Events that were made for comedy writers

For future reference

A couple of things I noticed via Twitter or the web over the Christmas break:

This tweet and the thread following contains some useful warnings about how not to improperly access academic stuff:

 Good to know how not to do anything wrong!

And this site is one I had never visited before, but yeah, looks really good:

Update:  now there is Anna's Archive.   Extremely useful.

Hazard reduction

This ABC Factcheck article on the matter of hazard reduction burns for bushfires is pretty detailed, and (as I would have expected) strongly indicative that there is not a fundamental problem of Greenies gone berserk and ruining all attempts at hazard reduction under the current system.

Why would I say "as I would have expected"?   Because, in case you hadn't noticed, it is primarily politicians on the Right, and their culture war warrior commentator supporters, who immediately start complaining about it whenever bushfires start.   It's remarkable, in fact, how conservative commentators who rarely get out of the city are suddenly armchair experts on how much fuel has been left in the forests and how bad those damn Greenies have let it get.   (They appear to have found one case of small scale environmental protest that interfered with one hazard control burn in the last couple of years, as far as I can tell.  From that, they just know that it's all about Greenies interference.)

Seems to me, using my common sense, that if it were a serious issue, the experts in the field (metaphorically, not literally) and the people who manage forests and hazard reduction would be the ones complaining about it.   By and large, they aren't.

Update:   a useful Twitter thread to read by someone with clear knowledge of the system.

Also - Jack the Insider also disputes the "Greenies caused all of this" fake excuse.

While there are environmental groups who campaign to restrict hazard reduction burns, in terms of political representation, there are 1273 councillors in New South Wales. Only 58 of them are Greens. There are no Greens on my local council and not one in the state government. In the Shire of Wingecaribbee, it’s a raft of independents, many National Party aligned, pock-marked with the odd property developer. It is hardly Leichhardt at 600 metres above sea level.

While I can’t speak for the rest of the country, I decided to go to the source, the local RFS, who tell me the real difficulty in hazard reduction burns is the country is so dry. Two consecutive winters with rainfall well below average make hazard reductions well, hazardous.

There was a furore in April 2018 when NSW Fire & Rescue performed a controlled burn in Hornsby which threatened homes as far south as Curl Curl and blanketed Sydney in smoke haze. Do people not remember this?

And let's not forget Graham Readfearn's earlier Factcheck article in The Guardian which I had previously linked to, containing quotes such as:

A former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, Greg Mullins, has written this week that the hotter and drier conditions, and the higher fire danger ratings, were preventing agencies from carrying out prescribed burning.

He said: “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim.”

The coal issue

I thought a Twitter thread by David Fickling on the issue of Australia, its coal exports, and climate change, was good and nuanced.   

I think John Quiggin will soon be posting an article about the same topic, and that will be worth reading too.

Update:  and if you want complete lack of nuance from someone who used to take climate change seriously, but then decided to culture war instead, have a look at angry man Mark Latham -

Update 2:   Gee, just how much of the new year am I going to have to spend asking "whatever happened to Jason Soon?".    Clearly, it would seem he doesn't think Australia's enthusiasm to sell coal overseas is an issue, because he's stuck on saying "1.5% of global emissions, nothing we do makes any difference".   But take these comments from the Fickling thread about how our involvement in emissions is much bigger than the 1.3% often quoted by Scotty From Marketing:

A lengthy "factcheck"article last November showed that, if you include emissions from our exports, you can get our national contributions to around 4.4 tp 4.8% of global emissions from burning fossils, depending on how you count:

If Australia's fossil fuel imports, containing an estimated 135.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, are netted off, Australia's share of the global emissions from fossil fuel combustion falls from roughly 4.8 per cent to roughly 4.4 per cent, while Australia's share of total emissions falls approximately from 3.6 per cent to 3.3 per cent.
  

Update 3:  Warwick McKibbin tweets today:

Sounds fair, and he is the climate economist the Liberals have leaned on before. His 2018 article about his favoured approach towards pricing carbon is here.

Update 4:  something good to come out of this?  Young Liberals with the "radical" idea of believing scientists unreservedly, and more aggressively tackling emissions?:

In early December, delegates representing Young Liberal branches across the state voted overwhelmingly in approval of a motion recognising the reality of climate change and the need for action.

The NSW Liberal party’s youth wing recognises this a particularly important issue facing our generation, as our generation will have to face the risks brought about by climate change.

They're going to have to wait to outlive some of the fogeys still in Parliament, though.

The "Scotty from Marketing" fail

Look, I know that people can exaggerate on Twitter and social media, and get a false sense of where broader community attitudes lie, and hence I don't take the outpouring of condemnation that I have been reading from those sources as necessarily accurate;  but I nonetheless find it hard to believe that, in their heart of hearts, anyone on the Right of Australian politics could possibly feel that PM Morrison has struck the right tone in speech or action since the present spate of widespread bushfires started before Christmas.

I have a clear feeling of schadenfreude from watching a politician from a public relations background, and given to pro-fossil fuel stunts like bringing coal into parliament, now trying to work out how to express sympathy about a type of disaster that has, scientifically, a clear climate change connection, and not sound like a hypocrite on climate change policy.

And I do think that the sarcastic twitter hashtag "ScottyfromMarketing" is very amusing.

I doubt that Morrison will lose his job over this, but surely there are some on his cabinet who are seriously disappointed in his performance.

Update:  After seeing the video of his visit to the disaster area last night, I am now not at all sure that he will keep the PM job.  In fact, it seemed that he barely had the social skills to be a politician, let alone a PM.   A truly terrible performance.

Images brought to you by climate change

Yeah, well, here's hoping the dire bushfire season is killing any last vestiges of PR credibility of climate change denialism/lukewarmism for the great majority of the Australian public, as images like these are pretty powerful:

To be honest, I know it won't change the mind of those who have spent a decade or two determinedly believing every fake "sceptic" and billionaire funded denialist with crap arguments that were repeatedly debunked by actual scientists.   They are too invested in their view to risk losing face by admitting that they were wrong.

But there must be an element of the public that thought they would start taking it seriously when they could see how it could affect them personally.  Their day has come.

PS:  to Graeme - I'm just going to delete everything you have to say about this.  I have no time for your nonsense on this issue on a day like today.

Oh, and in light of recent anti-Semitic violence in America, all Jew-ish referencing crap from you I'll just be deleting as soon as I see it.

Christmas greetings

This year's Christmas art has a Chinese theme, in a modest attempt to suck up to our coming overlords, of course:

Actually, it's from this:

The Life of Christ by Giulio Aleni (1637) is a picture-narration of the life of Jesus drawn by that early Jesuit missionary for the Church in China. It contains almost 60 engraved images, probably the earliest and definitely the most precious collection of Chinese icons.

I think you could safely describe his style as "busy".  Not always great with faces, though.  Have a look at this detail from next page, on the Presentation at the Temple, which features, if I am not mistaken, the (rarely depicted these days) circumcision of a not very bothered baby Jesus:

   
You can't half tell that the illustrator is Italian, from the way everyone is dressed, especially the kids and Joseph.  And as for the faces of Jesus and the kid in the front...I guess engravings are hard to re-start from scratch.

Anyway, have a good Christmas season, readers.

The range of future warming considered

Zeke Hausfather is a great read on climate change, although as usual I will now gripe about how you have to read Twitter instead of blogs to keep track of his comments.

Anyway, he wrote a piece talking about the recent fierce argument (largely between climate scientist types - I think) about what "business as usual" might mean - a crispy Earth, or something a tad less dire.  Here's his tweet at the start of his Twitter discussion:

The link to the start of his Tweet thread is here;  and the link to the actual article is here.

Now, Noah Smith has a piece in Bloomsberg which summarises it too, and Zeke thinks it's a good article, even though it doesn't discuss uncertainty:

And here is the link to the Noah Smith article itself.

Noah Smith is very much against any suggestion that you have to kill capitalism to meet lower temperature ranges.   After all, it is under capitalism that the changes have been taking place which have made BAU not a complete, planet killing disaster - just an enormously costly dire problem.

And this is the "glass half full/glass half empty" aspect of the matter.  As Andrew Dessler said:

I think it fair to say that all of this suggests as follows:

1.    Extinction Rebellion style complete and utter doom-for-planetary-life forecasts are, how should we put it?, somewhat exaggerated yet not completely able to be ruled out.   (Whether they help in terms of political motivation, or simply encourage depression and defeatism, is a good question the answer to which I am never 100% certain.)


2.    Progress towards limiting future warning to 2 degrees is not so far beyond reach of humanity as to be unachievable, despite the fact that the political (and societal) will across the globe is not unified enough;

3.  Defeatists such as Jason Soon (and, to be fair, some of my other readers) seem to think that everything is stuck politically forever where it is now on this issue, whereas I do not see that as being the case.   Trump and dumbass Republicans and their culture war, and their similar populists in other countries, are not going to rule the roost forever.   And China by the nature of its government has the ability to make great interference in industry such that I suspect that even the reports of their new coal power plants is not the dire problem that it first appears.

There are many ways in which to ensure that climate change  becomes a more severe problem than it potentially can be - be an outright denier; put your libertarian/small government biases above everything else and run a blog that caters to denialism and encourages old fools to keep voting against any effective action;  accept climate science but get  more interested in Lefties and culture war issues and adopt a defectist attitude;  get in thrall to some billionaire's pet ideas that there is only one way forward with energy.

They are all harmful to useful action.   It seems rather obvious to me that anyone who takes the issue seriously should concentrate on the overthrow of Right wing denialism and inaction in the USA, and the dubious takes on science that appear in India too.     The West needs to have a unified front, and I think that China will ultimately too, in the interest of self preservation.

Update:   Tobis and Dessler make another point (one which I have made before, too):

Animal sympathy will save us?

First, a couple of tweets:

To be honest, it's hard to be sure it really is a koala, and not (say) a backpack - but it does look the right shape; and honestly, who ever knew until relatively recently that wild koalas, who normally do not interact with us all, could be so charmingly trusting of humans when fires are around?

Next:  poor cockatoos:

  
Apart from being woken up by them screeching at 4.45 am in a Brisbane summer, how can you possibly dislike these smart, clean looking birds?  That they should fall out of trees due to heat stress is...distressing.

It's obvious from the internet, but also confirmed by my daughter, that the impact of fires and heat on wildfire can cause more sympathy and upset than seeing dozens of burnt out houses, or hearing about someone who died in their car escaping a fire.

You can say that we shouldn't be like that, really.  But it's human nature to perceive animals (or at least, the more charming variety that we can empathise with and like seeing outside our window) as helpless victims, whereas humans take the risk of bush living and know what they might be getting into.     

So I'm not going to get too concerned about any arguments that (I would bet) some Right wing types are probably making somewhere about misplaced sympathy:  anything that leads to more political pressure to take meaningful action to limit emissions and hence limit the worst case scenario in terms of climate change is a good thing. 

The Jason Soon solution to the tragedy of the commons: "There is no solution!"

I prescribe gas masks, as inhaling smoke for a month likely interferes with thinking; and a relocation from the Western side of Sydney, as contagion from Mark Latham's angry-man-who-can-see-the-truth vibes is proving really detrimental to a susceptible mind. 

Liberal PMs can never get this "the right image for a PM during a bushfire" thing right

Either they're rushing out of the house to put on their volunteer firefighting gear and looking like they are too closely involved in the dirty work instead of taking in the big picture from an Ops room; or they're secretly sitting on the beach in Hawaii until the PR officer says "really, this is bad, bad optics, you've got to get back", and even then taking a couple of days to do so.

Yes, the problem is the Force

I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker yet, but if this article in the SMH is anything to go by:

Star Wars suffers a disturbance in The Force – and it's The Force itself 

I have no reason to re-assess my view in my post about Last Jedi - the problem with the Star Wars universe is the lack of coherency in dealing with the nature of the Force through the movie series.

Which is a pity, because it was a clever part of the appeal of the first movie, as that opinion piece argues:

Back in 1999, George Lucas explained his thinking in creating The Force. "I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious," he told interviewer Bill Moyers. "I see Star Wars as taking all of the issues that religion represents and trying to distil them down into a more modern and more easily accessible construct that people can grab onto to accept the fact that there is a greater mystery out there.”

A bit of this, a bit of that, all thrown in together, heated and stirred: religion soup, in other words. Or, if you prefer, a non-specific kind of spiritualism, free of structure, hierarchy, church or cant.

Back in 1977, Obi-Wan Kenobi explained Lucas' hocus-pocus thus: "The Force is what gives the Jedi his power – it's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

It was nice and vague, with a bit of something for everyone; the monotheists could read that as God, the mystics as an iteration of Brahman, the atheists as a poetic rendering of universal matter.

Yes, indeed.    

Cool

This is the right thing to do, I reckon, and I think the soft Right commentators who don't like Trump but still think the Democrats will shoot themselves in the foot are just showing themselves up as more interested in the mere game of politics than the nation being left in safe hands:

And even if (or rather "when") the Senate acquits, the Trump letter, and his behaviour at rallies, indicates that it really, really hurts his narcissistic pride.

If it leads to him having some kind of mental break down and leaving the White House in a straight jacket, so much the better for the country. 

Just drink milk

Look, there needs to be a real push back against veganism by vegetarians, I reckon:

A vegan diet is generally healthy, low in cholesterol and protective of heart disease, but its followers must take vitamin B12 supplements or risk a condition that causes permanent numbness in their hands and feet, experts say.

Most people get their vitamin B12 from milk, but the plant-based substitutes do not have high enough levels to protect adults and children from peripheral neuropathy, which is irreversible.

Young festival-goers on a vegan diet may be at particular risk. “Kids these days inhale laughing gas,” said Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London. “That can actively cause vitamin D deficiency. There is a danger of young people going vegan, not having B12 and it could tip the balance to them getting a serious neuropathy.”

It could easily be remedied by the manufacturers of plant-based milks, he said. “Levels should be higher in plant milks than they are at the moment. If they were three times higher, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Internet claims that vegans do not need extra B12 were not evidence-based, he said. “I’m concerned that many people think it is a myth,” said Sanders. Gorillas eat a vegan diet, but B12 is produced in the colon and “they probably don’t wash their hands”, he said, so end up ingesting it. The Jains in India eat a vegan diet, but, he said, “all the Jain doctors I know have B12 injections”.

I am somewhat sympathetic to vegetarians who do so in the interests of minimising animal suffering;  but vegans, you're going too far.

Dress ups discussed

Gee, the Washington Post has more than a thousand comments following an article on whether it is a good or bad thing that most modern cruise line ships are downplaying "formal night", and the passengers are now not under much pressure to dress up in their best gear on any night of their holiday. What a first world problem, as many in comments are saying.

Anyway, I only post about it because of this photo in the article, of a 1920's ship (the Saturnia) which was, obviously, ridiculously ornate (at least in First Class):

You can read more about the ship on this website, and I see that it was Italian designed (that explains a lot), and yeah, completely over the top in other rooms too:

 

It's like they were trying to make the interior refuse to acknowledge it was inside of a ship.  Makes me laugh, really.

More solar power in the Northern parts of Africa

The other day I mentioned Morocco getting into renewable power in a big way.   Turns out Egypt is ramping up solar power too:

ASWAN, EGYPT – Near the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, a swath of photovoltaic solar panels spreads over an area of desert so large it is clearly visible from space.

They are part of the Benban plant, one of the world’s largest solar parks following the completion last month of a second phase of the estimated $2.1 billion (¥229.8 billion) development project.

Designed to anchor the renewable energy sector by attracting foreign and domestic private-sector developers and financial backers, the plant now provides nearly 1.5 gigawatts to Egypt’s national grid and has brought down the price of solar energy at a time when the government is phasing out electricity subsidies.

In 2013, Egypt was suffering rolling blackouts due to power shortages at aging power stations. Three gigantic gas-powered stations with a capacity of 14.4 GW procured from Siemens in 2015 turned the deficit into a surplus.

National installed electricity capacity is now around 50 GW, and Egypt aims to increase the share of electricity provided by renewables from a fraction currently to 20 percent by 2022 and 42 percent by 2035.

The article doesn't explain how they are doing to deal with the storage issue, but I assume some plans must be being made.

The case for sunny nihilism?

Interesting piece in The Guardian arguing that nihilism doesn't need to be a downer - you can have "sunny" nihilism, and there seems to be an upswing in that attitude amongst today's aimless youth.

Count me as unconvinced.  I don't dispute that nihilism can be the subject of much humour - the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy proved that quite some time ago.

But there is no reason why, as a philosophical approach to life, it should lead to this:

One of the many criticisms of nihilism is that it opens the door to unchecked selfishness. It’s a logical next step if you think there’s nothing to gain from life except personal happiness and pleasure. Yet for the people who have absorbed this message, the trend isn’t towards greed, but community-mindedness.

Skjoldborg urged his audience to solve problems. Gupta sought to build his own meaning. Tolentino’s whole book is an argument against self-serving, neoliberal systems that crush people lower down the economic ladder than you.

In the months since discovering I’m worthless, my life has felt more precious. When your existence is pointless, you shift focus to things that have more longevity than your own ego. I’ve become more engaged in environmental issues, my family and the community at large. Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock itself.

It can just as easily lead to the opposite - the view that no other lives have inherent worth and are, basically, disposable.  

Mitchell was right

Someone on Twitter has pointed that David Mitchell's piece in The Guardian in June looks very prescient in its discussion of Corbyn and the likely outcome of an election.  

He is as smart as his comedic persona suggests.

Maybe they plan on putting on a really big buffet for Him?

Mormon Church Reportedly Amassed $100 Billion Fund For ‘Second Coming Of Christ’

"It'll be an electoral disaster" seems a tad unlikely to me

As David Graham writes at The Atlantic:

The cynical read on the impeachment of President Donald Trump is that it hasn’t changed anything: Here we are, weeks into the process and on the eve of a House floor vote, and there’s scant movement in public and elite opinion to show for it. Notwithstanding the mountain of new evidence uncovered by the House Intelligence Committee, the battle lines remain the same: Most Democratic House members will vote to impeach the president, while acquittal in the Senate is a foregone conclusion.

But maybe the most salient fact about impeachment is how little something else has changed. Impeachment is incredibly popular, especially given the polarized environment.

A Fox News poll released yesterday found that a full 50 percent of Americans support impeaching and removing Trump—one point up from October. The Fox poll has always been one of the worst for the president on impeachment, but FiveThirtyEight’s polling average finds plurality support for removal—47.7 percent for, 46.4 percent against as of this writing—a finding that tracks consistent, slim support. (The site finds even broader support for the impeachment proceedings themselves, at 52.3 to 41.9 percent.) RealClearPolitics’ average, which is noisier, shows a small plurality opposing removal at this moment, though it was the opposite yesterday. The Economist finds clear plurality support for impeachment as well.

It’s worth dwelling on this for a moment: Roughly half the country not only disapproves of Trump’s job as president, but believes he ought to be removed from office, a sanction that has never been applied before. And that support comes at a time of (mostly) peace, with the economy (mostly) strong. There’s more support for impeaching Trump now than there was at the equivalent stage in the Watergate scandal—right after articles of impeachment were approved by the House Judiciary Committee. Rather than face impeachment, Nixon resigned. (Nixon, however, had far lower approval ratings than Trump does now.)....

Trump’s most likely path to reelection has always been to repeat his 2016 feat of losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College. That path remains open, but the past two months has made the chance that Trump could win a plurality or majority of the popular vote even smaller.
The matter is fairly simple: Impeachment is popular. The president is not.