Thinking about sacrifice

Don't ask me why, but I started thinking in the shower last night about the ubiquity of sacrifice to the gods as a key religious impulse around the world.   What do academics think is the motivation for lots of people around the globe having started to believe that gods need or desire sacrificial offerings?

Which led me to review again what Freud thought about this, and I was reminded about his obsession with boys wanting to displace their fathers sexually.   (Seriously, has anyone ever psychoanalysed Freud as to why he would think this was a universal feeling?   I mean, really:  just how many men in this modern era of on-line, public, anonymous, confession ever said they felt this way.   Or would Freud say that it's an unconscious desire, of course most boys and young men don't recognise it?)

Anyway, I read an essay by someone who pointed out Freud being influenced by a contemporary writer, William Robertson Smith, who wondered a lot about the idea of sacrifice in early societies.  Here's a key part of the essay:

In “Totem and Taboo”, Freud followed Smith’s argument closely but focused more explicitly on the killing of the totem animal, interpreting this not only as the symbolic murder of the god but as the derivative of a primal group parricide motivated by the desire of the young males to gain sexual possession of the females of the clan, who all belonged to the father (as the dominant male) and who were necessarily their mothers. Freud was indeed reiterating a principle first articulated by Smith himself (albeit in a footnote) — that there existed a double taboo which was breached in the primal sacrificial act: not to kill one’s fellow clansman and not to commit incest. Smith had written:

“I believe that in early society (and not merely in the very earliest) we may safely affirm that every offence to which death or outlawry is attached was primarily viewed as a breach of holiness; e.g. [sic] murder within the kin, and incest, are breaches of the holiness of tribal blood, which would be supernaturally avenged if men overlooked them.” (15)

This principle was to lie at the heart of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. The abiding interest lies in its use as by Freud to explain the origins of morality, culture and religion. The totem meal was “perhaps mankind’s earliest festival” and was thus “a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginnings of so many things — of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion” (16). Ambivalence both motivated the killing of the father and induced remorse:

“…we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too… A sense of guilt made its experience, which in this case coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been… They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for the father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They this created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos became guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned itself.” (17)

I don't know, Freud may be almost nuttily wrong about the whole Oedipus complex, but before I read this essay (that is, while I was still in the shower), it did occur to me - is part of the unrealised motivation for animal sacrifice to gods an ambivalence about killing animals for food in the first place?

I mean, it would seem that the closer modern urban people get to seeing how the animals we eat are raised and killed, the more they sense guilt about the process.  In older societies, slaughter wasn't hidden in the way it is now, and people surely (like us) thought young animals in particular were cute and endearing.  Yet people gotta eat, and lamb tastes better than mutton, and so eat animals they did.

Is part of the unconscious motivation behind the idea of sacrificing animals to God or gods that it's a way to deal with the guilt of killing animals to survive?   If the gods take part in the meal as well, then who can blame humans for having to do this to survive?

It's an idea, anyway.  Perhaps an eccentric modern one, since I don't know that anyone has really detected an ancient sense of regret in killing animals for food.   The idea of respect for a wild animal killed, yes.  Or maybe people just haven't been looking for it.  And I can use the Freudian trump card - it's an unconscious thing, but it was still there!

Reading more broadly on sacrifice, it's interesting to see that anthropological and psychological consideration of this is still a pretty active field.   I found two broad surveys of the topic that were pretty good:  one, the Encyclopaedia Britannica  entry Theories of the Origin of Sacrifice;  and another is a good essay by a Jungian psychoanalyst:   The Psychology of Sacrifice.   (I don't find the Jungian comments all that helpful really, but the survey of what others have theorised is very succinct yet comprehensive.)

All grist for the mill for my forthcoming Guide to Life for Aimless Young Adults.

Update:   I feel I should give a shout out to Buddhism for being the big religion for which, from the start, animal sacrifice was criticised and banned.  According to one Buddhist website:

One of the central rites of Brahmanism during the Buddha's time was the sacrifice (yàga)  which sometimes included the slaughter of animals. The Vedas describe in detail how these sacrifices should be conducted if the gods were to find them acceptable.  Some of these rites could be very elaborate and very expensive. The Tipiñaka records one sacrifice conducted by a brahmin named Uggatasarãra during which `five hundred bulls, five hundred steers and numerous heifers, goats and rams were brought to the sacrificial post for slaughter' (A.IV,41). The Buddha criticized these bloody rituals as being cruel wasteful and ineffective (A.II,42). He maintained that those who conduct sacrifices make negative kamma for themselves even before they have set up the sacrificial post, ignited the sacred fire and given instructions for the animals to be slaughtered (A.IV,42). He repudiated the killing of the animals, the felling of trees to make the sacrificial posts and the threatening and beating of the slaves as they were driven to do the preparations `with tear-stained faces' (A.II,207-8). He also made a plea for such sacrifices to be replaced by charity towards virtuous ascetics and monks (D.I,144).

But I see that animal sacrifice still happens in Tibet, due to the co-existence of old Shamanism with Buddhism:

The issue of animal sacrifice – the “red offering” (dmar mchod) performed in some Buddhist communities across the Tibetan cultural area in the Himalaya – has received considerable critical attention. Surveys such as that conducted by Torri (2016) have shown that, according to common belief, local deities prefer red offerings such as blood and meat1. In Sikkim – a former Buddhist kingdom and now an Indian state in the southern foothills of the Himalaya – nearly every mountain, hilltop, lake and river is said to be populated with supernatural beings. They play an important role in daily life, and need to be worshipped. Some of these entities were tamed and converted to Buddhism by Tibetan masters (Balikci-Denjongpa 2002 and Balikci 2008, p. 85). However, of course the taming of supernatural entities has not only been a feature undertaken by Buddhist masters who came to this region, but is also an important task of village religion itself. Village people often consult a Buddhist master and a shamanic expert simultaneously. As Balikci notes: “The Sikkimese shamans are the ritual specialists in charge of keeping good relations with the households’ and the lineages’ ancestral gods”  

And it seems that one of most excessive animal sacrifice festivals (not counting Eid, I suppose) happens in Nepal, but as a Hindu thing:

Despite outcry from animal rights groups, a festival widely considered to be the largest mass-slaughter of animals on Earth happened in Nepal this week, according to the Guardian. The two-day Gadhimai festival has been held every five years for the last 260 years in the village of Bariyarpur, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Kathmandu, where it attracts  thousands of Hindu worshippers from Nepal and neighboring India. Amid tight security, the festival opened on Tuesday with the ritual slaughter of a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and a pigeon, as a local shaman also offered blood taken from five points on his body. After this initial killing, around 200 butchers brandishing sharpened swords and knives entered the festival arena, a walled area larger than a football field, leading in several thousand buffalo. In the days prior, Indian authorities and volunteers seized dozens of animals at the border from unlicensed traders and pilgrims, but this effort failed to stop the massive flow of animals to the festival.

 Update 2:  Maybe I read this before, and perhaps even posted a link to it?, but Haaretz in 2016 gave an explanation of how Judaism came to stop doing Passover animal sacrifice after the destruction of the Second Temple, which was the site for a lot of ritual killing:

Jewish families made their way to Jerusalem from throughout Judea and beyond. Once they arrived, they purchased their sacrifice from one of the city’s many baby goat/sheep vendors and waited for Passover. On Passover eve, a representative from each family took their purchase to the Temple. At the appointed time, the gates would open and the representatives – each with bleating sacrifice in hand – filed in and lined up in front of one of the many priests, who themselves were lined up in rows in the Temple courtyard. Once the courtyard was full, the gates were closed and the mass slaughter began.

Each representative handed his goat or sheep to a priest who killed the animal, carefully collecting its blood into a bowl. Once the bowl was full, it was transferred to the priest beside him. From him it went to the one beside him, until, like a conveyor belt, it reached another priest who doused the altar with its bloody contents. After the blood has been completely collected, the priest handed the now-dead animal to the representative, who took it and hung it on a hook. Levites came over and removed the skin and innards, which were taken to the altar and burned. Once this was done, the representatives each took their dead goat or sheep and left the Temple compound to find their families. Then each family roasted the meat on a pomegranate branch and ate it in a festive night barbecue.

Since the Temple compound – about the size of 15 football fields – wasn’t large enough to fit all the pilgrims in at once, this process was repeated three times....

The task of adapting Judaism to its new Temple-less reality fell to Rabban Gamaliel II, head of the Jewish Assembly – the Sanhedrin. With regard to the Passover sacrifice, Gamaliel decreed that the sacrifice should continue in family homes, with each family sacrificing its own goat or sheep. 

However, other rabbis believed that the Passover sacrifice, like all the other sacrifices, could only be conducted by the priests in the Temple and that, like the other sacrifices, should not be conducted until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt. 

Some Jews followed Gamaliel and continued to sacrifice goats and sheep in their homes on Passover; others didn’t and saw the practice as apostasy. 

Within about two generations, the practice ceased when the anti-sacrifice camp assumed control and threatened to excommunicate those who practiced it. So, sometime in the second century C.E., Jews stopped the practice of sacrificing baby goats and sheep on Passover. Until recently, that is. 

Don't worry, teenagers - it will all become (sorta) clear in 40 years time!

Further to my recent post about how to motivate aimless seeming teenagers, I noticed this (arguably) less-than-useful article last night:

Scientists pinpoint the age you're most likely to find meaning in life 

Guess what the answer is:

Interviews with 1,042 people aged 21 to more than 100 years old reveal that people tend to feel like their lives have meaning at around age 60. That’s the age at which the search for meaning is often at it’s lowest, and the “presence” of meaning is at it’s highest, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Clinical Psychiatry.

 

If you’re a twenty-something ruminating about your life’s purpose, that may seem like a long time to wait. But take heart: If this study tells us anything, it’s that the ennui-fueled search for meaning in your early life is normal, and, even after 60, it doesn’t actually ever end. Instead, people may readjust how they derive purpose as they age.

Well, I'm looking forward to next year now, when I peak in life meaningfulness...

Good tweet, Adam

The next Olympics could be...problematic

By the way, has Trump yet tweeted sympathy and support for Russia in light of their ban?

A "Guide to Life" for young adults?

Well that's a co-incidence:  I have been wondering lately the very question posed at Slate:  What to say to motivate your aimless teen.

I wouldn't be the first parent to wonder - why does my teenager seem to be feeling uncertain and not have any passionate interest in anything?   Even what's she's talented at doesn't really move her much.

Why doesn't she know more fundamental general knowledge about the history of the world?   At least my son read books for a while, before his phone took control; and he watched Horrible Histories and has some knowledge of the big wars and revolutions.   [As a (perhaps sexist) generalisation, do girls have less interest in history because they don't enjoy imagining themselves in the midst of dangerous adventure in the same way that boys do?]   And don't speak to me about religion or philosophy - of the latter she knows nothing, but she's had exposure to Christianity of both Catholic and Protestant hue, and even still sometimes accompanies a friend to one of the "let's put on a show!" brand of evangelical suburban church.  But she openly says at home that she suspects there's nothing behind the curtain, so to speak.

I suggested last night that she should try the ideas in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason:   she said I may as well have just said that in a foreign language, for all the sense it made.

So yeah, I'm feeling the need for a Guide for Life type book for this type of young adult.  Of course, this is what Jordan Peterson's recent career is made out of, but he's full of waffle and rubbish such as curing his depression by eating just meat - he's not someone I trust to be imparting information and common sense.

And it can't be long - it needs to be relatively succinct.

If I can't find one, and I doubt that something that would have my seal of approval exists, I should write it myself. Getting teenagers to read it would be the challenge.   It would have to come in multimedia format for a phone, too...

Climate change and fish

News from Alaska (and sorry the extract is long, but it's important to understand it is not an overfishing problem per se):

In an unprecedented response to historically low numbers of Pacific cod, the federal cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska is closing for the 2020 season.

The decision, announced Friday, came as little surprise, but it's the first time the fishery has closed due to concerns over low stock.

"We're on the knife's edge of this over-fished status," North Pacific Fishery Management Council member Nicole Kimball said during talks in Anchorage.

It's not over-fishing to blame for the die-off, but rather, climate change.

Warming ocean temperatures linked to climate change have wreaked havoc on a number of Alaska's fisheries in recent years, decimating stocks and jeopardizing the livelihoods of fishermen and locals alike who rely on the industry.

A stock assessment this fall put Gulf cod populations at a historic low, with "next to no" new eggs, according to Steven Barbeaux, a research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who authored the report. At their current numbers, cod are below the federal threshold that protects them as a food source for endangered steller sea lions. Once below that line, the total allowable catch goes to zero. In other words, the fishery shuts down.

Up until the emergence of a marine heatwave known as "the blob" in 2014, the stock of cod in the Gulf of Alaska was doing well. But the heat wave caused ocean temperatures to rise 4-5 degrees. Young cod started dying off, scientists said.

"A lot of the impact on the population was due to that first heat wave that we haven't recovered from," Barbeaux said during an interview last month. Following the first heat wave, cod numbers crashed by more than half, from 113,830 metric tons in 2014 to 46,080 metric tons in 2017.
The decline was steady from there.

Too close to Christmas...

I'm going to be really busy the next couple of weeks, which means I should post less, or at least at night rather than during the day.  But the world is such a hot mess at the moment (literally, and socio-politically), it's hard not to read and be appalled by the news. Such as this:

*  the warning about rapidly increasing, low oxygen dead zones in the oceans got a lot of publicity, which is good.   I think one report noted that some sea creatures do OK in naturally low oxygen waters, such as squid.  "Well", I thought "that's probably good news for sea turtles."  But then I remembered that their gender mix is being changed hugely by increased heat around the eggs, so maybe things aren't even great for them...

* I saw Insiders yesterday, and they spent a lot of time on how this Morrison government considers itself unaccountable - if they don't want to answer a question, they just refuse to answer and move on, and journalists pretty much give up and move on too. 

This is very true, and a part of the increased authoritarian bent of the Right - but it all started under Tony Abbott and the refusal to disclose anything about how boats on the high seas were being dealt with.  And that was Scott Morrison too, citing "operational matters."  

He got away with it then, and he's getting away with it now.   A Newspoll overnight at least shows he has a negative approval rating (48% disapprove to 45% approve), which is something to at least be grateful for; but the government overall is at 52%/48% TPP, in a period where I think it's looked pretty crook.  Mind you, I still think we are in a "let's ignore politics" period still after the last election.

Oh - and Labor is still looking internally terribly conflicted on climate change and coal.   It needs to get a grip on that issue fast.

*  Republicans continue to be disgusting alternative reality nutters  taking lines they are specifically told are false and dangerous by their own national intelligence services.

For one of my stupider readers

I bet it was JC who made an anonymous comment here recently that current models couldn't be accurate because models in the 1970's said there would be global cooling.

Obviously displaying the continual self-imposed ignorance of a "it'll all be OK" lukewarmer/denier, it would appear he has never read the 2008 paper in the American Meteorological Society which explained exactly what was going on in climate research at the time, a field which was in its absolute infancy.   It contains this graph:

There was, basically, exactly one year in the early 1970's in which "cooling" papers were dominant;  and some of the very same people who featured with cooling warnings quickly realised their mistake.

Stephen Schneider's explanation appeared in a autobiography he wrote, but this is it in a nutshell:

Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, recalls those stories well. "I was one of the ones who talked about global cooling," he says. "I was also the one who said what was wrong with that idea within three years."  Schneider coauthored a 1971 article in the journal Science about atmospheric aerosols—floating particles of soil dust, volcanic ash, and human-made pollutants. His research suggested that industrial aerosols could block sunlight and reduce global temperatures enough to overcome the effects of greenhouse gases, possibly triggering an ice age. But he soon realized that he had overestimated the amount of aerosols in the air and underestimated the role of greenhouse gases.  "Back then this science was so new, so theoretical, it was really hard to sort it out," he says. He and other early climate researchers say they did not predict a global cooling trend but simply suggested the possibility. Evidence suggests that average worldwide temperatures did decrease between the 1940s and the 1970s. Some climatologists partially attribute the temporary cooling trend to industrial smog, which has since been overcome by the effects of growing greenhouse emissions and, ironically, by clean-air laws that have reduced atmospheric particulates. "Science is a self-correcting institution," Schneider says. "The data change, so of course you change your position. Otherwise, you would be dishonest." 

Having said this, I do agree with the mainstream climate scientists who are concerned with the exaggerations of Extinction Rebellion and others.   Mind you, lukewarmer/deniers already claim a long list of "failed predictions" (including, of course, global cooling) which you have to be completely ignorant to claim as failure at all, so it's completely understandable that some don't want to give any quarter to denialists by siding with them against ER.  After all, exaggeration or not, climate scientists would nearly all want ER to be politically successful in their aim for urgent action.   But the reality is, if you are concerned with accuracy, you really do have to point out exaggerations when they appear. 

There was a good thread about this on Twitter, starting here:

A bit of floating solar boosterism

Grist has an article about a floating solar cell array on a retention pond in New Jersey, and talks about other places where floating solar is being used.

It is not that big an array, as it is a pretty small body of water, yet it is still said to be America's largest.

I presume America's great lakes are far to susceptible to wild ocean-wave like conditions to consider floating solar on them, but they must have lots of other smaller lakes and dams where it is possible.

I still say it is an obviously good idea.

Good catch

In news from Jakarta...

Not sure we're likely to hear a current Australian politician say such a thing anytime soon:

In a candid podcast, Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he liked watching porn and that there was nothing wrong with it.

"If I watch porn, what is wrong with that? I like it. I am an adult. I have a wife,” he said during an interview with YouTube personality Deddy Corbuzier published on Wednesday.

But it's still, you know, Indonesia: 

The politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said it would be wrong, however, if he shared pornographic videos. “What is not allowed is to share [the videos] because sharers can be charged under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE),” he said.
Watching porn is still generally frowned upon in Indonesia and the government has made it difficult for citizens to access pornographic content.

The Ministry of Communication has banned pornographic websites. It has also banned websites not principally concerned with erotic material, such as Tumblr and Vimeo, due to the presence of erotica on the platforms.

This does remind me, though, of Gough Whitlam and Margaret heading off to watch that Swedish sex movie at the cinema in the 1970's.  (The Language of Love?  It's proving surprisingly hard for me to turn up the photo of them outside of the cinema that I recall.)

Has anyone debunked this yet?

This study, it seems to me, should have already been debunked by now, if it contained genuine big flaws:

Offshore windfarms 'can provide more electricity than the world needs' 

Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours.

Asking for friend who thinks nuclear is the only thing possible to remove power emissions ...

Good reason he's not trusted

The moderate Democrat/centrist types who I follow on Twitter (like Will Wilkinson, and some others I can't recall now) have often said that they find Buttigieg's performance during the Democrat debates off putting and annoying.   He's now handed them some real clear grounds to say his take on things is way, way off:

I don't watch Democrat debates, of course, so I don't know how he comes across.  But this was a really ridiculous thing to say.

HIV still a big problem

Was surprised to read on France 24 that the HIV transmission and death problem in Kenya is still so big:

The Kenyan government is battling the spread of the HIV virus with a nationwide campaign, but infections remain rampant: In 2018, 46,000 people tested positive, including 8,000 children under 15 years old.

With 1.6 million Kenyans living with AIDS, the eastern African country is the third most affected nation in the world.

Transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from mother to child is still common and extremely difficult to contain, mainly in the capital Nairobi's low-income neighbourhoods, and babies are often infected during breastfeeding.

“Education, education, education for the young people is key on prevention of HIV to the children once they get pregnant,” says Faith Kungu, a nutritionist at the Lea Toto clinic in Nairobi.

Despite free healthcare, 4,000 minors died of HIV-related causes in 2018. An HIV positive status is still a taboo and can lead to exclusion from society. Some women opt out of taking medicine to avoid suspicion.

Sad news for a Friday...

Let's list some stupid people (in particular ways)

*  Elon Musk - why the hell would a man worth $20 billion (but not in cash, poor diddums) not settle a defamation action by the guy he called a "pedo"?   Would be a better look than the humiliating evidence that is coming out in court:

During his testimony Mr Musk also played down other tweets, which were also later deleted, including one where he replied "bet ya a signed dollar it's true" to a follower asking about the "pedo" comment.

Mr Musk also acknowledged in court that he paid $52,000 (£40,000) to a man posing as a private detective to dig up dirt about the British diver after it became clear he would be sued. The investigator turned out to be a conman, Mr Musk said.

Under questioning on Wednesday, Mr Musk estimated his net worth to be about $20bn but insisted most of his wealth was held in stock.

"Sometimes people think I have a lot of cash. I actually don't," he told the court.

*  Angus Taylor:  has been revealed as a complete bullshit artist, both in his completely inadequate response to him and/or his office's involvement in inventing figures for political gain (insisting against all evidence that the Council itself had put the figures on its website), and for having implicated Naomi Wolf in a culture war story that happened in Oxford when she was in fact living in another country.    (Sure, a lot of people don't care for Wolf, too, but I can understand her being peeved about being mentioned in Parliament this way.)

He needs to be dumped.  Soon. 

* Scott Morrison:   a flim flam PM, now trying to make a name for himself by re-inventing the wheel of Public Service arrangements.   As Bernard Keene wrote, this stupid cycle of rearranging departments and amalgamation and de-amalgamation just goes on and on and on:

and as people wrote following his tweet:

Yes, the amount of energy put by governments into rearranging the public service chairs is ridiculous and wasteful.

Waddayaknow? Climate models have been making accurate predictions all along (pretty much)

As explained at Real Climate, even some of the first climate models, when properly assessed (which means, taking into account when they got emissions and some other forcings wrong - which is not something you can blame them for)  they have been pretty accurate.

Actually, I find the lengthy Twitter thread explanation by co-author Zeke Hausfather, which starts here, is better than the Real Climate post at explaining what they did.

Quick takes

*   I think the new James Bond trailer looks good.   And I still think the new Q looks like they really had Richard Ayoade in mind, but the producers were worried that his fans would just fall about laughing for 5 minutes as soon as he appeared on screen.

*  Richard E Grant is in the new Star Wars film and says its fantastic.  All actors in these films say that, though, don't they?    Is it possible that they have made a Star Wars film that doesn't include a big, new supa-dupa planet killing version of the Death Star?  Will they have sorted out the unsatisfactory explanations of the nature of the Force?   Gee, I'm sounding like I'm over Star Wars;  but no, I will still likely see this one.

*  What the heck?  Just days after I say I might move to an OPPO phone because I like a pop up selfie cam, there's news that my current brand Motorola has just brought out a mid-range phone with the same feature (and same memory):

 

Big if true

Sabine Hossenfelder has a couple of good posts up - one generally explaining "dark energy", and a follow up post about a paper that has just come out which says that one key measurement that was taken to prove the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is wrong, and hence dark energy doesn't exist.   The local movement of the relevant galaxies may explain the redshift of the light from certain supernovae.

This is, potentially, really big news.  At least if you're an astrophysicist, or general observer of big science ideas.  

He hates government spending, until it's directed towards his pocket (or at least, his workplace)

Chris Berg announces government funding for yet more of RMIT make-work for economists who can't get their heads on ABC TV much anymore, and look who's part of it:

At Announcement

---

• Funding: $423,540.00

• Investigators:
  • Prof Jason Potts (CI)
  • Prof Sinclair Davidson (CI)
  • Dr Christopher Berg (CI)

• Organisations:
  • RMIT University

The research:

Public Finance and Cryptocurrencies. This project aims to analyse the impact of cryptocurrency technology on taxation and the provision of public goods in Australia. The project will identify the historical relationship between money technologies and public finance, examine the impact of cryptocurrencies in relation to the modern state, and investigate the potential of utilising cryptocurrencies in the provision of public goods. The outcomes of the research will expand theoretical and practical understanding of public finance in a world of cryptocurrencies. The project findings will provide guidance to Australian and international policymakers to prepare for potential disruptions to taxation and public goods provision.

Hey, Federal government, I can tell you what the conclusions of this troika will be before you pay a cent:

*   Cryptocurrencies are great, cool, disruptive things and we really like them (because they have the potential to make governments collecting tax even harder);
*   Our government should lead the way in facilitating the adoption of cryptocurrencies as soon as possible, because that way, it makes our waffly research look important.

Now send me $200,000 (not in Bitcoin, thanks), and you're $223,540 ahead.

Update:  I have altered the heading to the post, because I don't know how such research funding works.   I would presume it may involve economics minions (post grad students?) being paid to do some work for the report, and travel or some such, so I don't know if the troika personally make money from it.

What other world leaders have to put up with...

Look, honestly: if Macron and Merkel took Trump to a side room, and he was later found to have "fallen" out of its fifth floor window, the rest of the European leaders would say "Who pushed him?  More to the point, who cares?"  

The kinda depressing "big picture"

If this graph in this tweet is correct:

what's been happening is that wind, solar and other renewables have only been replacing another source of emissions free power - nuclear.

That would help explain why, despite big deployments of non-nulcear clean energy, emissions are not going down. 

That we have to junk coal as a priority is obvious.

Well, that's weird

I don't know that I trust Hot Air contributor Jazz Shaw on anything much, but he has an interest in UFOs and occasionally talks about the Navy "tic tak" videos that have everyone puzzled.

He's interviewed a young physicist (? not sure that's right, given what follows) before about UFOs, but I hadn't read it.

Today, he's put up a post wherein said scientist (Deep Prasad) has explained that earlier this year he had an alien/otherworldly visitation (of sorts).  They were trying to blast a lot of information into his brain, apparently.   (Fortunately for Deep, anal probe was avoided.  They seem to have gone out of fashion now as part of UFO alien abduction/visitation lore.) 

You can read about it here, at Hot Air.

It puts me in mind of the sort of experiences Philip K Dick claimed to have had.  But unlike Dick, I would hope Deep is not a massive drug user.

I'm not sure about him, nonetheless.  Shaw links to a 2014 article in a University of Toronto paper in which they asked whether "first year undergrad" - on an electrical engineering course -  Prasad "could be the next Einstein".   But the big idea he discusses is - generating electricity from using your keyboard.   This does not sound promising...

Gopnik on James

Oh - Adam Gopnik's column on Clive James is very interesting (he knew him) and well written. 

The irony

To be honest, I think the White House Christmas decorations are at least better this year than the blood red theme that Melania chose last year (and which many mocked as resembling something from the Overlook Hotel):

But the funniest thing in the White House produced video (which gives the impression Melania personally sets this all up) is the bit where it shows a tree decoration reading "Be Best".

That the wife of the appallingly "Be Worst" tweeting President should have chosen that as a theme for her "everyone, be nice to each other" campaign is just irony run amok. 

Sordid

Well, this is a headline you don't see every day:

War and pissoirs: how the urinals of Paris helped beat the Nazis 

Unfortunately, most of the article is about how the Paris "pissoirs" came to be installed and then widely used by men for illicit sexual encounters.   I find that very surprising, given that I would have thought that the open air design of these things, whereby you can see who and how many are using the facility, would have meant that this protected them from such use. 

But there you go.

It is interesting that the opening anecdote is this:

At 11pm on 6 December 1876, policemen patrolling the Champs-Élysées discovered a well-to-do bourgeois in a public toilet, engaged in what they described as “indecent exposure” with an 18-year-old labourer. The older man, it turned out, was the prominent Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny, a bastion of the reactionary right who railed against the government’s secular tendencies and advocated a society based on family, religion and a return to monarchy.

The press immediately called out Germiny’s double standards. Despite his protests – he claimed his adventure was merely “research” – he became a magnet for satire, his political opponents making much of his hypocrisy. The writer Gustav Flaubert described the scandal as a “comfort that encourages the will to live”. Germiny was sent to jail and went into exile on release.

That put in mind of certain high profile "family values" Republicans in America caught out in toilets or with male staff over the years. 

And on the straight sex scandal side, this recent one shows another Trump supporting Republican with low grade morals:

Mr. Hunter is accused of spending more than $200,000 [of campaign funds] on personal expenses. The indictment, which was released last year, detailed spending on lavish family vacations to Hawaii and foreign countries, large bar tabs, and grocery purchases for his family. 

Mr. Hunter was also accused of using campaign dollars to fund several extramarital affairs between 2010 and 2016, including one with a member of his staff. Prosecutors also alleged that the congressman, a Republican elected to represent a Southern California district in 2008, attempted to pass off some of those expenses as charitable contributions to veterans.

Until Monday, Mr. Hunter had remained steadfast that he was innocent of the charges, at one point calling it a “deep state” conspiracy. Despite the allegations, Mr. Hunter won re-election to his seat in November 2018.

On a Polish question

A couple of links for a friend, if he happens to visit, and put here as a result of a conversation on Saturday night:

Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over

And in The Atlantic:

The Truth About Poland's Role in the Holocaust

Remarkable phones

I've been very happy with my Moto phone, but am very tempted to buy an OPPO phone when I can next justify an upgrade.

I convinced my son to buy the Reno 2Z at JB Hi Fi yesterday.  As usual, I am blown away by the increasing sophistication of newer phones in the mid range market.   And this phone was on sale for (I think) $455 - when I had only been looking at it recently at its normal price of $599.  (In fact, looking online, this does not seem to be a nation wide catalogue sale price - do JB Hi Fi do local store sales too?)  

The specifications for the phone are remarkable - especially at under $500. 

6.5" AMOLED 1080 x 2340 screen
128GB storage
8GB RAM
16MP front facing camera
48MP/f1.7 + 8MP/f2.2 + 2MP/f2.4 + 2MP/f2.4 rear cameras
Bluetooth v4.2
4000mAh battery + VOOC 3.0
Hidden Fingerprint Unlock 3.0

And I really like the pop up selfie camera, which avoids the whole issue of a camera lens cut out at the edge of a screen.  (I presume people get used to that, but it still seems an annoying feature of new phones to me.)

Of course, I might be doing my part to support a worrying wannabe world dominating nation by going for a Chinese brand over a Korean or Taiwanese one - but they make such cool stuff.  

Someone thinks Boris is not doing so well...

A really vicious take on Boris Johnson's campaign performance from someone writing (where else?) in The Guardian:

...with Boris Johnson we are in the political wild west. A one-man amoral no-go zone, whose prime motivation is his own survival and who can only talk in staccato bursts of white noise – an incoherent stream of unconsciousness designed to run down the clock in any public appearance.

Quantity theory breaks down with Johnson. The longer the election campaign goes on, the more bloated and pneumatic he becomes. Yet the more space he inhabits, the more distant he seems. Day by day, there is less to him than meets the eye. He neither looks like a prime minister, nor sounds like one.

Johnson used to at least be able to give a passable imitation of being Boris Johnson. Now he can’t even manage that. The gags and the mannerisms that used to be his calling card, now just fall flat. A one-trick pony whose one trick everyone knows. The surface has been stripped bare to reveal a core of molten need. Someone who craves attention and fears he wouldn’t exist without it. Someone whose narcissism leaves him devoid of empathy. Incapable of either giving or receiving love.

I must say, from the other side of the world, it is very hard to see why he is as successful as he is in Britain.  It would be a bit akin to, I don't know, some eccentric like Bob Katter being taken seriously as Prime Minister material here.

A recent daily visitor

It's been cute finding a wallaby having a rest at the side or front of our suburban house each recent morning, but it does cause the dog to go berserk:

By the way - that side of the house is a mess, but it can't seen from the street, and we have no reason to go there either.  Still, yeah, it should be cleaned up.

Appeal...

Against my expectations, a New South Wales court has found negligence proved in the class action against the operators of Wivenhoe dam in the 2011 floods.

Of course, I don't know the exact detail of the evidence presented, but what always seemed fishy to me was the complexity of modelling, compiled from overseas,  to show what level of flooding would have happened following different release patterns.

From memory, the modelling didn't even show that earlier releases would have guaranteed no flooding, just reduced heights.  If so, it should not be as if every house flooded deserves compensation - it should only be those in which flooding reached above the level that would have happened under the best scenario.  But maybe the judgement incorporates that?

I will be curious to see whether the litigants end up happy with the final results, or indeed, whether there might be an appeal.  The problem is, with an election looming, State Labor probably does not want to appear to be the one holding up "justice", even if there is doubt about the weighting given to conflicting expert evidence.

Update:  I wrote (surprisingly extensively!) about the details of flood levels discussed at the inquiry into the dam operation back in 2012.   It should be clear from that why I was extremely dubious of a court win on the negligence case.

Fast food review

It's been a long time since I tried a Hungry Jacks burger, but I wanted to give them a go with their fake meat burger.  I thought I had read that the patty was made by Beyond Burger, but I see from Lifehacker that (in Australia at least) it's by an Australian start up.   Cool.

So I had it last night.

First - I think it's amusing marketing (which probably causes some irritation to conservatives) that they have called it the Rebel Whopper.   Yeah - us real rebels are now the one disdaining meat [at least once a week, anyway.:)]  It was also at the very top of the drive through order board, indicating either that there is high demand for it, or the company is trying to generate high demand.

Second:  I had the Rebel Whopper Cheese.   No need to go completely hair shirt just because I'm not eating meat on my burger.

Thirdly:  the taste - really good, actually.   Sure, if you think about the texture too much, it is softer than a beef burger, but the flavour is very similar.  There was a lot of some creamy sort of sauce, but I didn't mind that.

Fourth:  even the chips seemed nicer than what I remember from HJ's.  Pretty salty, but nice texture and less fatty than McD's french fries.

Fifth:  the price - $11.70 for the medium meal.  Compares very well with the golden arches.

I will buy one again.  I liked it.

So this is what has become of the White House press corps under Trump...

Wow:

"TruNews" has a person in the White House press corps.  Completely normal times, hey?

(It would be rather like Graeme Bird getting press corps credentials.   And no - Graeme, I can and will still delete your comments at will, even if I mention you in a post.)

Can actual academics talk about this?

Re the Bruce Pascoe/ "Dark Emu" fight between Andrew Bolt and Leftists attacking Bolt's attack:

*  Andrew Bolt can, obviously, be a terribly sloppy and careless (not to mention stupid) polemicist, and being (more or less) on his side on any issue should give anyone sensible pause for concern.

*  That said, those on the liberal Left are clearing responding reflexively against him in defence of a book that is seen as supportive of aboriginal rights;

*  I have tried finding detailed reviews of Pascoe's book from when it first came out, but they are few and far between, and as far as I can tell, nearly all by people who are  not experts in this field but are broadly sympathetic to the aim of improving cultural perceptions of the aboriginal inhabitants at the time of colonisation.  Even so, there does seem an admission in them that Pascoe's claim might not be "fully proved", or such like, while still praising the enterprise overall.   Certainly, this has been enough to enable the book to be endorsed by the soft Left within the education departments of most States. 

* I am suspicious that there are academics out there who would be very critical of some of Pascoe's interpretations of historical reports, but they are probably reluctant to "stir the pot" and find it far more convenient and politically correct within the circles they work to remain silent on the matter.

* My impression, which I almost hate to admit, is that the Bolt take on the matter is likely more correct than those who think the book a brilliant work of valid revisionism.   I think it is very likely that it is really a political book based on scant evidence that hasn't been discussed much before only because it is quite properly considered scant and unreliable evidence by real academics who are choosing to remain silent.

That's my current take on it all, anyway.

What "you can't believe the modelling" looks like

Tamino at Open Mind has done an updated bit of graphing, and while it looks a lot like what Gavin Schmidt does from time to time, it's worth publicising anyway:

I took the data for global average temperature from climate model simulations in the CMIP5 archive; those are computer models used in the latest IPCC report. I used only those models with the “RCP4.5” emissions scenario (a middle-of-the-road choice). I then aligned them all so their average value was zero during the 1961-1990 “baseline” period. Finally, I calculated yearly averages for each of the 108 models included.

That enables me to compute the “multi-model mean,” the average of all the models at each moment of time. Also at each moment of time, I computed the standard deviation of the model values and recorded the highest and lowest model values (which can be different models at different times).

Now I can graph the multi-model mean over time as a thick red line, together with a yellow outermost envelope showing the range from highest to lowest, a tan-colored middle range the limits of the 2-sigma range (about 95% of the models) and a pink band the 1-sigma range (about 2/3 of the models).

And I can also plot actual observed global temperature from NASA (yearly averages using the same 1961-1990 baseline) as a black line:

 Someone in comments notes that Ross McKitrick has done a similar thing, but it's not as good as it ignoring coverage bias with HadCRUT.  Yet, when you look at his graphing, it still indicates a relentless climb, just lower in the "pink" band.   Which makes his scepticism look kinda pointless...

In other obituary news

Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.

In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.

I thought Miller gave one of the funniest Parkinson interviews I ever saw, and his series The Body in Question was just terrific viewing.    I'm not sure that I saw another series referred to in his Guardian obituary - Madness - if I did it obviously did not leave the same memory traces as did his first series.

In any event, a very clever and witty man.

Hey, he brought it up first

When I heard of Clive James' death, and heard his obituary on the ABC, I did think about his late-life climate change scepticism, and thought it best not to mention it today in light of the pleasure he brought to lots of people.

BUT:   look who did bring it up on Twitter in his very first comment about him:

I would have thought that Ridley might have realised that claiming James as a part of the climate change disbelief club hardly does more than illustrate what is so, so, obvious:   it's an old (mostly white, mostly male) persons' game, held mainly by those with no actual science education who think they can see a conspiracy that those damn young ones who keep getting on their lawn cannot.

But no, Ridley wasn't bright enough to stop his bank from crashing, so it was too much to imagine he might have realised this too.  

Update:  look who else is running the line "He was one of ours!  A poet, novelist and former media star who came out as a climate sceptic at the age of 77 when he had terminal cancer was one of ours!  What a sad day."

First world consumer complaint

I've put up with this enough:  the ACCC should take immediate action to direct any maker of frozen, crumbed fish pieces (and frozen chips) to be more realistic in their time estimates for when the product will be ready (when oven cooked) to a nice, crispy, finish.

I have come to the conclusion that the times on these products, regardless of manufacturer, are all at least 50% underestimated, if not more.  Have you ever got your oven baked frozen chips to a nice, non-soft finish in the 20 or 25 minutes these companies claim?   And yes - I preheat the oven to 200 degrees, and turn the chips or fish over half way through, taking the tray out to do so in order to keep the oven as hot as possible.   The oven seems to work within the margin of error you might expect from those given in cookbook recipes, but for frozen fish and chips - I reckon it is a clear case of misrepresentation. 

Alan Fels still gets his noggin on TV a lot.  We need him back to take on this important issue.

Sleep paralysis at home and abroad

I don't think I have mentioned this before - my teenage daughter has, over the last year or so, began to experience episodes of sleep paralysis.   All the classic stuff:  waking up and unable to move, and a dark entity moving towards her bed.  Tries to call out but can't.  She recognises that it most likely would happen when very tired before bed, and sleeping on her back instead of her side.  She said that in successive events, the dark entity was getting closer and closer to her bed. 

Fortunately, I think I had told her about this before she had her first episode.  (Seems to me it's probably a good idea to warn all children that this is a not so rare occurrence that they might experience, and they should not read too much into it.)   The point is, my daughter finds the experiences disturbing, but also understood what was going on from the first time.  (I think she realises what it is during the event, even though she can't stop it.)

Anyway, I'm talking about this now for two reasons:  there is an article at NPR summarising the phenomena, and a couple of weeks ago I was reading a Reddit thread about it, where someone commented that they thought it likely that this was the likely explanation for widespread belief in demons, witches and/or malevolent spirits across all old societies.

Oddly enough, that latter thought had not really occurred to me before - it may be a key element in the widespread belief in a supernatural realm generally.  

Here is some interesting information along those lines from the NPR article:

About 75% of the time, those experiencing sleep paralysis will hallucinate. "Most of the time, we'll hear that it's something frightening," Kushida says. "But there have been instances where a person will report that one of their loved ones was there."

In fact, the hallucinations typical of sleep paralysis are frequently influenced by a person's culture and described in terms of "paranormal activity." There are descriptions from Newfoundland of an "Old Hag," or witch sitting on the person's body. In Japanese folklore, the same phenomenon is called kanashibari, which means "bound in metal." Some researchers think sleep paralysis is to blame for reports of alien abductions.

This prevalence across cultures makes sense in light of Pennsylvania researchers' systematic review of scientific studies across a 50-year period. The review estimates that 8% of the general population has one episode of sleep paralysis in the course of their lifetime. The study found that this number is variable within populations. For example, more than 30% of psychiatric patients had an episode of sleep paralysis, and the disorder is most common in adolescents.

This is not to say that I don't believe in supernatural events at all - but it does seem a very plausible argument that people believe in devils and demons in particular because of this natural, medical phenomena. 

The most miserable country

I saw some of the documentary series on SBS last night "Russia to Iran: Across the Wild Frontier" and it was pretty interesting.

The thing that always strikes me about shows which travel through the lesser known parts of Russia is how miserable the country and its inhabitants routinely seem.   Sure, they drink and sing a lot, but the average Russian on the street always seems to look tense and miserable.  Not to mention the extreme level of police and secret service scrutiny that they still have to put up with. 

Last night, there was a large, largely abandoned, former mining town of the Soviet Union, set in a very spectacular looking valley.  There was an old guy who was paid to caretake something - it wasn't entirely clear what.  It was like meeting a character in a dystopian computer game.   Even his dog looked depressed.

I find it perversely interesting - how miserable a country can be.

I agree with the sentiment

b-boy is wrong to suggest that no one tweets about these Right wing armed "we will fight socialism on the streets" conspiracy freaks;  but he's right that it makes the hyperventilating by Right winger  about things like colleges students being rude to conservative speakers on campus and trying to shout over them look like trivia.

Food and racism

So I see that blanket dismissal of Indian and Chinese food as generically bad now causes cries of "racism".  

Seems a tad over the top, both the opinion and the most accusatory responses.  While the criticism of what foreigners eat can be closely aligned with racism,  it's not much fun if you can't go over the top in your dismissal of an entire cuisine once in a while.

I get into trouble routinely by dismissing Greek food with some acquaintances who have invited me to a local restaurant that they say is good.

I respond with:  it's the least interesting national food that I know of, although more than likely Russian cooking is even worse.  It's just that Russian restaurants don't really exist here, and so I can't compare.

There is nothing sophisticated about the seemingly very limited range of recipes that come out of Greece, and while it is certainly edible, it's also so uniform that all Greek restaurants or cafes seem to me to be virtually interchangeable in their bland-ish quality.   I may have mentioned before, I was pleased to hear Rick Stein say, when he did a series through that country, that his friends back in England said they thought it was a dull food destination.  He tried his best to talk it up, but the recipes he cooked or watched being cooked all looked just like pretty standard, pretty basic, Greek food to me.  And their desserts - just sweetness overload.

So there...

At least they're not very good at it?

Not sure whether I agree entirely with this "what's the big deal?" take on the story of an (alleged) direct attempt by China to have a government spy in Parliament:

but I at least take some comfort in the fact (assuming its true), they don't seem to be real good at  keeping the process a secret.   If your target runs to ASIO and then ends up dead, you haven't done it right.

And for all those who are going to say "of course the sell-out Left isn't as upset about this as they should be" (hi Jason) - yeah, I do find it ironic that they were not upset at all with the blatant, bad faith spying on East Timor by Australia.  (Someone notes that in Bruce Haigh's tweet thread, too.) 

Another failure for libertarian/small government economists

Along with their failed predictions of high inflation due to government spending to help deal with recession, economists on the American Right (and at Catallaxy) have warned about minimum wage increases being a disaster for employment.

Axios says (in a pretty detailed post for that site) that it hasn't happened:

Eighteen states rang in 2019 with minimum wage increases — some that will ultimately rise as high as $15 an hour — and so far, opponents' dire predictions of job losses have not come true. 

What it means: The data paint a clear picture: Higher minimum wage requirements haven't reduced hiring in low-wage industries or overall.

Tuesday philosophy

*   You know it's my blog keeping contract that I have to diss on Nietzsche at least once every 6 months?   Well, here's a good one, from Philosophy Now;  a review of a book very aligned with my scepticism of modern sympathetic revisionism of him: Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, & the Return of the Far Right.

Here's the first part:

Searching for ‘Nietzsche’ on YouTube will summon up a slick, insightful clip that has been viewed more than three million times. That’s impressive for a nineteenth century philosopher: Mill is lucky to reach six figures. As well as demonstrating his popularity, the clip tells you how Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is perceived, closing with praise for “our endearing, fascinating, often lovable” guide.

This is precisely the sort of fawning, soft-pedalling whitewash that Ronald Beiner wants to torpedo. The central message of Dangerous Minds is that there is no reading of Nietzsche that can make him morally acceptable to the political centre or left. Any interpretation that portrays him so is wishful, immature, and dangerous.

I agree with Beiner, and I also think that this is the most urgent discussion we could have about Nietzsche. We live at a time when the far right, sometimes inspired by Nietzsche, is resurgent; where he is revered by influential commentators such as Jordan Peterson; and where populist authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte have in a Nietzschean manner downplayed the importance of rules and truth in favour of heroic visions of strength and destiny. As for Trump, his post-truth, ‘alternative fact’ reality is such a spooky echo of Nietzsche’s idea that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ that it prompted headlines asking whether the German could be blamed for Trump’s rise or whether he merely predicted it. [A question asked by this magazine too, in Issue 122, Ed.]

Beiner cannot get over how Nietzsche, so explicit in his attacks on liberalism and egalitarianism, has become such an influential philosopher to the left. It is not as if Nietzsche tried to conceal his dismissive views about liberal morality or about the general populace. He shouts them from the rooftops. To set up the argument against leftish interpretations of Nietzsche, Beiner simply has to repeat some of Nietzsche’s most repugnant expressions: here is Nietzsche advocating slavery; there an incitement to genocide; and everywhere the contemptuous repudiation of equal human dignity.

Some Nietzsche scholars excuse these extreme outbursts by reading them as metaphorical, rhetorical, or comical, rather than literal, action-guiding imperatives. Although Nietzsche does often leave himself open to interpretation, I can’t see a shred of evidence that Nietzsche was anything but deadly serious about these issues.

There are two key parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are unambiguous: he finds egalitarianism disgustingly decadent, and he wants humanity to grow out of the idea of universal morality. Each individual must decide their own moral code. The concepts of good and evil are to be scrapped.

Go read the rest of the review - seems a pretty good and succinct summary of the problems with Nietzche's ideas.

*  And here's a take on John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice I had to read in university (and I thought it was pretty good.)    It's a review of a book on Rawls, looking at his work from the perspective of the old Catholic fight between Augustinian grace and the Pelagian views that lost out. 

First, a bit of history of Rawls, about whom I knew little, and the key part of one author's argument:

Nelson opens his book by placing Rawls’s recently discovered Princeton University senior thesis, written in 1942, in the long Augustinian tradition of Christianity that denied that sinful humans could save themselves. For Augustine and his followers, Pelagianism—named after a late-antique theologian who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church—overstated the extent to which human beings can earn their salvation. Such a belief verged on an ideology of self-redemption of individual sinners or of humanity itself that (as Rawls put it at age twenty) “rendered the Cross of Christ to no effect.” For Rawls, at the time a committed Christian who planned a career in the Episcopal priesthood before World War II service in the Pacific caused him to lose his faith, it followed that “no man can claim good deeds as his own.” To contend otherwise inflated human capacity and courted sacrilegious idolatry of humanity itself.

Nelson contends that this Augustinian response to Pelagianism lurked in Rawls’s defense of fair distributional justice long after he had moved on to secular philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls remarked that “no one deserves” their social ascendancy and the natural gifts—intelligence or industriousness—with which they achieved it. The fact that one person was endowed with them and another not was “morally arbitrary.” A theory of justice aiming at fairness rather than fortune would reject any sense that people deserved their class position. Some redistribution from the rich to the rest was therefore just.

Then soon follows an argument that I am not sure is convincing:

“Liberalism,” writes Nelson, “began as a theodicy.” By this he means that for the major liberal thinkers in the early-modern period, the attempt to justify the ways of God to men almost always included the belief that God is unfailingly good. It is their own autonomy that leads humans, if they choose not to conform to God’s plan, to introduce evil into the world on their own. What made for the correlation of Pelagianism with liberalism is that the theological defense of human freedom—including freedom to err—implied that individuals should be allowed politically to seek perfection on their own, without the interference of states or sects. Liberalism was born out of the insistence that, since agents were free enough to save themselves, they had to be left alone enough to have a chance to do it.

Observing that early liberals embraced the very theology that Rawls rejected, Nelson thinks Rawls’s followers are left with a big problem. Liberalism originated in the Pelagian heresy that refuses to saddle human beings with original sin, or to make them utterly dependent on the divine, but instead grants them autonomy, dignity, and (at least potential) self-made perfection. How, then, can Rawls and his followers reject Pelagianism without also rejecting liberalism?

Nelson’s answer: they can’t. Either you adopt the Augustinian line that, while no one earns their gifts and talents, any seemingly unfair distribution is part of God’s mysterious design, whose meaning is to be revealed only at the end of time; or you adopt the Pelagian view that you do earn them—that greater wealth really might reflect greater merit. You can’t have it both ways, as Rawls and his followers want.

I am feeling pretty sure there is some muddled thinking here, and I think it is in seeing too much influence of Augustinian thought on Rawl's post faith philosophising.  Surely Pelagianism leaves open that humans can engage in Rawls's thought experiment to come with a fairer way to view justice;  Augustinian thought, with its sense of human salvation being (to a degree, at least) outside of human control can leave too great a sense of helplessness to change social justice. 

In any case, kinda interesting.

The early bird considered

What annoys me most is that it is so loud for the first hour, and then it stops to acceptable daytime levels.  In Brisbane at this time of year, it means being woken up, often, at between 4.30 and 5 am.

So, why do they do it?  See this - Why do birds sing in the morning?

But why choose the hours around sunrise to sing? There are a number of theories, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

One idea is that in the early morning, light levels are too dim for birds to do much foraging. Since light levels don't affect social interactions as much, it's a great opportunity to sing, instead.

Another idea is that early morning singing signals to other birds about the strength and vitality of the singer. Singing is an essential part of bird life, but it's costly in terms of time and energy. Singing loud and proud first thing in the morning tells everyone within hearing distance that you were strong and healthy enough to survive the night. This is attractive to potential mates, and lets your competitors know you're still around and in charge of your territory.

For many years, scientists theorized that the atmospheric conditions in the early morning — typically cooler and drier than later in the day — might allow birdsong to travel further through the air. However, recent research shows this isn't the case. Birdsong travels just as far, if not farther, at noon as at dawn.

A somewhat negative review

So, The Guardian gives UK comedian Jack Whitehall a rather bad review that starts:

It’s not an auspicious start to Jack Whitehall’s show when he opens with a crude mime about hard, soft and “thumbing it in” Brexit. Of course, no one’s here for political insight: notwithstanding that he has always come across as the Conservative party in standup form, the state of the world has never been Whitehall’s concern. But even by his own flimsy standards, Stood Up is thin gruel from the 31-year-old, with one flouncing routine after another about diarrhoea, wanking, farting and photographs of his inflamed anus.

Two hours of exposure to that photograph could scarcely be more dispiriting than Whitehall’s touring set, which combines puerility, hack joke-writing and rampant inauthenticity in equal measure. The latter doesn’t concern his poshness, that is as complacently upfront a feature as ever.

And ends:

No 3D personality arises from these by-numbers jokes, nor any sense of an interest in people or the world. Environmentalism is lightly mocked; there’s a chirpy Auschwitz punchline and a routine about how to speak to people with a lazy eye. And then there’s all those jokes about pooing in the swimming pool, pooing at Chernobyl, farting in front of his ex, farting in a urinal. That Whitehall’s show is full of crap becomes, by the end, less matter of opinion than statement of irrefutable fact.

Even allowing for the reviewer obviously having a political objection to Whitehall, it does appear that it may be just another case of a comedian I can find OK in some contexts, but put them on stage in stand up, and I don't like much at all.

(I see that The Telegraph reviewer gave the same show 4/5 stars -  but I can't read the whole thing.)

As for his Netflix series Travels with My Father - even my son has lost interest with the latest series (set in America), and he has a higher tolerance for crude humour than me.    The show quickly developed far too many scripted bits pretending to be real.

Stiglitz complains - again - about GDP as a metric

In The Guardian:

In Europe, the impact of 2008 was more severe, especially in countries most affected by the euro crisis. But even there, apart from high unemployment numbers, standard metrics do not fully reflect the adverse impacts of the austerity measures, either the magnitude of people’s suffering or the impacts on long-term standards of living.

Nor do our standard GDP measures provide us with the guidance we need to address the inequality crisis. So what if GDP goes up, if most citizens are worse off? In the first three years of the so-called recovery from the financial crisis, about 91% of the gains went to the top 1%. No wonder that many people doubted the claims of politicians who were then saying the economy was well on the way to a robust recovery.

For a long time I have been concerned with this problem – the gap between what our metrics show and what they need to show. During the Clinton administration, when I served as a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, I grew increasingly worried about how our main economic measures failed to take into account environmental degradation and resource depletion. If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.

These concerns have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis.

Waiting for me to say the words "dog park?"

Go for the history, if nothing else

I ended up going to see the stage version of Chicago at QPAC last night.  I had declined the original invitation of my wife when she bought tickets, as the plan was she would go with my daughter, who pulled out due to, well, generic teenage malaise and/or a recent period of mother/teen daughter tension, so I ended up there instead.

It was...interesting.   Somehow, I had managed to avoid knowing anything about this show apart from the vague understanding that it was something to do with a woman in jail for murder in the jazz era.  (Obviously, this means I didn't see the movie version.)   I didn't realise that it was entirely about women in jail for murder.

Which struck me as an odd thing to write a musical around.  So I was interested to read after the show how this came to be, and Wikipedia, as usual, has a handy summary:

The musical Chicago is based on a play of the same name by reporter and playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was assigned to cover the 1924 trials of accused murderers Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner for the Chicago Tribune. In the early 1920s, Chicago's press and public became riveted by the subject of homicides committed by women. Several high-profile cases arose, which generally involved women killing their lovers or husbands. These cases were tried against a backdrop of changing views of women in the Jazz age, and a long string of acquittals by Cook County juries of female murderers (jurors at the time were all male, and convicted murderers generally faced death by hanging). A lore arose that, in Chicago, feminine or attractive women could not be convicted. The Chicago Tribune generally favoured the prosecution's case, while still presenting the details of these women's lives. Its rivals at the Hearst papers were more pro-defendant, and employed what were derisively called "sob-sisters" – women reporters who focused on the plight, attractiveness, redemption, or grace of the female defendants. Regardless of stance, the press covered several of these women as celebrities.^[3]
 
Annan, the model for the character of Roxie Hart, was 23 when she was accused of the April 3, 1924,^[4] murder of Harry Kalstedt, who served as the basis for the Fred Casely character. The Tribune reported that Annan played the foxtrot record "Hula Lou" over and over for two hours before calling her husband to say she killed a man who "tried to make love to her". Her husband Albert Annan inspired the character, Amos Hart. Albert was an auto mechanic who bankrupted himself to defend his wife, only for her to publicly dump him the day after she was acquitted. Velma Kelly is based on Gaertner, who was a cabaret singer, and society divorcée. The body of Walter Law was discovered slumped over the steering wheel of Gaertner's abandoned car on March 12, 1924. Two police officers testified that they had seen a woman getting into the car and shortly thereafter heard gunshots. A bottle of gin and an automatic pistol were found on the floor of the car. Lawyers William Scott Stewart and W. W. O'Brien were models for a composite character in Chicago, Billy Flynn. Just days apart, separate juries acquitted both women.^[5]
 
Watkins' sensational columns documenting these trials proved so popular that she wrote a play based on them. The show received both good box-office sales and newspaper notices and was mounted on Broadway in 1926, running 172 performances. Cecil B. DeMille produced a silent film version, Chicago (1927), starring former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart. It was later remade as Roxie Hart (1942) starring Ginger Rogers, but in this version, Roxie was accused of murder without having really committed it.

In the 1960s, Gwen Verdon read the play and asked her husband, Bob Fosse, about the possibility of creating a musical adaptation. Fosse approached playwright Watkins numerous times to buy the rights, but she repeatedly declined; by this point she may have regretted that Annan and Gaertner had been allowed to walk free, and that her treatment of them should not be glamorized.^[4] Nonetheless, upon her death in 1969, her estate sold the rights to producer Richard Fryer, Verdon, and Fosse.^[4] John Kander and Fred Ebb began work on the musical score, modeling each number on a traditional vaudeville number or a vaudeville performer. This format made explicit the show's comparison between "justice", "show-business", and contemporary society. Ebb and Fosse penned the book of the musical, and Fosse also directed and choreographed.

So there you go - as with Anything Goes, and its strange storyline of a female evangelist who was big in 1920's America but of whom I had never heard before, I learnt some interesting social history by having seen a stage musical.

What did I think of the show, apart from its educational value?   It's not bad, and I think the three female leads in particular were very good.   (It's quite a demanding show, physically, for the two main leads.)

But it does suffer worse than your average musical from the second act problem - wherein most shows struggle to match the high at which the first act usually ends.  In particular, the dance and musical ending of this show, after the trial, feels quite underwhelming.   My wife said that the movie ended differently, and that sounds like a good idea.

My other main reservation about the show is that I'm not sure if every production has to (contractly?) look as if it was still choreographed and costumed to be a 70's Bob Fosse production clone, but this version certainly does.  And, well, I have always thought this style looked cheesy:

That photo is from a review of a 2018 production in American, but the styles in last night's show were very, very similar.  Not sure it makes sense in any respect other than wanting to make 70's era homo and hetero sleeze styles look nostalgic.

Anyway, I also got to scope out a possible second balcony seat for next year's Ring Cycle - which I still haven't booked for myself.   Soon, soon. 

Quick casting call

If ever they are going to make a movie about the Trump impeachment, surely they would have to go with Laurie Metcalf to play Fiona Hill:

The regretable rise of conspiracy belief in the GOP noted by current prime conspiracy monger in the GOP

The problem with pretending something, as I have noted before, is that if you do it long enough, you start to believe it.   Hence it seems to me quite possible at least some portion of the American Right have gaslight themselves into genuinely believing conspiracies that they initially only pretended to believe to suck up to Trump.

It is such a disturbing thing to watch.