Beautiful science

Found via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, here's a spectacular bit of film making by a young guy who works on salmon research at the University of Washington.   It certainly shows you don't need a huge budget to get great nature footage these days.  Watch it in High Definition, full screen.

Salmon Research at Iliamna Lake, Alaska 2013 from Jason Ching on Vimeo.

What a repulsive bunch

So, Republican Mitch McConnell tries to up his popularity with the conservative, gun loving, climate change denying CPAC crowd by walking on with an (antique) gun held aloft.  What a revolting image for a  nation with regular gun massacres.  As this video shows, it didn't actually work when it came to his speech.

Also, have a look at this good commentary on the speech by vile NRA head Wayne LaPierre.

Norton's very funny episode

I don't watch Graham Norton's chat show all that often:  it's sometimes pretty good, sometimes just so-so. 

But last night, while looking for something to watch, I settled on a Norton episode which turned out to be pretty recent.  Featuring Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and the English actor from Downton Abbey (they were all in that Monuments Men movie, which seems to have been a bit of a critical and box office fizzer), it was genuinely very funny and felt very spontaneous. 

I see that my opinion is shared by others.

It is, at least for the moment, able to be watched in full here:

Dubious tax claims

I did note during the week, via Jason Soon's twitter feed, Adam Creighton's claim that the "rich" are obviously paying enough tax because it is only the top 25% of households that pay "net" tax.

I thought this smelt like more right wing, small government economist spinalysis* which is all about dissuading politicians from ever talking about raising high end tax rates ever again; in fact, its motivation is to suggest the rich should be taxed less.  (See IPA, CIS, right wing American economists.  Adam Creighton used to do CIS articles.)

John Quiggin has a short, sharp response. 

*   (I thought analysis which is really all about ideological spin deserved its own word)

Wages non disaster

As Koukoulas says: hardly the wages blowout of an inflexible market.

I would guess that the reduced number of restaurants doing Sunday trade means most people assume that penalty rates in hospitality should come down a bit.   That's probably about the only change to current wages arrangements for which there is any public sympathy.

Today's Rage choice

Well, there are a lot of uninteresting songs and clips still being put out, but I still didn't this mind one, by a new-ish Liverpool band.  It seems a while since I've noticed a band made up of young guys who don't look overly angst-y, and you can certainly imagine them going over big in the young female market, which deserves a break from the female domination of pop at the moment:

Roger lying down with dogs, again

I give Roger Scruton credit for being the rarest of things:  a clearly right wing intellectual who takes a precautionary approach to climate change, and advocates taxation as a means to address it.  (According to this review of one of his books - by Peter Singer no less - Scruton advocates a carbon consumption tax, even though it appears rather impractical to put an accurate figure for such on imported goods.)

So what's Roger doing coming out here and being the headline act, so to speak, of yet another IPA "Western Civilisation Symposium" in May this year?   Unless these symposiums are a bit of a money spinner for the far from poor IPA, it's hard to see why they are running another one.   You can tell from the comments at Catallaxy that the attendees are all more than likely already members of the IPA who are simply attending - and paying - to get the warm inner glow of hearing what they already believe, and to have drinks with people who think Labor and Unions are appalling people, darling, (and causing the downfall of the once great glorious West).

It keeps them off the street for a weekend, I suppose, and from making inane comments at Catallaxy.

But, does Roger know of the IPA's starring role within Australian politics at promoting not only skepticism over political responses to climate change, but disbelief in climate change per se?  

If he is genuine in his concern about a political need to take action about it (as he obviously is if he is promoting a tax as the answer), why would his lend his support to this organisation?

Unfortunately, there is a precedent for this behaviour.  Scruton was caught out as a handsomely paid shill for tobacco companies just over a decade ago.   What an embarrassment that turned out to be, and one would have thought that he might be more careful about his associations in future.  But then, the Institute of Paid Advocacy and him obviously have something in common.

Now, I assume the symposium will not touch climate change, but even so - if there is any prospect that this event is a money spinner for the IPA, or even if he is just helping raise its public profile, he's helping support an organisation that deserves his disrespect and complete disdain if he is genuine about climate change.

I see that Scruton is also doing a Quadrant event.  Similar comments apply.

Not sure if I approve

Flipboard buys rival news reader Zite from CNN

I've been meaning to comment for some time that I enjoy using both Zite and Flipboard on my Samsung tablet, and recommend them to my vast international readership. 

Now that they are going to merge, I hope I still approve.

On Qantas

Everyone has an opinion on Qantas, regardless of prior knowledge of the aviation industry, so why shouldn't I?   A few points:

*  Someone, I forget who, was saying that Qantas has been looking for an airline to partially buy into it for about a decade, and has had no success.   Is that really because of the ownership level restrictions, or because most airlines don't see it as a good buy?

*  Maybe it was the same person, maybe someone else, was saying that removing foreign ownership restrictions was no guarantee that Qantas would soon find a large foreign airline that wanted to buy into it;

*  Coalition politicians have been saying that if, say, China Southern wanted to buy a large chunk, it would still need Foreign Investment Review Board approval, which is not assured.

Why then, in light of these points, should anyone assume that the Coalition's priority - removing ownership restrictions - is going to do anything to solve Qantas problems either in the short term, or ever?   The general impression one gets is that its problems need addressing on a pretty quick time scale (within a couple of years, anyway.)

Some more observations:

*  There is no doubt at all that Joyce has done a terrible job on the politics of the help the airline needs.   This was covered on Radio National this morning.   Apparently,  few months ago he was talking as if the business was going to go under any minute, now he says it won't;  there is a heap of confusion over whether the airline does or doesn't recover carbon tax by adding a few dollars to each fare (and I note - people get hit with large fees for paying for a discount ticket with a credit card with Jetstar which dwarfs the extra few dollars of a carbon tax); he apparently asked for an unsecured loan of $3 billion (!) originally, which is just ludicrous in anyone's books.   Everyone recognises that the Asian expansion was ill considered, and it seems quite a few think the airline has made some poor choices with its fleet, although whether or not some of that predates Joyce, I have no idea.

Also, regardless of whether the unions really "deserved" Joyce's grounding a couple of years back, there is no doubt that such action hurts the public image of the airline for at least a couple of years.   (Anyone who misses a wedding or important function for this reason can probably be written off from ever flying the airline again.)

And, with my shallowest hat on - Joyce just looks and sounds like someone not smart enough to run an airline.  James Strong dressed and sounded like a toff, but actually, at a time when  people are looking at the stability of an airline for their long term business, image counts; and Strong's image was a hell of lot more reassuring than Joyce's.  

So, as much as I hate to say that I agree with a position that is being run hot at Catallaxy - yes, I think Joyce really needs to go.   He needs to take responsibility and give the job to someone new who seems to know what's going on and can keep his story straight.  (No pun intended.)

Update:   try as I might, I can't outdo the shallowness of Judith Sloan's Qantas analysis, which now includes "Oh My God - they let their off duty pilots fly in Business Class.  That just gives the public the wrong impression!"   

She also makes a claim about ex-staff entitlements which I am pretty damned sure, having a close relative who is ex-staff, is not true.  This has been pointed out by 2 people in comments already, and Judith has retreated to "well, maybe that just applies to some categories of ex-staff."   How about clarifying your claim in the actual post, you careless ideological warrior?

Update 2:  Good Lord.  About half a dozen people on the thread have now told Judith she's wrong about the hotels, and that having staff sitting in spare business class seats is routine across the industry, costs the airline nothing, and on long distance lets them catch a bit of sleep, which most people think is a good idea for pilots and even cabin crew   But she's insisting this is a bad look.  It's about time The Australian updated her pic:

Update 3:  It has occurred to me that in her post, JS did not make it clear whether, on the Qantas trip in which she say a pilot in uniform in business class, she was travelling business class or not.  If in fact she only spied this outrage while passing through the aircraft to her modest economy seat, then the word balloon should be modified to this, perhaps"  "Get to the back of the plane, who do you think you are, taking the seat that I might have been upgraded to?  Hmph." 

Update 4:

The Joyce spin on the carbon tax, which allows one person in Qantas to say it is not a factor, and then for the boss to contradict it, is explained here.   Basically,  Joyce is  being slippery with the truth, if not dishonest.   Even with his reduced fares, they still incorporate a carbon tax surcharge, so it is not right to claim the tax is unrecovered.

Innocent this time?

My dislike of Kevin Rudd and the awful disruptive power he wielded within Labor is well known, but it seems there is a very good chance he's being treated unfairly over his trip to Russia:

But a spokeswoman said the visit was linked to Mr Rudd’s new role as a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy school and a related research project on China.

“Mr Rudd is meeting with think tanks and other officials in Europe including the UK and Russia on this and broader foreign policy interests,” she said.

“This travel was planned more than a month ago and is not connected with recent developments in the Ukraine.”

Krugman on inflation obsessives

The Inflation Obsession - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman writes, after noting that inflation worrying was dominating the Federal Reserve just before the crisis hit, writes:

The point, however, is that inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political.

This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are.While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative.

Why is this the case? In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to
leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same.

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year.

Finally, all this ties in with a predilection for acting tough and inflicting punishment whatever the economic conditions. The British journalist William Keegan once described this as “sado-monetarism,” and it’s very much alive today.

Soldier problems

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Researchers reported Monday that most American soldiers who attempt suicide had preexisting mental health issues before enlisting in the armed forces, raising new questions about how to address sky-high suicide rates in the US military.

The research, published as three papers in JAMA Psychiatry, found that more than a quarter of current soldiers have at least one mental disorder, a rate about twice that for the general public. More than three-quarters of soldiers with mental illness say that their disorders preceded their enlistment in the armed forces, and some 60 percent of solider suicide attempts can be traced to those preenlistment mental troubles, the report said.

I guess we shouldn't be too surprised about this.   The all encompassing aspect of a soldier's life (and the chance to play out aggression for real) might well appeal to those who are somewhat troubled about some aspect of their life and want a big change.

I think this means I should keep dieting...

Study results confirm BMI is a direct cause of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure

The last bastion

Spotted in the thread following Hysterical Steve (Kate's) post about the Ukraine at Catallaxy:

Face it guys, we lost. All that remains of western civilisation and the glory that was the spread of the anglosphere is a few sites like diplomad and catallaxyfiles. Abbott and Brandis are shirking the repeal of 18C. The ABC is sacred. The paternalists are in charge. The ALP are in the lead in opinion polls. The USA is a mess. The UK is a worse one, and Oz is well down the same path.

I suppose its good that they have somewhere in cyberspace to gather and console themselves, and give the rest of us a chance to laugh at their delusions of grandeur. 

The manly man diet not so good

Animal protein-rich diets could be as harmful to health as smoking | Science | The Guardian


I think this means there will be less libertarians around in 20 years time.  (I have made the observation before that high protein diets are big with their side of politics:  it appeals to their "strong man" fetish and insistence that progressive politics is for girls and limp wristed men.   Did Ayn Rand's male characters eat half a cow for dinner before forcefully having their way with the strong willed heroine who just wants to be taken?  I certainly expect so.)

It's an interesting study, though, as it says that high protein may be good for you once you get older. But before then, not so good at all for your longevity.

Jericho on disability pensions

Those scary DSP numbers aren't so scary after all - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Greg Jericho brings a bit of his cool, calm and collected analytical style to the issue of disability pensions in this column.

Which also reminds me - Judith Sloan briefly, ever so briefly, flew the flag a year or two ago that raising the  Newstart allowance would probably be a good thing.  How often has she talked about that since then?  Has she repeated it in the hallowed halls of Catallaxy, ever? (I don't believe she has.)  

As Jericho indicates, the government is suggesting possibly merging DSP and Newstart into one allowance.  Maybe that would mean the former would drop and the latter rise a bit?   Who knows how Judith would react to that...

Freeman's change of heart

Well, isn't that interesting.  Via David Appell, I see that Freeman Dyson, in the late 1970's, accepted that increasing CO2 was (based on "prevailing opinion") more likely to be dangerous than beneficial.  What's more, he apparently thought that a carbon tax to undertake mass tree plantings to hold off any bad climate effects while clean energy came on line might be appropriate.

A couple of points:

a.  his article certainly helps show that the "is the earth cooling towards a new ice age?" issue in the early 70's was a brief, minority, view.   Just like actual climate scientists have been trying to tell dimwit climate denialists for years.

b.  Dyson is now a "lukewarmenist": he's also aged 90.   He would have been 54 when he wrote his cautionary 1977 paper.

I'm sorry, but when any person, brilliant or not, has one opinion on science in their 50's which is reversed in their late 80's, observers are generally wise to treat the "young" man opinions as sounder than the "old" man's opinion.  That's just life.

It is a particularly worth following this rule when their belief trajectory is running against the increasing consensus amongst scientists active in the field.

Questions for those promoting repeal of s18C Racial Discrimination Act

1.  Apart from the Andrew Bolt case, do you have any examples of complaints made relating to the section which have resulted in some form of unjust, or free speech inhibiting, result?    As Tim Soutphommasane notes, there are quite a few complaints made each year which are conciliated, and a few which go trial:

Central to the current racial vilification provisions, then, is the conciliation process that exists for complaints made about racial discrimination. The emphasis of the legislative provision against racial vilification is to bring parties to a complaint together to discuss the matter and arrive at an agreed resolution of the complaint. This educative and civil quality of Part IIA is frequently overlooked. For example, it is commonly assumed that breaching Section 18C results in a prosecution or criminal penalty. No one, of course, can be prosecuted for a crime under the Racial Discrimination Act, or convicted for racial vilification under Commonwealth law. In most cases, litigation does not even occur: last financial year, of the 192 complaints concerning racial hatred, only five (or 3 per cent) ended up in court. This is because any complaint involving racial vilification must be made to the Commission in the first instance, where the Commission will attempt to resolve the matter between the parties (which we do at no cost, and do successfully in the majority of cases). Only if the complaint is not resolved through conciliation, may the complainant can apply for the allegations to be heard and determined by the Federal Court of Australia or Federal Circuit Court of Australia.

2.  Given that at the crux of the Andrew Bolt case, there were claims he made about individuals that were factually in error, do you not think that Mr Bolt could have simply apologised for the mistakes and hurt caused, and that this would have prevented it going to hearing?

For me:  Tim Soutphommasane full speech the other night (at the link above) gave a good defence of the current law, and was very detailed philosophically and about its background.

Andrew Bolt has been playing the martyr about a column which contained mistakes, and which anyone can still read in its original form.   I expect that he was encouraged to run the case with costs covered by his paper. Otherwise, anyone would expect that a sensible person would have simply dealt with it as I indicated above.

The Human Rights Commission will not accept Commissioner Tim Wilson's position that the section is a dire thing for free speech, because he's both an intellectual light weight, and apart from bleating about the Andrew Bolt case, he hasn't actually shown any other case that people will think was a particularly unfair outcome.  

The Bolt was not a case which actually did have an effect on free speech.  Bolt's continual claim that his lawyers now tell him he can't write columns on the issue is obvious self serving disingenuousness.   

Commentary from a hysteric, and some others

Want the most rabidly, over the top, Obama-is-the-Great-Satan-trying-to-destroy-the-United-States-which-he-hates commentary from an Australian academic?  Look no further than Steve Kates at Catallaxy, of course.

His calm and reasoned (hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha) post prompted by Putin's actions starts:

It’s not as if Obama’s intentions from the start were difficult to read. He’s a hard left ideologue whose greatest hatreds are for the civilisation of the West and in particular the country of which he is president. That there are revelations upon revelations as one by one, but ever so slowly, the truth begins to dawn on those fools who elected him, or the international mobs who supported him, is something like a revelation to me. Just how self-deluded can these people really have been.

And now, despite my confession yesterday that I have no understanding of this geopolitical slab of the world, I will still say that I am somewhat persuaded by the "well, what do you expect the West to do, anyway?" line.   I would guess, however, that Malcolm Fraser goes further down the "it's actually the West's fault" path than is really necessary.

Elsewhere in The Guardian, however, I am finding myself persuaded by this take:

As in practically every international crisis, the pundit class seems able to view events solely through the prism of US actions, which best explains Edward Luce in the Financial Times writing that Obama needs to convince Putin “he will not be outfoxed”, or Scott Wilson at the Washington Post intimating that this is all a result of America pulling back from military adventurism. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes countries take actions based on how they view their interests, irrespective of who the US did or did not bomb.

Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is why Obama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.

Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain quite limited. (It’s called Nato.) Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a Nato country.

The writer, Michael Cohen, goes on to argue that it is actually Putin who will lose out, long term, by this strategy:

But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.

Which brings us to perhaps the most bizarre element of watching the Crimean situation unfold through a US-centric lens: the iron-clad certainty of the pundit class that Putin is winning and Obama is losing. The exact opposite is true.

Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.

For Obama and the US, sure, there might be less Russian help on Syria going forward – not that there was much to begin with – and it could perhaps affect negotiations on Iran. But those issues are manageable. Meanwhile, Twitter and the opinion pages and the Sunday shows and too many blog posts that could be informative have been filled with an over-the-top notion: that failure to respond to Russia’s action will weaken America’s credibility with its key allies. To which I would ask: where are they gonna go? If anything, America’s key European allies are likely to fold the quickest, because, you know, gas. And why would any US ally in the Far East want Obama wasting his time on the Crimea anyway?

You don’t have to listen to the “do something” crowd. These are the same people who brought you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other greatest hits.

Noah's precedents

It seems the Literary Review website does not allow for an easy way to get to its past month's on line articles.   But I've found the link to a review from last month's page of a book called "The Ark Before Noah - Decoding the Story of the Flood."

I liked this part, as an example of an unusual academic reaction to a discovery:

...in the 1870s, George Smith identified two pre-biblical accounts of a hero divinely commissioned to build an ark and so save the denizens of the world from a cosmic flood. Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time 'after more than 2,000 years of oblivion', he rushed around, tearing off his clothes in a state of ecstasy resembling St Francis's embrace of his vocation.

I've never read much about the Epic of Gilgamesh, although I have a distinct memory that after he made True Stories, David Byrne was supposed to have said he thought it could be a good source for his next movie.  (I hope I didn't dream that!)    But further down in the Literary Review article, it's noted:

...the biggest difference the Hebrew version makes is to the moral framework of the myth: in Mesopotamian accounts, gods unleash the flood capriciously, or for no declared reason, or to eliminate a distractingly, irritatingly 'noisy' world that is becoming uncontrollably overpopulated. The Jews' God, by contrast, acted justly, to punish evildoers and spare the only righteous man.

 But the most interesting thing is that the earlier version of the ark was not boat shaped:

In the course of his investigation Finkel sheds much light on philological and literary problems of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but one revelation dwarfs all others: in the earliest surviving description, the ark was round. The text is unambiguous on this point and includes detailed instructions for building a giant coracle out of more than 300 kilometres of coiled palm fibres, strengthening the structure with wooden ribs and decking, and coating everything in a waterproof mixture of pitch and lard. Finkel's painstaking and lively investigation of coracle-weaving traditions on the Euphrates makes the concept intelligible.

 Update:  this profile of the author appeared in Fairfax in February (actually, it's from the Daily Telegraph, I see), and it adds some detail that the round ark was not all that big:

''It was a coracle,'' says Finkel: a kind of round boat of rope around a wood frame. ''Half the people in Mesopotamia were professional boat people, so when someone told them this story, and said, imagine the biggest boat you ever saw, they must have asked: what did it look like?'' What is incredible is that the tablet has detailed instructions on how to build this enormous coracle, 21 metres across, 5.5 metres high, even down to the length of rope required.