News of the Day

Blah blah Israel-Palestine conflict.... Blah blah India-Pakistan tensions....


Brett Lee out for summer!? NNNooooooooo.......

Beware the technology/science/intelligence wish myth

Often in arguments about the future resolutions of apparently intractable problems, vague references to science or human intelligence to solve problems, or specific technological fixes are invoked that would neatly resolve said intractable problem.

Too many times the fix is chosen in a way that most closes the argument rather than being the most likely path that technology (or other aspects of humanity) will take in the resolving the problem or the opposite. Technology, science and intelligence are just as capable of enabling "problems" to be extended in time. What can be imagined to be solved by an improbable specific technology, could more likely be attacked by a sequence of more probable ones.

So when someone says that a space vehicle engine will be found that can take us directly from earth to Mars, or that peoples intelligence will be put to eradicating wars forever, or that we could live cheaply as brains in tanks, I would like a believable sequence of events or pathway that has a finite possibility.

Energy Positive Feedback

One of the "fundamentals" of oil prices (and other commodities) is the thought that the cost of extraction ought to be fixed or stable for a given geography, related to how difficult or involved the process. Changes in cost due to demand and supply is explained away to profit margin over fixed costs, costs of exploration and costs of increasing capacity etc.

The truth is, with such increasing automation of providing supplies, one of the larger marginal cost of energy supply is the cost of the energy used to provide that supply. Thus as the expectation of costs incease, prices will increase in a magnified way, as the feedback of energy costs increasing will increase the associated cost of extraction. There will be correlation between increases in one energy commodity and a range of other energy commodities and commodities that require a lot of energy to produce( eg. Aluminium, Iron), or that can produce alternative fuels (eg. silicon for solar panels, or sugar for ethanol etc.).

Similarly if expectations of prices start to decrease, and there was a considerable margin to start with, there can be a positive feedback which reduces the price and also the baseline cost of extraction as well through the correlated energy rich commodities. This snowballing downward will still leave some producers with profit margin, even if there would have been a considerable loss at those prices with input costs the way they were.

12 week slide

in Townsville petrol prices






Long slide in oil prices.

News of the last 40 days

If one had forgone news for the past 40 days, would they have really missed much?

Not only did the flood last for 40 days and not only did Moshe Rabbeinu spend 40 days on Mt. Sinai, we fast on the 40th day of Omer for the sin of the 'miraglim'" (spies who were sent by Moshe to scout the land of Canaan and determine whether it could be cultivated and if the people who dwelled on it could be overcome and who returned and recounted that the Land was inhabited by "Giants", and that it was uncultivated).

The Rabbi goes on to talk about the number "40" and the Hebrew letter "mem", it's Gematric (every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent) equal. He says that the Flood gave hope to the continuation of life on the planet, that Moshe Rabbeinu's sojourn on Mt. Sinai gave hope to the People of Israel and the Nations of the world, that we fast on the 40th day of the count of the Omer but hope that the miraglim wanted to make tshuva (repentance)


Let's start with the oil price. Forty days ago, only a few brave economists would have predicted $25 per barrel oil. Now plenty are.

Terrorists struck a major blow in Mumbai somewhere through that time. That may affect our cricket for some time to come.

Jaipur, Dec. 12: At least 22 people have died and 37 others are undergoing treatment at the Sawai Man Singh (SMS) Hospital after consuming spurious country liquor in two villages near Shahpura in Jaipur district.

The (Aus) government has begun to implement its stimulus package of pumping money directly to families and pensioners. For some reason, they have encouraged us to spend it rather than save it. For me personally it repairs our balance sheet a bit, but won't really encourage immediate spending.

Nothing interesting has happened in the US.

Schicksalstag 9/11 19th anniversary passed by without a single mention in the media :(

I have discovered that blame in general and scapegoating in particular, are the most damaging human instincts which I am continuing a personal crusade against.

Marconomic take on the credit crunch

I like to separate what I see as the proximal cause of the Worlds economy's "phase shift", and what I believe to be the root causes. The proximal causes can be traced to the US financial system, and a virtuous cycle of money suddenly turning into a vicious one.

The root cause, in my opinion, is what I believe all long term cycles root causes are - demographic shift. Net world aged dependency ratios have been rising, and especially due to Chinese history, one child policy and uneven population pyramid - there has been a long, seemingly reliable accelerating increase in young workers compared to potential retirees. This rate of increase is rapidly unwinding, causing a rapid shift in herd financial priorities, from consumption to investment to retirement savings - right around the world.

In this implosion case there was also a detonator. The financial setup for the trigger was in fact the Olympic Games. For me, it was no coincidence that the commodities boom peaked just before the olympics. The opaqueness of Chinese stores and orders for the pre-Olympic stock-up meant that both for the volume and price they were willing to pay for these commodities, speculation couldn't tell the difference between short term demand and long term demand.

Predictions made on 17th October

Dr. Clam said...
To change the subject, I think we will see your 40$US barrels of oil next year. Shall we take bets on the minimum price and the day it is quoted?

17/10/08 10:35


Marco said...
OK :) October 29th 2010 - $25 US per barrell.

17/10/08 16:23


Dr. Clam said...
Gaack! You are gamer than me. $37.90 US, August 17th 2009. (West Texas Crude)

17/10/08 20:49

I think the $40 mark will be crashed through like paper.

Wrong! I wasn't very wrong at all. I was very nearly right.

My plan was to take a photo on 26th September 2008 as evidence of petrol being under $1 a litre in Townsville. Exactly two months later I can actually do this as followsevidence shot









My next prediction was for the low point of oil prices of light sweet crude. My theories are that the higher and longer the overshoot, the lower and longer the undershoot. Oil prices will stay so low for so long that we will begin to wonder if $100 per barrell will ever be tested again. More on the specifics another time

Pro ?

I had promised a detailed objective analysis on the state of play, and the future of abortion. Hopefully it is here

From axiom 1 I will try to go through the relevant assumptions I am going to make before I start. For the moment I will accept correspondence on how my conclusions ought not to follow from my assumptions and reasoning. Any correspondence questioning my assumptions can be made separately as comments to them where they are described separately.

The political line in the case of Abortion has Pro-life on one side and pro-choice on the other extreme."Symbolic" prohibition, such as that practiced in Australia (where abortion is technically illegal but with such a broad range of cases considered in the best interest of the mother's health and with doctor's given a free hand to make the call in that regards), is considered to be somewhere in the middle of the continuum. It is quite clear that no matter where on the line one places oneself, peers on the line tend to have very correlated viewpoints. I leave it as an exercise to the reader (yes. Both of you) to identify actual correlated viewpoints. True objectivity would allow us to explore ideas that take us well away from the line with views that would not normally be held as a combination
Laws regarding abortion can affect greatly the Game Dynamics at an individual level. The detail of crime enforcement at the individual level, by changing the risk/reward calculus, will have knock on effects far into the future. Like with animals that eat the shoots of young trees, disastrous effects will not be noticed until well into the future when those trees ought to be fully grown.


There is not much point taking time to lay Blame on any sector of society or individuals if one wants to remain objective.

Many in the argument over abortion have a vision of a future which is perhaps an ideal World. What I would like to do here is to find an Evolutionary Pathway from what we have now to potential futures that have a finite possibility of coming to fruition.

When looking at the effects of any law change one must take into account how Self-adjusting systems of the economy and especially democracy can introduce negative feedback on any piecemeal policy changes. In dictatorships that have a command and control economy, the feedback will only take hold in the long term if the demographic effects lead to revolution, or the economic effects gradually lead to ruin. To get from A, the here and now, to B the vision of the future, successfully, changes in policy need to be economy neutral and should not discriminate against any class of the voting public to avoid the negative feedbacks.

Pro-Life proponents have a vision of the future where abortion of a foetus is considered the same way as the slaughter of a baby.
Pro-Choice proponents have a vision of the future where every child is a wanted child without exception.


These views are not necessarily incompatible. The trick is finding policies that move towards one vision without giving the impression that it is moving inexorably away from the other, then visa versa for the next step, all the while avoiding situations where reversal of the policies becomes a popular concept.

Vision 1
Pro-Life proponents have a vision of the future where abortion of a foetus is considered the same way as the slaughter of a baby. To most, pre-Rowe-vs-Wade US or Catholic Italy in the 60's is a close analogue. However, when looked at more closely the abortion prohibition legislation/enforcement falls way, way short of any analogous infanticide legislation in any similarly modern country. For the vision to work analagously *all* legislation associated with birth needs to be pushed forward to at least early in the pregnancy if not to conception. The lack of analagous registration legislation gives a glimpse of why for one, the legislation failed to bring down (illegal) abortion rates to anywhere near infanticide rates even for these examples where, initially, abortion prohibition had majority backing. I will leave it as another excercise to the reader to find other items of legislation where the foetus/baby legislation is not analagous(yet).

Vision 2
Pro-Choice proponents have a vision of the future where no child is born to a woman who does not want one at that time. A close analogue is currently European countries such as the Netherlands or the Nordic countries, with particular emphasis on Universal sex education, access to contraceptives, access to family planning and parent counselling and importantly access to fertility clinics. Although it seems the analogues fit closely, desire for a child is a slippery concept compared to the obligation to ones child which is statutory. Because conception is still quite a lottery, angst about timing and control of the process makes us rely so much more on artificial quickfix to ensure conception or contraception. Abortion just gives a small window of opportunity to suit the mother's desire at the cost of a life. Also, there is no fluid process for babies who aren't wanted to be moved to families where they are a wanted child. Such a process would partially obviate the need for abortion or IVF for that matter. ie. those who have unwanted pregnancies ought to be able to offset those who cannot have children naturally. This would theoretically keep the endpoint of every child being a wanted child with less of the wastes of abortion and IVF.

Observations
One of the great ironies is that symbolic prohibition of abortion is not in itself helpful in reducing the abortion rate (approximate though it may be in prohibitionist countries). Because no prohibition regimen has ever reached the required condition of the crime not paying on average, rather than evenhandedly stopping abortions, it has the effect of increasing the price of abortion, thus becoming a demographic selection process based on lack of means. Proportion of "Unwanted" babies in poorer demographics is an immediate proxy for the demographic time-bomb that this can set up, with future crime rates being just one of the many possible ill-effects.

Another irony is that for all humans clever economic systems for efficient allocation of capital in free market economies, we cannot seem to get any clever liberal system that would efficiently allocate babies to those most able to raise them. The system that comes closest is the foreign adoption system, where for a nominal price, one can adopt a baby from a poor country of ones choice, usually at a time of ones choice. Although not technically "buying" a baby, this has some of the aspects of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I leave it as another exercise to the reader to dream up of an evolutionary pathway to a legal system that can do this for home grown babies.

Certain individual policies, especially those following the political continuum, create their own backlash once the side effects start to kick in. If abortion clinics are closed wholesale, the immediate effect is to dramatically reduce abortions for a short time, inconveniencing a small but potentially riled group. This group finds it easier to gain a large sympathetic group, especially using handpicked extreme cases (eg. rape, incest, very young pre-teen mother or combinations) which would normally not be publicised due to privacy concerns. The democratic feedback would generally work to simply reverse the policy change within at most a couple of electoral terms in modern democracies.

Thankfully, policies outside that of the pro -? political continuum can have effects on the long term abortion rate. General wealth and economic growth has positive effect on both reducing the abortion rate and reducing numbers of "unwanted" children. In Australia, generous and universal family payments, and especially baby bonuses may have considerably reduced demand for abortions based on economic hardship. For a wanted pregnancy, there is a class of crime of "murder of an unborn baby" for cases of violent acts with the intent of terminating the pregnancy against the mothers will. This appears to confer some rights to life for the unborn which are better than none. Many countries have health benefits that reduce the pre-natal health expense burden. Most mothers-to-be register to see a Gyn/Obst doctor for their pregnancy - there is no reason why laws enshrining responsibility for the unborn at that point would be controversial.

These policies don't appear to generate a democratic backlash, nor are they particularly burdensome for the Government, so I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be expanded in the direction of reaching closer to the ideals of both vision 1 and vision 2.

My Visions
I have a couple of possible visions I will call X and Y.

Both these visions are based on a subset of future society gradually becoming the norm and making the current "line" between pro-life and pro-choice completely irrelevant. They are based on technology that is currently being developed for reasons completely unrelated to abortion policy.

Vision X is expanding on technologies designed to aid achievement and detection of natural conception, and relies on market oriented ways of matching unwanted pregnancies with those that desire to adopt or have a child which are having trouble conceiving naturally. This vision keeps the probablistic attribute of natural conception and assumes the impossibility of it being anything else in the future. It imagines a completely transparent surrogacy/adoption regimen for those who sign up to the vision. It may appear to be both "Big Brotherish" and an unethical advocacy of the trade in babies/fetuses, but since it is only for people who understand their changed rights to privacy and to guardianship of the children involved, it really should not be an issue.

Vision Y assumes that IVF techniques expand and improve to the point that not only do they become almost 100% reliable, but that they become cost effective to the point that natural conception will have few advantages left.

Vision X Points
Technologies assumed:
1) Ovulation kit implant:(a) Growing Market - An absolute boon for couples trying to conceive naturally, an implantable device will be way more effective than the "kits" currently available. The market for these will grow regardless of any implications for abortion legislation.
(b) Other Uses - For those *not* wanting to fall pregnant, this implant can be attached to a watch/mobile phone alarm, and be a direct feedback as most unwanted pregnancies are somewhat related to naivety about ones own fertility at any one time. This is a potential growth market that *does* have implications for the level of unwanted pregnancies.

2) Switchable male contraception: (a) Growing Market - The technology has just now become available, and is essentially a switchable barrier contraceptive that works similarly to how vasectomies do. Its general convenience will give it a rather broad market base, likely to grow quickly.
(b) Other Uses - Because it is electronically switchable, there is potential for it to be automatically activated with proximity to an ovulation kit implant attached to a woman who has given it a setting of not wanting to fall pregnant. Since this would still be potentially desirable at an individual level, it would probably be a potential growth market as well as indubitably reducing unwanted pregnancies.

3) Implantable pregnancy kit: (a) Growing Market - Home pregnancy kits are becoming cheaper and more reliable, but the extra piece of mind in knowing precicely the circumstances and time of conception will make this device, if it becomes available, have a quickly expanding market for those trying to conceive.
(b) Other uses - Even for women not planning to get pregnant, this device could give the absolute most time possible to take all options into account. Its spread among women who do not have ethical or moral issues against abortion, may still help the long term vision X.

Self adjusting demand/supply issues
There is a link between issues of surrogacy, adoption, Foster parents, custody issues, fertility, family planning, economic values, family values, crowding etc.

Vision X envisions loosening of the statutory nature of genetic parents of children having automatic responsibility for the child. Responsibility is not generally transferable, which has a tendency to lock the economic and social consequences, making abortion such an irresistible economic/social option.

On the other side of the ledger, when couples (etc.) desire to have a child, timing is a great cause of stress. Again there is a window of opportunity when a new child is the most desirable, but no way to ensure timing, aspecially when alternatives such as adoption have so many conditions and delays, biological parents have veto rights, and the cost/benefit balance of IVF are not helpful in the grand scheme of things.

If a self adjusting system (such as an economic one) to match those that are expecting children they would rather not, with those that aren't expecting when they would want to, was possible, it would go part way to reducing the economic/social push to abortion.

Another required part is a "pricing" signal at the point of conception that would go anywhere from being a cost to there being a considerable reward for proceeding with the pregnancy depending on demand/supply constraints or population signals.

A third required aspect is a strengthening of the rights and responsibilities of adoptive parents and opening the way to softening the veto rights of biological parents where appropriate to enable the self-adjusting system.

These parts can be achieved in ways other than just allowing a free market for surrogacy/fostering/adoption/babies, which would have the obvious flaw of appearing unethical.

One obvious way would be for women of childbearing age to be allowed to voluntarily sign up to a society register, which would have a value determined by demand and supply within the society, of how much to charge for surrogacy within the group, how much family payment/health benefits surrogate mothers get if they get pregnant as they have pre-registered that they would not be the after-birth parents, and which baby is allocated to which adoptive parent. If there are more pregnant mothers than there are people looking to adopt from that pool, the charge for surrogacy would drop, and so would the payments to the surrogate mothers, and visa versa.

If signing up to such a register meant getting a baby exactly when you want one (even if it is not your offspring), and those that get pregnant before they are ready to be parents get paid hansomely for their trouble, then that may be enough to get a large starting set that could encompass all but the most traditional couples.

Vision X could therefore get very close to the twin goals of dramaticallly fewer abortions and dramatically fewer unwanted children.

Vision Y

Vision Y, in contrast, assumes that reproductive technologies expanding on IVF improve to the point that couples' (or individual woman's) desires to have children can be accomodated reliably and promptly. Safe in that knowledge, young males would feel confident enough to have their sperm frozen and have a vasectomy thus not needing to worry about unwanted pregnancies on their part.

Equally, women would also have equivalent surgery, completely relying on artificial means of conception when that is desired.

At the moment of course, the technologies assumed are not reliable to this point. While the technologies for vision X involve individual (and possibly private) knowledge about ones own fertility and a flexible, self-adjusting "market" for desired parenthood, vision Y's technologies involve mastering the genetic conception process artificially. Enough technological knowledge would be required to replace all the natural genetic checks and balances that occur in nature with artificial ones.

Vision Y envisions that the natural bond with the biological mother is crucial enough to offset the flexibility advantages of the increased number and fluidity of adoptions of vision X.

As to whether vision Y equally obtains the twin goals of every child being a wanted child and having negligible number of abortions also depends on overcoming current obstacles. With vision Y, one of these is for changed circumstances after a woman gets pregnant. It is quite easy to see that even if one goes through the process of IVF, that if it had become something cheap, easy and reliable, her reasons for changing her mind once she got pregnant may become more fickle.

On the other hand, it is quite tenable that the conditions of access to IVF etc. can be attached to rules that forbid terminations for those who have gone through this process as a condition for access.

9/11

Now a nineteenth anniversary, and I haven't seen a single mention of the anniversary on the news or current affairs shows. Maybe for the 20th people will see that it was a crucial turning point in Geopolitical history.

Today

It would be remiss of me not to mention the horse race(s) that are on today. I would like to say that predicting stockmarket indices values for any time in the future is like predicting the results of a horse race. Experts on horses can intimately know the details of every horse that is running in a race, but they generally can't beat the market(bookmaker). Similarly, the best predictor of the future value of an index is the current value of the index (similarly with commodity prices etc.) which doesn't mean it is likely to stay the same either.

On other news I have found an article that explains Why the free media is biased. Something that had bothered me since it was discussed on Klaus Rohde'd blog earlier in the year. It restores my faith in free media, especially over the government controlled sort.

Surreal

I travel by plane rarely enough that I still find it quite surreal to get in an aeroplane and spend two days thousands of kilometers away and then come back to your ordinary life almost as if it never happened. I also still find expecting a baby to be quite a surreal experience. This is part of the appeal of it.

To insure or not to insure?

One of the biggest responses I get when I ask the question "Why insure?" is for peace of mind. I personally don't get peace of mind from insurance. Firstly, you can't be sure that the insurer will be solvent at the very time you might need them for a big payout. Secondly, if your cash flow is poor, the very money you spend on insurance can be a drain that could harm your financial security. The returns on investment as far as insurance goes are poor, especially if you have morals and are a lower than average risk of claims. I always get the feeling that the greater part of my premium goes to those with clever but fraudulent or weasel claims, and for the rest of us it is a false peace of mind.

With this in mind, I am happy that Australia is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn't explicitly insure deposits. Deposit insurance, like other insurance is definitely a false peace of mind. The only insurance for investments like deposits, shares, bonds, property, employee training, love, children the list goes on... is to have a balanced portfolio of investments as well as some cash under the bed etc. Remember the balance!

Marconomics

I have defined marconomics.

Not too pretentious?

Good date choice

I'm now glad I used September 26th as a future-prediction date as this Buttonwood Economist article has used the exact same date (for 2021) as a criticism of governments' willingness to ban short-selling to staunch losses due to share-markets falling.

Wrong, very wrong

As you can see from the graph, Townsville's fuel prices are nowhere near the dollar mark that I had predicted two years ago. Although oil is well down on its peak, and looks bearish overall, my thought that oil would be back down to around $70/brl and the Aus$ at around $0.85 US seem to be incompatible with the forces of doom holding financial markets.

Marconomic Policy wish-list

in no particular order.

Nation-wide water trading.

Early family payments for pregnancy registrations.

Easy Aus work visa/residency/citizenship pathway for all pacific island state residents including Hawaii.

Tradeable whale-hunting quotas.

Freaky

I was just booking a hotel over the internet, while watching the start of the news. As it happened there was a breaking news item of a hotel being bombed. I had just booked in to the Marriott hotel... It was a Marriott hotel was attacked. I just checked to make sure that it wasn't the same hotel before I confirmed. I don't believe in omens....

Electoral Math - US vs Australia

The esteemed Dr. Clam and I had discussed the differences between the electoral math between the US and Australia and Dr Clam came up with something I couldn't have said better myself:(context here)

Preferential voting and proportional voting in the senate makes minor and single-issue groups not associated with a major political party much more important and successful in Australia. Third parties can play a constructive role,not just act as spoilers to cause civil wars. If there had been just one Democrat candidate in 1860 , that extremist yokel would never have gotten in with 39.8% of the vote.(Australia wins!)

*On the other hand, compulsory voting reduces the importance of single-issue groups associated with major political parties, which are valued in the US because they can get out the voter base. This means single-issue groups have less influence on the policies of the major parties here, and the parties better reflect the mainstream. (Australia wins again!)

* Finally, the US has been comprehensively gerrymandered on the state and federal level so that there are very few marginal seats, and parties can concentrate their resources even more disproportionately. (Australia, once again, wins!)

Basically, the jist of point two is that candidates on the extreme ideological edge of the major parties are an asset in the US, while they would have absolutely no chance in Australia (and would have to try for minor placings in the senate)- the mainstream would eat them up for breakfast.
Thus Sarah Palin, by dint of her being more of a wing ideologically compared to the mainstream, appears to be a blunderous choice (as it would be, in Australia). Any political commentator with any nous for the US electoral mathematics would realise that the mainstream just has to not hate her enough to be bothered voting against her.
I've been meaning to add an entry in Principia Marconomica about electoral maths, as I have done for a few other tidbits of late, the jist of it being that it doesn't matter so much that elections give spurious results, but that in the long run the electoral system is self-adjusting and stable.

The advantage of being black...

.. in chess is that you get to see what the opponents move is before committing to a strategy. Thus when the Democrats selected Joe Biden for VP nomination, this opened up the current strategy of the Republicans to fill a vacant niche of "woman on a presidential ticket". I think the Republicans looked several moves ahead on this one, and the current Republican plan bears no resemblance to that which would have been the case had Hillary been the VP nominee (see p-K4 vs p-Q4).

Stringing another "West Wing" analogy, I think the best chance for Obama is for McCain to have been a well known supporter of [big oil] energy (don't know? is he?) - and for there to be a big [oil installation] scary incident at a crucial stage in the election campaign.

Sarah Palin

For months, I have had nothing interesting to say about the US election....Now suddenly I have so much I want to say that I can't keep up with my brain.

Having watched *All 7 Series* of "The West Wing", I am convinced that there is a serious case of Reality imitating art in the US at the moment. This article seeems to concur - eg.

One of The West Wing's team of writers, Eli Attie, admitted that the character of Congressman Santos was based on a young rising star of the Democrats, one Barack Obama.

On Sarah Palin, I don't even know where to start: Her *Fifth Child*, the fact that she's a dead ringer for Arnold Vinick's campaign manager (Sheila Brooks), her pro-life stance... her love of guns and hunting....

Maybe I'll start with her fifth child: Expecting our own fifth child at the more advanced age of 38 - at the forefront of our mind, is the increasing risk of Down's with age. Even more prominently, having Googled "Fifth Child" just to see what would come up, came a novel by Doris Lessing about... a life shattered by the unexpected fifth pregnancy turning out a disabled child. This on top of the fact that the birth of a severely disabled child is a particular nightmarish fear for me. Sarah's acceptance of her fifth child having Downs syndrome is a poignant message to me. I am in awe that she would be going for VP.

Professor Ronald Laura

Googling Professor Ronald Laura again?

I am all for balanced upbringing of my children (and children in general), but I rail against the unbalanced philosophy that rails against usage of technology and formal/rote learning in education in general.

That got My Attention

The US election wasn't inspiring me much until Sarah Palin got the VP nomination for the republicans.

Veal of the sea?

Calf:






Veal:

Back to cold war style imperialism

It appears there is a resurgence in cold war strategy that is apparent in Georgia. Russia had always preferred bullying in the old "East Bloc" and "Soviet Union". These were not necessarily voluntary unions but ones that were enforced from time to time. The US tended to use money handles to get "client states" on side, and eventually, this proved to be the key to the breakdown of the soviet empire. Communism was an inferior economic model, and its lack of democracy meant it could not adjust appropriately through succession of leaders and failing economies. Thus it appears that although the borders have changed dramatically, the upgraded economics and transformed country altogether have allowed Russia to actively assert its geopolicy of old, which seems to only require a strong military, and complete control over its media. The only tactic that is plausibly optimal for the US is also the Cold war tactics of old - ie. money and military support for client states. There was a nash equilibrium for a long time throughout the cold war with the stalemate perpetuated by Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The stalemate only ended when the USSR no longer had enough money to continue its strategies. Russia may yet again be vulnerable from say, a commodities bust economically, or a leadership succession issue politically, but these really cannot be counted on in the short term. Thus I foresee a solidification of the front line of the cold war in the Caucauses, and veiled threats of Great escalation as a way to manipulate policy in the future - virtually a return to MAD, in fact. China may well join the fray in imperialism of its own with its front lines of Taiwan etc.

What does Marconomics say about who is to blame for the war in Georgia?
Marconomics states that that is the wrong way to think (see principle 6). Blame in this case implies that there exists an impartial international court that can *both* judge and enforce its findings. Attempting to come to conclusions based on evidence as to who is to blame is putting the cart before the horse. The rules of the game in this case have as the highest court the UN security council. Thus if any of the veto-wielding members are part of the conflict, they cannot be effectively policed, except via threats by one of the other veto-wielding countries.

How did Russia "Win"
There are several strategic masterstrokes that Russia has made in the leadup to this conflict. Of course, in the long run, by the mere dint of the fact that they were "surprise" tactics which humiliated "the west" this will hurt Russia dearly (eventually).

One masterstroke was to give Russian citizenship to South Ossettians who wanted it. I have often thought that giving US citizenship easily to Iraqis (or Bosnians, Kosovars...)under occupation etc. could be easily turned to the US's strategic advantage.
Another smart move was to use the media cleverly to demonise Georgias leadership. As a "nominal" democracy, it is clear that the Russian population is right behind Putin, and think that the Georgian leader (Saakashvili) should be crushed like a bug because they believe him to be a tyrant. It wouldn't surprise me if in ten years, Russians rue the fact that they didn't go all the way and finish the job, much as the US rue the fact that Saddam Hussein wasn't brought down back in Gulf War I.
The tactical masterstroke was to predict Saakashvili's moves, and swiftly orchestrate counter-moves which included extensive propaganda. Staged and prepared propaganda from media fully under your control will always play better than even "nominally" fair and free western style press. Nobody believes the media to be impartial anyway, so it is better to go the whole hog and be as brazenly biased as people can believe.

Given that "true" democracies with "free" press have such a strategic liability over a system like Russia's, does this mean that the political/media systems in Russia (and China) are better than the west's?

No. The long term adaptability of true democracies and the truth-seeking nature of private, free media are decisive in the long run, even given their short term strategic liabilities.

Forget the Olympics. Who's winning the Geopolympics?

Unfortunately, it seems to be the "bad" guys :(.

Georgia (after being provoked by Russian interests within its borders) launched its military into an offensive and has provoked an even more disproportionate military attack from Russia. This has the unfortunate consequence of making Western-backed Georgia still look bad for "starting" it, while Russia gets a free hand due to tacit Chinese approval in the UN. A sheer reluctance from the "west" (US or anyone else) to fight a war on the Georgians behalf against Russia means that Georgians are pretty much dangerously exposed and isolated.

In China, its huge economic success of late, and the legitimacy it has gained just by staging the olympics, has resulted in fairly rampant nationalism, in which the population has started to believe that its political system is "better" than democracy. This may embolden it for otherwise unwise military adventures of its own.

The real ten-year plan

I must admit I was being a little tricksy with my previous ten-year plan entry. I had a ten year plan already and I was waiting for the right opportunity to mention it. I decided to have a "surprise" birthday party for myself. I planned the party - the guests (all close family) got the surprise. During grace I thanked God for birthdays and then told everyone I had talked K into having another baby. Being one that "Likes the rollercoaster" (Parenthood movie quote) I am delighted at this new adventure we are embarking on.

No cliches please - and if anyone mentions Doris Lessing Horror Fiction to K they're a dead man!

Hunting adventures in the 70's

I've started yet another miniblog for links to my fathers current project of pictures, film and book of his hunting adventures. Hunting in Zambia early 1970's is my link for it. If you are at all interested, place comments, ratings, etc. especially with the clips.

Brief background: Zambia in the early 1970's was a typically African country in which independence was quite recent, and the result was fairly chaotic. Trophy hunting and the ivory trade were already globally frowned upon, even while at the same time, some elephant reserves had over-populations which had denuded them of virtually all trees. The attitude, therefore of the casual well off resident (predominantly white) "adventure" hunter, was as follows:

1) Follow the letter of the law and hunt only under the "license" system.

2) Report poachers to relevant authorities.

3) Most game reserves were very near villages - Therefore enlist local villages to use every scrap of hide, bone, meat (dried as biltong) etc. as they were generally subsistence with little regular protein in their diet and few sources of income.

The illegal (or even legal) hunting for just the trophy with the abandonment of the carcass was anathema. Also, the "canned" hunt popular with mega-rich visitors who just wanted to tick another box in the "things to do before I die list".

Like whales, elephants live wild and free until the moment they are killed - chickens tend to live a short and miserable existence - and provide one thousandth of the meat that each elephant does.

This following clip has me in it! I'm the little kid that looks like a girl holding hands with my mum with the black long hair. I was probably one.

Like duh!

ANU Professor Dayal Wickramasinghe tells 666 presenter Ross Solly life could be everywhere in space.

Wish I could find the transcript

A new "Ten Year Plan"

Back in 1992 I was playing a round of golf with "The Groose" and Andrewww. I asked them where they wanted to be in ten years time. I can't remember what they said, but I knew that I wanted to be back in Townsville with a stable life with plenty of family support and perhaps an interest in the family business. When me & K decided to have kids, we had a secret pact to space our children about three years apart and to have a maximum of two boys. Once Z was born, our ten year plan was complete, and ever since, I have been struggling to have a vision of where I want to be in ten years time. The truth is, any ambitions I had as an individual are no longer relevant eg. - to become a great tennis/trumpet player. Ambitions I had vicariously for my children have come up against the barrier of their own free will being at odds with what I believe they *should* wish to strive for. I seem to have lost the steering wheel to my life and I'm just relying on accelerator, break, gears and momentum for any control at all. Any ideas?

Economist.comments.marcoparigi

Still doing more Comments on Economist.com than my usual blog sphere of reading.

Subjects of interest include:

China
Iraq
green taxes
superannuation
oil
carbon footprint
Australian immigration/guest workers

Minke Whale Meat - It's the beef of the sea!

In response to Dr.Clam's suggestion to eat more whaleThis should really be a real ad for the real product that ought to be offered in Australia.

*Update* I have it on good advice that Minke whale meat is WAY healthier than beef (and other common non-fish varieties)



And just for balance:

The coming oil price crash

There are numerous "experts" talking up the price of oil. Like at the end of the Dot.com boom, I believe this is a technique to give those in the know time to sell dud futures to those that aren't. As far as reality is concerned, supply and demand are nearing that elusive intersection. From the demand side:US demand has already slumed 10% on some figures

from this article.

On these figures, the US demand will drop much faster than it will pick up in China, in barrels per day terms.


On the supply side, there are several increases in capacity going on in Saudi Arabia, and Iraq production has stabilised and is likely to increase, if anything. oil saviour? perhaps.

Consumer committment to reducing petrol usage has finally started happen in several countries. For the layman this means that even if petrol prices suddenly drop, consumers are likely to keep to these committments, without the usual usage surge that happens with lower prices.

As far as when? goes, the US is stocking up on fuel for the summer driving season. When the oil companies realise few are driving this will reduce the price a little bit. China is stocking up big time for the Olympics and internal aid. Once the Olympics are done and there is spare, the oil price will plummet.

Yes I'm talking down the oil price, but does anyone listen? :) we'll see....

Narrative II

Clam's narrative in italics
Let us begin with the way the world was twenty-five years ago. It was in the last years of a titanic struggle between two great powers, and every single event that happened anywhere in the world was seen, and had to be seen, firstly and most importantly in relation to that titanic struggle. What opportunities did it afford for the advantage of our side? What opportunities for the other side? Who benefited in the long term, in the short term? It was an age of game theory in international relations, of conspiracy theories that were credible and even true, of brinksmanship and mind-numbing terror. Perhaps you do not remember it like that. This is my narrative, and I am saying how I remember things.

In that titanic struggle our side, the West, supported many unworthy allies; in a calculated fashion, because those allies were important in in the existential struggle. Hence Suharto, the Shah, Pinochet, at certain times a certain Iraqi strongman.

In the milieu in which I lived, I breathed in a certain cynicism about this titanic stuggle. Sure, our side was ours, but we were not enthusiastic partisans. Our side had high ideals, and failed to live up to them; the other side, too, professed high ideals, and likewise failed to live up to them. They were two great grey colossi locked in an interminable struggle. We were weary unto death of their fighting and wanted something, anything, to make it end.

One day it ended. We had won.

Over the next few years- the next several years- it gradually dawned on me that my cynicism had been misplaced. The other side had been, in its essence, wrong and evil, and our side was, in its essence, right and good. The crimes that had been committed by our side had been committed, rightly or wrongly, as calculated moves in a struggle against a far greater evil. The crimes of the other side had been committed as calculated moves to still all voices of opposition and dehumanise mankind.

I realise this must sound breathtakingly naïve to many people. But I think there is no other plausible reading of the historical evidence. I am prepared to justify it at appalling length in subsequent posts.

Almost the last, but far from the least evil to spring from this titanic struggle happened in the first half of 1991. A tyrant who had made unprovoked war on most of his neighbours, who had caused the deaths of upward of a million people, who was a bad egg overall, had been brought to bay by a vast alliance of many nations. He could have been cast down, as all tyrants should be cast down, with relative ease. And yet he was not. President George Bush called upon the oppressed people of Iraq to rebel against their ruler, and did not aid them as they fought and died. The vast armies were dispersed and sent back to their homes. The tyrant remained in power. Why was this allowed to happen?

This was clear to me then as it is now. This was a judgement call. It was plausible then as now that things could have gone really badly even if he was thrown out. For the purposes of the narrative I will accept as an axiom that it was a mistake to leave him in power, and the interpretation of the Cold War as outlined above.

I remember the removal of Saddam from power being a bipartisan policy throughout the 1990s, once the habits of thought of the Cold War began to recede. I was angry about sanctions. I was angry about the bombings of 1998. I was angry then because these things because they impacted disproportionately on innocent civilians, and they had no hope of achieving what is most precious to God, in the words of Baha’ullah, which is justice. The invasion of Iraq was carried out to make amends for the shame of 1991 and bring this long overdue justice. It was obvious that it should be done, long before 2001.

The New World Order TM as I saw it had developed to the extent that a large chunk of the society deemed that the UN was, for good or ill, the only arbiter of such interventions. This worked acceptably in the break-up of ex-Yugoslavia. Iraq was different in as much as Saddam had a grudge against the US in particular. For the US, Iraq was unfinished business. Saddam took delight in defiance, in particular, defiance the US. In short, it was personal. There was umpteen other tyrants that did equally bad things over the 25 years. I could argue that many of these were equivalently evil and ripe for intervention. I would personally argue that it is a greater shame that Mugabe has avoided being toppled, for instance.

* It seemed quite clear from the pronouncements of George Bush et al that the goal of the invasion was what I have said above, to crush a wicked despot like a weevil.

The goals were more multi-faceted than that. I have argued that leaving armies go completely idle means that when they are needed, they will be almost useless (as most of those in Europe are). As I said, with Iraq, it was a little more personal. Saddam was so cocky he thought he could keep Kuwait. Taunting the western world by continuing to preside over a once great country that was becoming a failed state. Essentially again, invading was a judgement call. Crushing Saddam was a primary goal, but to see it as being completely unselfish in terms of what was judged to be good for the US or even for its president's legacy is quite partisan.

* In a move stupid in retrospect, George Bush et al sought to obtain an imprimatur from the United Nations for the invasion. This brought the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue to the forefront, because the UN resolutions that Iraq had flouted were concernd with these.

Again, one way or another this was a judgement call. Perhaps George wanted to give Saddam the false impression that he may yet avoid invasion. Perhaps he wanted to be sure there *wasn't* any mass destructive weapons before invasion. The New World Order TM works better if there is some sort of UN rubber stamp. In terms of TNWOTM the outcome of the war was that it is completely on hold as far as removing tyrants is concerned, and more to the point, removing tyrants is so burdensome for the US that it will only happen when it gets personal or close to home for the US.

* Because Iraq had not complied with these resolutions, a murderous regime of sanctions was daily punishing the Iraqi people.

Saddam had set it up such that invasion would punish them way more than even sanctions.

* Everyone was agreed that the Despot had Weapons of Mass Destruction: the French, the Russians, Uncle Tom Cobbley, etc. If anyone had good evidence to the contrary, they sat on it.


There was so much bluff and double bluff, exaggeration and downplay over this, that everyone in every party could reasonably be accused of being a liar.

Lying is a great handle for launching partisan attacks, and like children overboard it is milked for all it's worth well after it has been acted on as if true when the lie was being told. Lying should not be considered as part of a narrative, but as a springboard for launching partisan attacks.

So my narrative is that motivation for war (Gulf War I and II) is 90% American values("Blooding" the military, revenge for 9/11 related riks, unfinished business from Gulf War I) and only 10% Aslan values. Despots can do anything they like to people in their own country without risk of invasion(see Darfur, Zimbabwe), but if you make it personal for Americans and their president, you will be taken to task, and *Americans will be happy to risk lives in the struggle and the aftermath*. Serbia may well be a counterpoint to this narrative because it wasn't personal. However, it was personal for NATO as a whole. For the Americans it was rather a cowardly but militarily effective testing ground for new smart weapons. It took all of two *Accidental* helicopter US deaths to put a whole ground offensive to a halt for months. Serbia was just a much easier judgement call than Iraq or say Serbia when Bosnia was being throttled. There was talk even then of the US attacking them, but without the cover of a UN mandate, was geopolitically unwise.

So in conclusion, I want more Aslan values and less American values in nation-building excercises. I will protest the war inasmuch that if they open the door by saying it is about justice, then accept criticism about the way it is delivered. If you open the door by saying it is about WMD, then accept that this action is outside of the bounds of The New World Order TM, and other countries or the UN do not have the responsibility in the aftermath. Above all note that all breaches of Aslan style behaviour in this and any conflict will make it harder to pursue future acts of justice outside of The New World Order TM.

Counter - Narrative:Must provide a good example/that's not how you win wars anyway!

This is a counter-narrative that I'd kind of given up on when the build up to the Iraq war started back in 02, but on reflection, I think it still is of great intellectual and theoretical importance. It is based on my theory of the trade of "Sympathy". When a country/entity gets brutally attacked (eg.'s Jews in WWII, 9/11, Pearl Harbour, Suicide bombings, Hiroshima, Blitzkrieg bombings etc.), that which gets attacked obtains a sympathy credit. When a country/entity retaliates, anything close to proportional retaliation cashes in that credit.

In modern day geopolitical confrontation, keeping and holding that sympathy credit (ie. avoiding retaliation) is key to winning the peace. Revenge is something that never wins the peace, and retribution should be left to any court of law that can decide on it.

An important side note is that "who shoots first" is of absolute critical importance both in a battle sense and in a declaration of war sense. Thus no matter how rediculous it sounds, the US would be seen to be a World leader much more, would be seen to have absolute moral integrity within the UN, and would have been that much closer to a new world order in which it was the moral leader, had they either not attacked Iraq, or had waited (even indefinitely) for them to "shoot first".

Thus East Timor wins the peace in their country, partly because they didn't retaliate proportionally (nor request other countries to do so on their behalf).
Israel appears to be gradually cashing in their sympathy credit ever since the end of WWII, Australians in Afghanistan (etc.) are winning sympathy credits due to their rules of engagement which prohibits them from shooting until fired upon. The Iraq war has cashed in all (and then some) of the sympathy that the US had left over from 9/11.

Thus the war in Iraq was wrong on the count that it did not show a good example for other world citizens, and anyway, that is not how wars are won.

Now for the refugee intake

Finally the government has announced an increase of unskilled migrants increasing our overall intake to 300,000. Hopefully that will include "economic" refugees and others who are desperate enough to seek people smugglers. All that is left is to increase refugee quotas drastically and to relax work visa requirements, and I will be satisfied

Alternate Narrative on Mesopotamia

In response to:
Doctor Clam's elegant intellectual take on attitudes to war in Mesopotamia
Who is after an alternate intellectual narrative (from the left)

I have the following link to offer with my recommended comment snipped.

Economist article on Iraq, Iran and US


Azr@el wrote:
May 10, 2008 17:13
Where does the economist find such clueless journalist? Look at the problem from the desired end results from the view of the three outside players involved; what is an ideal Iraq in Iranian eyes? What is an ideal Iraq in Sunni Arab eyes? What is an ideal Iraq in U.S. eyes? The Iranian's want a demilitarized Iraq run by Shia's with a friendly Kurdish choir. Their tool to achieve this goal? The ballot box and a little ethnic spring cleaning of recalcitrant Sunnis. Their major problem? Pan-Arabist Shias trying to hijack the show. Sunni Arabs? They want a strong man of Sunni Arab persuasion to restore the good old days of pre-Kuwait Saddam. Their instrument? Money to al-qaeda-lite, political isolation of the Shia Iraqi government and of course foreign Sunni fighters by the truckload. Their major obstacle? History and demographics, neither favors them. The U.S. ? No one, especially no one in the white house has the slightest clue what an ideal endgame would look like.


The point being that it is very much (at least) a three entity game even in its simplest working model. There appears a distinct possibility that each entity is following optimal strategies,there is a Nash equilibrium of sorts, and that the endgame is a generation away. The "oil security" issue will only gradually improve, as the main players realise that security is unlikely to get much better or much worse for a long time yet.

Does this link work

Does this link to Economist articles with comments! work? It feels like sending a letter to the editor and always being published!

Prediction time minus four months

On Sunday, September 24, 2006 I wrote "I am confidently predicting that on this day in 2008, the price of petrol will be under $1.00 Au per litre in Townsville."

To which Anonymous replied:Today is 7 May 2008.

Given that the price is already in the $1.40 to $1.50 range and the price of oil has tipped US$120/barrel, I'd say that the alarmists win.

Well, I am not anywhere near conceding, the reason I indicated the same day is that I wanted to rule out seasonal factors. The oil price spike has since spread to a raft of energy and agricultural commodities. By predicting Townsville prices it also disconnects my prediction from distorted markets. I did not predict a gradual lowering of prices, but an overshoot followed by an undershoot. This has not got past the overshoot yet, and I await patiently for a triggering event of say the Olympic Games to get me there before my self-imposed two year limit.

Mostly Harmless Science Blog: Googling Professor Ronald Laura?

Mostly Harmless Science Blog: Googling Professor Ronald Laura?

It's the Balance duh

When raising children, there is so many competing obsessions related to the child's well being that it really is a minefield. eg:

Food health - obsess that foods they eat are the healthiest possible.
Fitness health - make sure these kids get enough excercise.
Dental health - make sure that teeth are brushed, water is fluoridated etc.
Sun safety - sun exposure between birth and 20 yo means high risk for melanoma.
Money management - kids must learn to manage money early so they don't risk debt traps etc.
Social learning - obsess with kids able to interact one on one and in group situations.
Stranger danger - recognise dangers with strangers.
Abusive relationships - recognise dangers with non-strangers.
Academic learning - achieve as well as possible academically.
Clean room - learn how to manage one's own space tidily and usefully.
Smoking/drugs - Avoid the trap of getting hooked and counter peer pressure with solid knowledge.
Alcohol - moderation.
Disease - Up to date immunizations and good hygene.
Road safety - Bike helmets, seat belts, alertness.
Swimming safety - avoid the toddler killer of drownings.

So often one sees children of parents obsessing in one (say academia) and so obviously has ignored another (say, weight gain). The examples I have seen are endless, and some such as fitness are notoriously hard to balance with others such as sun safety for instance. It is quite easy to see as an outsider of the failures of these obsessions, often with some being overdone and others seemingly completely ignored. I urge everyone to aim for the balance - see which ones your children are weak in and concentrate on those for a while. Are we spending too much effort on diminishing returns? Walk the fine line, dear friends.

Peak oil = peak food?

(lame peak oil satire)Peak Food is the point in time when the maximum rate of global food production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, a food crisis may develop because the availability of conventional food will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak food production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.

Some observers, such as food industry experts Kenneth S. Deffeyes and Matthew Simmons, believe the high dependence of most modern humans, agricultural and industrial systems on the relative low cost and high availability of food will cause the post-peak production decline and possible severe increases in the price of food to have negative implications for the global economy. Although predictions as to what exactly these negative effects will vary greatly, "a growing number of food industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of tonnes of food that can be supplied every day."^[1]

If political and economic change only occur in reaction to high prices and shortages rather than in reaction to the threat of a peak, then the degree of economic damage to importing countries will largely depend on how rapidly food imports decline post-peak. The Export Land Model shows that the amount of food available internationally drops much more quickly than production in exporting countries because the exporting countries maintain an internal growth in demand. Shortfalls in production (and therefore supply) would cause extreme price inflation, unless demand is mitigated with planned conservation measures and use of alternatives, which would need to be implemented 20 years before the peak. (/lame peak oil satire)

What to Blog... What to blog

The US election stuff bores me to tears, and I have no interesting opinion about the candidates.

I was going to talk about the local council elections, because I feel violated in that preferential voting was thrown out the door, and no explanation nor correspondence was entered into. First past the post significantly devalues votes for anybody other than the front contenders. I would reccommend throwing out the state Labor government but it appears a near certainty anyway.

Kevin Rudd appears to be in his element on a diplomatic world tour. He is uniquely placed to bring up the issue of Tibet appropriately. Meanwhile Julia Gillard can knuckle down getting that unemployment rate back up from its continuing record lows.

I was going to say more about brass banding, but all I've got is that I was offered a trumpet part in "Thouroughly Modern Milly", a local theatre production, and I turned it down.

View From the Back Row

(24/3/08)

I have just come back from the Brass Band Championships held in Brisbane over Easter. The euphoria of winning the street march, something quite rare for Townsville Brass was tempered by our faltering somewhat through our Test piece later that same day. Being a second cornet player and therefore stuck in the row behind the "Solo" cornets who get to play all the showy bits, is not too taxing on rehersals, but still critical during contests. That suits me just fine and I had a great time.

Life lessons

When I was young but starting to control my own food choices, I used to have a great time teasing my mother by choosing foods with artificial colours (flavours etc.)She was one for believing all artificial substances in foods should be considered "bad" and to be avoided, even if all available research pointed to them being 100% safe. I would be into jelly, cordial, soft-drink, lollies and all those things that I was deprived of as a young child. This extended into my own children, where it would give me pleasure to feed them froot loops just to annoy my mother. That was until Zac came along. We were quite sure some foods were making him hyper-active. The before and after drinking creaming soda at Sizzler was quite stark. He liked banana lollies, so we moved towards using them as "bribes" like we did for the other children to help control behaviour. Lo and behold, his behaviour got distinctively worse when we tried that tactic. Then one day we had fed all the kids froot loops, and Zac too since he would have been jealous if he had missed out. Not long after he started being particularly loud and got cranky at the slightest provocation. We were having a party later that day (he was about 2 and a half years old then) but he refused to get dressed, insisting he stay naked. He wasn't much into clothes and we had a lot to do, so we moved on after a half an hour of screaming. When relatives arrived for the party they mostly felt his nakedness to be unacceptable, which led to another round of screaming for 30 minutes at a time as various relatives thought they knew Zac behaviour and felt they could convince him otherwise. The behaviour, if anything, intensified and the screaming started happening with any interaction. The party was a complete disaster, but Zac hadn't quite finished with us. The screaming and hyperactivity kept going and going through the evening. It stopped only when Zac crashed to the ground in complete exhaustion and fell asleep suddenly. As can be expected, the froot loops hit the bin. We converted to the all natural confectionary company, which has been a bit of a godsend. We made a mental note of every single food-stuff which triggered hyperactivity, to determine the additives and commercial foodstuffs to avoid. Things like artificial banana flavour, bright blue and red food colouring, some preservatives. Confectionary is a minefield of probable triggers. At home we stock only the all-natural lollies and that is working quite well. There are a raft of complications outside of home, with friends, teachers, parents etc. casually unaware of the risks.
It is easy to generalise, and put the blame of other's hyperactivity on artificial additives, but it is a lot more complicated than that. That said, additives are a significant contributing factor to a scary proportion of diagnosed hyperactive and autistic cases. It is impossibly hard to narrow down triggers when they are different for every individual, and behaviour profiles are often a lot more subtle and there are time delays, and for some behaviours, diet can have a residual effect that lasts weeks, and is not necessarily isolated to artificial substances. One rule of thumb is that it isn't the sugar that gives a sugar high, but the artificial stuff that goes with it. Zac can have sugar all day and still be in control.
Suffice it to say that this issue has gone full circle for me, and now I obsessively check every food we buy for additives. We avoid them for the whole family. If they have this much effect on Zac, surely they can't be that good for the rest of us either!

Evolution - The scientific method

I believe strongly in the development of evolutionary science, and I have new hypotheses that ought to be tested that don't contradict any experiments done, nor do they contradict the overall modern evolutionary synthesis. However, these hypotheses, if proven, may open up some arguments thought long ago settled.

The role of random mutations is well researched. These are well observed and are thought to be the basic unit of truly new, potentially beneficial adaptations.

DNA repair Is a process where damage to the DNA is fixed. This process is imperfect, however and failure in repairing mutations is a variable source of mutations. The process of DNA repair is blind to the function of the gene it is repairing. Thus, resulting mutations tend be in random places, and the build up of mutations on sections of DNA that don't change the function of the gene happen at a well defined rate. Thus, a process of feedback of information whether the gene is functioning properly, is the only way to account for genetic drift NOT occuring on important functional elements of the gene. Natural selection acting on whole organisms holding that gene is the only feedback commonly agreed on by evolutionary biologists to occur. However, my view is, that with a hierarchy of genes (ie. genes that control a bank of genes, that each control a set of basic genes that relate to a phenotype), there needs to be a hierarchy of feedback to ensure that the lower level genes are functioning. Ie. there needs to be a form of selection within an organism such that each basic gene can be selected or rejected based on its function independently of all other genes. The corollary being that lower level genes that are suppressed in some way by some higher level genetic action, can have its function ensured with the same process of feedback.

There are a number of mechanisms that could be at play to ensure functional integrity of genes, that are not natural selection between whole organisms. One of the mechanisms proposed, which is quite likely to be involved in some way is through the selective properties of sperm. In this mechanism, sperm act as selective proxies for the organism but specifically for genes lower down in the genetic hierarchy. Thus, every lower level gene affects the selective aspects of sperm, and that which gets to reproduce has fully functioning lower level genetics.

In this sense, this hypothesis is not concerned with the genetic variability due to the shuffling of phenotypes that follow the laws of Mendelian Inheritance, but only the functionality of the individual allele itself. This hypothesis takes it as a given that the spread of mendelian traits is the primary source of variability in phenotypes that are subject to selection in a standard Darwinian way. This hypothesis is concerned with: 1)How "improved" versions of alleles arise.
2) How stress triggers greater mutations.
3) How latent phenotypes not visible in a species can become common again.
4) How many "truly new" genes are involved in speciation, and how many genes are latent ones that are re-activated (or de-activated), or inserted via horizontal gene transfer, or are just a previously unobserved combination of mendelian and non-mendelian traits.

More Rants

There are clearly other biological hypotheses that have somehow graduated to the orthodoxy, such as Earthly abiogenesis. The hypothesis that non-life to life transition happened on Earth is a reasonably testable one, but a lot more mileage is given to experiments that assume early Earth origins (ie. that somehow Earthly origin is almost certainly the "truth"). However, I will concentrate on those biases against anything that remotely appears Lamarckian or like intelligent design (even if the intelligence is held within the DNA and/or the organism itself).

Now my thesis is that although the main feedback of information back to the DNA of how well it is doing is via the brute force of "natural selection" - that is a comparative between individuals with different DNA. However, my thesis is that there clearly is processes that are very much like selection that is also giving a feedback of how "fit" the DNA is. There are tens to hundreds of millions of sperm that are competing for an egg. The male is producing these and there may be a selection process from that side which strengthens those sperm with particular mutations and weakens others depending in part on the level and type of stress he is under. On the female side, the same thing is bound to be happening, with body conditions slowing down sperm with some particular mutations and letting through others depending on the level and type of stress she is under. As a final error correcting check, particular important sequences of genes are tested in the controlled conditions of the ova. The ova has been fully formed since before the mother-to-be was born. This is a rudimentary "archive" that checks on crucial DNA sequences to make sure there is no changes to those. Thus, a great deal of crucial environmental and/or competitive information is fed back to the DNA, as well as strict error correction on crucial segments during and even before conception. Thus the new organism will have had extensive pre-birth selection to give its genes the best chance of survival.

This might yet be uncontroversial - But it really depends on how sophisticated the stress to mutation-selection link is. To me it is plausible that there is a simulation engine powered by the subconscious mind that does intense calculations on how well any particular mutations may benefit particular constraints. Information can flow through the conscious mind, seeing certain genetic consequences, and the subconscious could translate it to stress information that would be selective for sperm proxies of the same genetic consequences. These would be really, really smart mutations - Much smarter than any genetic engineer could ever hope to become in following millenia.

The difference between the orthodox view and my view can be illustrated by a fashion paradigm. In the orthodox view, fashion designers make random changes to existing designs and force models to wear them. If they sell, they make more of the same. If they don't, the clothes get thrown in the bin and they don't make anymore of that crap.

In my view, what (successful) fashion designers do is that fashion designers make random changes to existing designs - show them to a test audience (of horny males, apparently :)) - changes that show some approval get kept. Process is repeated as many times as the exhausted sewing machinists and test models can cope with and then the surviving clothing is forced onto the model and onto the catwalk.

In my more sophisticated fashion design view, the machinists and models are given a break and all the experimentation with random changes happen on the computer (or a drawing board) and get shown to the test audience. By the time the design gets on the catwalk, the design looks "worked" and unlike the designs it may have been based on. To an untrained eye, it might still look like random changes, but those that *actually* put random changes straight on to the catwalk don't win the fashion show.

Additionally - to look at it another way the *winner* of the fashion show can gloat and make grandiose claims about his *creativity*, when in truth he just had a more sophisticated system of randomised changes with good feedback loop.

Rant

My research on modern ideas on Lamarckism has led me to Edward Steele, a controversial Australian Molecular immunologist. He has (indirectly) demonstrated a counterexample contradicting the Weismann Barrier. Now my instinct (as was his) was to suggest that the Weismann Barrier is therefore disproven, and we should be looking more closely as to when, why (or why not) there would be information feedback from somatic cells to germline cells.

I would also suggest that the Central Dogma of molecular biology should not be taken as gospel in evolution. It is not a proven fact as such - it is a simplification that demonstrates the orderly passage of genetic replicative information. It says nothing at all about the exceptions to this process (mutations). However, it is the very exceptions to the process which drives evolutionary progress. Natural selection is the big feedback loop for information about the environment to (indirectly) affect DNA. I am certain that there is extensive natural selection between sperm - However, this isn't exactly comparing one's fitness with others, because they are all from the one organism. An elaborate error correction mechanism (to obtain the best possible duplication of genes) is not actually selecting at all. It must be practically a simulation of how fit they will be in the environment - letting through genes and mutations that "pass the test" which must be indicative enough of adequate fitness through a living body.

Dillemma - Conviction Rant or Scientific Method

I am not sure whether to use this blog to state what I believe the scientific truth to be, or whether to methodically and scientifically (with citations) demonstrate why I am right.

At this link - The crux of the matter is laid out a plausible genetic mechanism for "smart" mutations that would clearly be a superior response to stresses than "random" mutations. If that kind of response is actually possible in an organism, those organisms that express this response would clearly be "fitter" than those that don't. In a purely Darwininan way, those without capability for "smart" mutations would not exist anymore.

Selective stress-breeding to create a long-neck

Background: This system presumes that my theory is completely correct (I do). Artificial selection is all well and good and has a proven record of succeeding in breeding stock with desired characteristics. However, the characteristic in question must exist in the population to start with. This is highly unsatisfactory and there is just no way you could, say, breed an antelope with a considerably longer neck (or taller all round, like a giraffe) without triggering appropriate mutations first.

The trick would be to find the same stress/mutation trigger that caused (say for the giraffe) those mutations required to be more prevalent, which allowed natural selection to have something useful to select from and speciate a taller (long-neck) animal.

The first condition is to pick an animal that feeds on leaves. There is not much point picking a carnivore or a herbivore that only eats grass/fruit etc. because there is no natural situation in geologic history in which a long neck would be the difference between life and death for such. I choose the antelope in this case - it eats leaves and lives in the same continent, so might share the required triggers and responsive genetics.

The second condition is that the breeding stock must be in some kind of stress. This is considered animal cruelty, so I suggest any experiments are done in a subsaharan country that is in a state of war: Nobody notices any cruelty that happens in those countries. Stress is well known to trigger mutations and is highly necessary to accelerate the process of artificial selection.

The third condition is to pick a stressful situation appropriately. Adaptive mutations happen as a mutation response that succeeded in the geologic past. They may not be apparent in the animal because they eventually reversed in the normal cycle of things - hopefully numerous times in the species' history such that it reinforces the response(s). In the case of the antelope, the stressful situation might have these features:
1) Near-starvation. This is known to also have physiological responses of delaying maturity, among other things. It is likely to trigger responses that might achieve it more food for its progeny in analogous situation.

2) Declining and/or isolated population. This reinforces that it is likely to be a long term stress, and which migration is unlikely to resolve. Inbreeding and polygamy might be physiological indicators of this.

3) Visual cues that food is plentiful higher up. Perhaps just out of reach, or even selective cues like seeing that taller relatives are better fed.

4) A lack of predators. Predators are known to put selective pressure towards earlier maturity thus smaller form.

I don't know if penning up antelopes, while at the same time putting heaps of food just out of reach of all but the tallest is an ethical way to prove Lamarck right - But I think that is exactly the sort of thing that led to Giraffe's long necks, and could be demonstrated within the space of a few lifetimes.

2nd draft "Marconomic Theory of Regressive Evolution"

Mainly for clarification, disambiguation and to match experimental evidence?

My theory, is concerned with "Macro mutations" and in its plainest form just expands on what is already known. I will use the term DNA subroutine for a gene that can be switched on or off to express the macro mutation in question.

Fact: an organism under stress exhibits considerably higher mutation rates.

Theory: Different types of stresses will confer different spectrum of mutation - ie. the mutations will favour more likely beneficial mutations for a predicted future requirement which the stress would signal.

The mechanism proposed is that over a window of genetic experience (say a million years) the DNA stores information regarding which mutations were more appropriate for the given stress and which ones weren't. A "bank" of hundreds of thousands of DNA subroutines that has built up over time and proved their worth are either expressed or switched off to save metabolic resources. If a subroutine has been switched off long enough it can be relegated to "junk DNA" status and will not further be trusted in the field due to it being no longer valid in the new context (or from an orthodox perspective become unusable due to genetic drift)

A word on micro mutations:

Micro mutations are classified as completely random errors in duplication of genes. These are strongly evident and well studied. However, the orthodox view is that the only way for these micro mutations to avoid eventually destroying the function of the gene in question is for them to be field tested by natural selection. To put it another way, the whole organism has to die before reproducing to avoid one crucial micro mutation from being copied. I find this argument incomprehensible. It is like as if the only way to avoid errors in programming the oxygen intake valve of the space shuttle is to launch it anyway, let it crash and avoid using those blueprints again. I call it the crash, burn and learn concept. It might be alright for a virus with millions of launches every second, but I don't think it would quite be so good for the Emperor Penguin.

This lends itself to my belief that there is something else at play other than natural selection. There must be some sort of error correction or testing mechanism on individual DNA subroutines, and if there is, they can just as easily apply to non-expressed genes (or, much more likely, there is a system that expresses these, but localises them for testing only, thus suppressing the evolved purpose of the DNA subroutine for that generation at least).

Marconomic Theory of Regressive Evolution

I will start with a generalised genetic disproof of inheritance of acquired characteristics from Wikipedia.Genetic disproof
There are many formulations of the genetic disproof, but all have roughly the same structure as the following:

Acquired traits do not affect an organism's genome.
Only the genome is passed to the offspring.
Therefore, acquired traits cannot be passed to the offspring.
While this proof may be logically valid, it suffers from the material fallacy of begging the question, since no one who believes in inheritance of acquired characters would believe both assumptions.


My theory throws these assumptions away and replaces them with this observation. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is not evident because the genome has embedded within it thousands of generations of experience as to what genetic traits are worthwile and those that aren't. In *general*, genetic mutations mimicking acquired traits do *NOT* make the organism any *fitter* to survive in nature.

Instead, the following rules of regressive evolution apply:

-Genetic mutations in offspring are a result of stresses on the parent(s).
-Mutations have a directed element that depends on the exact stress involved.
-The directed element is programmed into the genetic code via association between the stress which is acting as a trigger, and the mutation which has been "proven" to be appropriate to survive better under new conditions indicated by the stress.
-The strength of association between the trigger and the mutation is entirely dependent on the reliability of the trigger being an indication that the mutation is appropriate to the new "environment".
-Many of the mutations concerned are simply switching on or off complex functions that are permanently programmed in the genetic code whether they are active or not.
-Certain combination of stresses may create combinations of mutations without precedent in itself, but each mutation would have been "field tested" individually in distant or more recent history.

Examples that should be quite clear-cut:

Darkness stress: Species adapted to cave conditions or permanently underground (moles etc.) are uncannily blind whereas their closest relatives have full sight. The stress of being in darkness your whole life would cause a considerable proportion of your progeny to have genetic vision defects - all other things being equal.

Wetness/dryness stress: Kamerrers experiments on the midwife toad (Chapter 7 Panda's thumb) had some merit. Clearly, one must separate the selection pressure from the stress trigger to prove the point that mutations to switch back on genes that helped in water are not evident without the wetness stress. Experiments need to be formulated with this in mind. River-courses changing their path makes sudden changes in local environments.

Radiation stress: In Earth's history every single large scale event would have radiation associated with it. Volcanoes erupting, asteroid impacts, solar activity, and possible magnetic field fluctuations would all send rare radioactive elements in the atmosphere or increased radiation. Is it any wonder then that the most obvious, largest scale mutations are caused by radiation? It is a clear signal that radical mutations in any direction might cause some to survive better.

"Regressive evolution" as a term has been almost exclusively used in describing reduction of features, such as in the loss of eyesight and pigmentation in cave dwelling fish. In "Marconomic" terms, reduction in features is also the clearest example of it in nature. Switching off something that was there appears a backwards or downwards move, while the re-switching on of a previously inactive feature appears to be either a leap or not a truly new feature, depending on whether it had been observed before in related species. Philosophically speaking, backwards, downwards and leaps are artificial concepts based on thinking of evolution (falsely) as a ladder rather than the reality of it being a "bush". Switching on or off of features that are then passed on is adaptive either way. Thus I group losses and gains of such features in the same "regressive" boat.

I call it "regressive" evolution because the process almost always borrows tricks that have developed in the past with selection pressures optimising them. Switching them off saves resources when conditions dictate they are unnecessary. However, they are there for when they are required, and perhaps almost all of the evident "faster" evolutionary processes have borrowed perfectly working genetic tricks and combined them in new ways.

At first glance regressive evolution is not really evolution because it never introduces truly *new* changes. However there is such a large number of possible combinations of trigger-responsive genes that the number of species in the Earth is dwarfed by it. If there is a million genes that can be switched on or off depending on triggers, that makes two to the power of a million possible combinations. Virtually all of them will be truly new changes. Also triggers will almost always produce a spectrum of mutations - This is because the future cannot be predicted perfectly. Chance, probability and statistics is a big part of the process. Truly random mutations, however are almost certainly an evolutionary dead-end.

So I have said that in *general*, genetic mutations mimicking acquired traits do *NOT* make the organism any *fitter* to survive in nature. However, this begs the question: Is there any *specific* genetic mutations that do? (Mimick acquired traits that triggered the mutation)?

The trait/mutation would have to fit the following conditions:
A) The organism must be in a state of life or death stress or reproduction-challenging stress(1)
B) The "situation" must be very analogous to situations repeated in the genealogical history (2).
C) The mutation must clearly help progeny in analogous stressful situations more than just being shown/trained/helped by the parent(s) etc. (3)
D) The disadvantages of the mutation must be clearly outweighed by the advantages given assumed environmental constraints. (Needs a clear cost/benefit advantage)

(1) It is not enough, for instance, that a giraffe stretches their neck reaching for higher food. For a trigger situation, the giraffe must see other giraffes dying of starvation, be short in food itself, and endure the frustration of seeing lots of leaves just out of reach. (Using a well known Lamarckian example) If it isn't a life or death situation, the mutation will be both unecessary and resource-depleting.

(2)The "knowledge" associated with the trigger must be on firm statistical ground. The trigger will never be something only associated with proximal individual adaptation. For instance one 1930's experiment devised to investigate inheritance would chop of an insect's antenna that generally grows back. Any number of generations "experience" would not offset the natural experience of the insect, which is - that a more ideal regrowth of an antenna is unnecessary for survivability and reproduction in any conceivable natural environment. Even if it was - chopping off an antenna would not be an indicative trigger.

(3) It is tempting with certain features, to assume that if strength in one arm is important to survivability, and a person strengthens that arm for a greater part of their life to suit their job, and that their children are likely to have the same constraints - that a genetic mutation that would strengthen that arm without as much training would have evolutionary merit. However, if the feature is being passed on to the child by training from the parents, and very few are dying due the the arm being too weak, a mutation may be less reliable than just letting the parents train their children specifically.

A Rundown of evidence that supports my theories:

1) Experiments show that general mutation rates increase as a result of stress.
2) Humans and bacteria have some parts of their genome that are extremely similar. Even though these same parts are quite resistant to random mutations (ie. random mutations do no noticeable change to the organism). As with most parts of the genome, the specific functions of these segments are unknown.
3) Natural selection needs mutations to select from. Stressful situations lend themselves to particular mutations. This article lays out a clear example of adaptive mutation. Because almost no research is looking for similar adaptive mutations, it is unclear whether this is the exception or the rule.
4) My theories do NOT rule out random aspects to the process. Genes that *Are* under constant selective pressure will have (seemingly random) mutations and will use natural selection as a process of refinement, quality control and mutations that don't affect the purpose of the gene will build up in that gene over time -*at well researched rates*. Selective pressure is the error-correcting mechanism in this case and certain critical sequences can stay the same for Billions of years by this mechanism. This fits in perfectly well with my theories.
5) The apparent extension of this randomness into virtually all genes fits the data quite nicely. However, this should not rule out that the apparent randomness overall, is due to the randomness of the factors that cause mutation triggers. The orthodoxy is that the apparent randomness rules out environmental feedback causality of most of the overall apparent mutations. As pointed out in (3) there is some clear counter-examples to the orthodoxy.