Conservatives and same sex marriage

I find it hard to believe that the conservatives in the Coalition who are apparently chattering about a challenge to Turnbull's leadership if he allows a conscience vote on same sex marriage think they are on a winner here.

I've said before, I think a plebiscite is a good way to resolve a matter of unusual social and cultural consequence - yet I don't doubt that it will go in favour of gay marriage.   But having achieved it that way does give a clear societal endorsement to the change - and conservatives won't be able to claim it is just a result of elitist, out of touch, politicians (or judges) knowing what's right for society.  From that point of view, I think SSM activists should endorse the policy too.   And I think my view on this is reflected in public support for a plebiscite.

Having said that, all sensible people can see how it is going to pan out if a plebiscite is run at the next election, and as such, why should sensible people lose sleep if a government changes tactic and just says "lets vote on it now - the polling is clear on how a plebiscite will go, and has been for years - it can be a conscience vote, and we can stop talking about it and think about other issues."

Those who think it deserves to be an issue to bring down Turnbull just aren't sensible.   But they are likely to be completely unable to read the evidence on climate change, too, and make sensible responses to that as well.  They just love pushing hopeless causes against the evidence, for culture war reasons.  

I think a conservative push to oust Turnbull on this issue would just backfire on them in a spectacular way - confirming in the public's mind that the Liberals are a party at internal war with itself, just as the Rudd/Gillard wars harmed Labor.

Ethicists and pets

Boy, The Guardian (based as it is in a country renowned for its fondness of dogs) is asking for trouble when it runs a piece in which ethicists question the morality of pet ownership.

(Yes, there are many critical comments following.)

While there are lines in it which appear close to "peak Guardian", some points are valid enough.  In fact, it starts with someone noticing live baby rats on sale in a pet shop being available for snake food.   (I do think there is something inherently strange, cruel and unnecessary about keeping reptiles as pets if they can only be fed live mammalian food.)  Also, despite repeated discussion of the issue in the media, the breeding of dogs with inherent health problems just to match some pedigree "ideal" is pretty ridiculous.

So, I don't doubt that there are ethically questionable issues with some pets.  

But, as my wife said after we lost our first dog a couple of years ago, "dog people" have trouble being happy when they try living without a dog.   And there is no doubt that dogs can have a fantastically comfortable and mutually rewarding life with humans.

But (and I think I have read and perhaps blogged about this before),  attitudes to pet keeping haven't always been the same:

Widespread petkeeping is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 19th century, most animals owned by households were working animals that lived alongside humans and were regarded unsentimentally. In 1698, for example, a Dorset farmer recorded in his diary: “My old dog Quon was killed and baked for his grease, which yielded 11lb.” However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, animals began to feature less in our increasingly urban environments and, as disposable income grew, pets became more desirable. Even as people began to dote on their pets, though, animal life was not attributed any intrinsic value. In Run, Spot, Run, Pierce reports that, in 1877, the city of New York rounded up 762 stray dogs and drowned them in the East River, shoving them into iron crates and lifting the crates by crane into the water. Veterinarian turned philosopher Bernard Rollin recalls pet owners in the 1960s putting their dog to sleep before going on holiday, reasoning that it was cheaper to get a new dog when they returned than to board the one they had.

Actually, I'm a tad skeptical of that last story.  It just doesn't ring that true - or at least, I would expect, would be a pretty rare attitude to find amongst pet dog owners of any era.  

Anyway, worth a read...

Update:   I asked my pet sheepskin at lunchtime what she thought of the article, and she wasn't impressed:

Mosquito reduction by bacteria

Nature reports on a clever, relatively natural, way to reduce mosquito populations.

There is a caution towards the end of the article against killing off mosquitoes everywhere - they are part of a food chain, after all.  

Getting confused by the number of generals

I'm starting to lose track of the reputation of the Generals Trump has appointed around him.

I thought initially that Kelly was the thoughtful, monk like one - but no, that is Mattis.  McMaster has apparently been shouted at by Trump, but apparently convinced him to stick to the Iran deal.  So maybe he's OK?

But Kelly - well, he apparently doesn't doubt intelligence on Russian meddling, and was critical of the Trump firing of Comey, but on the other hand has been using Trumpian style fear rhetoric about immigrants.

I have my doubts he is going to last, somehow...

Ice problems

This article explains how use of methamphetamine is bad for the health, generally.

Cult watch

Do economics students who go to RMIT realise that one of the lecturers has become a full blown cult member?  Steve Kates yesterday, making his undying confidence in Trump and all who surround him very clear:

You know, she may not even have wanted him at the birth. But if you are the kind of loon who thinks we should not be thankful that Trump is president because his Communications Director prioritises his work in the White House over attending the birth of his child then you should drop political commentary....

[After listing various international problem headlines]:

I have no idea how to solve any of this, but I do believe that there is no one I’d rather have thinking these issues through than Donald Trump.

Kates' family members should be thinking seriously about some intervention.

Amongst the fellow cultists at Catallaxy, I see that some are a little bit shaken by the 10 day reign of "The Mooch" .    Kates won't be:  it will all be for the greater good, somehow.

As for the "misanthrope mutual support club" vibe of Catallaxy threads, I see that it's time for confessions from one of the more depressive figures there:

Bizarrely, I think he makes a living as a travelling entertainer in country regions.   Farmers can be a miserable lot at times, maybe that's how it works.

I feel a bit guilty for doing this, as it does feel like mocking people who actually need help.   But  as I argued before, it's doing them harm, the way misanthropes and denialists of various shades are finding comfort in company at that blog.

Cannabis and impairment

One of the issues with legal use of cannabis is the unavailability of any test to reliably test for impairment (for driving, for example) after its use.  It's why some employers (airlines, railways, defence forces) will simply have a zero tolerance of its use.  

This story at NPR notes the problem it presents for policing in Colorado. 

Yet another unwanted movie review

Kong: Skull Island.  

Yes, yes:  reviewers were correct - it's like a cross between Apocalypse Now and ye olde King Kong, with a bit of additional spin (new, unexpected, giant creatures, for one; and Kong doesn't fall for the diminutive woman, thank heavens).   It looks pretty great - a lot of that interesting Vietnamese multi-island-just-off-the-coast scenery features, and the CGI is good.   The script is occasionally quite funny, and the direction is sometimes pretty noticeably clever.

But - it is still a "gigantic creature lives on an island surrounded by constant storm" scenario.   It does get a little gory towards the end.

It's officially:  OK. 

(Partly filmed in Queensland too, but you would never recognise it.)

Lots to worry about

*  North Korea:   how exactly does Trump think China can instantly stop North Korea from lobbing missiles towards the West?   Obama's policy adviser doesn't think it's easy peasy like that:

Ben Rhodes, who was a foreign policy adviser under President Barack Obama, contradicted Trump’s message, writing on Twitter that it “is not at all true” China has the ability to solve the North Korea issue quickly, and warned that the president’s message involves a “very dangerous and destabilizing approach.”

Maybe Trump should be talking more to Putin, too, about his attempts to subvert the US role in the region.

*  Islamic terrorism and aircraft:  it is a worry that there are Sydney based wannabe terrorists trying to come up with plans to take down an airliner.

I would assume this plan was detected via eavesdropping on internet and other communications.   Meanwhile, Australian IPA aligned libertarian  types, I saw last week, are against the government enforcing tech giants to provide a way to unencrypt stuff, because (hey, it's libertarians) - money!

* Both Italy and large parts of  Australia are very dry at the moment.  There is also recent concern about the loss of fertile land in Africa.

Comedy and the public service

I usually watch Utopia, but I've never been 100% sure whether to fully endorse it.  (Well, I did say I was enjoying it back in 2014.  Perhaps my doubts are growing.)

It does have good acting, I think - with the possible exception of Rob Sitch, who has a very limited range - and some lines can be sharp and amusing, if not lol funny.

But the problem with the show is that it's still mainly a satire of Public Service managerialism (and secondarily, of political obsession with spin), but it feels that the heights of faith in managerialism are well in the past, perhaps by two or three decades now.

The result is that I never am sure whether the satire is accurate, or dated.  Certainly, last week's episode, featuring the hoops that the female lead (I don't really remember any character's name) had to go through to get a promotion her boss had promised her struck me as relatively accurate from what I had heard of the public service from a friend in it - back in the 1980's.   (And by the way, the female actor who was the HR person inventing procedural roadblocks was really good in a well written role, I thought.) 

I'm not sure how anyone on the outside, who no longer knows anyone in the public service, finds out how the character of public service life has changed in recent decades.  But I hope it has...   

Back to Dunkirk

After watching Dunkirk, it's good to read some real life accounts about it.  This article at The Conversation is good.

Laffer, Krugman, comedy

I don't watch Full Frontal much, but happened to see it this week, and thought that this story (not by her) was the best bit.

It centres on the puzzling continuing grip of Arthur Laffer on Republican and IPA brains, and also features Paul Krugman.   Worth watching:

 

When even Melanie Phillips understands it's a case of the Right hyperventilating in ignorance...

Gee, it's one of those one in a hundred days on which a link found via a Catallaxy thread is actually worth reading.

The very conservative Melanie Phillips, who is a climate change denialist and therefore of routinely unreliable opinion on anything, is actually quite correct in her take on the Charlie Gard case.  The Right wing campaign, largely emanating from America, in support of the grief stricken parents of Charlie, was entirely ill conceived in virtually every respect.

Of course, the great majority of threadsters at Catallaxy sided with the American Right too, because ignorance and bad judgement loves company.  

Warning sign

In a remarkable series of leaked comments, all the incredible infighting in the Trump administration is set out by that Scaramucci character, whose opinion of Trump turned around even faster than an ex-IPA staffer grabbing a lucrative government job.

But perhaps the biggest sign that he's an annoying idiot - he refers to himself in the third person.

An unfortunate head

Peter Dutton's head, with the additional loss of hair in recent years, seems to have taken on a profound roundness, particularly in the top half:

I have kept feeling that it's reminding me of something, but couldn't put my finger on it.  I think it might be this:

In a dumbed down version, of course.

Coal for the poor

I've always thought that the argument beloved of climate change denialists that being anti coal was condemning the poor to stay poor was a bit of a crock.  Here, in a good article by David Roberts, is the explanation as to why:

The energy poor fall in two basic categories. Around 15 percent of them live in urban areas, in close physical proximity to power grids, but they aren’t reliably hooked up to those grids.

Both technical and political barriers prevent connection. Those households tend to be dispersed and consume very little energy, which means connecting them is a money loser for utilities. And in many poor countries, utilities are not under social pressure to provide universal access; indeed, they are often centers of patronage and corruption.

Building more coal plants and hooking them to those grids won’t help these households at all. Indeed, in countries like India where this is a serious problem, there is already excess coal capacity on the grid, so new plants are likely to sit idle.

Hooking these households to the grid requires better governance, better financing for the upfront costs of connection, and reform of electricity subsidies and tariffs.

The other 85 percent of energy-poor households are rural, distant from any centralized grid, mostly in Africa, India, and the rest of developing Asia. Putting more coal power on those centralized grids is obviously not going to help them.

EAS Sharma, former Indian minster of power, notes that some 6 million urban and 75 million rural Indian households lack electricity access. "These figures have not changed appreciably since 2001," he writes, "though around 95,000 MW of new largely coal-based electricity generation capacity was added during the intervening decade."

New coal plants are not targeted to areas with poor electricity access. Why would they be? Those households are poor! There’s no money there. Instead, coal gets built where there’s large-scale commercial or industrial demand.

Go read the whole thing, and email it to Sinclair Davidson, Henry Ergas et al ...

Scratch that off my potential holiday destinations

I thought Sri Lanka was supposed to have some nice enough parts, but they sure have their problems with the nasty dengue fever:

Sri Lanka celebrated its eradication of malaria last year. But now the country faces another mosquito-borne illness: dengue fever. It's also sometimes known as "breakbone fever" because of the severe pain it can cause.
A dengue outbreak has left some Sri Lankan hospitals so full that they're turning away patients, says Gerhard Tauscher, an operations manager with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He is based in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.
More than 107,000 suspected cases of dengue have been reported so far this year, according to Sri Lanka's ministry of health.
That's almost twice the number of people diagnosed with dengue in Sri Lanka last year. The death toll from this outbreak is about 300 people, the IFRC says.

Electric highways

I didn't even know they were a thing:

Queensland will have a 2,000km network of electric vehicle charging stations that make up one of the world’s longest electric vehicle highways within six months.

The state government announced on Thursday it would build an 18-station network stretching along Queensland’s east coast from Cairns to Coolangatta and west to Toowoomba.

The stations, which recharge a vehicle in 30 minutes, will offer free power for at least a year in what the environment minister, Steven Miles, said was a bid to boost the number of electric cars on Queensland roads, currently about 700.

I had no idea electric cars were so well catered for in the US:

Queensland’s “electric highway” will span a comparable distance to the “west coast electric highway” in the US, which runs from California to Oregon and Washington state. However it is dwarfed by the Trans-Canada EV highway, which, at about 8,000km, is the world’s longest.

But the US in total now boasts 16,107 stations and 43,828 charging outlets, according to the US Department of Energy. Tesla drivers can reputedly make journeys of 20,000 km.

Flying over Dunkirk

I'm still thinking about Dunkirk - always the sign of a good movie.

One thing I did particularly like was the flying in the film.   (In fact, the portrayal of the relative intelligence of the 3 services indicated in the film pretty much matched my own biases, based on past experience.)

Here's an Air and Space article on the filming of the flying sequences.

No politics today

Instead:

*  I think this article at the Catholic Herald looking at the history of the 20th century splintering of the Anglican Church (and warning that the Catholic Church could well be heading towards the same path) was interesting.   I hadn't heard of these categories before:

For most of the 20^th Century this diversity was even viewed as its strength because, thanks to a shared pension board and the clever use of ambiguity in official statements, the three main factions with Anglicanism – which one wag labelled ‘high and crazy’, ‘broad and hazy’ and ‘low and lazy’ – were happy enough to rub along together despite their radically different set of beliefs. It seemed as if the Nicene Creed, a very loose application of the 39 articles and strong civic approval gave just enough common ground to hold the show together.

But the question as to how Catholicism is going to handle the same pressures is far from clear.   I can see how very liberal churches essentially lose their raison d'etre, and become more or less just purely Left wing social clubs; but I also see how the highly conservative Catholics are now extremely uncharitable and  unpleasant Right wing culture warriors who are amongst the worst examples of religious devotion.  It's hard to see how the Church is going to keep weaving a path between the two extremes...

*  Pop philosophy apparently is big in Germany at the moment.   Who knew?:

Philosophie Magazin now has a circulation of 100,000, proof that Eilenberger’s approach paid off. Indeed it would appear there is a new demand for ideas in Germany, one ripe for the plumbing. In 2017, philosophy in Germany is booming. Student enrollment in philosophy courses has increased by one-third over the past three years. Its leading practitioners are giving TED Talks and producing best-selling books, top-ranking TV shows, and festivals such as phil.cologne, which attracts more than 10,000 visitors to the German city each June.

*  I care little for poetry (by which I mean, I care not at all), but this book review talking about an apparently famous Polish one still seemed interesting.

*  And as for science - Nature explains how scientists are really fretting over what are appropriate P values for different disciplines.   Seems it took an awfully long time for this problem to be recognised.