardian about Lewis, which also mentions Pullman, who loathes Lewis.   [I certainly don't expect Pullman's legacy to count for much in 50 year's time though.   Is that too bitchy?  :) ]

The Guardian article does make the point that the Shadowlands movie with Anthony Hopkins was about as far from fact in characterisation as a movie based on a real person could possibly be.   The old (BBC?) telemovie version was infinitely better.  I would hope someone might be replaying that somewhere this weekend. 

 

A fight continued

For Philippa.  The rest of you can ignore it.

Old airships

That Time Jules Verne Caused a UFO Scare

When I was a child, my local Council library carried quite a few Jules Verne novels, and I used to enjoy reading them.   I bet their popularity amongst modern kids is pretty non-existant, which is a pity.  

Apart from talking about the peculiar plague of airship sightings that occurred before they existed outside of fiction, this article gives a very good background about the popularity of Verne in his day.   In Back to the Future 3, when Doc and his wife to be talk of their mutual admiration of the author, this was far more plausible than I realised.  

A good article.

"Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" used to be even more interesting 50,000 years ago

Mystery humans spiced up ancients’ sex lives 

I don't really try to keep up with human evolution news:  it seems to change too often on too little evidence.

But I do like to imagine what versions of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner could have been many years ago:

The results suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet-unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

The first published Neanderthal¹ and Denisovan² genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups bred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today.

Anti conspiracy summary

John F. Kennedy conspiracy theories debunked: Why the magic bullet and grassy knoll don’t make sense.

I was impressed by the documentary on ABC last week (JFK The Lost Bullet) which really took apart the "magic bullet" theory, and featured a couple of witnesses who were there.

As I said in another post recently, the 1960's seems a long time ago now, and it feels odd to see people who are witnesses to the event who don't look so old.  

Slate features another witness story too which is interesting.

Oh, and here's a detailed and convincing rebuttal of the recently revived Secret Service shot Kennedy by Accident theory.

A different sort of philosophical enquiry

The FBI files on being and nothingness

The FBI under J Edgar Hoover must have been a fun place to work:

The FBI had been keeping an eye on Sartre from as early as 1945. Soon after, they began to investigate his contemporary, Albert Camus. On 7th February, 1946, John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, wrote a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, drawing his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, “reportedly the New York correspondent of Combat [who] has been filing inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country.” Hoover gave orders “to conduct a preliminary investigation to ascertain his background, activities and affiliations in this country.” One of Hoover’s underlings had the guts to inform the director that “the subject’s true name is ALBERT CAMUS, not ALBERT CANUS” (diplomatically hypothesizing that “Canus” was probably an alias he had cunningly adopted).

The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.
 

I hope this works...

Hola – free program lets you enjoy any website from any country [Freeware] | The Red Ferret Journal

...but I haven't tried it yet.

Update:   it works!   At last, Colbert is mine again.   (Don't spread this around too much, though.)

Some like it hot

Chilly lab mice skew cancer studies 

International guidelines call for laboratory mice to be kept at room temperature. Yet the rodents find that range — 20–26 °C — uncomfortably chilly, says immunologist Elizabeth Repasky of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Mice, she notes, lose body heat more rapidly than humans, and, when given a choice, prefer to reside at a balmy 30 °C.

At stake might be more than just creature comforts. In a study published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, Repasky and her colleagues report that in mice housed at room temperature, tumour growth was faster than in those housed at 30 °C, and immune responses to cancer were suppressed.

Sea level rise is complicated

Changing winds dampen Antarctic sea-level rise 

Working out the future of global sea level rise under AGW is very complicated, as this article shows.

Anti Randianism noted

Ayn Rand’s vision of idiocy: Understanding the real makers and takers - Salon.com

I love a good bit of anti-Randianism, and this article is quite a detailed attack. 

Argument for age of consent reform

Lowering the age of consent: U.K. public health advocate John Ashton wants to relax the age of consent to 15.

From Slate, an interesting article on this issue starts as follows:

 In 16th-century England, the age of consent was set at 10 years old in an effort to protect young girls from sexual abuse by adult men. In 1875, parliament raised the age of consent to 13; in 1885, it upped it to 16. Now, a leading public health advocate has proposed that the United Kingdom bring the age down again in light of the high proportion of British adolescents who are having sex—with one another—before they’re legally capable of granting consent.

Lowering the age of consent to 15 (where it stands in Sweden) or 14 (where it’s set in Germany and Italy) would “take these enormous pressures off children and young people” who feel they need to hide their sexual activity, said John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health.

It makes quite a difference to realise the substantially lower age in some European countries hasn't caused their society to fall apart.

Update:  I would have thought that the most obvious necessary reform for this area would be the adoption of "Romeo and Juliet" style laws, which (as far as I can see from Wikipedia) has surprisingly been an innovation in some American states, including currently conservative ones.   

Krugman, Colebatch, and the big picture

Paul Krugman has an interesting column in which he seems somewhat persuaded by an argument that the world may have moved to a sort of permanent economic slump:

Again, the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing. 

Why might this be happening? One answer could be slowing population growth. A growing population creates a demand for new houses, new office buildings, and so on; when growth slows, that demand drops off. America’s working-age population rose rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, as baby boomers grew up, and its work force rose even faster, as women moved into the labor market. That’s now all behind us. And you can see the effects: Even at the height of the housing bubble, we weren’t building nearly as many houses as in the 1970s. 

Another important factor may be persistent trade deficits, which emerged in the 1980s and since then have fluctuated but never gone away. 

Why does all of this matter? One answer is that central bankers need to stop talking about “exit strategies.” Easy money should, and probably will, be with us for a very long time. This, in turn, means we can forget all those scare stories about government debt, which run along the lines of “It may not be a problem now, but just wait until interest rates rise.” 

More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time. 

In other economics talk of note, Tim Colebatch gives the thumbs up to a new book by Garnaut about what Australia should be doing:

What to do? The first priority, Garnaut insists, is to try to bring the dollar down, a lot. It's not the only thing we have to do, but without that, all else is in vain. Newman's contrary view that the dollar is only a minor issue is silly, as his muddled comparison of Australian and US wages shows. In $A, our average manufacturing wage rose 11 per cent between 2009 and 2012. In $US, it rose 42 per cent. Three-quarters of that rise came from the rising dollar. We cannot restore our lost competitiveness without bringing it down.

Garnaut hopes that more interest rate cuts could do the trick. Experience suggests that's optimistic: in my view, the Reserve Bank needs to intervene in the markets to drive the dollar down, with the government helping by removing the $2 billion a year tax break to foreign owners of government bonds.

What about the budget? Garnaut's forecasts imply that, without action, the deficit could blow out horribly ahead - yet to cut spending and/or raise taxes would slow the economy further. He advocates doing both, trimming middle class welfare while closing tax breaks, but offsetting this (as Hockey plans to do) by a strong push to build productivity-enhancing infrastructure - chosen on economic merit, not for political reasons.

St Francis revisited

Here's an enjoyable article by Joan Acocella reviewing a couple of recent biographies of St Francis of Assisi, which gives a decent short history of his life.

I had not realised he had been such an immediate success.  But I had heard of his eccentricities before:

A corollary of Francis’s devotion to humility was his distrust of book learning. Almost proudly, it seems, he called himself “illiteratus.” He never owned a complete Bible. He never became a priest. To him, book learning smelled of wealth—only rich people had books at that time—and thus of arrogance. One medieval source records his response to a novice who asked for a psalter: “When you have a psalter, you will want a breviary; and when you will have a breviary, you will install yourself in a throne like a great prelate, and you will command your brother: ‘Bring me my breviary!’ ” He then took some ashes from the hearth and rubbed them into his body, all the while repeating, “I’m a breviary, I’m a breviary!” Over time, his hostility to scholarship encouraged some people—for example, members of religious orders devoted to education, such as the Dominicans—to regard the Franciscans as a bunch of oddballs and half-wits, which, no doubt, some of them were. Francis accepted into the community anyone who applied. There was no test, no waiting period.

The story about the psalter seems to represent Francis as a man of rigid principles. He was not. To every rule, he made exceptions, on the spot. No friar could ride a horse (a symbol of wealth), but if the friar was sick, all of a sudden a friar could ride a horse. No new entrant, in divesting himself of his goods, could give them to his family, but if it turned out that the man’s giving away his ox would impoverish the family, the ox stayed home. Francis believed in discipline—fasting, hair shirts—but he didn’t eat bugs, and he warned the friars that excessive fasting was harmful to “Brother Body.” Also, he occasionally advised his followers to find their own way to salvation. On his deathbed, he said to them, “I have done what was mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours!” This is strange, since he had so clear a program for a Christian life. He may not have meant to be permissive, but he often was.

Which was certainly owing in part to another of his characteristics, attested to by everyone who knew him: an extreme natural sweetness. He was courteous, genial, extroverted—he was fun, a quality not always found in saints—and he laid it upon the brothers, as a duty, to be cheerful.

Read the whole thing.