Boring daydream believer

Can someone pass on this message to Tim Blair?:  the endlessly repeated return to the fantasy of no government funded ABC for Australia is an incredible bore.  

Like climate change, it's time you learnt to face reality:   the ABC is trusted and its funding is popular.

Something to do with hedonism?

I reckon people will be puzzling over the reasons for this odd finding from a new drugs survey:

The analysis, to be released on Thursday, shows people who identify as homosexual or bisexual are six times more likely to use ecstasy or meth/amphetamine, which includes ice and speed, than heterosexual people.

"Homosexual and bisexual people were almost six times as likely as heterosexual people to use each of these drugs, and were also about four times as likely to use cocaine as heterosexual people and three times more likely to use cannabis or misuse pharmaceutical drugs," AIHW spokesman Matthew James said.

On the other hand, this is not so surprising, at least in regards to meth use:

The report found mental illnesses were becoming more prevalent among illicit drug users.

Among people who had used an illicit drug in the previous 12 months, about 27 per cent had been diagnosed with, or treated for, a mental illness, an increase from 21 per cent in 2013.

Mental illness rates were particularly high for ecstasy and meth/amphetamine users.

"In 2016, 42 per cent of meth/amphetamine users had a mental illness, up from 29 per cent in 2013, while the rate of mental illness among ecstasy users also rose from 18 per cent to 27 per cent," Mr James said.

"Drug use is a complex issue, and it's difficult to determine to what degree drug use causes mental health problems, and to what degree mental health problems give rise to drug use."

Those who tend to talk about ecstasy as a pretty harmless party drug have some explaining to do too.  (They'll probably just fall back on the self medicating excuse, like they have for decades on marijuana.) 

Simple life advice

Those who read climate change blogs will be aware that climate scientist and writer Andy Skuse recently died at a relatively young age (63, I think) from the spread of prostate cancer (ugh - men of my age really wish this disease was not so prone to controversy over testing and treatment), and many folk have linked to his touching post in which he disclosed that he didn't have long to go.  

The part that particularly resonated for me was this:

The certainty of a premature death focuses the mind. Strangely, at moments of acute stress, one sometimes feels the exhilarating sensation of living in the present moment—experiencing a beautiful, perfect, harmonic world—instant Zen mastery. But it is fleeting. Familiar mental attitudes reassert themselves. At least that’s what happens to me.

But one unexpected change is acquiring a lasting and enhanced appreciation for the humdrum, the everyday stuff of living, rather than the extraordinary experiences that we sometimes think ought to define our lives. As he died of cancer, the singer Warren Zevon advised: “Enjoy every sandwich.” It sounds trite, but it’s true.

Forget about bucket lists. Get used to replacing the thrill of new experiences with the intensity of doing ordinary things for perhaps the last time.

I think that's a good way to live, even without cancer.   And seeing he's talking about food, as I have said before, one good thing about these new fangled fasting diets is the intensity with which one appreciates the taste of any food that's in your meagre 600 calories a day.   But even when I am off the fasting wagon, as I am again at the moment, I do often notice the pleasure of many foods.   And things like the thrill of making a $1 razor cartridge last who knows how long?   :)

In grooming news

Back in June I advised the world that I had started using a very cheap version of one of those razor sharpening rubbery things (bought for $5 at Target, not one of the $20 or $30 overpriced ones at the Razor Shop.)

I'm still using the same cartridge (a generic brand one from Coles, made in Mexico), and it's getting up to 4 months' use now.

It definitely works.  Previously, after about a month, I could tell by the application of after shave that I was getting more micro nicks and scratches on my skin, and also could sometimes start cutting myself a little due to applying additional pressure.  None of that is happening.

I recently suggested to my children on the drive to school that I should set up a stall on the school grounds offering "Common sense advice" for $2, for things that modern teenagers seem to be missing out on from the current education system.   This would right up there in my list of life advice worth imparting. 

Yet more marriage talk

Must be same sex marriage that's making everyone talk about marriage more generally.

Peter Martin writes about its current state in Australia in an interesting article "Getting married is a surprisingly rational thing to do". 

The only I would dispute is that it is all that surprising.

He notes:

People who are married are, on average, happier than those who aren't. Until recently it was thought this might be because happy people got married rather than the other way around. The good news is that a detailed examination of British happiness surveys by two Canadian economists shows pretty clearly that, whether or not happy people get married, they do indeed become more happy after marriage. It had been thought that happiness blast didn't last – that married couples lost the sparkle after two to five years. Married couples do indeed become less happy over time, the researchers find, but that happens to everyone of marriageable age. The important finding is that at every age, married people are on average happier than ones who aren't married.

As for evidence about what makes marriages last, he notes from some research:

They find that what helps most is being similar. Couples who are close in age have less than half the risk of separation as couples where the man is nine or more years older. Couples with different views about whether or not to have children are twice as likely to split. Couples where the man is much better educated than the woman are 70 per cent more likely to split. If one partner smokes and the other doesn't, separation is 75 to 95 per cent more likely. If the woman drinks more than the man, separation is two-thirds more likely.

What each partner brings with them matters too. If they bring low incomes, they are twice as likely to split. If the husband is or becomes unemployed, they are three times as likely to split. If one or both of the partners have divorced parents, they are 60 to 85 per cent more likely to split. If one or both brings with them children from earlier relationships, they are two thirds more likely. Differences in race and religion turn out not to matter at all.

Over at The Conversation, meanwhile, there is some surprising research discussed which indicates this:

Our new data analysis finds parents with daughters are slightly more likely to separate than those with sons, but only during the teenage years. And it’s the strained relationship between parents and their daughters that might bring a couple to the breaking point.

Our working paper studied more than 2 million marriages in The Netherlands over ten years and shows that divorce risks increase with children’s ages until they reach adulthood – with parents of teenage daughters at greater risk. However, this risk disappears in cases where the fathers themselves grew up with a sister.

There's more:

The effect peaks at age 15, when the risk faced by parents with daughters is almost 10% higher than the risk faced by parents with sons. In the following years, the differences narrow again, and they disappear once the child turns 19. A similar pattern is also found among second-born and subsequent children.

Although no causal link could be established from the Dutch data, the higher divorce rates might be explained by strained relationships between young women and their parents.

The increased odds of divorce from teenage daughters aren’t unique to Dutch married couples – we find the same association for Dutch couples in de facto relationships, and for married couples in the US. In fact, we find that both of these groups face considerably higher increases of divorce odds from teenage daughters, compared to Dutch married couples.

I have a teenage son and a younger teenage daughter:  I can tell them tonight over dinner that he's a protective effect on the marriage.   I think she'll find that idea pretty funny.

And as for same sex marriage, I suppose I should note another article at The Conversation that is rather bland and says that same sex marriage makes the same economic sense to the couples as does heterosexual marriage.  No surprise there. 

With this generally positive publicity for marriage, I'm expecting that any day now Jason will be asking Homer to officiate at his. 

How to make people marry?

I suppose the "yes to SSM" people will say this is an irony:   that social conservatives who don't care for SSM nonetheless keep pointing to the association of no marriage to poor economic outcomes in the US in particular (and I would guess, to a lesser degree, in Australia too), and wish that more people would marry for that reason.    But, it's hardly a valid point - the percentage of gay marriages out of the total number of weddings appears to be around 2% in the UK, for example, and I have the distinct impression that gay marriage anywhere is primarily a middle class and up thing in any event.

I'm talking about this because of this article in The Atlantic, talking about research looking into the question of how much difference good quality education really does make to poverty and economic mobility in the US.  The result was a bit surprising (if it holds up, I guess):

Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their  hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.

Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.

For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. “We can’t educate people out of this problem,” he says.

His work, like Chetty’s, is not causal—meaning Rothstein is not able to identify exactly what explains the underlying variation in his economic model. Nevertheless, his work helps to provide researchers and policymakers with a new set of background facts to investigate, and signals that perhaps they should be reconsidering some of their existing ideas. (Both Raj Chetty and his co-author Nathaniel Hendren declined to comment for this story.)

Jose Vilson, a New York City math teacher, says educators have known for years that out-of-school factors like access to food and healthcare are usually bigger determinants for societal success than in-school factors. He adds that while he tries his best to adhere to his various professional duties and expectations, he also recognizes that “maybe not everyone agrees on what it means to be successful” in life.

The article goes on to note that this is goes against the grain of what politicians (of both sides) like to claim, but at least those on the Left (who probably tend to make the biggest claims on the importance of education) can point to other things that they support as being helpful:

As a stronger explanation, Steinbaum points to the rise of  “interfirm inequality,” a phenomenon in which even workers with very similar education histories, ages, and industries make very different amounts of money depending on which firms they work for.

Meanwhile, other studies have suggested that differences in local labor markets can affect economic outcomes and upward mobility. For example, in 2015, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, in conjunction with the economists Richard Freeman and Eunice Han, published a report building on Chetty’s work and found that union membership seems to be another critical factor helping poor people escape poverty. The researchers went beyond Chetty’s regional-level analysis to compare outcomes between individual union and nonunion households. They found that low-income children who grew up with parents in unions earned more as adults than the children of nonunion parents. They concluded that making it easier for individuals to collectively bargain would likely help boost economic mobility.

Anyway, the marriage point:   I guess the problem is a bit chicken and egg as to whether there is any causal relationship between it and poverty.  But everyone does feel in their gut, don't they?, that less single parenthood and fathers having the motivation of providing for a family they live with every day must be a healthy thing for how well off a family does, and the economy more broadly.  But how do you make it happen?  

Brain light

I always thought that those animations of the brain and neurons you see on science shows, the ones where there are like flashes of light in neurons, were just fanciful illustrations of electrical type signalling.

But I seem to have missed that there is something called biophotons, which have been known about for some time, even if their purpose (if any) was unknown.  Here's some information from a recent article about them:

Here’s an interesting question: are there optical communication channels in the brain? This may be a radical suggestion but one for which there is more than a little evidence to think it is worth pursuing.

Many organisms produce light to communicate, to attract mates, and so on. Twenty years ago, biologists discovered that rat brains also produce photons in certain circumstances. The light is weak and hard to detect, but neuroscientists were surprised to find it at all.

Since then, the evidence has grown. So-called biophotons seem to be produced naturally in the brain and elsewhere by the decay of certain electronically excited molecular species. Mammalian brains produce biophotons with wavelength of between 200 and 1,300 nanometers—in other words, from near infrared to ultraviolet.

If cells in the brain naturally produce biophotons, it’s natural to ask whether nature may have taken advantage of this process to transmit information. For that to happen, the photons must be transmitted from one place to another, and that requires some kind of waveguide, like an optical fiber. So what biological structure could perform that function?

Today we get an answer of sort thanks to the work of Parisa Zarkeshian at the University of Calgary in Canada and a few pals. They've studied the optical characteristics of axons, the long thread-like parts of nerve cells, and conclude that photon transmission over centimeter distances seems entirely feasible inside the brain.

Virtually here

For my recent birthday, I was pleased to receive a relatively cheap VR headset to use with my new Moto G5 Plus phone (which I had specifically bought because it had a gyro sensor, which is necessary for VR use.  I am very happy with the phone as a phone, by the way.)

As for this exciting new world of Virtual Reality more or less in my pocket:   it's pretty impressive, even if a bit like looking at the world in standard definition instead of 4K.

I've only tried a few apps so far.  The rollercoaster videos I've seen are a bit meh:  for the best experience of that, drop into the Samsung shop like I did recently and sit in their motion chairs while watching the rollercoaster video.  That really gives a strong sensation.  (My daughter, sitting in the chair beside me, said she felt like taking it off while climbing up the clickerty first slope.    We're both a bit chicken about rollercoasters - I knew what she met.)

But some other 360 degree content on Youtube is pretty good.  I especially enjoyed the Experience the Blue Angels in 360 Degree Video put on there by USA today.   It's very cool to be able to turn your head around and look at the guy behind you, and up through and all around the cockpit.  (I've done it - flown in an F18 - in real life, so it was a bit like re-living it.)

Even if it's not in 360 degree mode, watching some of the videos I had taken on my phone was pretty interesting too.  It blew them up in a way that I had to turn my head to see all of what was going on at the periphery.   (You can use an app to change the setting of how big the videos appear.)

There is increasing content being put out there with the 360 aspect.  Not all of it makes that much sense - in some animation I was watching, there really was no point in looking away from where the director wanted you to watch, even though you could. [Update:  I see now too that I can download the Cardboard Camera app to let me take 360 degree photos.   Cool.  I think.]

I was also wondering about future uses.  I can imagine it being helpful for preserving the sanity of the confined - astronauts on the long trip to Mars, perhaps?   And as for those who have thought of  administering psychedelics to the dying (that's how Aldous Huxley went out, apparently - but how would you know it would be a "good" trip at this key point when you would surely regret giving them a nightmarish one?), I presume they will be thinking of adding this device with some trippy app as well.

So, overall, it's pretty fun and exciting, and I recommend that, if you don't have it already, make sure your next phone has a gyro sensor so you can experiment with this.

(Even you, Homer.  You can do some virtual cricket stuff, or something.   Explore the inside of Shane Warne's empty head in 360 degrees, perhaps?)

Many laughs were had

I chose a few things to watch with my son over the weekend, and they were all a success:

What We Do in the Shadows:   probably the last thing I will view on Stan before un-subscribing.  (Netflix conquers all.)   This New Zealand mockumentary from a few years ago about a group of vampires flatsharing a house in Wellington got better reviews than I realised, and it is very enjoyable in its silly way.   I don't know why, but the line "Remember, we're werewolves, not swearwolves"  delivered by Rhys Darby struck me as particularly memorable.

The Good Place:   a Netflix sitcom that good reviews, and from the first episode, I can see why.   The set up:  a woman who has led a less than exemplary life ends up in heaven, but realises she must have got there by some sort of mistake.  What to do about it?   Looks like a sizeable budget and charming acting by all concerned.  

Mystery Science Theatre 3000:  the Netflix revival of a popular US show from the 80's and 90's which I never saw.     (I don't think it ever got a run on Australian television, and I forget where I did see a bit of a episode but not enough to understand why it had a following.)   I see now that there are lots of the old episodes on Youtube.

Look, it's all a bit hit and miss, the quips made while watching atrocious old science fiction movies, but the ones that hit can make you laugh a lot, and the stunningly poor quality of the movie featured last night ("Reptilicus", a Danish [!] 1961 monster movie) was a sight to behold.

My son found the framing comedy in the space station very cringeworthy (some of it sort of is), but he ended up admitting that overall it was pretty funny.   I think it might be even funnier under the influence of just the right amount of alcohol:  future experiments may be held in that regard.

In more recently viewed Colbert

I hadn't really bothered to follow the Equifax hacking scandal in the US, so if you are like me and didn't realise how bad the company had behaved, do yourself a favour and what the very funny Colbert explanation:

Now for a nice post about same sex marriage

I have to say, if one is inclined towards making out the conservative case for same sex marriage, this recent video of gay actor Jim Parsons talking to Colbert about how getting married to his partner of 15 years did make him feel different is pretty good stuff:



Colbert himself is always charming when talking about his marriage and family (there's a video out there where he tells his studio audience, before taping a show, the story of how he met his wife, and it's really good.)  

Going back to Parsons, what he says does match with something that I heard from a relative who did some work as a civil marriage celebrant for a while after she retired from her full time job.  She said when marrying couples who have been living together for some time (as most are these days), it was often the partner who claimed to be the most nonchalant about the significance of getting married who turned out to be the most emotional on the day.  

Bashing Tony Abbott, and Tim Blair

Gee, if it weren't for the ABC and immature Lefties to complain about, Tim Blair would have trouble finding fodder for more than a couple of blog posts a week.  He's managed to get 4 posts out of the not terribly effective attack on Tony Abbott by the weirdo anarchist:  yes, the Left is crammed full of violent ratbags cheering on horrendous violence on the just and righteous Right, which doesn't have a violent bone in its body.

He seems to overlook that people mightn't feel all that much shame in finding this incident just a bit funny, because:

a.  it's not as if there was any sign of actual injury on Tone's face the next day - which isn't to say that the attempt to do him worse injury wasn't an action to condemn (as every politician from any side of politics immediately did) - but it did mean that the Tweeters that have stirred Blair weren't making fun of an incident that clearly cause the victim much pain.  One suspects that if it involved blood, stitches or a black eye, fewer people would be game to tweet in support of the attacker;

b.  the funniest thing - because it is so unexpected - is that a weird, scary looking assailant goes on TV, admits to the crime and indicates he regrets not doing a better job.    I mean, come on, he's an idiot.  Idiots acting out with no sense of what's in their best interest are pretty funny.

Anyway, what's become pathetic about Tim Blair (and this goes for Bolt too - in spades) is the pure unadulterated one sidedness of his chosen role - regardless of whether he was on holidays or not, not a word on his blog about the great visuals of a torch bearing march of (mainly) white dudes at Charlottesville, armed militia wandering the streets of the same town and worrying the local Synagogue, followed by a President who was mainly concerned about blaming "both sides"; but some twits on Twitter support an idiot who tried to head butt a politician here, and this is meant to show that the problem with political violence is all a Leftist one?

As I have noted many times, including yesterday, the pure Right threads of Catallaxy have for years had some regulars opining that its going to take an armed uprising to set things aright in this country, or the US.   Jokes are routinely made about how many people it would take to be shot to get small government and low taxes in place, and no one blinks an eye. 

Yeah, yeah, we get it Tim:   you can find hypocrisy and idiots on the Left side of politics.

Why don't you look at the morons and the objectionable comments they make your own side for once, instead of just standing by and making a buck by pandering to them?

A peculiar piece

There's an article at the New York Times written by a black gay man entitled My struggle to take Anti-Hiv medication.    I think people should find it odd.

First, there's no doubt that he's had much misfortune in his life:

My father was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison in 1989, where he contracted H.I.V. No one in my family is exactly sure how. In 1991, six months after he returned home, he died. Less than two years later, my mother also died. I was only 7.

I don’t remember my parents in any great detail, but I do remember that people in our rural South Carolina community ostracized my sister and me once they learned our parents were H.I.V. positive. One parent even transferred her daughter out of my second-grade class.

He goes on to explain that he was put off asking for this HIV prophylactic drug by the first doctor he asked:

I was 27 when I first worked up the nerve to ask my doctor for a PrEP prescription. I was there for my fifth annual H.I.V. test, and I’ll never forget the look of disgust on her face as she told me why I wasn’t a candidate for the drug: I didn’t engage in “reckless sex” and I wasn’t a “druggie.” She was white and her tone was so thick with judgment that it made my skin crawl. I quickly dropped the subject. 

Five years later, with a more sympathetic doctor, he did go on it, but this is where it gets odd:

Instead of telling me why I wasn’t right for the drug, we spent the time talking about why I felt that I needed it. I had promised my parents that I would take every precaution against H.I.V., so I put enormous pressure on myself to take it. Plus, it let me be extra cautious about my health and my partner’s health. After our conversation, he tested me for H.I.V. and wrote me a prescription.

Promised his parents posthumously, I assume he means?  Anyway, having obtained the drug:

My first few weeks on PrEP, I felt fine. Every morning at 8 a.m. my cellphone chimed with a reminder for me to take my pill. I even began to develop a subtle sense of pride in knowing that although I was having sex only with my partner, I was upholding my word to my parents.

But as the one-month mark approached, I began to have serious doubts about why I was taking PrEP. After all, I wasn’t having sex with men other than my partner; same for him. We still used condoms, despite having been together for several years.

I recognize that PrEP is effective and agree that it should be available to people who want to take it. But after about a month of taking it off and on, I just stopped. I couldn’t get over the psychological barrier that somehow I was weakening my body by training myself to rely on pills. Instead, my partner and I decided to take the precautions we’re comfortable with.

Um, unless his partner was already HIV positive (or on medication for it), and this is never stated as being the case, the only implication seems to be that he took it because he cannot trust his partner to be true to his promise that he isn't sleeping around with other men.  Or, perhaps, that he couldn't keep his own promise to his partner - who he has been with for several years?

He points out that blacks have historical reasons to be wary of the medical establishment, and notes:

Retention rates for PrEP are deplorable — one study showed usage in Mississippi dropped by 15 percent over a three-month period — and it’s clear to me why. I had guilt and carried emotional baggage. I also felt alone in my journey. There was no PrEP community that I could find with which I could share my anxieties, no PrEP “sponsor” to call and discuss my night terrors or fatigue.

Is it possible that low retention rates indicate confidence that a partner found is HIV negative and faithful?   Not after 3 months, I guess.

Really, the article just seems to re-enforce something about the expectations of a gay lifestyle - that they have very low expectations of their partners - or themselves? - managing to have sexually exclusive relationships even if they promise to do so.

The conservative case for gay marriage is supposed to be about treating gay men similarly to how straight men behave - but honestly, how many heterosexual men (or women) have the expectation that they are at risk of contracting an STD from a steady girlfriend or boyfriend if they have started sleeping together (and assuming they don't have one from the start)?   Very, very few, I would say.   It's pretty much a natural expectation of fidelity that does not even need stating.  But in the gay community, it seems that it is quite the reverse, and few people think that is unreasonable.

The matter of exclusivity in relationships is one where a vast difference still lies between the heterosexual and homosexual communities.

Decline and Fall

(Before I start - Jason, I wouldn't have picked you for a Waugh fan.  I was quite surprised.)

Anyway, Crikey has an amusing free article up noting the descent of Mark Latham, who I was annoyed to see turning up on Sunrise this morning.  

The entertainer, part 2

Look, perhaps JC, who visits here sometimes, can try telling "struth" to get on the antidepressants, or take some professional counselling, or something.  Here's part of his unhinged performance for today:

JC, stop ignoring these paranoid, depressed twits who share forum space with you and only find solace in imagining that an armed uprising will set Australia back on the path of true righteousness and wealth.   It's a very unhealthy place if you let them encourage each other that they aren't nuts.

Stop motion Wes

I've said before that Wes Anderson's artistic sensibilities seem best suited to a cinema medium where he can control absolutely everything - stop motion animation.   (I haven't seen all of his films, but Fantastic Mr Fox remains my favourite thus far.)

Here's his next stop motion effort, which looks good, but has that slightly concerning aspect of whether he will do Japanese culture justice:

Reason not to trust competitive swimmers

Via NPR, I was linked to an article in Chemical and Engineering News, talking about the smelly and unhealthy disinfection by-products (DBPs) of chlorinated swimming pools:

But the biggest contributor to DBPs in pools is urine. Researchers estimate that swimming pools contain an average of 30 to 80 mL of urine for each person that’s jumped in. Some of that is released accidentally or without the person realizing.

But for elite swimmers, peeing in the pool is an accepted part of the culture. Eldridge, the Masters swimmer, confirms that peeing in pools is commonplace in elite competitive swimming. It’s a frequent topic of conversation and joking among swimmers.

Practices can last for hours, Eldridge says, and swimmers chug water during stops between intervals. Swimmers rarely leave the pool during that time. “Do you really think that all these people in the pool, exerting at the level they are, drinking as much as they are, don’t have to pee in two hours?” she asks.

Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte have both been captured on video admitting to peeing in the pool and seeing nothing wrong with it. A quick YouTube search turns up multiple such videos highlighting their cavalier attitudes.

Hero Jimmy

I just got around to watching the Jimmy Kimmel videos in which he attacks Senator Cassidy for his claims about what he would insist on in Obamacare repeal, and it is a very impressive performance.

The follow up, where he puts the boot into that Fox News host is equally refreshing.

You can watch the first video with some commentary at Slate, and the follow up also is also there.

It is incredible, from here, to see how dire Republican politics has become in the United States.   How can they be so hell bent on repeal of such a key area of government policy with so little care for the details of what it is being replaced with? 

Kimmel is being praised all over the mainstream media for his stance, and he deserves it. 

Who would have thought, watching him years ago on the Man Show (which presumably made more than a few feminist liberals grind their teeth - although I think it was, basically, good natured) that he would become such a liberal hero?   

Modern reproduction

Well, this is news to me.   Via an article from QUT entitled

What motivates men to donate sperm online?

 (no, the answer is not pornography), I've learnt that such do it yourself on line services exist.  (Sure, sperm banks have been around for a long time, but we're talking about a non commercial system here.)

This one, Pride Angel, is English based, and as the name suggests, seems designed mainly to cater to gay and lesbian couples who want to reproduce but don't have all the right equipment at hand, so to speak.  Single women can use it too, though.  They'll sell you the "insemination kit", too.

I have no doubt that gay couples can be good parents, and I feel that those who adopt or foster any child with health or behavioural problems who are difficult to place with families are positively praiseworthy.

On the other hand, it will be a long time before I can see that the commodification of child creation by gay, lesbian, or straight people via these methods as normal and unobjectionable.

Update:  didn't I once write here that the image of the stork delivering babies was a premonition of the future in which semen would be flown around the cities by drones for immediate use for people using a service like this?    I think I did...Yes, I did back in 2013.  (I've been having odd thoughts for longer than I remembered.)

A familiar title

Helen Dale's apparently going to get her ex-boss David Leyonhjelm (Mr Glum now that he doesn't swing as much power as he used to in the Senate) to launch her new book The Kingdom of the Wicked in a couple of weeks' time.

Googling the title to see if there were any early reviews (there aren't), I was suddenly reminded that it shares the title with a (not very widely read, I think) later novel by Anthony Burgess, also set at the time of Christ, and which I actually once started to read, but quickly abandoned as not being to my taste.

I guess it is a generic sounding title for a Roman historical novel (or an alternative history one - which I think her's is), and it does have a subtitle (threatening that it's a series), but I still think a different title might have been a better idea given some of the literary controversies in her past...