Good writing

American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning : The New Yorker

This article by Arthur Miller, apparently from 1998, paints an evocative picture of hot New York summers of the depression era in particular.   He also reflects on hard work in those days:

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse
than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect,
and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood
why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from
a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow
would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until
midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and
Jersey, and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique, a
very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks.
He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his
patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late
afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he
held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical,
razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through
his index finger at the second joint. Angrily refusing to go to the
hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel,
and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking. When the blood began
to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on
the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work
the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening,
as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

 Wow.

Moore missed

There's much Monty Python talk in the British media due to the remaining team members doing their "last reunion" shows to massive crowds in London, but to rather mixed reviews. 

The Guardian had a column in which various famous-ish people nominated their favourite sketches.  I don't believe anyone mentioned good old Dennis Moore.

I have posted before about this very silly series of sketches, and re-watching it, I have to say it is undeservedly overlooked and, unusually, sort of subtly funny for Python.  (The way Dennis digresses continuously, in particular.)

My previous post was of pretty poor video quality, though.  I have found these versions, with czech subtitles, are much clearer:

Another surprising dog story

Man's best friend linked to lower diabetes risk in infants

The study from Finland investigated whether microbial exposures from animal contact during infancy are associated with the development of diabetes. The researchers studied 3,143 children at two Finnish hospitals between 1996 and 2004.

Of nine early microbial exposures studied – including farm animals, day care and exposure to antibiotics – only indoor dog exposure was inversely associated with subsequent development of preclinical type 1 diabetes.

“Dog contact may affect the human immune system in many ways”, the researchers wrote.

In the benevolent dictatorship of Steveworld, all prospective parents have to have a puppy first.  [But parents found with marijuana will have their houses bulldozed, Israeli style.  A yurt will be supplied in compensation.]  Birth will be celebrated with a government supplied gift basket including a $10 bottle of Australian chardonnay pinot noir, several parsnips, and a chorizo*.

Update:  * and a big brie with a box of water crackers, of course.

Comedy improvement

I opined a few weeks ago that, after viewing a couple of recent-ish episodes of Big Bang Theory, it appeared to have improved considerably from a previous season in which I thought it showed signs of being in terminal decline.

After seeing a few more episodes since then, I think I was right:  it has definitely improved.

The episode watched last night in which Sheldon gets accused of workplace sexual harassment was, I thought, very funny; and showed sharp writing all around.

A sitcom that recovers like this is a rarity.

However, reading elsewhere, it would appear that the episodes I have seen recently are perhaps all season 6 (last night's episode definitely was), and season 7 has just finished in the US, with at least one person on the net thinking it's bad again   Also, it has been renewed for 3 seasons!  That's stretching the abilities of the writers to breaking point, I'm sure.

Hippy libertarians with guns

Ha.  Via Jason Soon, I see an entertaining article that reports on the anti-social, nutty, self-absorbed wankerdom of (at least one part of) the American libertarian movement. 

I was saying this from the start...

In-vitro meat unlikely to become reliable food source

Yes, you could feed the world with microbial protein grown in vast factory vats and processed into something vaguely resembling soft meat (see "Quorn").  But growing actual muscle cells into something with the texture, taste and appearance of meat is always going to rely on much, much more complicated and energy intensive techniques, and putting an animal in the field to eat grass is always going to be more reliable and cheaper.

Come back in 50 years and tell me I'm wrong.

[It occurs to me that this is the same stupid use of technology that you see in fertility treatments.   If you have ethical doubts about eating meat, there is already a huge range of other tasty protein options to avoid doing so, or doing it less often than you currently do.   In fertility treatment, we see the desire to experiment with the life of children with "3 parent" embryos so that the incredibly tiny number of mothers with mitochondrial disease can have "their own" baby instead of adopting one.   These are both rich persons' vanity projects.]

Quite right

Silence on missing asylum seeker boat a disgrace to the nation

Julian Burnside ends his column with this:

And whatever the facts turn out to be, Morrison has treated theAustralian public with contempt. The public have a legitimate interest in knowing what is being done, in our name, to people who have done nothing worse than ask for our help. Morrison either knows the fate of the refugees or he does not.  If he does, he should tell us: either that
they have been rescued or helped, or that they have been sent to Sri Lanka.  The alternative is that he does not know, in which case he should be sacked for incompetence.

We should no longer be treated as if we do not care about the fate of other human beings.

I maintain my opinion that the media as a profession is not reacting strongly enough to the military junta-like behaviour  of this government.  It's not just wrong or annoying that Morrison and Abbott keeps secrets on this from the Australian public; it's positively outrageous.

Stop shrugging your shoulders, newspaper editors and columnists, and saying "we don't like this, but we can see that the Coalition does not fear public backlash against them as long as boats don't arrive."  You need to complain that you and the public are being treated as children in a way previous "tough" Coalition governments dealing with the boats have not, and that the reasons given are patent crap.  

Update:  I was reminded of this in a comment at The Guardian.  Tony Abbott during last year's election campaign:

QUESTION:
Will you commit to putting out an alert when every boat comes through?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, I absolutely accept that you need to know how we're going. You absolutely need to know how we are going, and if we have a good week, a bad week, an in-between week, you will know all about it. One way or another, we will get full disclosure to the Australian people. The only point that Scott was making is that in the end, there are some bits of information which are operationally sensitive and that particular judgment has to be left to the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders.

The word you're looking for is "flake"

Annabel Crabb writes about Tony Abbott's complete backflip on the matter of federalism:

Of all the reversals and surprises for which the Prime Minister has been reproached over his political career, his change of heart on federalism must be the largest and most striking.

In 2009, when he wrote Battlelines, Tony Abbott was so convinced that the Commonwealth should be given more power to override state governments that he wrote his own Constitutional amendment to that effect and pasted it in the back of the book.

The failure of federalism, he wrote, was the key to many of Australia's worst problems. And people expected their national government to fix things, so the Constitution's fiendish section 51, with its pernickety and much-mulled-over list of things the Commonwealth is allowed to interfere with, should be simplified to give the Feds power to overrule the states on pretty much anything.

"Giving more authority and commensurate revenue powers back to the states is an option, but it is not a real one," Mr Abbott argued in a speech to a 2008 conference, Australian Federalism: Rescue and Reform.

"It is an implausible one in the modern era. The only real option I suggest is to give the national government the power to match people's expectations about who should really be in charge."

She then writes:

 One of the most mystifying yet persistent characterisations currently abroad in the Australian political arena is that the Prime Minister is some kind of obsessive ideologue.

Well, I agree.  He's not an ideologue:  he's a flake who is currently under the influence of obsessive ideologues. 

Some of the definitions of flake from Urban Dictionary:

 An unreliable person

A useless, shady, deceitful person who is so unreliable and selfish they cause you much anger and frustration. A Flake's only agenda is what they want to do.

A Frequently unreliable person who says that they will do somthing or attend somthing, but never shows.

About that new Caliphate

A very good backgrounder here about the head dude of ISIS, or whatever it calls itself today, and his grandiose claims of a new caliphate. 

One thing for sure:  there's a drone with his name on it. 

One other thing:  I think it rather lucky we don't have a gun toting Republican (probably like Romney, since he was big on decrying weakness in foreign policy and spending bazillions on defence) as US president at the moment.

"And may I add my sincere congratulations on how you've managed to suppress your moral doubts about what you're doing."

Scott Morrison revs up border officials while continuing his silence on Tamil asylum seekers
It is somewhat outrageous that there is not more general outrage about the veil of secrecy this government has cast over acts of highly dubious legality in the Indian Ocean.

And Scott Morrison's pep talk to Customs about doing a good job - the heading to this post indicates how I view the implied message.

Update:  The Guardian lists what we think we know about operations over the last 8 months.  

Looking into parsnips

I cooked and enjoyed quite a nice meal on Saturday night involving equal quantities of pumpkin and parsnips.  (Don't worry, it wasn't purely vego - I added a smallish sized chorizo to it too.  I find it hard to avoid cooking without chorizo lately.)

The issue of parsnips was a subject of much discussion at the dinner table (their expense, their taste, whether you can just substitute carrots*, how Uncle Scrooge was attacked with them in a comic I remembered from childhood* ) but they seem a subject worthy of further investigation.  

I will report further soon....

* clearly, no

*The Golden Fleecing

Awesome cold photos

How to survive a winter in Antarctica – in pictures | Art and design | theguardian.com

There's a fantastic group of photos at the link taken around the futuristic looking Condordia station in Antarctica.

Krugman on Kansas

Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman really puts the boot into Laffer and supply side economics in this column.  I assume Ms Sloan doesn't care much for him (Krugman), either.

Renewables doing better than expected

How Tony Abbott made the carbon tax work

There are some really remarkable figures quoted by Peter Martin indicating the success of renewable energy already in Australia.  I hope they stand up to scrutiny.

His point that Abbott's made up "crisis" narrative if the carbon tax was introduced actually pushed people hard into solar is pretty convincing too.

Given that electricity pricing is expected to drop slightly, but (I think) gas is likely to be going up in price, I have my doubts that Abbott is going to win the kudos he thinks he will from the public for the dropping the carbon "tax".  People are not good at remembering their previous bills - and if yearly prices still creep up, the effect of one significant drop is going to be quickly forgotten.

I think it is disappointing that business generally has not been more prominent in being clear that if you are going to do something about reducing carbon dioxide, the Labor policy was pretty good, and more effective than anything the Coalition is thinking about.  And surely there is considerable disruption from these swings in government policy that has costs too?

It's a big drop

I'm heartened to see my dislike of the Abbott Federal government (and Abbott personally) continues to be reflected in polling.   Newpoll and Morgan both indicate that on primary votes, the Coalition has dropped a full 10 per cent since the election.   That's pretty massive in such a short space of time, isn't it?  Details (including a link to today's Newspoll) are at Pollbludger.

(Pollbludger also notes that the TPP for Labor is even stronger if you believe the polls that include respondent allocated preferences, rather than the "last election" preferences.   Sweet.)

In other political news - Treasury head Martin Parkinson was a target of the Right when he was working under Labor.  Now that he is seen as giving a warning to Labor to not reflexively oppose all savings measures, it makes the Right's dark mutterings about his partisanship look flimsy and ill founded, does it not?

And yes, Labor does have to tread carefully here.  Especially if there is a real chance of a double dissolution election, Labor does have to be able to show that they appreciate that there does need to be some serious re-jigging of finances going into the future.  Unfortunately, accepting what most people will take as pretty obvious - that a relatively small increase in GST will cover a fair bit of the problem - is probably something Labor is not inclined to do.  They have to come up with something else, then.

The exact opposite

Joe Stiglitz is in Australia and did an interview on Lateline last night, which was rather entertaining because of the way in which he came across as the exact, perfect opposite of the right wing, nuttily anti-Keynesian economists who infect The Australian and post at Catallaxy.

I don't know if an anti Stiglitz column has appeared yet in the Australian, but at least one, if not six if their pro-smoking jihad is anything to go by, is surely on the way.  We can tell because Judith Sloan has already indicated her disdain for the man, but seems to be holding back for some reason (at the moment at least.) 

And then we have Julie Novak, tweeting:

Want to observe what is wrong with the economics profession? Watch the Stiglitz lateline interview. Keynesianism recklessness writ large.

Julie, of course, was sucked in by some Right wing conspiracy guff about the Fabian society, and as with Sloan's continual attitude that climate change is to be dismissed, and insistence that the ABC is Out of Control, as is the Fair Work Commission, and don't get her started on the Productivity Commission:  well, I find Joe runs a much more convincing narrative, to put it mildly.

Something's wrong...

...with the Hollywood machine, and the entire planet of under 30 year old movie goers (because surely that is the only possible market for this series) when the woefully reviewed Transformers 4 makes $300 million globally on its first weekend. 

I thought I read recently that the Chinese market didn't like the sameness of some Hollywood series (was it Marvel movies they were talking about?), yet here we have them going strong to one of most tedious noise machine series ever made.

But it is actually interesting to see how important the Chinese market now is - look at Edge of Tomorrow, for example, which which will not go too far over $100 million in the US but is getting - as with Transformers 4 - about double that take from the overseas market, which is dominated by China and Korea.  In fact, those two countries combined, count for more than the US for both movies.

You have to wonder what this will mean for the types of movies coming our way in the next decade.

UN talks pot

Marijuana: Pot use declines worldwide, but not in the US ( video) - CSMonitor.com

The UN reports that world wide, marijuana use is going down, except in the US.   Given the capitalistic excitement that is underway in that country over legal marijuana (the report opens with this:

 In Seattle this weekend, a school bus rigged up as a food truck will start selling
items infused with marijuana. The menu includes truffle popcorn, peanut
butter and jelly, and a Vietnamese pork banh mi, reports the Los Angeles Times.)

we can be sure that use will increase.

Increased use has been leading to increased treatment being sought.  I also note this:

According to the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), about 9 percent of people who use marijuana become dependent on
it – a number that increases to about one in six among those who start
using it at a young age, and to 25 to 50 percent among daily users.

The UN report notes (wisely):

“Based on assumptions regarding the size of the consumer market, it
is unclear how legalization will affect public budgets in the short or
long term, but expected revenue will need to be cautiously balanced
against the costs of prevention and health care,” the report states.

“In addition to the impact on health, criminal justice, and the economy, a
series of other effects such as consequences related to security, health
care, family problems, low performance, absenteeism, car and workplace
accidents and insurance could create significant costs for the state,”
the UN report cautions. “It is also important to note that legalization
does not eliminate trafficking in that drug. Although decriminalized,
its use and personal possession will be restricted by age. Therefore,
the gaps that traffickers can exploit, although reduced, will remain.”

Founding deists

'Nature's God' explores 'heretical origins' of religion in U.S.A.

Here's a review of an interesting sounding book on the deism of those who were prominent at the founding of the USA.

Sunday physics

I haven't noticed this Youtube channel before, but I assume he knows what he's talking about, and he does a pretty awesome job of communicating complicated ideas: