The Right is the problem

From an opinion piece in the LA Times:

Thankfully, Americans don’t buy his [James Inhofe's] extreme take. They do believe global warming is a thing, but they aren’t persuaded just yet that it’s a critical problem.

One study found that that is partly attributable to conservative media's dismissive coverage of the phenomenon. The Gallup Poll finds that 81% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans think the seriousness of global warming has either been correct or underestimated, while 68% of Republicans and only 18% of Democrats think the problem has been exaggerated. 

And I see that, in Australia, the IPA is again hosting a tour of Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change contrarian scientists who makes a living from fossil fuel interests by claiming all other climate scientists are wrong.   As Skeptical Science notes, he's been singing the same song since at least 1992, and was wrong then, and is wrong now.

He's actually probably more objectionable than the IPA's previous guest, Monckton.  The latter is more obviously a buffoon. 

Now I'm worried

Sure, of the IPA crowd, Chris Berg seems the most affable, but he's still not to be trusted.

Here he is today arguing that cybercrime "is not the bogeyman it is made out to be."

Here he is in 2010 noting that pressure cooker bombs are "weak":

Then there is ''Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom'', which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed ''close to the intended targets''.

It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully.

Here's a photo of the aftermath of a couple of weak old pressure cooker bombs, which killed 3 and injured 264, which appear to have been made following instructions from the very same on line Islamic terrorist magazine, the articles of which Chris said "when they're not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal."




Yes.  Very banal.

Experiment in non censorship noted

The New York Times had an article  on the weekend looking at the question of what is known about the effect of internet pornography on teenagers.

The answer proposed is:  not much.

This is not surprising.  As the article says, it's not as if you can easily get ethical consent to do studies that compare one set of teenagers deliberately exposed to certain types of pornography with those who are not exposed.  And, for those who have seen some pornography, proving causal connections is particularly difficult:

After sifting through those papers, the report found a link between exposure to pornography and engagement in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or sex at a young age. But little could be said about that link. Most important, “causal relationships” between pornography and risky behavior “could not be established,” the report concluded. Given the ease with which teenagers can find Internet pornography, it’s no surprise that those engaging in risky behavior have viewed pornography online. Just about every teenager has. So blaming X-rated images for risky behavior may be like concluding that cars are a leading cause of arson, because so many arsonists drive. 

American scholars have come to nearly identical nonconclusions. “By the end we looked at 40 to 50 studies,” said Eric Owens, an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and co-author of “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. “And it became, ‘O.K., this one tells us A, this one tells us B.’ To some degree we threw up our hands and said, there is no conclusion to be drawn here.”

This is one of those areas where, regardless of the difficulty of drawing causal connections, there is good reason to take a common sense approach that limits on the amount of pornography available to teenagers be limited.  The availability of hard core pornography via the internet in virtually every teenager's house is a novel situation we have never really seen the likes of before.  It is not the equivalent of soft core Playboys being found in a secret stash.   And video and photography of real people engaged in the real activity is also rather different from fictional, written accounts - the latter is an act of imagination that everyone knows has not involved a real person using their body in a morally dubious fashion.

Thus, I have never had a problem at all with the idea that the "standard" household feed of internet access should make some attempt at filtering out what would be called x rated video and photographic pornography, even if it is a certainty that what's left will never be as "safe" as Reader's Digest, with an "opt in" choice to be made by those who want it.   Australian internet companies and libertarian types have always claimed that this was virtually impossible to achieve for technical reasons. Yet, as the NYT article points out:

Starting late last year, Internet service providers in Britain made “family-friendly filters,” which block X-rated websites, the default for customers. Now any account holder who wants to view adult material needs to actively opt in — effectively raising a hand to say, “Bring on the naughty.”

The initiative, which was conceived and very publicly promoted by the government, is intended to prevent what Prime Minister David Cameron called the corrosion of childhood, which, he argued in a speech last year, happens when kids are exposed to pornography at a young age.

Tech commentators who are against any form of filtering always argue that a determined teenager will be able to get around it.  That hardly seems the point when one is considering children under 13, who are not likely to be highly motivated to searching out pornography anyway. And even for your normal teenager, the (shall we say) low threshold for arousal probably means that we can acknowledge that the filtered feed may have enough material for their, ahem, purposes; but this is still better than full unlimited access to a world of demeaning examples of sexual activity. 

I am sure that it would be widely considered a bad thing if (hypothetically) all laws regarding access to adult shops were revoked and newsagents and bookshops were suddenly to open vast sections devoted to the most lurid and explicit DVDs and magazine covers, and could hand out sample copies to 14 year olds.  Why is reasonable, age related regulation of access to the physical thing accepted, but the cyber version is supposed to be completely open or it's painted as some sort of censorship crisis?    Opt in plans do nothing to prevent adults accessing what they want to access.

So, I am very interested to see how the English new scheme works out.  There is remarkably little comment on the internet about it, even though it has now been in place for a few months.   I would thought that it had caused some massive log jam on the net, we would have heard already.

If it works reasonably well, it should be taken up elsewhere too.

About that Roger Pielke Jnr argument

I'm rather busy at the moment, but just wanted to note this passage from a recent Real Climate post, as it is a good, short summary of why one key Pielke Jnr argument is a complete distraction:

The cost of extreme weather events

If an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming is hard to prove by statistics amongst all the noise, how much harder is it to demonstrate an increase in damage cost due to global warming? Very much harder! A number of confounding socio-economic factors clouds this issue which are very hard to quantify and disentangle. Some factors act to increase the damage, like larger property values in harm’s way. Some act to decrease it, like more solid buildings (whether from better building codes or simply as a result of increased wealth) and better early warnings. Thus it is not surprising that the literature on this subject overall gives inconclusive results. Some studies find significant damage trends after adjusting for GDP, some don’t, tempting some pundits to play cite-what-I-like. The fact that the increase in damage cost is about as large as the increase in GDP (as recently argued at FiveThirtyEight) is certainly no strong evidence against an effect of global warming on damage cost. Like the stranger’s dozen rolls of dice in the pub, one simply cannot tell from these data.

The emphasis on questionable dollar-cost estimates distracts from the real issue of global warming’s impact on us. The European heat wave of 2003 may not have destroyed any buildings – but it is well documented that it caused about 70,000 fatalities. This is the type of event for which the probability has increased by a factor of five due to global warming – and is likely to rise to a factor twelve over the next thirty years. Poor countries, whose inhabitants hardly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, are struggling to recover from “natural” disasters, like Pakistan from the 2010 floods or the Philippines and Vietnam from tropical storm Haiyan last year. The families who lost their belongings and loved ones in such events hardly register in the global dollar-cost tally.

Tony's dream....

Yong speaks

Ed Yong, whose blog "Not Exactly Rocket Science" was recently added to my blogroll, has a TED talk on line now.  His voice is very different from what I expected, and his talk on mind controlling parasites is good:

A spectacularly bad week for Right wing figures past their "use by" date

Let's list the losers from this week, in no particular order:

1.  Bronwyn Bishop.  It doesn't matter that she was always destined to win the vote (has a government ever voted against its own speaker, rather than simply asking him or her to resign?), the grim look on her face during the detailed and fairly put argument by Tony Burke was enough to hurt her, and Tony Abbott.  Michelle Grattan, who I think is generally pretty fair in her commentary on personal performances, has labelled Bishop as not even giving the impression of trying to be fair.  Bishop ought to protect whatever frail legacy she thinks she has ("a mile wide but an inch deep" rings true to this day) by resigning in light of Labor's declaration of no confidence in her.   I am guessing she won't.

And how ludicrous was it of Christopher Pyne to say that the fact the challenge was prepared meant it was a "stunt"?  If you take on a major and serious task like this, of course it has to be backed up with evidence.

By the way, in all the commentary about it, why has no journalist followed up on Burke's claim that Bishop lied about what was on a tape?   Isn't that a very serious allegation?

2.  Tony Abbott   Knights and Dames.   Did he seriously think there would not be near uniform ridicule from politicians and the public about this?   Was he trying to distract from something else, like his poor judgement with giving Sinodinos a job when he must have know damage was coming up?  He looked genuinely upset with Bill Shorten's ridicule in the House, helping ensure his self inflicted damage from this ridiculous exercise.

And how about his claiming that Bishop had handled the challenge to her with "grace and good humour"?  There was no evidence of humour on her part whatsoever.  

3.  Arthur Sinodinos.  Well, it's more than a week since his damage was done, but since then, despite the Commission saying that it was not really going after him, it still looks very likely he is not coming back.  I didn't think he was past his use by date until this came to light, but he is.

4.  Cardinal George Pell.   By all accounts, of course including the very detailed ones by Marr, a pretty terrible performance in that he agreed that the Church had acted appallingly in a crucial child abuse court case, but to quite a large degree sought to deflect blame for that to a string of other people, and tried to make up for it by saying the Church's door was now open to making large compensation payments.   All rather too late for those who have died, George.  The physical stoop he has developed in recent years has been like a living reminder of the diminishment of his judgement and character in the eyes of most Australian Catholics, let alone amongst people who don't care for the Church.

5.  George Brandis.   What a brilliant idea, when defending laws softening steps that can be taken by individuals the victims of racism, to point out in Parliament that people have a right to be a bigot!    He was arguing with Penny Wong, and also thought it a good idea to also call her "bigoted".  She apparently went livid, but managed to control herself.

I had heard years ago that Brandis has been an unpopular, abrasive figure with a large slab of the Queensland Liberals.   He's obviously not always great at thinker on his feet, either.

Reports during the week said that his proposed amendments were softened under Cabinet influence.  God knows what they must have been like before that.

Brandis' bigot comment is going to haunt him for a long time.  No one would be disappointed to see the back of him.

Warm water problem

A couple of weeks ago, there was a guy on Landline from (I think) the Bureau of Meteorology talking about a subsurface body of very warm water being tracked West East across the Pacific.  It was thought that if it surfaced, it would be the start of a clear El Nino.  He said it was about 4-5 degrees hotter than average.  I had no idea that large warm, subsurface (about 150 m down) bodies of water were tracked like this in real time.

The subject gets a detailed explanation at this blog post.   I don't know who the author is, but he seems well versed on the subject.  He says it has the potential to be a bigger El Nino than the record setting one at the end of the 1990's.

Let's see what happens....

Winding, windy moors must be good for your health

Kate Bush tour: Extra London dates confirmed - News - Music - The Independent

PS:  she's 55.

Make up your minds

Richard III expert: The skeleton in the car park may not be the missing monarch after all - Archaeology - Science - The Independent

Not all wet after all

That's a surprise.  It seems everyone was expecting a disaster (ha! another pun) but the reviews for Noah are quite strong.

Bickmore watches Steyn dance

It's been up for a week or two, but Barry Bickmore's "Flashdance" comparison to how Mark Steyn thinks he can conduct himself in a defamation action is really hilarious.

Aly on the RDA

I quite like Waleed Aly's column on the RDA controversy.  He argues that making the standard that of "the ordinary reasonable Australian" effectively makes it a white standard:

This matters because – if I may speak freely – plenty of white people (even ordinary reasonable ones) are good at telling coloured people what they should and shouldn’t find racist, without even the slightest awareness that they might not be in prime position to make that call.

This is particularly problematic with the proposed offence of racial “intimidation”. To “intimidate” is “to cause fear of physical harm” according to the draft Act. Now our ordinary reasonable white person is being asked to tell, say, black people whether or not they are “reasonably likely” to be fearful of physical harm. Black people – reasonable ones – might actually be fearful, but ultimately a hypothetical white person will decide that for them.

Heh.  Let's not forget the most belligerent white blogging promoter of full repeal of s18C, Sinclair Davidson, claimed this in relation to an aboriginal man

Actually, no. Calling a man an 'ape' is not racist and not demeaning. Rude, yes. Unnecessary, yes. poor behaviour, yes.

He copped a lot of criticism about this, even from white right wing sympathisers; and given that he's from South Africa, it was all the more extraordinary. 

[Deletion, pending further research.]

And only yesterday, he wrote this about those annoying "community groups" who don't want the Act amended:

The elected government of the Commonwealth of Australia is the leadership of the largest community group in the country – also the only community group that actually enjoys widespread legitimacy. 

Shorter version:   "Suck it up, Jewish community groups.  You've lost."

He had already denied there could be friendship with those who support s.18C:

 This is a fork in the road. Those who choose to walk down the path of 18C must do so alone, without the comfort and friendship of those of us who choose freedom over slavery.

Which I reckon would strike most people as an extremely immature attitude.  But then again, this is a man who gets a big thrill from Judge Dredd.   Let's face it - libertarianism is a philosophy that attracts the immature, and those with limited empathy.  (On the empathy question, how else can you interpret a fondness for labelling a large section of society "moochers".)

Now, I am not arguing that he is a racist - and I haven't noticed anyone allege that against him.   What I am saying though is that his philosophy gives him a particularly acute tin ear when it comes to questions of what other people should find as racism or offensive on the grounds of race.   This is also tied up with his ironic way of seeking to deflect attacks by revelling in them (he frequently celebrates having been called an evil bald fascist gnome, for example.)   The fact that he readily bans his critics at his own blog shows that he's not as immune to attacks as he likes to pretend he is.   But his theory seems to be that everyone should take on criticism the way he does - put on a show of laughing it off (even though it does hurt or annoy you); don't think of yourself as a victim - that's a sign of weakness.   Yet, of course, he has been one of the biggest public (and private, I assume) hand holders of the most vocal "I'm a victim" claimant of all in this matter - Andrew Bolt.

Anyway, back to Aly, who ends his column this way:

I have no doubt the Abbott government doesn’t intend this. It doesn’t need to. That’s the problem. This is just the level of privilege we're dealing with. This is what happens when protection from racism becomes a gift from the majority rather than a central part of the social pact. It’s what happens when racial minorities are required to be supplicants, whose claims to social equality are subordinate to those of powerful media outlets outraged they might occasionally have to publish an apology.

And it’s what happens when lawmakers and the culturally empowered proceed as though ours is a society without a racial power hierarchy simply because they sit at the top of it.

Well said.

Update:  the Catallaxy warrior and self proclaimed former friend of Jews seems to think that by talking about a white majority often not having the best idea of what racial minorities may find insulting, Aly is acting in breach of s18C.

Pity he ignores 18D.  Or rather - typical. 

Also the irony.   As I have argued, Davidson himself gives credence to Aly's argument that white folk sometimes don't have a clue.

Krugman, Piketty, etc

What a good post from Krugman, talking about the much discussed new book by Piketty on the intensifying inequality in the US and globally, in which he notes that the history of taxation in the US is entirely different from what Tea Party drips (ha, a pun) think it is. (And incidentally, the Piketty argument as explained at that last link sounds extremely convincing.  It looks like it is being received as a death knell for the Right wing economic orthodoxy and philosophy of the last few decades.)

And here's a second Krugman post, arguing that dissing the Koch Brothers is entirely legitimate.

Amusingly, I see that Catallaxy is running one of its "Gee, aren't rich people great?" posts about the Koch Brothers at the same time.

It's a feature of the Ayn Rand shadow on libertarianism that they rarely make any differentiation  between the rich who earn it in an admirable and positive way - innovation, hard work, meeting a market for a product that genuinely benefits everyone with limited harm to society or the environment - and those who earn or use their gains in a positively harmful way, or did not actually earn it at all but simply were born into the right family.    In fact, they argue strongly against any attempt to bring morality to the issue of how money is made - Sinclair Davidson thinks campaigns against Apartheid South Africa didn't work, couldn't care less that tobacco companies sell a carcinogen when considering whether they should have unfettered marketing via trade mark, and has taken to complaining regularly about new divestment campaigns against fossil fuel mining companies.   He dismisses as essentially unworthy any attempt to remove the scandalous use of tax havens by the likes of Apple and other multinationals.   He'll soon be making a teary video "Leave Capital alone! You are lucky it even performed for you.  Leave it alone!"


But going back to Piketty:  I see that John Cassidy in the New Yorker has a series of charts that illustrate the argument.  I'll copy just this one, showing that Australia really has been better in the inequality stakes:

A new dwarf planet. Cool.

Dwarf planet stretches Solar System's edge
This Nature report doesn't say it, but another one in The Guardian ends with the possibility that a very large dark planet is way out there too:

The latest work has already thrown up an intriguing possibility. The angle of the body's orbit and that of Sedna's are strikingly similar, an effect most likely caused by the gravitational tug of another, unseen body. One possibility is a "Super Earth" that traces so large an orbit around the sun that it has never been seen.

"If you took a SuperEarth and put it a few hundred astronomical units out, the gravity could shepherd Sedna and this new object into the orbits they have," said Sheppard. An astronomical unit (AU) is around 150m kilometres, or the mean distance from Earth to the sun.

Earlier this month, Nasa'sWide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise) reported the results from its search for "Planet X", a hypothesised planet far out in the solar system. It found no evidence for a new planet larger than Saturn within 10,000 AU of the sun. But Saturn is 95 times more massive than Earth, so a smaller Super Earth could go undetected in that region.

Great news for hard science fiction writers, I am sure.

About the Racial Discrimination Act amendment...

Michelle Grattan has a column at The Conversation about the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, and I agree with it completely.

I like this analogy:

There is a respectable case to be made that the present act is too wide. If drafters were starting from scratch, with no law on the books, they would probably be better to leave out “offend” and “insult”.

But there is not a clean slate, and changing the status quo has disproportionate dangers. It’s rather like punching a hole in an asbestos shed – a stable if not ideal structure suddenly turns into a hazard, its particles scattered with unpredictable risk. It would be easier and better to leave well alone.

I think that's a brilliant summary of the attitude of Warren Mundine, and (probably) of all the ethnic bodies that have urged the government not to intervene.

She goes on to note that until the current law resulted in a friend of the PM losing a purely symbolic battle (one caused by his own poor research and failure to simply apologise and correct errors in lieu of defending a court action)  this was not an active issue for the Coalition at all.    She writes:

And, apart from keeping faith with an outraged columnist, what is this about? There have not been other troublesome cases; the law has mostly functioned well.

Brandis claims that (unnamed) journalists tell him there is this “chill” of censorship. But who precisely wants to say what that they are not saying now?

One can’t imagine that Abbott himself would want a heightened debate on race. On indigenous affairs in particular, he’d be appalled – not least because it would endanger his push for indigenous recognition in the constitution.

Yet the government’s rhetoric over 18C and related sections of the RDA suggests that free speech is being suppressed.

That highlighted line is pure right wing bulldust, talked about by the likes of the teeth grindingly annoying fake culture war commentator Nick Cater (the UK's gain, and our loss, when he migrated here.)   As is typical of the Tea Party inspired Right in Australia now, they are setting up a straw man to attack by insisting that matters that the centre Right won about 20 years ago are still alive and crushing the nation.  Look at aboriginal issues - Labor was embarrassed by being gullible on Hindmarsh Island, and Bob Hawke weeping over claimed aboriginal sites; by the end of the Howard government, they were supporting the intervention in the Northern Territory and had a tougher approach to limiting alcohol than the current Liberal government.  (In truth, both parties have moved somewhat to the centre.  The Coalition's panic about native title is now seen as greatly exaggerated, and most in the party were fairly gracious about the Rudd apology.)

Given Andrew Bolt's behaviour, I find the line taken by Tim Wilson, as repeated by Brandis and all the FOB's* actually pretty nauseating - that the way to a better society is for there to be no limit on offensive expressions and for "good" people to vigorously attack objectionable views.  As Michelle writes:

Those worrying the most about the alleged chains on free speech can be sensitive when the exchanges become too robust. Bolt was outraged when outspoken indigenous figure Marcia Langton threw around allegations about him on television. “I was so bruised … that I didn’t go into work on Tuesday. I couldn’t stand any sympathy — which you get only when you’re meant to feel hurt,” he wrote.

He pointed to inaccuracies; after Langton apologised to him he demanded the ABC apologise too (she had made the comments on Q&A).

The Langton-Bolt exchanges contributed little to the public debate, but if you are going to complain there is not enough opportunity for unfettered free speech, it seems more than a little inconsistent to be upset by someone saying offensive things about you. Isn’t the aim supposed to be a world of unrestrained biffo all round?

And, of course, "classic liberals" like Wilson, Berg, and Sinclair Davidson in particular (who seems to be trying to make up for not having lived out a boyhood dream of being a righteous Rambo, or  comic book superhero, by being really nuttily belligerent on free speech) argue for "unrestrained biffo" from a position of white, male, social success. 

If they had an actual case where they could show some important issue has not been adequately canvassed in Australian society because of the RDA, they might have a case. The fact is, they don't.  I also strongly suspect that they have run so hard on this because of media donations to their think tank, which (I would guess) may have been inspired more by the Gillard government's clumsy attempt to revise media self regulation than the Bolt case.

I know it won't be an instant social disaster if the Act is amended, but it is the matter of why and by whom this is being argued now that paints a picture of a government with completely inappropriate  priorities interested in protecting mates who least need it. 

And, as such, it is yet another example of poor judgement by Tony Abbott.



* Friends of Bolt, of course.

And further:   I see from an article that Jason Soon links to, that at least some of those who support the free speech case in principle still feel uncomfortable with the way it is being argued.  I also agree with the take on Chris Kenny:

Hypocrisy is compounded, however, even by the principled. Chris Kenny suing the ABC for defamation for showing a manipulated image of him having sex with a dog is case in point.* People look at the kind of cases that have been brought forward under 18C and have (rightly, in my opinion) determined that some of these are a case of ‘hurt feelings’, to the extent that the judgements significantly impinge upon free expression. This line of argument has since been expanded to suggest either implicitly or explicitly that all the cases of racism and racial insensitivity are simple matters of ‘hurt feelings’ - everything, from a taxi driver being racially abused to a demented columnist with an axe to grind is ‘hurt feelings’.

On the other hand, the way most people have treated the Kenny case suggests that such belittling is reserved for 18C. There are those who would defend the concept of defamation law as it protects one’s property (reputation), which is not a terrible idea in itself. The issue is that there seems to be no recognition that there are gradations. The idea that a manipulated image from a group long known for satire would actually damage Kenny’s reputation is simple nonsense. But there seems to be this desire to see cases of alleged defamation as uniformly are valid and legitimate - in other words, a valid restriction of speech - whereas all cases under 18C are equally illegitimate. One kind of complainant deserves the benefit of the doubt and another kind does not.

What is happening is that there’s a peculiar blindness about how wide a net defamation law really casts, whereas there seems to be perfect 20-20 vision on 18C.

A 1985 bargain

Gee.  Someone under 35 probably has no idea.

Have a look at this ad I just scanned from a 1985 Omni magazine which I have been hoarding all these years.

Read all about the wonders of a 10mb plug in hard drive for$695:

A co-incidence?

Well, I was previously dismissive of the dangerously unhinged pilot theory, especially when it was based on his support for Anwar Ibrahim.  But now I am not so sure.

The other thing is that the climb to higher than safe altitude always seemed very hard to explain.  As part of a plan by someone to disable the passengers, it does make some sense.  It would be a very twisted and self absorbed pilot who would do it as part of a final joy flight, though.  But if it was a hijacker, it's a bit of co-incidence that it was on a flight piloted by someone with (allegedly) a fair bit of trouble in his personal life.

Maybe the glowing digital cockpit screen in these aircraft need to flash a question to the crew before they take off  "You aren't feeling too depressed or unhappy today to fly?  Think of your passengers."   Who knows, that may be enough for some potentially suicidal pilots to reconsider.

As recorded at the Cabinet meeting where Tony Abbott decided to reintroduce dames and knights

Update:  turns out he didn't discuss it in Cabinet or the party room.   Just asked a few colleagues.  Wow.  At least he knows enough to realise when not to ask permission for a really stupid idea, but not enough to not go ahead with a really stupid idea.

Update 2: I've just realised - that stage group doesn't fairly represent the Abbott cabinet at all:  there are far too many women involved.

Queen Victoria revisited

Well, that's odd.  Julia Baird, the Australian journalist who turns up regularly hosting The Drum (she seems pretty smart, but somehow she just manages to be dull in that role) has an opinion piece in the NYT about Queen Victoria.  Julia's writing a book about her, apparently.

A couple of interesting extracts:

In the 1800s, a woman could be proud if her child reached primary school age. Out of every 1,000 born, around 150 died. Largely because of the prevalence of measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and cholera, three out of 10 children did not live to age 5. In some towns in England, the death rate was almost twice as high; some blamed the rather dubious practice of drugging babies with opium to calm them while their parents worked. (A piece published in 1850 in “Household Words,” the journal edited by Charles Dickens, blamed the “ignorant hireling nurse” who managed eight or nine babies at a time by keeping them drugged and “quiet, almost, as death.”) By the century’s end, about 80 percent of parents took out insurance against their babies. That practice was eventually frowned upon for encouraging infanticide.

Ah yes, the under regulated life of Victorian England was a fantastic place.

But as to Queen Victoria herself, Julia notes that a new book argues that our historical image of her as a lousy mother was permanently and unfairly twisted by a couple of gay men:

Ms. Ward, who wrote a dissertation on the same subject, began comparing the three official volumes of Victoria’s letters to the more than 460 volumes of correspondence in the Royal Archives in the Windsor Tower, while researching the queen as a wife and mother. She grew curious about the men who edited the letters and why they chose to obscure Victoria’s private life and motherhood.

It turned out that their mission was to protect Victoria as well as her eldest son, Edward VII, from the hint of any scandal at all; they cut out suggestions, for instance, that she was infatuated with her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne.

The man given the task was Viscount Esher, an adviser to King Edward VII; he hired the Eton housemaster Arthur Benson to edit it. Both were gay. Both found the editing experience overwhelming and onerous.

Both also, crucially, viewed Victoria as ancillary to the men around her. They wrote in their introduction: “Confident, in a sense, as she was, she had the feminine instinct strongly developed of dependence upon some manly adviser.”

Only 40 percent of the letters in the volumes of her letters are actually hers: Most of the others are written to her by prominent men, and the correspondence with female relatives and friends is scant.

“The small number of women’s letters in the published volumes,” writes Ms. Ward, “cannot be attributed to the editor’s ignorance of their existence.”

In truth, Benson was bored by correspondence between women; it was “very tiresome.” Yet the letters Victoria exchanged with the young queen of Portugal, Donna Maria, which were almost entirely excluded, reveal a great preoccupation with their young, the joys of children and the pains of giving birth.

Interesting.