Down the road

I recently suggested that Pope Francis, if driven out of Rome as an Antipope , should take his seat of power down to Copacabana.   (An aging Barry Manilow can write the music for his arrival.)  

But now I see that there is perhaps reason to move a bit further down the road:  to Abrico.   A nudist Antipope on the beach at a rave - that's the sort of speculation you are only likely to read on this blog....

Niki and Andrew sitting in a tree...

Niki Savva,  one of the slightly less annoying conservative commentators, heaps praise on Andrew Robb in The Australian today.   In real life, he must present as something different than he did on Kitchen Cabinet:

Robb, personable and good humoured, has been on 22 overseas visits in the portfolio (13 to Japan, South Korea or China) and is a firm believer in personal contact.

Personable and good humoured?   Pity his face never seems to match his alleged temperament.

Surely the public realises that free trade agreements aren't forged in one year by one new Minister?  One would hope that they appreciate Labor's lead up work.  Unless of course there are bad aspects to the agreements, then the Coalition deserves all the blame.  (Heh)

Why do they still exist?

I can sort of see some the reasoning behind the world revolutionary zeal behind anarchism when it started a couple of centuries ago - I mean, there was an awful lot wrong with an awful lot about how the world was operating at the time, and hey, any dramatic change may have seemed like a probable improvement.

But come any G20 meeting, and we get the gormless anarchist "movement" back in the news:

Meanwhile, police have said they are not aware of a group of activists on social media calling on lone wolves to infiltrate G20 protest groups to 'fight and destroy governments'.

Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart has told The Courier-Mail that police are aware of a number of anarchist organisations active on social media.

I mean, seriously guys and girls, have a look at the most anarchic countries around the world at the moment.  Permanent revolution still looks like a good idea, does it? 

Why not put your signs down and your silly masks and grow up by getting involved with genuine political parties?  

Smart drug not so smart

'Smart' drugs won't make smart people smarter

Apparently, there's a drug around called Modafinil (used for promoting wakefulness) which students think will help them with exams.  But research by a Dr Ahmed Mohamed at the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (?!) begs to differ.

Unfortunately, given the photo of the shirt the good doctor is wearing, I'm not entirely sure I should trust him.  It would put me off performing well in a laboratory setting.

Fessing up

It's an interesting story, this one about the Mormon leaders coming clean about Joseph Smith having up to 40 wives.   Still, he only did it reluctantly, we are re-assured:

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives.

The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

Bit hard to see why he thought God wanted him to take his pal's wives too.   But all's fair when you've got a hotline to the Almighty, I guess.

I see that even modern Mormon women have something to worry about:  being given a wife number on entering Heaven:

There remains one way in which polygamy is still a part of Mormon belief: The church teaches that a man who was “sealed” in marriage to his wife in a temple ritual, then loses his wife to death or divorce, can be sealed to a second wife and would be married to both wives in the afterlife. However, women who have been divorced or widowed cannot be sealed to more than one man.

Kristine Haglund, the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, said that while she found the church’s new transparency “really hopeful,” she and other women she had talked with were disturbed that the essays do not address the painful teaching about polygamy in eternity.

“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Ms. Haglund said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t be practiced in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are really troubled by it.”

Update:    William Salatan says the Mormons will have a revelation about "accepting homosexuality" eventually.  

Live coverage excitement

OK, I know it must be hard to have someone talking to camera for the whole 6 or 7 hours or something that it going to take the Rosetta lander to descend to the comet, but as I write this, it is on its way down and this is the exciting scene (with no audio) from the ESA live feed:

Keane on The Australian

I like the opening description of The Australian in Bernard Keane's column today:

The Australian’s smear campaign against the Prime Minister hasn’t had a lot of new material lately. Having devoted months and acres of newsprint to investigating the minutiae of what Julia Gillard did in the 1990s and not turned up a single actual claim of wrongdoing, the brains trust at Holt St must be ruing that after such a big investment of resources in smearing her, all they got for their troubles was a few points’ fall in her approval rating.

Still, The Oz didn’t get where it is today — a dying paper for angry old conservative men — without a willingness to flog a dead horse. So today, it carried over 1000 words on the AWU matter about how there’s “a prima facie case that she could have been charged”, by one Terry O’Connor.

Big Piketty vindication for the US?

An astonishing graph at The Economist, in an important article about a new study suggesting Piketty was certainly right about the US, at least:



Gee, that "trickle down" idea from the 1980's has worked out a treat.

Go ahead and shrug your shoulders, libertarians.

Update:  from the blog post at the LSE by Saez and Zucman on their work:

The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of families. Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before. For a time, rising indebtedness was compensated by the increase in the market value of the assets of middle-class families. The average wealth of bottom 90 percent of families jumped during the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But it then collapsed during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  (See Figure 2.) Since then, there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012—the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1 percent more than tripled between 1980 and 2012.

How can we explain the growing disparity in American wealth? The answer is that the combination of higher income inequality alongside a growing disparity in the ability to save for most Americans is fuelling the explosion in wealth inequality. For the bottom 90 percent of families, real wage gains (after factoring in inflation) were very limited over the past three decades, but for the top 1 percent real wages grew fast. In addition, the saving rate of middle class and lower class families collapsed over the same period while it remained substantial at the top. Today, the top 1 percent families save about 35 percent of their income, while bottom 90 percent families save about zero.

If income inequality stays high and if the saving rate of the bottom 90 percent of families remains low then wealth disparity will keep increasing. Ten or twenty years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.

What should be done to avoid this dystopian future? We need policies that reduce the concentration of wealth, prevent the transformation of self-made wealth into inherited fortunes, and encourage savings among the middle class. First, current preferential tax rates on capital income compared to wage income are hard to defend in light of the rise of wealth inequality and the very high savings rate of the wealthy. Second, estate taxation is the most direct tool to prevent self-made fortunes from becoming inherited wealth—the least justifiable form of inequality in the American meritocratic ideal. Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression. The same proven tools are needed again today.

 Update 2:   ah, I see it was Saez & Zucman who Cato and the WSJ were attacking mid year about their figures for calculating wealth.  This working paper release presumably gives the details of what was in the powerpoint presentation Piketty was referring people to. 

A libertarian makeover

Well, I used to assume on appearance alone that Julie Novak of the IPA was a lesbian (come on, I surely wasn't alone); and maybe she is, I'm not sure, but it turns out that she is also a former he.  Didn't see that coming.

So this is the second transgender libertarian-ish economist that we know of - Diedre McCloskey being the other.  I think it is well known that men who go transgender often chose quite macho careers - the military, mountain climbers, engineering - the theory being that it is an over reaction in compensation to their inner desire to be feminine.   As I think it would be fair to say that aggressively free market, libertarian ideas are the most "macho" form of economics there is (and God knows, its followers at Catallaxy routinely question the masculinity of males who they perceive as being of the Left), I think we can likely expect most transgender economists to come from that side of the fence.   Davidson does seem to really like kilts;  I'm now suspecting it's part of the softening up process for an announcement...

In any event, it changes nothing about my attitude towards Novak's work and her opinions:  they're routinely doctrinaire, predictable, full of fetishistic adoration of free markets and complete disdain of government. Best ignored, as a male or female.

Update:  I see McCloskey was saying much the same in 1999:

''There is this romantic idea among men that they are free agents in the marketplace, without any ties except to their individual selves,'' Ms. McCloskey said. ''While men think of themselves in metaphors of competition, there is an assumption among women that we are together, helping each other survive.'' She added: ''I was an aggressive, assertive male, and I felt comfortable. Now I am ashamed because that was so very macho.''

All Putin-ed out

Gee, I bet Abbott regrets the "shirtfront" line, given the way it has absolutely dominated everything in the media about the meeting.  If someone doesn't come out of it with a bloody nose, it'll feel like such an anti climate.

Oh no - Bourne again?

Look, Matt Damon seems a nice enough guy on TV chat shows and what not, but I can't say that I have ever been completely convinced that he is that good an actor, and I don't care much for the type of material he seems to chose.

It was for that reason that I never went out of my way to see any of the Bourne movies, but they were on free to air TV here recently, and my original decision was retrospectively justified.  Sadly, Bourne is set to return, with Damon and (for me) the largely unwatchable Greengrass.

Honestly, how were these movies so popular?  Let's go through some that I saw:

Bourne Identity:   Geez, just how much amnesia do you have to suffer to go into a Swiss bank, find your security box with a hoard of cash, a half dozen fake passports (and a gun?  I forget) and still not realise what kind of work you must be in?   He goes back to the girl and asks "what sort of man has all this stuff?", or something like that.   The audience, having seen spy movies over the last 60 years, has a good idea; it seems to be pushing things to suggest that our hero cannot come to a similar conclusion.

What's more, he then goes back to the Paris apartment one of his identities lived in (and, oh yeah, everyone who drives into Paris ends up parking in the morning on the embankment over the Seine with Notre Dame in the background) and makes a phone call from there.   Leading, of course, to killers turning up pronto.   Again, just how dumb does Bourne have to be?

Pushing credibility just too far, if you ask me, even allowing for its genre.  I was underwhelmed.

Bourne Supremacy:   I remember David Stratton, I think, saying that he found Paul Greengrass' intense use of "shaky cam" throughout this film made him (literally) sick, and I simply couldn't watch much of it on a big screen TV for the same reason.   Honestly, my TV has never made me feel queasy before.

 And the rapid fire editing that is part of Greengrass' style - man, I thought Quantum of Solace was the height of that*, but no, this should be like a masterclass in how not to attempt to create fake excitement by not letting the audience see anything for more than 1 to 1.5 seconds, tops.  It's a really awful technique.  The movie is literally unwatchable.

OK, missed Bourne Ultimatum.

Bourne Legacy:   a sort of spinoff/reboot with a different actor.  Strangely, he's also one who I would not associate with muscle action heroics.   Look, I wasn't watching as closely as I could, and maybe that's why I never really understood what was going on with the blue pills and why our hero was suddenly a rogue who had to be killed.   Wolves, drones, guns and lots and lots and lots of chasing through the streets of Manila.   As I have never seen much of Manila before, I did watch that sequence closely, and given that it went on for a good 25 minutes or so, I now feel I have seen much more of that city than I ever really needed to see.

Maybe the next in this off shoot (is there going to be one?) will make me understand what was going on.

*  (I know he didn't direct it - but did they share the same editor?)

A musical interlude

I saw this on Rage on the weekend, and immediately liked its cute, quirky but slightly creepy vibe.  It's been around since 2009, I see:

Bursting through the advanced age reliability threshold

An aging scientist makes what I think a very unlikely prediction:

SEX will be entirely recreational by 2050, with all reproduction achieved in the laboratory, the inventor of the contraceptive Pill has predicted.
Us chemist Carl Djerassi says sex and reproduction will soon be separated in the Western world and that men and women will freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised. By mid-century, most couples will have IVF through choice, not necessity, he believes.
“The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be _fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,” he told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph.

His age:  91.

Sorry, but this bears all the hallmarks of a person who has exceeded the age related unreliability threshold.  Basically, the great majority of people, even when formerly sensible in their field of expertise, become an unreliable source of opinion by about the age of 80.   Maybe 85, max...

Seems sound advice

For a Lasting Marriage, Marry Someone Your Own Age - The Atlantic

Seriously?

Cuts to jobless benefits will boost economic growth, Australia tells G20: The Australian government has cited controversial cuts to unemployment benefits as one of the key structural reforms that will increase economic activity by 2 per cent, according to a draft of its growth strategy to be submitted to the G20 leaders' summit.

The reference to the jobless reforms – which include a measure preventing unemployed people under 30 from accessing welfare payments for up to six months – comes even though the changes have been blocked in the Senate.

The objective of boosting economic growth by 2 per cent "above what is currently expected" during the next five years is the main goal of the G20 meeting, to be held in Brisbane at the weekend.

Andrew Leigh is quoted further down in the article:

However, Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said cuts to
welfare payments such as   the unemployment benefit, family tax
benefits and the pension would act to suppress economic growth.

"If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor,
it has an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything
they've got," he said.

"That will detract from economic growth."

When even Judith Sloan was suggesting a few years ago that there was a good case for increasing unemployment benefits (even though I think she doesn't like to repeat this moment of Lefty madness), I think I know which side of the argument has more credibility.   

Sad news

Wayne Goss, former Queensland premier, dies at 63 | Australia news | theguardian.com

I think Wayne Goss is widely regarded as an unworthy victim of the weird local politics of Queensland, having lost the premiership prematurely for no good reason at all.  Even my late, permanently rusted on Coalition supporting mother never bore him ill will, as I recall.  The only downside that I know of is that he did help bring on the rise of Kevin Rudd in politics.   No one's perfect...

Interstellar noted by Mr Soon

I'm never sure lately if some tweets by Jason Soon are out to deliberately goad me, even though I trust he knows that some of my posts are written knowing they will annoy him.   (Yes, my readership is so small, I can write posts with one person in mind!)

This latest one, on his reaction to Interstellar, seems designed to annoy:

Saw Interstellar on Sun – unapologetic celebration of exploration & progress, vs the ‘caretaker’ spirit of the new Green religion.

"New Green religion" - the line beloved of climate change denying, Andrew Bolt readers and Catallaxy??  Bah, humbug.

I note that one of the more improbable things that Phil Plait (I think) found about the movie was that NASA survives as some secret underground organisation capable of mounting interstellar exploration while the world crumbles around it in environmental catastrophe.

I would have thought that the long term interest in having a global economy strong enough to fund humanity eventually moving off planet actually points to serious action now to limit the potential effects of global warming by urgently reducing CO2.  This would help reduce the chance of environmental catastrophe that, unlike in Hollywood, I would not be surprised may prove dire enough economically to delay human expansion indefinitely.

But of course, I haven't seen the movie....

Update:   family friendly animation wins at the box office.  (And Nolan's movie opens worse than Inception.)  

Taking the Right personally

I like watching Kitchen Cabinet for the opportunity it gives to view politicians in what is meant to be a more relaxed atmosphere, talking to the very congenial Annabel Crabbe over a meal.

I know that people will say that it is simply a part of my complaint that the Right side of politics has been badly damaged here due to the poisonous influence to the ideologically motivated side of the American Right that has lost interest in both evidence based science and economics, but I have to say, I now find that nearly all Coalition politicians compare very poorly to Labor ones, even at a personality level.

Coalition politicians nearly always come across as being nervous ninnies.  Tony Abbott and his "ha...ha...ha;"  Christopher Pyne and his career mother Amanda Vanstone didn't impress me (even though Vanstone is from the moderate wing of the spectrum); and while Andrew Robb might be admired for his gumption despite suffering long term depression, he does appear to now be a permanently glum robot incapable of pleasure (perhaps?) because of medication, and I was dismayed to be reminded that it was a man suffering long term mental illness who roused himself out of his sick bed to convince his fellow politicians to dump support for an ETS, leading to the current hopeless Prime Minister we endure.   I don't remember much about Joe Hockey's episode, except that he was another male politician who has an almost child like inability to cook anything other than a steak.  Yet he has so comprehensively stuffed up the Budget, and come out as an obsessive about wind power to the extent that a wind mill on the horizon 15 km away upsets him, he's turned out to be a pretty comprehensive embarrassment to the party.

There are exceptions, I suppose:  I certainly don't consider Barnaby Joyce to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can see why people like him anyway.   Nigel Scullion from the Northern Territory also has a certain pleasant air of frankness about him.

But in comparison, I usually find myself pleasantly surprised by the relaxed air of intelligence of your average Labor politician on the show.

I know Bill Shorten was just a bit too lovely dovey on screen with his wife for comfort, but I still felt better about him after the show than before.  (I have always felt relatively neutral towards him.  I think it was painful watching him suffer by the way he was caught up in the Rudd/Gillard battles.)   I am strongly against lesbian couples using some donor semen to make their own baby, but again, after watching Penny Wong I found myself liking her a lot more than before.   Craig Emerson presented as living in extremely modest circumstances, and really, what was he thinking with his little song and dance routine while he was still in power?   Still, I found it hard not to warm more to him as a result of Annabel's show.

And let's broaden this out a bit:  in commentary terms, Andrew Bolt has evolved into a self satisfied ugly caricature of  moderate Right wing analysis with his self pity and obsession with race and portraying Islam in the worst possible light.  As for climate change - he is a complete gullible joke, of course, never showing a scintilla of skepticism towards anything he reads from Watts Up With That or Professors Jonova and  Monckton.  His disingenuous enthusiasm for endorsing all of the Michael Smith sliming of Gillard (while always adding the disclaimer that "Gillard denies ever having knowledge of the matters") was really appalling.

Tim Blair doesn't seem to realise that the "frightbat" thing just carried too much Young Liberal style undergraduate sexism to be funny, and while he doesn't put the same enthusiasm into climate change denial as does Bolt, his reading list on the topic is clearly limited to denial sites.  It's hard to stay enthusiastic for his brand of lightweight critique of the silly elements of Left wing culture and attitudes when he so proudly wears his intellectual laziness on the key environmental issue of our day on his sleeve.

They both like Mark Steyn, of course, who thinks he can call a scientist a fraud, despite no support amongst other scientist in the field for such a view, and then defend it as free speech, while using his corner of the climate change culture war to get more money from his deluded readers.   

And as for News Corp Right wing female commentators and their attitude towards "feminism" (Miranda Devine, Albrechtsen, Sloan) gee, its got pretty ugly when they spent all their time criticising Gillard for "playing the feminism card" instead of  noting the appalling treatment she got from Right wing broadcasters and the patronising and offensive lines Abbott used.  

So it's remarkable how unlikeable I find so many on the Right have become.   And while I have been saying for a long time that attitude to climate change seems to have become an incredibly good bellwether on political judgement generally, it seems to give a good indication of  unpleasant aspects of personality too.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, even on the Left.   Step up, K Rudd, and take a bow...

About those old temperatures

I meant to link last week to a good explanation at The Conversation about the problem with old Australian temperature records from before 1910.   There, done.

Phil says sorry

Interstellar follow-up: Movie science mistake was mine.

Phil Plait at Slate says he got some of his science critique of Interstellar wrong, and apologises.   He still thinks it was a crook movie, though.