Some history to remember

Exxon-Mobil, Bush, and global warming.

Just a reminder to anyone who thinks the IPCC Pachauri scandal is all a Lefty affair (so to speak):  Pachauri was the favoured pick of George W Bush for the job, with some suspecting at the time that it was because Exxon thought he would not be effective.

In other "libertarians who fail to impress" news

I don't think it is really worth anyone's effort to watch Helen Dale's video of a speech she gave to the recent, widely ignored, LDP conference (from which I gathered that the party's plan is to ensure that all married "queers"* who want to carry a gun for self protection can do so), but if you do, I defy anyone to claim she made a legitimate point about gun control and suicide.

She made a ridiculous connection between those who want gun control (partly) out of concern of an increased suicide rate from guns with a desire to made suicide illegal.

A patently absurd suggestion.   People do not want to see gun suicide because, nearly all of the time, suicide is an act (often implusive) by people who are depressed or falsely believe there is no alternative, and which devastates the deceased's family and friends.   Guns provide a particularly easy way to act on an impulse.  I have linked before (although I cannot find it now) to articles about how research shows that reducing people's ability to act impulsively on suicidal thoughts reduces suicide.  Indeed, Helen says that there is "some" evidence that tight gun control does have an effect on suicide rates.

It's common sense - and it obviously has nothing at all to do with any thought that it would be a good idea to make suicide a criminal act.

*  Incidentally, I note that Helen self identifies as such now.  Not entirely sure what that means in practice, but whatever.  

Nomination for one of those "You had one job" posters

Here's the start of a report in The Australian:

HUMAN Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson is “seriously concerned” Australia is going backwards in its support of free speech

Seems clear to everyone, doesn't it, that Wilson is having no effect on the government at all in terms of a "freedom agenda".  

If anyone should resign from the HRC for general uselessness, it's him.

Oh look - Triggs being silent during Labor's term [not]

PM - Commission slams conditions on Christmas Island 12/12/2012

Another great IPA pick

I see the IPA is bringing out another person to tell them what they already think they know.  Normally, it's "climate change - rubbish", this time, it's "taxes - who needs taxes!" from Arthur Laffer, of Laffer curve fame.

Funny thing is, the latest Laffer inspired experiment is going spectacularly poorly:

Back in August 2012, Laffer told a crowd at the Johnson County Community College, if Kansas would slash its income tax rates, it would result in “enormous prosperity.”

He told a reporter at the time that he had not produced an economic model on when Kansas will notice meaningful economic growth.

Two-and-a-half years later, Kansas is staring at a budget crisis, with more than a billion dollar gap between revenues and expenses projected in the current and next budget years. The state is also experiencing a low private job growth rate, as well as a slow-growing economy.

In a 45-minute phone interview, Laffer said while he is “not surprised,” he didn’t know why the deficits have occurred. He still believes adamantly in his supply-side economic theory: If you reduce income taxes, you will raise more revenue, not less.

Just when the revenue starts to rise is another matter.

“You have to view this over 10 years,” Laffer said. “It will work in Kansas.”

10 years!   Looks like his experiment is going to have to be terminated before then.

It's rather peculiar that Laffer is said to be influential amongst Republicans again, when the Kansas experiment isn't working.   All a matter of ideology not caring about evidence, just like in climate change.  (Although it appears Laffer may be somewhat more sensible about a carbon tax than most Republicans.)

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/steve-rose/article7024256.html#storylink=cpy

Blowhard-ing a gale

Holy heck:   Andrew Bolt's blowhardery (to coin a term) is at Cat 5 cyclonic strength lately, even if it turns out Marcia might have been a Cat 4.  (What sort of idiot does a song and dance about whether a cyclone was really a Cat 5 or 4?   Of course it's not a totally precise assessment at the time.  Jennifer Marohasy and Jonova are climate change denying clowns.)

Question time should be interesting today...

I assume that Labor will ask the PM if he was aware of the Attorney General's attempt to get Triggs to resign, and authorised it.

Triggs is telling the committee the secretary of AGD suggested to her a new position would be found if she’d vacate her spot at the Human Rights Commission.
Triggs:

It was definitely said to me that an offer would be made for me to provide work for the government in areas of my expertise in international law.

(This is amazing. Truly.)

I cannot see how this extraordinary episode cannot hurt the government...

Update:  plot thickening - Secretary says Triggs called the meeting to ask about Brandis' view of her.

Brandis says he had heard from "others in the HRC" that she was considering her position.

My hunch about the involvement of blatant political appointee and Brandis friend "Freedom Boy" Wilson looks like it might have some legs....

Update 2:   Triggs' counter explanation of the meetings went pretty well. 

Abbott refused to answer question in Parliament as to whether he knew Brandis was going to offer her another job.  Not a good look, to put it mildly.

The government is leaking like a sieve, and from Cabinet too.

It made for a very glum looking lot on the government benches in Parliament during question time today, particularly when listening to what Abbott was going to say about the Triggs affair.  They then sat in unhappy silence while a string of questions quoting leaks consumed the rest of the session.

Hiatus that's not much of a hiatus might continue for a while yet

Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming : Nature Climate Change : Nature Publishing Group

Interesting sounding paper here, and I'll just cut and paste the abstract:

Since the end of the twentieth century, global mean surface temperature
has not risen as rapidly as predicted by global climate models^{1, 2, 3} (GCMs). This discrepancy has become known as the global warming ‘hiatus’ and a variety of mechanisms^{1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17}
have been proposed to explain the observed slowdown in warming.
Focusing on internally generated variability, we use pre-industrial
control simulations from an observationally constrained ensemble of GCMs
and a statistical approach to evaluate the expected frequency and
characteristics of variability-driven hiatus periods and their
likelihood of future continuation. Given an expected forced warming
trend of ~0.2 K per decade, our constrained ensemble of GCMs implies
that the probability of a variability-driven 10-year hiatus is ~10%, but
less than 1% for a 20-year hiatus. Although the absolute probability of
a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year
hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%).
Therefore, given the recognized contribution of internal climate
variability to the reduced rate of global warming during the past 15
years, we should not be surprised if the current hiatus continues until
the end of the decade. Following the termination of a variability-driven
hiatus, we also show that there is an increased likelihood of
accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the
sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in
the Pacific Ocean.

Rat empathy

This Rat Experiment Will Haunt You, But Not For The Reason You Think

Have a read of the comments too, where lots of people note that rats are much nicer than mice...

National security noted

Some pretty reasonable commentary here on Abbott's national security speech yesterday.  This paragraph puts terrorism numbers in perspective:

 Let's focus on the 'abroad' part of the claim. According to the Global Terrorism Index, '17,958 people were killed in terrorist attacks last year, that’s 61% more than the previous year.' Which is horrific, of course, but 82% of those deaths occurred in just five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria. As you can see in the graph, deaths from terrorism in the rest of the world have been pretty stable since the peak in 2001:

As I was saying last week...

Mars One plan to colonise red planet unrealistic, says leading supporter | Science | The Guardian

Movie talk

I usually write something about the Oscars each year,  and usually end up watching a fair slab of it, as you never know, I might get to see Steven Spielberg in the audience, and that makes it all worthwhile. 

Not that I have seen more than about 20 minutes of this year's show yet, but here are some quick comments:

*  It seems Neil Patrick Harris' job as host has had distinctly lukewarm reviews.  Good - I really don't care for the guy.   On the other hand, how many years has it been since anyone said - "gee, he/she did a great job hosting that show last night"?   I have no idea - but it seems like decades.  I remember finding Steve Martin funny one year, and then I think he hosted again and was flat.  Chevy Chase was funny once too, if I recall correctly.  But the show just seems to defeat everyone now, alternating each year between "flat" and "awful". 

* The only big nominated movie I have seen this year was The Grand Budapest Hotel - and I didn't care for it.   Birdman, the best movie winner, I see has made all of $38 million in the US, and as an eccentric black comedy, it was likely destined to not do well commercially.  They really don't go out of their way to reward box office success these days, do they?  

* By far the most critically praised movie of the year - Boyhood - came away with just one actor award.  I saw a funny tweet about that (remembering that it was a film made over 12 years):




Heh.  Haven't seen it, but I heard it has reappeared at the cinema.  Perhaps I should make the trip.

*  Hey, if weren't convinced before that tattoos are a terrible distraction from everything else about a nicely presented woman, didn't Lady Gaga's inside arm tatts make for a change of mind?

* Clint Eastwood's movie won a gong for sound editing only?  Lots of liberal critics liked it, so I am a bit surprised.  Maybe it was the fake baby that put them off...  

* That screen writer for The Imitation Game looked awfully young.   Yeah, he's 34, and a very young looking 34 at that.   It sounded like he was going to say he was gay like Turing, but apparently he's not.   Well, he seemed a nice enough guy, I guess, except it is precisely because of his screenplay's inventions that I don't want to pay to see the movie.  Sorry. 

ADL (Abbott Desperation Level) has been raised to "6"

It's a handy measure based on the number of Australian flags he appears with during media events.

Abbott's lunge to paint himself as the "The Best Protector of the Nation During its Greatest Crisis, Ever" is just way too transparent to do him any good, isn't it?

Seriously?

The story itself is behind a paywall, and so far, I only see Latika referring to it:


Update:   Latika later notes that this was reported at the time - I had forgotten....

Freeman Dyson on spies he has known

Scientist, Spy, Genius: Who Was Bruno Pontecorvo? by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books

What a fascinating insider take here by Freeman Dyson about spies in physics....

Record cold in perspective

This is why some record cold days in one part of the world does not prove the world is not warming:

One would think you could get the concept of the Eastern part of the North American continent not being "the world" into the head of an economist like Steve Kates, but it appears one can't.

Mr Kates and his RMIT pal Sinclair might also like to read this explanation of the matter of the warming Arctic being suspected of being behind the jet stream wobbles that help bring cold air temporarily down to parts of the US and Canada.  Jennifer Francis writes clearly on the matter, being one of its main proponents, if I recall correctly.

Lincoln and the Mediums - a great read

The Spiritualist Who Warned Lincoln Was Also Booth's Drinking Buddy | History | Smithsonian

A fascinating article here about the Lincolns and mediums they (well, mainly Mary) consulted.

You know, I often get the feeling that the influence of spiritualism in Western society over the century of 1850 to 1950 has been given short shrift in popular histories or movies.   As this article indicates, it was a very big movement that attracted a following from all parts of society, but people seem to know little about its early "success".

Uplifting

BBC - Culture - The bra: An uplifting tale

Here's a moderately interesting account of the history of the bra, and I extract this paragraph partly because I am immaturely amused by the name of the authority, but also because I have not read the term "breastbag" before:

 “Evolution sometimes takes a break,” argued Beatrix Nutz, an
archaeologist and researcher at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, in smithsonianmag.com.
“The Greek mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes (276 BC–195 BC)
knew our planet was a globe and even calculated its circumference, but
throughout the Middle Ages people believed it to be a flat disc. Bras
are certainly not even remotely as important as the actual shape of the
earth, but they were obviously invented, went out of fashion, were
forgotten, and supposed to be invented (again) in the late 19th
Century.” Nutz also cited two earlier written sources referencing what
could be perceived as early versions of the bra. “The French surgeon
Henri de Mondeville (1260-1320) reported what women whose breasts were
too large did. They ‘insert two bags in their dresses, adjusted to the
breasts, fitting tight, and put them into them every morning and fasten
them when possible with a matching band,’” she said, adding: “An unknown
German poet of the 15th Century wrote in his satirical poem, ‘Many make
two breastbags, with them she roams the streets, so that all the young
men that look at her, can see her beautiful breasts.”

 

Roof walking

As I have mentioned over the years, our house has regular visits by possums and (unfortunately) rats:  the latter always start turning up in the ceiling in autumn when the summer oven like temperatures in the roof space start cooling.   We hear them, I go up into the ceiling and lay baits and look for dead bodies.  (Fortunately, they mostly seem to die elsewhere.) 

As for possums - they are not infrequently seen on the balcony rail, or heard scurrying along the lower part of the roof (which, conveniently for them, comes close to a very large tree in which you can also hear them rustling at night.)

In the morning, sometimes we have had birds hopping on the roof, too.

So I've heard animals on or in the roof, a lot.

But lately, including early this morning, there is something on the roof which makes a sound which is oddly like footsteps.  It does not have a scurrying quality at all, it sounds like the slowish thump, thump, thump of a person walking carefully on a roof.

I mentioned it at lunch, and my daughter says she has heard it in the evening.  I've only heard it later at night, or very early in the morning.

I'm a bit puzzled about what Australian  animal can make a roof noise like that.  Googling the topic I see from this handy American guide to things in the attic that raccoons can make a walking sound.
The things is, based on past experience, I am a bit skeptical that possums, even large ones, move in such a way that they can sound like footsteps.   Can't see what else it could be, though.  A very large  cat is not out of the question, I suppose, but we will have to see.

The incident has put me a bit in mind of the "devil's footprints" story from 19th century Devon, minus the snow, of course.     I can imagine people in, say, the midst of a witch panic, being wound up over the sounds of (what they think is) footsteps on a roof.

The Australian ramping up the attack

Every person interested in politics will be reading The Australian's lengthy, detailed, leak filled report on the totally dysfunctional Prime Minister's office under Abbott/Credlin, served with a side of "how nuts is Abbott anyway, for wanting to unilaterally deploy thousands of Australia troops to Iraq again?"

Interestingly, it says Abbott can't sack Hockey because Hockey will retaliate with damaging payback (in that he won't wear all the blame for a crook budget.)

And in comments following the article, the usual bunch of ideologues who say "replace Abbott with Turnbull and I'll never vote Liberal again."

As I said before - this is a crisis for the Coalition because it is split about 50/50 on the matter of belief in the reality of AGW and climate change; not a matter of mere personalities as it was with Labor.