The myth of our convict past

Piers Akerman posits a novel take on our history:

Go back far enough and all of our forebears came from somewhere else because this was perceived to be a better place to be.

I understand some of them even insisted on being shackled to the ships so they wouldn’t accidentally fall out on the way.

I wonder if I can sue my high school history teacher for teaching me a lot of our forebears were sent here as punishment.

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Akernomics 101

So-called fossil fuels? Piers Akerman may be onto something here.

The market must decide the support for ethanol-blended fuel — not the government, not monopolies and not urban Laborites and Greens determined to punish users of so-called fossil fuels.

The concept of ‘fossil’ fuels is clearly only a construction of Teh Left.

It follows therefore that fuels is just fuels. Whether so-called fossil fuels, or so-called biofuels.

The spurious distinction does, however, beg the question why Piers thinks the market must determine ‘support’ for one or the other.

Offhand the only answer I can think of is that the market is frightfully good at that sort of thing, and it would be a pity to under-utilise it.

It’s simple Akernomics.

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Tim Blair and money well spent

Remember Tim Blair?

Yep, he’s still merrily blogging away, irrelevantly but happily cocooned within his protective layer of fans, well-wishers and TrollDelay™.

Tim recently announced to his fawning followers...

Remember the great big terrifying Gulf of Mexico oil disaster of 2010? No? Well, neither does the gulf.

Followed an exulting quote from the Wall Street Journal reporting that, although “many scientists predicted that a significant amount of the resulting chemical pollutants would likely persist in the region’s waterways for years ... those scientists were wrong.” (Tim’s emphasis.)

You see, apparently those clueless scientists had, unlike Tim, failed to predict that a “fortuitous combination of ravenous bacteria, ocean currents and local topography helped to rapidly purge the Gulf of Mexico of much of the oil and gas released in the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010.”

Tim does this exulting thing from time to time. December 2010...

Remember the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? The worst environmental disaster in decades? The worst in US history? That just keeps getting worse? It was no big deal.

Followed an exulting quote that “the ecosystem of the Gulf itself turns out to have suffered remarkably little damage.”

Indeed, given the extent of the disaster (which, lest we forget, tragically killed 11 oil workers), who could be unhappy about a result like that? I know I’m happy and relieved.

Relatedly, it was reported yesterday that the disaster looks like costing BP a total $41 billion. The company will be budgeting to cover these costs for years to come.

Of that $41 billion, a figure was cited a while ago of $13 billion for “oil spill response” costs related to cleaning up the environmental damage. The rest all goes on compensation, law suits and fines.

I don’t know who could reasonably argue that BP’s $40 billion isn’t money well spent to keep Tim and his merry band of jokers feeling good about themselves.

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Webber and the Medicare Safety Net

There’s been some sloppy reporting in the press recently regarding criticisms by the former head of Medicare’s Professional Services Review board, Dr Tony Webber, of rorts and abuses in Australia’s public health system. Dr Webber has estimated that $2-3 billion are “spent inappropriately” annually.

A claim given particularly lurid prominence in most media reports is that the Medicare Safety Net had been used “to subsidise cosmetic procedures, including surgery for ‘designer vaginas’ at $5000-$6000 each.”

Really? As in, subsidised directly under the benefits schedule?

Well, no, actually...

Here’s Dr Webber quoted in The Australian:

Denouncing the system he helped oversee, Tony Webber claims Medicare is “riddled with misdirected incentives” for doctors, that payments worth up to $140 to GPs for writing care plans have created “opportunities for a bonanza” and that the safety net has been used to “subsidise cosmetic procedures such as surgery for ‘designer vaginas’ at $5000-$6000 each”.

Now Webber quoted in The Age:

He says he is aware of instances where the Medicare Safety Net had been used “to subsidise cosmetic procedures, including surgery for ‘designer vaginas’ at $5000-$6000 each”.

Now here’s Webber writing in the primary source, his article in the Medical Journal of Australia:

During my time as Director of Professional Services Review, the Safety Net was used in effect to subsidise cosmetic procedures such as surgery for “designer vaginas” at $5000–$6000 each.

Attentive readers will notice both The Australian and The Age omitted to quote two rather important words; i.e., those cosmetic procedures were “in effect” subsidised under the Medicare Safety Net.

The import, I believe, of what Dr Webber actually wrote is that the “open-ended nature of the Safety Net” permitted opaque arrangements under which such cosmetic procedures could be effectively, albeit indirectly, subsidised without administrative detection. (See paragraph 9 here.)

But the sloppy quoting, by both the above papers, promotes the impression that such cosmetic procedures have been somehow directly subsidised, as if under the MBS.

Note, however, that The Australian at least made reference to Webber’s “open-ended” criticism of the Safety Net, albeit several paragraphs down from the ‘designer vaginas’ quote; whereas The Age omitted that “open-ended” bit entirely.

Webber’s article is worth the read. Note also, he doesn’t “denounce the system he helped oversee,” as hysterically reported in The Australian; he actually quite seems to like it but wants it fixed.

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CSIRO and internal peer review

A “peer-reviewed” CSIRO study has apparently found “much stronger public support for wind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest.”

Naturally a news report like that would demand scrutiny down at Southbank, where Andrew Bolt only yesterday gleefully reported a study from Spain that suggested Spanish wind farms “might” kill millions of birds annually.

Sure enough, Bolt seized upon a detail in that news item that a CSIRO scientist (and deputy director) was “one of the reviewers of the report.”

“Pardon?” Bolt asked. “CSIRO peer reviews its own work?”

Smitham may well be a meticulous reviewer, but having peer reviewers so close to the authors does not seem to me to be a wise way to guard against group-think.

That's a fair point — not withstanding Bolt’s motives in querying this CSIRO study are as predictable as his accepting, on face value, the Spanish bird-kill study.

So, come on Andy! You're a journalist, aren't you? You can contact them to... you know, find out the troooth!

It took me all of half a minute to google that CSIRO project team’s particulars, then a couple of minutes to shoot off an email to the designated contact person asking for clarification. By this afternoon, I had my answer.

Bolt, in an update to his post, seems to have tentatively settled on his own answer, suggested by one of his readers — it was simply a case of "misreporting".

He’s wrong.

I was informed that CSIRO reports are generally reviewed by CSIRO staff who aren't part of the specific project team, but who have expertise in the field, and who will frequently have had experience reviewing work by other scientists outside of the CSIRO. Further external review may be solicited if the work is to be published in external journals.

There it is, Andy — scooped ya! Thanks for the lead.

So yes, it's possible that such a process of ‘internal peer review’ (as my CSIRO contact frankly put it) could make the CSIRO’s work prone to something like “group think”. It would require a rigorous regime of internal checks and balances to address that risk.

If that isn’t already the case, then beefing up the review processes for their published work would certainly improve the CSIRO brand.

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Urinal humiliation policy leaked

In a barely coherent and historically confused on-air rant, US shock jock Mark Levin tries to enunciate unofficial US military policy in the ‘war on terror’:

Let this be a lesson to every one of you subhumans who plots against America and tries to kill American citizens. We don’t give a damn who you are! We don’t give a damn what you believe! And we don’t give a damn if you’re offended! Because we’re going to hunt you down and kill you and then humiliate you after you’re killed!

Got it?

Yep... got it! — Those marines who urinated on corpses of Taliban fighters they’d just killed are not ‘bad apples’ in an otherwise noble enterprise. No, they’re the embodiment of what Levin and his ilk would like to see as the norm of behaviour in our warrior caste.

But while Levin speaks for the shit-scared and clueless, others such as Sebastian Junger at the Washington Post endeavour to understand what has happened to ‘us’.

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan... At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn’t want them to be like that.

I do feel for our warrior caste, being torn as they are between ‘enlightened’ standards, and what people such as Levin “want them to be like.” It’s not enough that they are put in harms’ way in a hopelessly flawed enterprise. They’re also subject to deeply conflicted expectations of cosseted ignoramuses in the media.

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Tim Blair cherry-picks for cheap point-scoring

It would now appear to be okay for conservative and right-wing pundits to cite the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project as a realistic tally of Iraqi war dead. At least, that’s the impression one might take from a post at Tim Blair’s blog, in which he favourably cites IBC figures.

Then again, it may simply be a case of Blair cherry-picking a convenient number in order to score a cheap political point off one of his perennial hate-objects, Kevin Rudd, for “his repeated support for the bogus Lancet figure.”

Blair has, of course, consistently held the Lancet (Johns Hopkins) study on Iraq war mortality to be “bogus”. But if the Lancet figure is bogus, what might Blair make of Iraq Body Count’s tally, given the IBC people themselves openly concede:

Iraq Body Count (IBC) compiles data from news reports to provide a baseline number of confirmed fatalities, but it should be noted that many deaths will likely go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media.

IBC’s tally, then, will understate the death toll virtually as a design effect of their methodology. It may also be noted that IBC, unlike the Johns Hopkins study, does not attempt to capture ‘excess deaths’ from flow-on health effects of the war.

So, maybe Rudd’s support for the Lancet study is not so wide of the mark after all.

Further, perhaps it’s Blair himself who “needs a correction.” Being opinion editor for a major daily newspaper, he should at least have some competence on the topic over which he’s dissing on a public figure.

But let’s face it, such considerations are decidedly off Blair’s radar. It’s fairly evident by now that he couldn’t give a rat’s arse what the actual Iraq war civilian toll might be.

Blair’s blogging activity has always been heavily reliant on name-calling and schadenfreude. ‘Disinformation’ is, however, perhaps too strong a word for what Blair actually does, since no-one with any sense would trust in the veracity of someone who notoriously has no interest in fairness.

And anyway, from his readers’ perspective, his function has always been to pad out a ‘conservative’ narrative with a kind of quasi-cool schtik. It’s a vaudeville, more than anything else.

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Merry Rectory Christmas

The "real" Christmas tree on the Rectory front lawn.

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One more time again: Christopher Hitchens

It’s worth your while to listen in on, or catch the podcast of the late Christopher Hitchens interviewed by Phillip Adams last year about his memoir, Hitch 22.

Late Night Live

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Public health facility now unencumbered with patients

Yes Minister, this could be one of the best run facilities in the public health system.

With all residents now gone from the nursing home a new staff structure has been put in place.

Some administration staff have been retained to oversee the closing off the facility and to explore options for its future use. Maintenance staff also remain in place with two house keepers and caretakers appointed to ensure the building is kept up to a high standard as future uses are sought out.

Koroit Health Services Acting CEO and Director of Nursing Michelle Finnigan said the appointment of the housekeepers and caretakers were important ones... “This will ensure the building is safe and secure and it will be keep fresh and vibrant to help get ready for future opportunities.”

Meanwhile, even the former staff never had it so good.

“And the nursing, kitchen and cleaning staff have also found some wonderful new opportunities and they are now free to move onto the next stage of their careers.”

Everyone’s a winner!

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