Groucho does smoking

Henry Ergas confirms himself as a complete tosser in his Saturday column, which comprises part of The Australian's nutty jihad against people who doubt their position that plain packaging is a FAILURE and WRONG!

He deploys all the tactics we've seen before - the straw man about how plain packaging should have had an immediate drop in smokers, and that it would result in smokers moving to cheaper brands so why do it? - both of which I showed had already been considered by the likes of strongly anti-smoking economists such as Harry Clarke.

Ergas notes the difficulty of working out the effects of different measures taken over a same period - typically increases in excise happening along with increasing restrictions on advertising.  But then (of course) he's happy to cite tobacco industry econometrics study which "indicate" it's all in the excise, and attacks Labor for not doing "Regulation Impact Statement" before introducing the policy.   He thinks this:

Roxon’s failure to undertake a RIS means the Abbott government must complete a post-implementation review of the plain packaging legislation by December. It should seize that opportunity to carry out an independent, rigorous review of policies towards the tobacco industry. The unfortunate reality is that this area has become a policy trapdoor: once a policy is implemented, there is no way out, no matter how costly and ineffective it may be.

Yeah, well, we kind of like of that way, because tobacco has been losing big time, and who cares whether it's (say) 10% advertising restrictions and 90% excise, or vice versa, or any combination in between?   The combination of policies has clearly been working.   And doesn't common sense suggest you're never going to be able to completely be sure of the precise weighting of the different factors?

Sinclair Davidson has taken up a similar line - arguing that you must be able to a cost benefit analysis of tobacco policy.   Of course, this fits hand in glove with the line he and fellow climate change "skeptics" have long taken - you can wait to decide on reducing CO2 until you know exactly what the climate sensitivity figure is.  Both are disingenuous ways of arguing to do nothing (including, with climate change, up to the point where you can't do anything effective anyway),  because your ideological starting point is that you don't want businesses interfered with. 

Amusingly, Davidson has also been running the line that we are being just too mean to smokers and making them feel bad:

The anti-smoking lobby has done an magnificent job of stigmatising and denormalising smokers and smoking. 

Oh diddums. 

Back to Ergas:  what about this section (with my comments in brackets):

After all, that policy imposes significant costs. Consumers are harmed, as the quality of a product they value is forcibly degraded [only if you count an ugly packet as degrading what's inside it - a smoker can still buy a premium brand if they want to]; producers’ profits are reduced and their trademarks destroyed [oh boo hoo - the industry which sickens and kills a large proportion of its addicted customers is going to lose money - that's a feature, not a problem]; and if consumption rises as plain packaging causes prices to fall (relative to the levels they would otherwise have achieved), the community’s health suffers [we already thought about that - so we brought in excise increase too].

What's the bet that Ergas used to be a smoker, by the way?

Update:   incidentally, this "we are too mean to smokers now" palaver - the fact is that something 3/4 of smokers want to quit anyway.   Encouraging youth never to start is a good way to ensure they're not going to regret their addiction in the future - and  we can promise with pretty high certainty they will.

Factor that into your cost benefit analysis, can you?

Electric bicycles popular - in China

Yeah, so Harley-Davidson have a electric motorcycle out that may or may not go into production, by the sounds.  But in the story, I noticed this interesting point:

Purpose-built electric bicycles are becoming hugely popular. In China 25 million are sold each year, according to Prof Peter Wells, co-director of the automotive industry research group at Cardiff Business School.

By the way, just Googling around to see what's available in Australia in the way of scooters (it has occurred to me before that I could scooter to work from where I live for much of the year), I came across this pretty interesting looking design that is coming Australia's way soon.  Hey, it's a cheesy ad, but the machine itself looks pretty cool to me:

A mixed bag

Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic

Some of the comments following this essay are pretty much in line with my take - worth reading, many parts are surely correct, but some parts seem dubious. 

Small government by whatever it takes

I sort of missed the evolution over time of Right wing think tank increasing support for strict compliance with constitutional provisions and getting all aroused by the prospect of increased State responsibilities and less Commonwealth involvement.  They're currently Hi 5-ing themselves over the High Court making Commonwealth funding to assist programs within States a trickier thing.

It seems its all to do with fairly fanciful ideas of competitive Federalism being obviously A Good Thing.   Also, they'll run with any idea as long as it means government being smaller, somewhere.

While I don't doubt that States sometimes come up with novel and better ways of doing things which are then followed by other States, you can't dismiss the "race to the bottom" effect of such competition either.   And certainly, for some workers (Defence Force in particular) the lack of certain standardised things between  States (like school curriculum) had long made movement around the country a disruptive pain.   Now the likes of Judith Sloan are all for differentiation between States' schools again, regardless of the effects on worker mobility which she presumably thinks is a good thing.

It's also far from obvious to me that IPA types get any increase in their much desired minimal government if the States get their responsibilities re-inflated.   After all, look at things like anti outlay bikie legislation:  what small government types probably consider the most illiberal laws in the country are from State parliaments.

I am of the view that you get more intelligent government the higher up the Federal chain you go; you may not think much of politicians at any level, but for the spectacularly ill qualified, eccentric and prone to corruption, look no further than your State governments.   For this reason alone, I have been generally happy with the greater role of the Feds in matters over the decades, and yet again find the Right wing ideologues wanting worse outcomes for the public simply due to their ideology.

Not sure you should be helping them, Michael

Saving Joe Hockey: the budget we should have had

I find myself agreeing with nearly all of this "free advice on the budget" column by Michael Pascoe, but hope he is not part of a successful rehabilitation of a government I want to see the back of...

Why he's not to be admired

As this story from Mediaite notes, Rupert Murdoch is sincerely for immigration reform in the US, and has just written an op-ed about it, but the people he is battling are Republicans devoted to his money making Fox News business.

This has long been the problem with Murdoch:  he makes money by the cynical method of running media outlets that run political views he doesn't even agree with.   He plays both sides of the street - another classic example is when he was (formerly) promoting climate change action (now, with the break up of his last marriage, he seems to have changed his mind) he was simultaneously happy for Fox News to run hard on climate change denialism.

If media magnates want to use their media to run political and social views that they believe, well, they are entitled to and you can at least respect their consistency.

But when you are reaping in your riches from a media network which has become so influential yet runs views you strongly disagree with - where's the honour in that? 

Rewriting the map

The New Map of the Middle East - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic

Goldberg looks back at his 2007 prescient article talking about how the Middle East may end up.

I was interested in how his views have changed on the original division:

In the article, I was very critical of the imperial hubris that motivated the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East by the British and French. But I’ve warmed to the argument that the Sykes-Picot arrangement was, in one sense, inadvertently progressive. The makers of the modern Middle East roped together peoples of different ethnicities and faiths (or streams of the same faith) in what were meant to be modern, multicultural, and multi-confessional states. It is an understatement to say that the Middle East isn’t the sort of place where this kind of experiment has been shown to work. (I’m thinking of you, one-staters, by the way.) I don’t think it is worth American money, or certainly American lives, to keep Iraq a unitary state. It is, of course, important to invest in plans that forestall the creation of permanent jihadist safe havens, and about this the U.S. should bevigilant, more vigilant than it has been. But Westphalian obsessiveness—Iraq must stay together because it must stay together—just doesn’t seem wise.

In the same way, there was the same "inadvertantly progressive" justification involved in the Iraq invasion in 2003 - the view that removing a dictator who violently suppressed parts of the population would allow for democracy to flower, and that it was almost racist for opponents on the Left to argue that the people there were incapable of working out their differences peacefully.   From memory, that was pretty much the position that Christopher Hitchens promoted, and which I found somewhat persuasive at the time.   It would be interesting to know what his position is now.

That Indian problem, again

BBC News - Why do millions of Indians defecate in the open?

Yes, we seem to read about the dire lack of toilets in India a lot in the last couple of years (which reminds me, I wonder how the poo2loo campaign is going - looks like they have some cricketer on board now.)

But the thing I wanted to note about this BBC report was this interesting campaign slogan, which I gather is fairly unique in the history of politics:

Access to sanitation is a challenge that India's politicians want to tackle - both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised to put an end to open defecation in their 2014 general election manifestos.

During his campaign, Narendra Modi, BJP's newly-elected prime minister, promised: "Toilets first, temples later".

Adam Creighton notes The Australian's beat up

This story's getting stale, but still, a few key features of the way some of our Tea Party Lite economists have conducted themselves need to be noted:

*   They set up a straw man to attack in the first place, carrying on (at first) as if it was self evidently "a disaster" if any short period after implementation showed a small uptick in consumption. 

Yet it was Sinclair Davidson himself who linked to a Harry Clarke/David Prentice paper that was out before plain packaging started that argued that PP may lead to people using cheaper brands, and that it was important for excise increases to offset this effect.

The ABS figures which indicate a slight increase for the first couple of quarters, then a large drop in the March 14 quarter, are entirely consistent with what Harry Clarke wrote in his paper.

Clarke and Prentice also noted (I'll paraphrase here) that the effect of PP may well be small (so you wouldn't necessarily expect to see a sudden drop in total smokers) and that it was probably going to work mainly on young people and their take up rate of smoking.   All of which indicates you would need to wait for a couple of years at least to see what effect it may have had.   (And even then, of course, there is little way of separating out the effects of the excise rise and the plain packaging.)

As with climate change denial, our Tea Party Lite economists rely on their readership not having understood the case in the first place.   

*  Adam Creighton in the Australian today argues about what ABS volume stats mean (and it is rather confusing, I concede.)   But whether he is right on that or not, here's where he ends up:

Despite evidence from both the tobacco industry and the ABS, the impact of plain packaging is yet to be determined after just 18 months. The measure may ultimately contribute to a real decline in smoking rates and cigarette sales.

So, what does Adam think of the headline on the front page of his paper which started all of this:

Labor's plain packaging fails as cigarette sales rise

But as Media Watch noted, this beat up of a headline ensured that Big Tobacco got big, useful headlines in England, where the policy is still under consideration.  If Creighton had any courage at all, he would specifically criticise his paper for its conduct, not just sneak this near the end of his column.

Go JQ

Treating Australians as parasitic 'leaners' is a grave mistake | John Quiggin | Comment is free | theguardian.com

A very good piece here by John Quiggin on the "class warfare" bulldust that Hockey is going on about, while at the same time doing a "moochers" lite analysis of "leaners and lifters". 


I also see that on a Fairfax online poll (yes, I know, not to be taken too seriously) asking if Abbott should call a double dissolution, 92% are saying "yes"!   I would bet that about 90% of that group is saying so because they reckon this government is so on the nose that they would clearly lose at a quick election.

Can Andrew Bolt and his readers genuinely be this dumb?

Unbelievably, Andrew Bolt has a post today  Fish killed by cold water the CSIRO said would be warm in which he calls a 2012 CSIRO prediction that Tasmanian waters would continue warming "a dud", because apparently a temporary wave of cold water is being blamed for a fish kill there.

Seriously, does Bolt think ocean water doesn't move around all the time, causing changes in ocean temperatures?   Doesn't he know that this is what an El Nino, for example, is all about?   Does he think a temporary incursion of cold water means a long term warming is not happening?
 
Does he think the CSIRO is making it up when it says Tasmanian waters have, on average, been warming rapidly (by global standards) over the last 50 years, as illustrated here?:

Does he think that fisherman are just pretending when they say warmer water fish have been moving into Tasmanian waters?

Andrew Bolt is embarrassing himself by displaying sheer, dumb, wilful ignorance.   That he has readers who don't give a second thought as to what he claims is perhaps the greater problem.

On a lighter, yet still depressing, note...

Here's a screen shot from The Guardian website "People" section this morning.   Has there ever been a sadder collection of stories for anyone interested in the current state of the entertainment industry?:

Possible explanations for The Australian's mental disturbance sought

Wow, just wow.

The Australian has deployed five six writers today to attack Media Watch for calling them wrong on their front page beat up last week about the alleged effect of tobacco plain packaging.

Merritt (Legal Affairs editor!), Ergas, Klan, Kerr, Creighton and Davidson.

They even re-print the latter's post from Catallaxy yesterday, including its criticism of Media Watch "cherry picking" which involves its own cherry picked quote to claim MW made a mistake with its use of 1.4% twice, as I pointed out yesterday.   (Amusingly, in the thread, my main Western Australian female fan, Philippa, mistakenly thinking that I was participating in the thread, actually linked to my post.  Yet no one from Catallaxy who read it noted back on the thread that I had identified a mistake.)

But the bigger point is this - there's something just clearly nuttily paranoid about how this paper conducts itself now, and wouldn't it be good to know where that is coming from?   If this newspaper was a friend, you'd be recommending it seek professional help; there's something clearly wrong going on in its head. 

It would also be good to know why it has decided to die in the ditch for Big Tobacco.

Damning figures on guns and kids

There are some spectacularly damning figures listed in this Slate article about how wrong it is for any American to think that having a gun in the household improves a kid's safety:

The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of all children murdered in the developed world. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States are 17 times more likely to be murdered by firearms than children in other industrialized nations.

Children from states where firearms are prevalent suffer from significantly higher rates of homicide, even after accounting for poverty, education, and urbanization. A study focusing on youth in North Carolina found that most of these deaths were caused by legally purchased handguns. A recent meta-analysis revealed that easy access to firearms doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk for suicide among all household members. Family violence is also much more likely to be lethal in homes where a firearm is present, placing children especially in danger. Murder-suicides are another major risk to children and are most likely to be committed with a gun.

Crucially, these deaths are not offset by defensive gun use. As one study found, for every time a gun is used legally in self-defense at home, there are “four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” A study of adolescents in California found that there were 13 times as many threatening as self-defensive uses of guns. Of the defensive encounters, many arose in confrontations that became hostile because of the presence of a firearm.

In the overall suicide rate, the United States ranks roughly in the middle of the pack among industrialized nations. However, we are the exception when it comes to suicides among children between the ages of 5 and 14, with an overall rate twice the average of other developed nations. This stark difference is driven almost exclusively by a firearm-related suicide rate that is 10 times the average of other industrialized nations.

And there is plenty more to appal the sensible reader.   Read the whole thing

Evolving from a "disaster" to "not very supportive"

I trust that people who have been reading Sinclair Davidson's series of articles on plain packaging for tobacco have noticed how he has changed his rhetoric over time?

First, March 27, noting that industry says it sold 0.3% more in the first twelve months:

What a policy disaster! The situation of the ground must be even worse.

 June 6, based on the same information:

For a policy that had the intent of reducing smoking rates, this is a disaster.

June 10, after thinking about it a bit more:

It is an open question as to whether existing smokers are smoking more, or if new smokers are taking up the habit.

Today:

A lot of very careful work needs to be done into the efficacy of the plain packaging policy – the early evidence isn’t very supportive of the policy.

And yet he complains when others (according to him) don't take him seriously enough at a forum discussion?

And how was this for a classic bit of arse covering by Judith Sloan after she wrote an Australian column which virtually repeated every argument Davidson had run up the flagpole:

Sinc, you are doing a great job on this.

But we should not forget that this is really an issue of principle rather than empirics.

Inspiring work, hey, by economists who shoot their mouths off first, and think harder later.

Update:

I also note that Sinclair Davidson's post of today tries on a "gotcha" that Media Watch quoted a 1.4% figure incorrectly for two different things.   He even quotes from the BT letter to show "what it actually says", but in doing so clips off the first reference to 1.4% in the letter.  Here's the full section, with 1.4%'s double appearance in bold:

 “From 2008 to 2012 smoking incidence, or the number of people smoking, was declining at an
average rate of -3.3 per cent a year. Since plain packaging was introduced, that decline rate
slowed to -1.4 per cent,” Mr McIntyre said.
“Over the five years in the lead-up to the introduction of plain packaging, total tobacco industry
volumes were declining at an average rate of -4.1 per cent.
“Subsequently, since plain packs were introduced on 1 December 2012, industry volumes have
actually grown for the first time in a long time to +0.3 per cent.
“Further, the number of cigarettes smoked on a daily basis declined at a rate of -1.9 per cent in the five years leading up to plain packaging, while it slowed to -1.4 per cent after green packs hit shelves.

 Oh dear, the letter is "not very supportive" of the attempted gotcha after all.

Now Davidson then goes on to criticise Media Watch for omitting the paragraph in the letter that argues, in spite of the percentages it just quotes:

“With growth in industry volumes, fewer people quitting and a jump in the amount of cheap illegal cigarettes on the streets, you could draw the conclusion that people are actually smoking more now than before plain packaging came into effect.”

Yes you could draw that conclusion - at least if you're an economist who brings no skepticism at all to tobacco industry spin and doesn't think about the letter as a whole.

Surely the actual problem here, for people other than Davidson and Sloan, is that the letter's conclusion makes little sense in light of its own quoted stats.   The number of smokers is reducing, the number of cigarettes per day smoked is reducing, but the industry is telling us that we can conclude people are smoking more now?   [They might have an argument there, somewhere, if they want to critique how the different sets of figures they quote are compiled, but they certainly don't make it.  The simple fact of the matter is that their claimed increase in sales volume, together with the alleged increase in black market sales, don't naturally gel with declines in the number of smokers and the number of cigarettes smoked per day.]

Here's the thing:  the industry wants to discredit plain packaging (absolute certainly on that point) and had an "obvious" way to do it - to offer cut price cigarettes and claim that any increase in sales volume over any short period shows the "failure" of the policy.  (They were likely assisted in this by the timing of the excise increase which may have led to some stockpiling before the price rise.)   But of course it is a self serving tactic, just like the IPA will campaign in the media by touring climate skeptics, and then quote any drop in polling for "public concern" about the issue to tell the government "see, this is not an important for the public, no need to deal with it." 

And above all of this is the clear fact that many proponents of plain packaging expected it to work long term by discouraging the young from starting, and assessing whether it is working that way or not would take some time to establish.  (Teenagers represent a small proportion of total smokers anyway - under 18 year old smokers now are well under 10% of the total*, and it's substantially more popular with girls at that age.  Somehow, I suspect that it is probably exactly that gender at that age that may be most put off by the de-glamourisation of cigarette packaging.)

Update: * not sure what the right figure is - the percentages in the link I was looking at was for percentage of under 18 teenagers who smoke - not what percentage of total smokers they represent.  That figure is proving hard to track down quickly.

Stuck on unpopular

I see from Newspoll that Abbott's "dissatisfied" polling went from 50% earlier in the year up to close to 60% with the budget, and has stayed there.

I suppose it is only 6 weeks or so since the budget, but it's nonetheless pleasing to see a flaky, windvane of a PM with a policy he is most committed to that is considered an eccentric dog by most in his own party; who takes advice from business ideologues who can't even believe in science and climate change; who is prepared to operate border control under a fake veil of "operational secrecy" so that the public doesn't even know if it should be concerned; whose government drifts into unnecessary terminology changes so as to score points from an Israeli PM who is a favourite of Fox News; and who introduced with no pre-election discussion a major change to tertiary education that has unseen equity consequences while his daughter got free education pretty much for being his daughter, is stuck on unpopular.

Marijuana and capitalism

I see that tonight's Foreign Correspondent is about how business is rubbing its hands with glee at the prospect of a legal marijuana market in much of the United States.  An article along similar lines from the US can be read here.

This does strike me as a very serious issue.  As that second article notes, there's little doubt that tobacco use in the 20th century took off as a result of both a more convenient product pushed along by the profit motive.

The inadequacies of an under regulated market with regards to marijuana in Colorado have already been displayed by the stupidity of selling things like candy bars full of multiple "doses" of THC, with next to no labelling of the danger of consuming too much too quickly.  Talk about your obvious danger with no care taken by the profit maker.

Now, I guess some may argue that, like alcohol, where profit pushes sales, marijuana with find its natural level of societal use.

But the legalisation advocates like to argue that the ubiquity of its use is one of the reasons for legalising it.   Hence you could argue that there is already is a "natural level" of use in society, and what you see by legalisation is permission to give capitalism its full force behind manipulating a market to increase it:  to redefine a new "natural level".   The example of tobacco shows, of course, that capitalism left alone can  take scant account of the interests of public health and productivity. 

I suppose you could argue that the State, if in future concerned about the increase in use, could seek to drive it down by increasing taxes, as they do with smoking and alcohol.   But the higher the taxes, the less likely you will ever actually remove the black market for the drug, which in this case is even easier to manufacture than either tobacco or alcohol. 

I therefore think there is every reason to be leery of legalisation because capitalism and its role in promoting markets makes for an uncomfortable mix when it comes to a "new" product it is not actually in our societal interest to see becoming too popular.

Saudi money causes problems, again

ISIS: The Saudis helped create a monster they can't control in Iraq.

If you were playing a world building game on your computer, about the last strategy you would want is to put a large amount of a very useful resource under the ground of a region made of sand with humans living there who (probably partly because of the harsh environment itself) think they hear God talking to them.

Yet that's what our God seems to have done, and world peace has been paying for it in one way or another for quite a time now.

Maybe this should be added to the atheist arguments against God - an all knowing being would not be so bad at game strategy.

Internal affairs

Health Check: the ins and outs of burping and farting

Well, I didn't realise there was a gas recycling system going on in such a large scale inside me:

Imagine how much space 25 litres of gas would occupy – about one third of the interior of a small car. That’s how much gas you produce every day in your intestines. So it’s little wonder that farting, bloating and burping are relatively common.

Much of this gas production is recycled – by re-absorption and use within the gut, particularly by the almost two kilograms of bacteria in your colon. Indeed, almost 22.5 litres is absorbed by the gut, used by gut bacteria or expires through the lungs.

I think that's a useful fact to drop into my script for episode 3 of the show about time travelling fecal transplanting doctors.  

Fermented fish from another part of the world

Korea’s Fish Special: A Delicate Mix of Outhouse and Ammonia - NYTimes.com

Well, it turns out that Scandinavia is not the only region that has developed a fondness of what many say is the most gut wrenchingly smelly and offensive food of all - fermented fish:

But fermented skate from this southern island tops them all. By far South Korea’s smelliest food, the fish, called hongeo, is described by lovers and detractors alike as releasing odors reminiscent of an outhouse. Served most often as chewy pink slabs of sashimi, hongeo is prized by enthusiasts for the ammonia fumes it releases, sometimes so strong they cause people’s mouths to peel.

“I used to think that people could not possibly eat this stuff unless they were crazy,” said Park Jae-hee, a 48-year-old marketing executive. “But like smelly blue cheese, it has no replacement once you fall in love with it.”

I'll pass, thanks.

Common sense not heard so often in the US

It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun

This article in Gawker makes much sense.   I find it incredible that over my life time, the US has moved more towards something resembling the Wild West, rather than away from it.  Like libertarians generally, gun loving NRA types live in a fantasy world and discount the common good.

And I would also note that while LDP eccentric Senator elect Australian David Leyonhjelm is doing media bits claiming that our drop in firearm deaths both before and after the gun buyback means that the buyback affected nothing, in the US the NRA and gun loving nutters continually draw a connection between concealed carry and a drop in crime.  It's OK to draw the connection sometimes then, is it?

Stern on the inadequacies of economic modelling of climate change

Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’ - Climate Change - Environment - The Independent

Just as I suspected:

Lord Stern, who wrote a hugely influential review on the financial
implications of climate change in 2006, says the economic models that
have been used to calculate the fiscal fallout from climate change are
woefully inadequate and severely underestimate the scale of the threat....

Professor Stern and his colleague Dr Simon Dietz will today publish the
peer-reviewed findings of their research into climate change economic
modelling in the The Economic Journal.

Their review is highly critical of established economic models which,
among other things, fail to acknowledge the full breadth of climate
change’s likely impact on the economy and are predicated on assumptions
about global warming’s effect on output that are “without scientific
foundation”.

Professor Stern, whose earlier research said it is
far cheaper to tackle climate change now than in the future, added: “I
hope our paper will prompt ... economists to strive for much better
models [and] ... help policy-makers and the public recognise the
immensity of the potential risks of unmanaged climate change.”

What the heck, Andrew Robb?

Up on Business Insider:

Australia’s chief trade-deals negotiator has labeled the bid by President Barack Obama to cut U.S. power-plant emissions as lacking substance.

“There’s no action associated with it,” Trade Minister Andrew Robb said in a Sky News interview from Houston, Texas, where he was accompanying Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Abbott, who is seeking to dismantle Australia’s carbon- price mechanism before it hosts Group of 20 leaders in November, isn’t supporting Obama’s bid to pressure India, China and other nations to help form a world-wide agreement to combat climate change. The president is seeking state-by-state limitations on carbon-dioxide emissions to limit the effects of man-made global warming, and earlier this month proposed cutting power-plant discharges, the nation’s largest source of the gas, by 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels.

“Despite the rhetoric you get over here and all the targets for 30 percent reductions and all this, it’s just rhetoric,” Robb said.

I'm sure that Obama appreciates the two faced aspect of the Ministry of the government he just hosted.

Or is there some misreporting, because that sounds an extraordinarily ill considered thing for Robb to say.

Rude economist

I see on the weekend Catallaxy that Sinclair Davidson grumbled about being ignored:

I actually did start listening to the forum just at the point that SD was making his points.   Unless my ears deceived me, there was one direct response to him by one of the other people on the forum.  It was respectful.  As indeed Jonathan Greene always is to him.

Mind you, his apparent feeling that he wasn't adequately responded to in the forum, by posting this at his blog before the show was even on the air, indicates that he probably did deserve to be ignored - that's what people who engage in pre-emptive hyperbole should expect.  

Sure, there can be humour in hyperbole; but we all know that when people use it too much, depending on which audience they are talking to (calling anyone even slightly Left "commies", or admitting a fondness for thinking in terms of "moochers"), people soon start to cotton on that there is something more going on underneath.

This change of language by people who are writers or guests on media outlets when they are talking on their own blogs has always annoyed me - as I wrote last year in a more general attack on Catallaxy:

I used to get really annoyed with Tim Dunlop when he was a paid blogger for News Ltd putting on the "voice of reason" approach in that forum, and then sneaking off to his own personal blog to make snarky, nasty and personal attacks on John Howard.

That applies as much to the Right as to the Left.

Jericho analysis wins me again

Joe Hockey: all's fair in welfare and budgets | Business | theguardian.com

Yet again, I find Greg Jericho's take on matters to be far better argued than the ideologically driven take of the Coalition and, of course, The (laughably biased) Australian. 

Adam Creighton spinning faster than a wind turbine

Adam Creighton says today:



A couple of questions for Mr Creighton - no where in the article can I see an explanation of where the losses come from. I would have thought a steady process of erecting turbines and building other renewable energy plants, as well as adapting the network to be able to cope with it, would generate quite a few jobs. But I guess the report works out some way that it won't be a net employment benefit - it would just be good if you would tell us how that works.

Secondly - isn't the proper response, even if the job loss figure is plausible and not a beat up  - "what, only 6,000 jobs for a very sizeable increase in renewable energy? That's a fantastic deal".

The Coalition is said to be cutting 16,500 jobs in the space of 3 years. No Right wing economist is claiming that this is going to be a dire crush on the national economy, are they? So why then are you pretending that 6,000 jobs up to 2030 is a drama?  There are presently about 11,500,000 people working in this country.  Who knows what the figure will be by 2030, but at the moment 6,000 is about .05% of the work force.  

Lenore rips into Tony on climate change

Tony Abbott is no action man on climate change | World news | theguardian.com

This summary last week by Lenore Taylor explaining how Abbott is not serious about substantial action on climate change was very good.

And since then, we have a story in Fairfax today that Greg Hunt got rolled, in a big way, on spending on solar.

I don't know how Hunt lives with himself, really.  Supposedly devoted to emissions trading schemes, he was forced to reject them just so that Abbott could differentiate himself from Labor, and now can't even get good funding for solar up.

Edge reviewed, and back to the 60's

So, I'm sure everyone's waiting to hear what I thought about Edge of Tomorrow?  Hello....?

Anyhoo, saw it yesterday, and yes it's a good, solid science fiction-y treat.  Cruise is fine, so is Emily Blunt, and the film looks a million bucks.  (Actually, about 178 million bucks, apparently.)   It is actually good to see that a movie involving extensive battlefield violence can do it without showing much at all in the way of blood or gore. 

But I have two reservations - it does involve one very  improbable fall that doesn't kill our hero; and the very end was a little too, I don't know, not quite clever enough?   In fact, from a time bending point of view, I'm not at all sure that the story makes that much sense if one examines the ideas carefully, but it doesn't really matter.  The pace keeps you from pondering it anyway. 

Cruise's last science fiction film, the (I think) under-rated Oblivion was, for me, actually a little bit more enjoyable.  (Virtually no one is going to agree on that, but it did have more originality going for it.)   But once again, Tom deserves to be rewarded for working in pretty intelligent and well made science fiction as often as he does.

Apart from the thematic similarity to both Groundhog Day and Source Code, and the somewhat Starship Troopers feel of the exosketons and the way they drop from the sky, the one connection I haven't seen anyone make is to Captain Scarlet.  Yes, the Gerry Anderson show from the 60's in which our "indestructible" puppet hero got killed near the end of virtually every episode.  This always seemed to me to be a silly and somewhat depressing set up for a kid's show, but I watched it anyway.   It seems nearly every episode may be on Youtube, as well as the awful looking later CGI attempt to revive it, which seemed to be based on the bizarre idea that computer generated puppet like characters would go over better than actual puppets.

Here's an episode for your edification.  If you do nothing else, you should go to the end credits, involving many scenes of our hero being killed, but over a very groovy song:



And from the somewhat ridiculous to the extremely silly, it was while looking at Captain S on Youtube that I found a link to something called Solarnauts, an atrocious looking British pilot that was never made into a full series.   It stars one familiar face - a young Derek Fowlds who later was famous for "Yes Minister".

The model work is spectacularly bad, and as for a British concept of what the well dressed lady astronaut of the future will wear, try this:

I sense that all actors involved were seriously happy that the show was never picked up.   Anyway, here it is:


  

Update:  by an odd coincidence, I read today that the actor who provided the voice of Captain Scarlet has died.  

Rugby union explained

Continuing my series "Pretty obvious things from a disinterested observer's point of view about various codes of sport (and why can't anyone else see these?)".

A game of union was on TV last night, and once again I just could not shake the old verdict I made years ago:   this sport looks exactly like a group of 4 year old boys playing rugby league.  

True, the ball did not stay out of sight under a group of boys blokes for as long as I have noticed in some previous (rare) viewings, but it's still a silly looking game.

That is all.

An interesting suggestion

The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth - NYTimes.com

Tyler Cowen writes:

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the
world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less
urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars
improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and
destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that
preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work.
Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments
on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or
simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a
nation’s longer-run prospects.

Here's the last few paragraphs:

There is a more optimistic read to all this than may first appear. Arguably
the contemporary world is trading some growth in material living
standards for peace — a relative paucity of war deaths and injuries,
even with a kind of associated laziness.

We can prefer higher rates of economic growth and progress, even while
recognizing that recent G.D.P. figures do not adequately measure all of
the gains we have been enjoying. In addition to more peace, we also have
a cleaner environment (along most but not all dimensions), more leisure
time and a higher degree of social tolerance for minorities and
formerly persecuted groups. Our more peaceful and — yes — more
slacker-oriented world is in fact better than our economic measures
acknowledge.

Living in a largely peaceful world with 2 percent G.D.P. growth has some big advantages that you don’t get with 4 percent growth and many more war
deaths. Economic stasis may not feel very impressive, but it’s something
our ancestors never quite managed to pull off. The real questions are
whether we can do any better, and whether the recent prevalence of peace
is a mere temporary bubble just waiting to be burst.

 Spotting a large, alien spaceship in the outer parts of the solar system, heading towards Earth, may give a good replacement sense of purpose.

Soccer explained

It has a very low scoring rate, making it a boring game to watch.

That billions of people can still nonetheless get excited about it tells us something about humans, but I don't know what.

That is all.

Ratgrets, I've had a few...

Been forgetting to post about this rather intriguing study that indicates rats suffer from regret. 

That is all.

A man who thinks like me

Could the demand for affordable housing be solved by going back to tents? - Architecture - Arts and Entertainment - The Independent

In a Culture Show special, Tents: The Beginning of Architecture, to be broadcast next week on BBC2, Tom Dyckhoff wonders whether tents could be a solution to today's housing crisis. The
presenter seems to think that tents – or at least more comfortable, more modern, and bigger versions – might be an option if we can't build enough flats and houses. Maybe one of architecture's oldest forms could have a life past festival season?

Cool.   My vision of a yurt led economic recovery of Australia might be shared by someone else...
 

ISIS explained

Interesting article from December on the rise of this ISIS group of fanatics currently trying to take over Iraq. 

In record heat news...

Anger rises as India swelters under record heatwave | Reuters

Swathes of north India are sweltering under the longest heatwave on record, triggering
widespread breakdowns in the supply of electricity and increasingly angry protests over the government's failure to provide people with basic services.

The power crisis and heatwave, which some activists say has caused dozens of deaths, is one of the first major challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected
three weeks ago partly on promises to provide reliable electricity supplies.

In Delhi, where temperatures have hit 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) for six days straight, residents marched through the streets in protests organised by opposition parties on Thursday. In the north of the city, people enraged by night-long outages clashed with police and torched a bus, media reported.

I would be surprised if it has only caused "dozens" of deaths.  It's hard to imagine a worse urban environment to be in during a 45 degree heatwave...

Update:  reported yesterday from beautiful downtown Doha:

In the coming days, the Qatar Meteorology Department has forecast that temperatures across the country will reach highs between 44C (111F) and 49C (120F) by noontime, the highest the nation has seen during the month of June in almost 52 years.

The rising temperatures have been attributed to the “deepening of the Indian Monsoon” over the Gulf coast.  In a statement, the MET said that 49C weather during this month is relatively unusual.

Honestly, why does anyone live in that part of the world?

Agreed

An adviser to Pope Francis says Catholicism is incompatible with libertarianism. He's right. - The Week

Libertarianism and Catholicism are not compatible, and the weird thing is that it seems to be only very conservative Catholics who think it is. 

Where is it?

Gee, Andrew Bolt seems late with his daily post about how ABC News isn't identical to The Australian's news and is thereby totally out of control. 

Can someone please explain this to me?

Well this is weird:   Adam Creighton has written a column in which he sounds pretty convinced by Piketty's book, which is probably causing several Right wing economists to wonder whether he's suffered a recent bump on the head. 

But in the very last paragraph, he says:

The deeper question is whether all this matters. Inequality in all countries has been falling. Also, Marx’s premise — falling real wages — was being refuted at the very time he was writing Das Kapital in the 1860s.

Wasn't the point of Piketty's work that there is strong evidence of rising inequality in the West, at least?  And that the Financial Times efforts to claim he had made serious mistakes had pretty much fallen on its face? 

Colorado Govenor recognises the danger, at least

In a Washington Post report, the Colorado (Democrat) Govenor with one of those peculiarly American names (Hickenlooper) at least sounds alert to the danger of the legalisation experiment:

Hickenlooper’s office has been monitoring marijuana usage through public polls. He said Tuesday there has been no noticeable spike in marijuana use by adults; most of those purchasing marijuana for recreational purposes were buying weed illegally before Jan. 1. What concerns him most, he said, is that those polls show evolving attitudes about marijuana among kids.

“Our biggest fear with marijuana, without question, is that it’s going to get in the hands of kids. Most of our polling doesn’t seem like there’s a big spike of adults using it. Most of the people that are using recreational marijuana were using it before. But when you look at kids and whether they think they’re going to smoke marijuana in the near future versus the old days, they seem to think it’s a lot less dangerous,” Hickenlooper said.

How's that Iraq going?

Mosul’s collapse is Nouri al-Maliki’s fault: Iraq’s prime minister failed to rule inclusively.

This seems like a straight forward explanation of what's going on in Iraq at the moment.  These  paragraphs at the end sum up the bigger picture:

The countries in the region have to form indigenous alliances to stave off these radical threats. The United States can help, but there is no way any American politician
is sending back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops: They didn’t compel or convince Maliki to adopt a smart policy before, and they wouldn’t be able to do so now.

But this could be yet another sign of a breakdown in the entire Middle East. The war in Syria, which can be seen as a proxy war between the region’s Sunnis and Shiites, is now expanding into Iraq. The violence will intensify, and the neighboring countries will be flooded with refugees (half a million have already fled Mosul), with few resources to house or feed them.

Depending on what happens in the next few weeks, or maybe even days, we may be witnessing the beginning of either a new political order in the region or a drastic surge in the geostrategic swamp and humanitarian disaster that have all too palpably come to define it.

Of course, for some on the Right it's All Obama's Fault.  (I see that John McCain is even taking that line, and I used to think he was a more reasonable Republican.)  But then again, for Tea Party types, if they nick themselves shaving in the morning, I'm sure they curse Obama's name.

An unhealthy look at plain packaging

Good Lord!   Is it actually a requirement to be gullible and ignorant about issues to be a writer for the Australian?  (As well as onside with Rupert's view of the world?)

I had not noticed til today that long time Australian media writer Errol Simper wrote a couple of days ago about why he thought plain packaging of tobacco was not working.   The funny thing is, (and to be bitchy for a moment), Simper's ghost like photo used by the Oz for years has always had an "unhealthy, prematurely aged smoker" vibe about it, and in this column he confirms he has long had issues with giving up the habit. 

But Simper's article contains all the lack of insight you expect from the ideologically motivated smoker or ex-smoker - no skepticism about tobacco company supplied figures or how to properly interpret them, and (most importantly) a complete ignorance of the fact that there has been considerable research on how people respond to ugly packaging, and that the view was always that a long term reduction in smoking involves discouraging young people from ever starting. 

As those who post at Catallaxy have shown, smokers (or ex smokers who delighted in the habit and bear ongoing resentment that they no longer do it) are about the last people to have objective ideas or understanding of anti smoking tactics.  But do they have to embarrass themselves by showing that off in the media?

What if Hedley ran a press campaign and no one cared?

I got the distinct feeling yesterday that Hedley Thomas is cranky because he's put all this effort into supporting those obsessed with trying to prove Gillard was right in on the dodgy deals that her boyfriend did as a unionist 20 years ago, and yet no one cares much about the politically motivated Royal Commission which is now looking into it.

As I have said from the start:   the basic details of what Wilson and Blewitt did has been known for years,  Gillard did discuss it in the press and no one cared. Including Andrew Bolt.   Almost certainly, journalists did not keep talking about it because, given her rise as a politician, there had been years for her enemies to leak discretely about her direct knowledge of Wilson's fraud, and as it had not happened, it was very unlikely that anyone did have such proof.  

Then, once she became PM, one journalist stuffed up in his attempt to revive the story, making a claim on a detail which he previously hadn't been allowed to by the paper's defamation lawyers.  He got sacked as a result when Gillard blew her top to his editor.

This lead to a radio shock jock journalist trying to pick up the story, falling out with his boss, getting the sack too, and then entertaining the sleaziest of all people involved (Blewitt) and running a web based campaign for right wing obsessives with a problem with a left leaning female Prime Minister.

Andrew Bolt decided to get his mouth involved in a quite disingenuous way, repeating all allegations, none of which proved criminality on behalf of Gillard, but working well as a general smear campaign (for the Right wing that cared what happened 20 years ago, at least).  The rest of the media didn't pay much attention because, well, it happened 20 years ago and no one - no one - had ever said that Julia had told them "Ha!  All that lovely money that my boyfriend conned out of Theiss!  Straight into my house reno!" 

Somewhere along the line Hedley thought he would join the campaign too.

At the heart of this, as always acknowledged by Smith, at least, was the personal efforts of a rich ex lawyer and (former) Labor associated entity  Harry Nowicki, whose appearance on 7.30 Tuesday night indicated he (and, according to Wilson) others have been bankrolling all this with, at heart, not much more than a political motivation to hurt Gillard:

SARAH FERGUSON: What's your motivation for your involvement in this?

HARRY NOWICKI: I think it's important for the facts of this story to come out, because it is a link in the chain of Ms Gillard becoming Prime Minister.

How is it possible that someone involved in... in, in questionable behaviour becomes Prime Minister? Now that's a political story, that's not my story.

There was a tantalising hint at the end of that interview that Ferguson knew Nowicki had spoken to Labor Party identities too, but he denied it. Yesterday, he suddenly "clarified" that he had "misunderstood" Sarah Ferguson:

Mr Nowicki said he misunderstood 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson's question last night when he was asked if he had ever discussed the case with members of the parliamentary Labor Party.

"I spoke to Robert McClelland, not in his capacity as a Labor minister but as a participant in court proceedings in 1995 and 1996 involving the AWU and Bruce Wilson," he said today.

Mr Nowicki said Mr McClelland suggested he contacted The Australian newspaper’s Hedley Thomas who was also investigating the case.

Mr Nowicki is not coming out of this as a disinterested investigator smelling of roses.

In yesterday's evidence, I don't think we heard anything significant that hasn't been publicised before by Bolt, Smith, etc over the last year or two.   Even the evidence of Hem is going no where - Wilson turned up at the office after pulling some sort of all nighter at the casino and asked him to deposit money to Gillard's account.   So how does anyone know that he wasn't just using the winnings from the night before?

The one thing I am not sure I had heard before was about the builder who remembered money changing hands at the house.   Is it just me, but I find it a little hard to credit that an 84 year old builder would maintain a clear recollection of money exchanging hands at a work site nearly 20 years ago.   There might be an explanation as to why it would stick in your mind - like if someone had told you shortly thereafter that it was stolen money.  But I don't think there was any such explanation given, and remember - Gillard was not even a politician at the time.

This has always been, at heart, a sleazy attempted political smear attack against a PM who, in any event, lost the job due to the poisonous internal politics of Labor resulting not from having a crooked boyfriend 20 years ago, but merely from the disastrous ascendancy of Kevin Rudd.

This makes people care even less about the Royal Commission, and Hedley, Smith, con man Pickering and Bolt are almost certainly going to miss any sense of satisfaction out of its results.   At least, one hopes, Smith has lost money out of being a complete jerk and all round tosser.  (Although with all the talk of the money floating around to fund it, who knows if even that has happened.)   Unfortunately, Andrew Bolt continues to make a pretty penny out of the same tactic.

But it is kind of funny watching him fume about the ABC not covering the commission in sufficient detail for his editorial standards.

A dinner to forget

Well, I never heard of this before:

Almost 50 years ago to the day, an unlikely dinner date took place between TS Eliot and Groucho Marx. Each a huge fan of the other's work, Groucho and Eliot corresponded for three years before their meeting eventually took place. In June 1964, a car took the star of A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races, from the Savoy to Eliot's home nearby for a much anticipated dinner with his hero, wives included. Eliot wanted to hear about what it was like to make those movies, but Groucho couldn't remember the desired scene from Duck Soup and preferred to quote to Eliot the vast chunks of The Waste Land that he'd memorised. Eliot couldn't be less interested in hearing his own poetry spouted back at him. The meeting was a disaster.

Death by dress in Victorian days

Here's a short but surprising article about the dangerous fashion for crinoline (go to the link to see what they are) in Victorian times.  The opening paragraph:

In addition to smallpox, cholera, and consumption, Victorian era denizens had to consider the perils of crinoline, the rigid, cage-like structure worn under ladies’ skirts that, at the apex of its popularity, reached a diameter of six feet. The New York Times first reported the phenomenon of crinoline-related casualties in 1858, when a young Boston woman, standing by the mantel in her parlor, caught fire and within minutes was entirely consumed by flames—an unfortunate incident that came on the heels of nineteen such deaths in England in a two-month period. Witnesses, impeded by their own crinolines, were forced to watch the victims burn. “Certainly an average of three deaths per week from crinolines in conflagration,” the Times admonished, “ought to startle the most thoughtless of the privileged sex.” A similar tragedy occurred shortly thereafter in Philadelphia, when nine ballerinas burned to death at the Continental Theatre.

Stop drinking from jars, trendoids

For all I know, it's been happening for years and I've only recently noticed (as I recently explained.); But here's a photo from a NYT article on the best iced coffee in the country - and it features at least two photos of them being served in jars:

Just stop it!

Mind you, an iced almond-macadamia milk latte does sound pretty tasty.

Tea Party thinks it's on a winner?

So, Tea Partiers are ecstatic that they got David Brat in, primarily on the basis that he is against immigration reform?

Yes, way to go to win over the Hispanic and Asian vote, Republicans. Sowing the seeds of long term demographic failure, more like it.

The Tea Party Right really isn't very bright, to put it mildly.

Update:  from a January 2014 look at Brat at National Review:

He chairs the department of economics and business at Randolph-Macon College and heads its BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program. The funding for the program came from John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T (a financial-services company) who now heads the Cato Institute. The two share an affinity for Ayn Rand: Allison is a major supporter of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Brat co-authored a paper titled “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand.” Brat says that while he isn’t a Randian, he has been influenced by Atlas Shrugged and appreciates Rand’s case for human freedom and free markets.

His academic background isn’t all economics, though. Brat got a business degree from Hope College in Holland, Mich., then went to Princeton seminary. Before deciding to focus on economics, he wanted to be a professor of systematic theology and cites John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr as influences.

And he says his religious background informs his views on economics. “I’ve always found it amazing how we have the grand swath of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we lost moral arguments on the major issue of our day,” he says, referring to fiscal-policy issues. 

 OK, an admiration for Ayn Rand of any form is a warning sign for - at the very least - unreliability in an economist  (cough *stagflation warning* cough), but as with Paul Ryan, a serious Christian who still admires Rand and takes economic hints from her is just ideologically nutty. 

Murdoch has dinner with our leader

Update:  today's Essential poll shows Labor reaching the magic 40% primary figure.   Coalition 37%.  TTP 54/46, pretty much in line now with all other polls.  (As an aside:  how do the Nationals manage to have so much influence with a primary vote of 3%?) Shorten now preferred PM by 4%.

Anyhow, monty and I should be off for drinks at Sussex Street again...

Foreign Correspondent recommended, yet again

Last night's Foreign Correspondent, about a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, was fascinating viewing.  In fact, every week since the show's return has just been fantastically well done stories about international politics, but always with a large element of human interest.

There is nothing that compares to this show on commercial TV.   In fact, serious current affairs on any commercial TV station has been dead for decades.   Perhaps 60 Minutes in it original incarnation in - what?, the late 70's or 80's? - came closest to being worthy.  But since then?

Just do a proper test

BBC News - Mobile phone effect on fertility - 'research needed'

I see from the side links to this story that there has been speculation for at least a decade that mobile phones might be affecting sperm cells, at least if the phone is worn close to their traditional mobile storage facilities.

Surely the way to get some definitive evidence of this is to recruit sufficient university students (cut out those who use marijuana or other drugs) who carry phones in their shirt, test their "boys", and then give them a belt pouch for their phone and get them to use that in the same front facing position for (I don't know?) 3 to 6 months, and re-test them.

That seems better than all this survey evidence, and laboratory testing of exposing samples to radiation, doesn't it?

Greg's getting annoyed

IR debate hijacked by the right - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Here's a good post, full of graphs, whereby Greg Jericho gets to blast away about how Coalition complaints about the state of IR and wages are pretty much fact free.  

A recent recruit to the Anti Tattoo League

I still get people commenting from time to time at my anti tattoo post (quite a few from the angry tattooed of the world, last time I looked), so it's of interest to note that The Guardian has a comment piece up by a young woman who has regretted getting a "sleeve".

I wonder how many people have the physical discomfit she describes:

Underneath my ink smears are raised scars; the whole thing bubbles up and itches in summer. Even in a tailored suit it peeps out like mould. Blue ink has seeped between the layers of skin and spread into my armpit. My generation will be at the NHS at 80 getting our gammy legs seen to while doctors try to find a vein under the faded, stretched, misshapen detritus of our unartistic body art; a postmodern mash-up of badly translated Chinese words, bungled Latin quotes, dolphins, roses, anchors, faces of favoured children or pets, and Japanese wallpaper designs.

Yes, I award her honorary membership to the League. 

The comments that follow the article are often pretty amusing, too; partly driven by the fact that the writer seems to be a child prodigy that few have heard of.

Still, she's on the righteous side of the tattoo issue, and for that she's OK in my books.

Somehow, I doubt he has the solution

Warren Mundine has a whine today about how money spent on aboriginal housing still hasn't made a difference and he'll see that cuts to "failed programs" and "eliminating waste" will make a difference.

It is amazing that cost effective aboriginal housing programs just never seem to happen.

But let's face it:  there have been decades of talk of the need for a different approach to providing appropriate aboriginal housing in remote areas; surely at least some of the new ideas have been tried and failed.  In light of this, I am very skeptical of anyone who comes along and suggests, like Mundine, that he can see where it's all going wrong and something new must be tried and wasteful administration must stop and it'll improve.   

In fact, it's hard to avoid the feeling that the problems with housing arise from some very fundamental issues which are near intractable unless there were to be pretty major movement towards changing these things:  settlements which exist in areas with next to nothing resembling an economic attachment to the rest of the nation; chronic drug and alcohol problems in those places, and the dire effects that has on child raising as well as engagement with what slim economic opportunities which may be nearby; and family arrangements which can led to overcrowding of housing and maintenance needs well beyond those of, say, the Western nuclear family.

None of these problems are easily addressed, and some suggestions (educating children in towns away from family) have sensitivities due to past aboriginal treatment.

So Warren's complaints and proposed actions are rather unlikely to represent any major change to what has gone on before, is my bet.

And see - for once I got through this topic without mentioning yurts.  Well, nearly. 

Hilarious

I noticed this morning The Guardian report that News Corp is accusing the Daily Mail Australia of plagiarism.

Yes, that would be the company that saw this Daily Mail site layout, which has been used for years:

 

and recently decided to start setting out its Daily Tele like this:

Oh I see - on the side bar the photo is on the left and the words on the right on the Tele version.  And they like pinky-red too.  That's OK then.

Good question

Someone at the Christian Science Monitor is wondering why the US media seems reluctant or slow to call the weekend Vegas shootings an act of domestic terrorism.

And of course, the guns will turn out to have been legally purchased, I bet.

Update:  looks like I was wrong on the legally purchased guns.  Mother Jones report indicates they may have received them in response to a plea on Facebook, of all places, for any gun "that can reach out and touch evil tyrant bastards."    Of course, it really takes a country with an unusual number of Right wing paranoid gun loving nutters for such a request to be made and receive helpful responses...

The blockbuster not doing so well at the box office...

Suggestions for lines for Peta to be saying welcome.

I think it's Twitter worthy as it is, though.

Update:  that was a hint to someone, anyone, with a Twitter account to post it to auspol.  :-)

BTW, I haven't seen the movie yet. Next weekend.

Update 2:   I have previously been critical of politicians who call a broken promise a lie.  (And yes, I don't give credit to Labor when they do that to Abbott either.)

But just on the radio this morning, I heard Abbott repeat what is a clear lie from 2011 when giving his press conference with (his only) international buddy on climate change, Stephen Harper:

“We should do what we reasonably can to limit emissions and avoid man-made climate change but we shouldn’t clobber the economy, and that’s why I’ve always been against a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme, because it harms our economy without necessarily helping the environment.”

This is a lie.   As Bernard Keane noted in 2011, Abbott tried to "un-lie" (my word, not Bernard's) the same claim he made back then by a later qualification:

 Oddly, despite the media attention, most missed Mr Abbott’s particularly risible remark. It wasn’t merely that Abbott claimed he had never supported a carbon tax or an ETS — a claim so demonstrably untrue even The Australian mentioned it. He belatedly qualified that by adding the caveat “as leader” hours later, the worst recovery since Basil Fawlty, learning his American guest enjoyed the works of Harold Robbins, pretended to be lambasting someone else. “Oh Harold Robbins. I was talking about… Harold Robinson.”

 Years later, and he's back with the same claim, with no qualification.

For all of the gigantic (and undeserved) kerfuffle from the public about Gillard (allegedly) breaking a promise when her general sympathy to the idea of carbon pricing was well known, Tony Abbott with his "say anything" approach to climate change and a host of other issues is truly the one who has earned the "liar" title.

Weekend update

*  I am happy to report that the chicken recipe as noted last week is quite nice.  But can someone explain to me why, for as long as I can remember, baking chicken always takes about 1 1/2 to 2 times longer than recipes suggest?

*  I didn't even want to go to the Lifeline Bookfest which is on again this long weekend at the Convention centre.  (I have probably 10 books from previous years' visits awaiting my attention.)  But my wife wanted to go, and while there, I remembered that I wouldn't mind reading a biography of Einstein.   Located! (And it was the only bio I saw about him in the whole place.)  Cost $6.  Also got a couple of short Graham Greenes I hadn't heard about before.   A successful visit.

*  Had a couple of nice craft beers at the Hoo Ha Bar yesterday afternoon.   A nice, comfy bar close to Southbank which one could imagine being happy at every Saturday afternoon.   (And the craft beer movement is a fantastic thing that I trust will never end.  Why did it take so long to happen, though, I wonder?)

*  Long weekends are good, aren't they?  They avoid that neither-here-nor-there feeling of a Sunday afternoon in a normal workweek.  I have never got the hang of Sunday afternoons.  Maybe it's because I used to do homework at that time when I was a student if there wasn't anything else on that weekend, but even as an adult it goes something like this:  Saturdays are a welcome break, and good for shopping and either eating out (if you are single or in childless coupledom) or cooking something that take more time; Sunday mornings are relaxing for a special breakfast and a political review on TV, followed by a relaxed lunch; but Sunday afternoons are just too close to Monday to feel entirely comfortable with them.

* I have not yet seen Edge of Tomorrow.  I might, tomorrow.  (Or maybe next weekend when daughter is on a sleep over.)