Applied Hermeneutics

Pub Friday

2012-02-03T11:34:00.002+11:00

The myth of our convict past

2012-01-28T20:30:00.004+11:00

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.

Akernomics 101

2012-01-27T18:30:00.003+11:00

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.

Tim Blair and money well spent

2012-01-20T23:00:00.004+11:00

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.

Webber and the Medicare Safety Net

2012-01-19T19:00:00.003+11:00

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.

CSIRO and internal peer review

2012-01-18T18:15:00.008+11:00

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.

Urinal humiliation policy leaked

2012-01-15T12:30:00.003+11:00

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.

Tim Blair cherry-picks for cheap point-scoring

2012-01-03T19:30:00.007+11:00

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.

Merry Rectory Christmas

2011-12-23T22:30:00.001+11:00

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

One more time again: Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-22T20:30:00.001+11:00

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

Public health facility now unencumbered with patients

2011-12-16T19:30:00.005+11:00

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!

News beat

2011-12-15T19:30:00.001+11:00

Walking by The Age building in the city this evening, I almost blundered into the path of a media scrum, covering some obviously Topical Dude (even if I knew who was who, I couldn’t get a good look who he was) as he tried to make his way along the sidewalk to his parked car.

I looked back to see a cameraman had positioned himself in the traffic lane to get an ‘exclusive’ shot of ‘Topical Dude through car window.’

We so need those.

Shameless self promotion or "men in skirts" XXXVI

2011-12-14T23:34:00.007+11:00

Theme: Michael Park, 'The battle of Gaza, 312 BC - Doomed men of distinction'. Illustrated by Igor Dzis and José Antonio German.
Ancient Warfare, V.6, 2011

The horsemen reached Azotus (modern Ashdod, Israel) near midnight. Their horses, lathered in sweat in spite of the crisp December night, made directly for their stabling and water. Of the elite cavalrymen who had earlier left these winter quarters, few returned. The survivors, a defeated and desultory lot, made their way toward their general’s lodging. Here, in “council” (synhedrion) with what remained of his “Friends” (philoi), Demetrius canvassed his options. Many of the Friends, “the most distinguished of whom were Pithon [son of Agenor], who had shared the command on equal terms with himself, and Boeotus, who for a long time had lived with his father Antigonus and had shared in all his state secrets”, lay dead on the battlefield (Diodorus 19.85.2 – all references to this source and book unless noted). Still in his blood and grime covered armour and struggling to come to terms with events, Demetrius had an envoy sent to Ptolemy “about the burial of the dead since he was very anxious at any cost to honour those who had perished with the funeral that was their due” (85.1). More than a few of those who’d perished had sat in another council prior to the battle; a council of war.

So?? Go buy it!

Elsewhere: Lancet assessment of mixed outcomes in Afghan health

2011-12-10T09:40:00.002+11:00

The Lancet reports the release of the first national comprehensive mortality survey of Afghanistan as providing cause for both hope and concern.

To improve rebuilding efforts as well as gauging development initiatives and years of multisectoral investment by the international community, the Afghan Public Health Institute of the Ministry of Public Health and the Central Statistics Organisation undertook the Afghanistan Mortality Survey (AMS) 2010. AMS 2010 is the first national comprehensive mortality survey of 222,351 households, 47 848 women aged 12—49 years, and verbal autopsies of 3157 deaths in the 3 years preceding the survey, and covers 87% of the population in 34 provinces in the country. ...

The most encouraging progress is in maternal health, with an overall increase in coverage of antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, and births in health facilities to 63%, 34%, and 32%, respectively. Despite these achievements, fewer than 16% of women reported having at least four antenatal visits (the minimum necessary to provide adequate screening for pregnancy complications), while 71.5% women had not received postnatal check-ups for their last birth, which is vital for monitoring delivery complications.

This is in a context where...

According to a UNICEF fact sheet released last month, Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places for a pregnant woman or a child to be born. Afghanistan has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world, with 1400 women out of every 100 000 livebirths dying of a complication related to pregnancy or childbirth, while its mortality rate for children younger than 5 years is ranked second in the world, with 199 deaths per 1000 livebirths. Even if a child is lucky enough to survive birth, he or she could only expect to live 44 years, while the life expectancy at birth of the world overall is 67.2 years for 2005—10.

However,

this report is not without limitations. First, 9% of the total populations in Afghanistan, who live in the rural areas of Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul provinces in the south zone, are not represented in the survey owing to security reasons, which seriously limits the report’s usefulness for planning. Second, although the survey has suggested much lower maternal, infant, and child mortality rates than previous estimates, given the geographically limited samples and use of verbal autopsy data, the numbers should be treated with caution. ... Finally, anthropometric indicators such as stunting or wasting rates, which can help evaluate malnutrition—the biggest contributor to child mortality by far, are missing. According to UNICEF’s Afghanistan Country programme document 2010—2013, around 1.2 million children younger than 5 years and 550,000 pregnant or lactating mothers are at high risk of severe malnutrition in Afghanistan.

The Lancet concludes, ominously:

To safeguard what has been gained with so much difficulty, sufficient and consistent assistance must be ensured from the international community.

Hear hear! And let’s be reminded again of Tony Blair’s 2001 pledge that we will not abandon Afghanistan.

Freddie puts Simon Ferocious back in his box

2011-12-08T07:00:00.005+11:00

A program screened recently on the rock group Queen relates an anecdote about an encounter the band had with Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols.

Scene: Wessex Studios, London, 1977, where Queen were recording their News of the World album, while the Sex Pistols were recording Never Mind the Bollocks.

Vocalist and rock god Freddie Mercury, drummer Roger Taylor and roadie Peter ‘Ratty’ Hince recall the encounter.

PH:	One day we were in the control room and Fred was sat at the desk. And suddenly we heard this voice and it was Sid Vicious who had come in. And he was clearly the worse for wear.
RT:	Sid came in. Sid was a moron. You know, he was an idiot.
PH:	And he called in to the room, “Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?”
FM:	I called him Simon Ferocious or something, and he didn’t like it at all. I said, “What are you going to do about it?”
PH:	Fred went and took him by the lapels and pushed him out the door.
FM:	He hated the fact that I could even speak like that... I think we survived that test.

Cue Freddie and the band’s anthem...

O brave new climate!

2011-12-06T11:00:00.011+11:00

For his final TV show of the year, Andrew Bolt had tantalisingly promised his followers “a mention of Tim Flannery.”

So naturally I had to tune in, hoping for his sake he wasn’t going to run with Bunyip’s failed gotcha on Flannery, to which he’d given such prominence on his blog. In the event, he took a somewhat different angle. Phew!

Bolt sought to ease our Flannery-inflamed anxieties by emphasising three points. (See youtube video. Note: creepy presenter warning.)

First,

With the expected increase in Australia’s population this century, you’ve got to expect some increase in the number of “weather-related deaths” anyway.

True enough so far as it goes, and we eagerly await the release of Doctor Easychair’s study into what the actual real numbers will be.

Second,

The “death estimate” presupposes the world warming by “an incredible four and a half degrees this century, when it hasn’t actually warmed for the last decade.”

The supposed absence of warming over the last decade to which he refers is, of course, a recurring fancy of climate change ‘sceptics’ everywhere.

Also noteworthy is that the study he refers to, published in 2008^* (way before Flannery was appointed to the Climate Commission), actually considers various public health outcomes, aside from ‘death estimates’, across a range of scenarios.

For his third point, Bolt quoted a snippet from that study:

This assessment does not quantify the extent to which future adaptation to climate change will modify the levels of death...

The document itself continues,

..., injury and ill-health for each health outcome. It will be difficult to make confident quantitative assumptions about the potential adaptive consequences...

“Difficult”? Not for our Doctor Easychair, who confidently gushes his third point:

“This death estimate comes from researchers who admit they didn't allow for us getting richer and smarter, so much better able to adapt to the new climate. You know, being able to afford better cures, better disease prevention. Cheaper air conditioning!”

Yay, we’re saved!

While we eagerly await the details of Doctor Easychair’s confident quantitative assumptions about our adaptation to this “new climate” — which he may or may not believe in anyway, who can say? — still the prospect of unspecified cures and cheaper air conditioning is welcome relief after all that scary stuff.

And it’s not unreasonable to expect Doctor Easychair will next solve other problems such as war, famine, and... oh, let’s throw in cold fusion and teleportation.

* Garnaut Climate Change Review, June 2008, “The impacts of climate change on three health outcomes: temperature-related mortality and hospitalisations, salmonellosis and other bacterial gastroenteritis, and population at risk from dengue.” Available as PDF document from the Garnaut Review website.

UPDATE

Yep. Andrew Bolt really does believe it’s all about him. On a video of a discussion between Robert Manne and Tim Flannery, he observes:

I’m mentioned so often by the two alarmists that I wonder why they didn’t simply invite me along to have the debate they’d promised.

Promised debate?

Latrobe University, which hosted the event on August 12 this year, billed it as “A Conversation between Tim Flannery and Robert Manne.”

It’s the youtube hosted version (posted, it says, 1 day ago) that for some reason titles it as “Robert Manne vs. Tim Flannery,” with the description, “Robert Manne debates Tim Flannery.”

Anyway, I had to wait 17 minutes for the first mention of Bolt (17:27), then 23 min (40:10) during which Greg Sheridan came up (33:58). Then he was mentioned once during the Q/A where Manne imagined a hypothetical debate between Bolt and Phillip Adams (1:07:55).

So that’s three very brief mentions in over 80 minutes. None of those mentions related to any particular point of science because the focus of the conversation was on Flannery’s role in communicating his brief as Climate Commissioner.

Manne and Flannery did have a number of points of difference, but they maintained the discussion in a spirit of civility (so often missing in political discourse, so Bolt is always saying).

It’s a pity our Doctor Easychair only has ears for himself, because he’d seem to have missed out on hearing a thoughtful, wide-ranging discussion.

Why wasn’t he invited? I guess because it was intended as a thoughtful, wide-ranging discussion.

Elsewhere: Will there be another one of those glorious Gillard defeats that make the country better?

2011-12-03T21:40:00.003+11:00

Jeremy Sear (or whoever’s now controlling that blog) makes a pithy, pertinent point:

Here’s hoping her Prime Ministership enjoys another great achievement during the ALP National Conference, that of her being rolled by the rest of the ALP on her opposition to marriage equality.

Great things are possible when Julia Gillard is Prime Minister and she doesn’t get her way.

Quite so. Where to begin?

One more time again: Facebook & You

2011-12-03T16:10:00.001+11:00

image source verydemotivational.com

FACEBOOK & YOU

if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer.
You’re the product being sold.

'Welcome back' song

2011-12-02T22:52:00.002+11:00

A welcome back song. Who the hell needs Whiter Shade of Pale??

(What "uppers" is the drummer on?)

Bunyip’s failed Flannery gotcha

2011-12-02T10:30:00.007+11:00

The Australian government’s Climate Commission this week released a controversial report projecting “impacts of climate change on the health of Australians.”

The report was launched by Chief Commissioner Tim Flannery, which was duly reported in The Australian. From among the report’s projections, the paper reported:

Without international action on climate change to limit temperature rises to [2 degrees celsius], the number of predicted temperature related deaths in Australia is predicted to rise from just over 6000 in 2020 to about 10,000 in 2070.

Admirably taking this statement with a sceptical grain of salt, blogger Professor Bunyip armed himself with “a pocket calculator and a copy of some recent Bureau of Statics [sic] projections” to set about testing the Climate Commission’s predictions.

In 2020, according to the ABS, Australia will be home to some 30 million people, of which Flannery insists roughly 6000 will be carried off by dengue fever and other curses that thrive in the heat. By 2070, the same ABS projection posits a likely population of between 46 million and 54 million, depending on which curve you choose to track.

So let’s see how that works out: 6000 deaths per 30 million means a 1-in-5000 chance of being done in by nasty weather as of 2020.

And 10,000 deaths in a 2070 population of 54 million? Well that comes in at 1-in-5400 climate casualties.

So the warmer it is, at least by Flannery’s reckoning, the safer and healthier we will be.

Neat... except Bunyip has made a couple of erroneous assumptions — one trivial, and one that’s somewhat more serious.

Trivially, he attributes the “reckoning” to Tim Flannery, when in fact the report’s authors are Lesley Hughes and Tony McMichael. (Hughes is a commissioner with the Climate Commission, and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University. McMichael is professor of population health at Australian National University.) True, Flannery as Chief Commissioner did launch the report, but the centrality attributed to Flannery by Bunyip and his fellow travellers is about an agenda.

More serious, however, is Bunyip’s simplistic (albeit pocket calculator-friendly) assumption that the health-related effects of hotter temperatures will be linearly uniform across Australia.

Whereas the modelling from Hughes & McMichael is somewhat more complex:

Under a worst-case scenario, unmitigated climate change may modestly reduce temperature-related deaths in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and NSW . . . but deaths could increase markedly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

That’s an actual quote from the report that was in the article Bunyip relied upon for the above, so he has no excuse other than agenda-driven zeal.

So, Bunyip will need to factor into his calculations some sort of inverse differential between Qld/NT and the other states and territories, based on population projections for each, factoring in some assumptions about relative risk in each, etc. etc. etc.

The take-home message of Bunyip’s foolishness is that modelling of complex systems is ... well, complex ... and requires somewhat more than a pocket calculator and an agenda.

Oh, and beware when someone like fact-averse Andrew Bolt thinks well of you.

UPDATE 06/12

Bunyip has rebutted my remarks here in an update to his post, in which I’ve been soundly bitch-slapped, had my ~~arse~~ ass handed to me on a plate, whilst simultaneously having it kicked, on my way out the door. That’s fixed my little red wagon, yessah, and I won’t be dragging my ~~arse~~ ass back in a sling for more, nossah!

Kidding. He called me some names and had a little whine about standards.

Not inflaming, merely informing

2011-11-29T23:30:00.004+11:00

“Every boat just adds to your bills”

Andrew Bolt gleefully ‘reports’ to his readers the following, from the Australian government’s federal Budget Update:

onshore processing costs related to irregular maritime arrivals, which are expected to increase by $1.3 billion over four years as a result of an increase in expected arrival rates compared to those at Budget. [Bolt's emphasis]

Doctor Easychair’s readers will, of course, dutifully follow his link to read the remainder of that paragraph he omitted to ‘report’:

This is partly offset by $1.1 billion in reduced costs and savings associated with not progressing offshore processing arrangements at this time, leaving a net impact on the budget of $197 million over four years [my emphasis]

Ecchhh!

Spittle-flecked fury over Europe

2011-11-22T23:30:00.001+11:00

Conservative hero Brendan O’Neill has been in full spittle-flecked fury because…

when powerful West European nations use extreme financial pressure to force a change of government in less powerful European nations, no one seems to mind.

Oh er, but he calms down a bit further along, noting…

There has been some disquiet over what has happened in the past week, however, even in pro-EU circles. Some have expressed concern about the “technocratic turn” in Europe.

But…? But…?

What these observers don’t realise is that this is not a “turn”. It is the extreme logical conclusion to the EU project.

Well gosh… but it’s also in large part an extreme logical conclusion of some extraordinary circumstances that presently beset Greece and Italy — an elephant in the room which O’Neill all but ignores.

Instead O’Neill sets up a series of strawmen, similarly ignoring context to bolster his overarching narrative about “the liberal EU project in all its naked, tyrannical, oligarchical glory.”

He excoriates France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel — whose economies have time and again been imposed upon to bail out less robust EU members, another detail ignored by O’Neill — as “EU overlords” who have, for example, “reacted with spittle-flecked fury to Papandreou’s referendum idea.”

Oh, the hyperbowl!

Greece and, to a lesser degree, Italy are in serious trouble, but the “liberal EU project” is only incidentally a contributing factor.

Andrew Bolt pays “very great respect indeed”

2011-10-12T21:45:00.001+11:00

And why would he not, when the payees are three actual scientists who have aligned themselves with his crankish views on climate science?

Bolt’s dubious praise is actually a petulant expression of spleen in response to a feisty defence of orthodox climate science by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb.

From the outset Bolt refuses to dignify Chubb with the title ‘Professor’, referring to Chubb simply as ‘Mr Chubb’ in the heading of his post.

He then introduces a video of his interview with his three tame scientists with the following:

... here’s a video of me paying very great respect indeed to three scientists who do agree with Chubb on one thing — that scientists like them are indeed treated with contempt, but not by the people Chubb means ...

Yep, “vewwy gweat wespect indeed” — that ought to fix Perfessor Chubb’s little red wagon.

Well then, what did Professor Chubb say to provoke such a puerile, tongue-poking performance from our good Doctor Easychair? Perhaps it was this bit:

[Chubb] also attacked “entertainers” in the media who had the privilege of an audience but not the responsibility to go with it. “For many in the media and politics and for the plethora of so-called commentators, undermining science is becoming an increasingly popular pastime,” he said.

Note that Chubb wasn’t specifically referring to Bolt as one of those ‘entertainers’, but — since clearly everything’s about him — Bolt has clearly taken to heart what he regards as a stinging jibe.

Notwithstanding his doomed efforts at fact-based commentary — which sadly requires a competent grasp of actual facts — I do hope Doctor Easychair comes to realise what an honourable thing is the role of entertainer in our lives.

On this blog alone, his endearing antics have been the subject of around two dozen out of 800-plus over almost 6 years. And his contribution to the wider blogging community is inestimable.

But is it worth two u-turns?

2011-10-08T23:20:00.000+11:00

image by jacob

South Gippsland Highway
Caldermeade, Victoria, Australia

Pattern emerging?

2011-10-08T10:20:00.006+11:00

Research- and fact-averse Andrew Bolt doesn’t know what day of the week it is (compare the title embedded in the url link with the post’s now-corrected banner heading) because he has “been preoccupied with trying to get Anne Summers to correct and apologise for a very damaging false claim she made about my wife.”

Elsewhere he applauds Gerard Henderson’s “dutiful” efforts to “document the howlers” in Susan Mitchell’s “bizarre rant against Tony Abbott.”

Well, everyone makes mistakes, even a most-read columnist — as Bolt himself admitted recently, “I also made mistakes, Justice Bromberg said, although none seemed to me to be of consequence.” (Ignoring, of course, that those “mistakes” were a decisive factor in his recent court loss.)

And so, a pattern seems to emerge with regard to which mistakes, errors of fact and distortions of the truth our Doctor Easychair holds to be “of consequence.”

UPDATE

. . . a very damaging false claim . . .

The words that kind of leap out at you in that expression strongly suggest that Doctor Easychair actually does know that a “false claim” can be “damaging” to, say, an innocent party.

There may be hope for the boy yet.

Suggested alternative headline

2011-10-02T22:00:00.004+11:00

After Andrew Bolt was judicially ‘silenced’ last week in the Federal Court, his paper The Herald Sun ran a screaming headline on its front page quoting their own Free Speech Martyr.

But I decided the headline demanded a little bit of tweaking to improve its accuracy:

Love survives

2011-03-18T23:00:00.000+11:00

image source

Severe but not catastrophic

2011-03-15T13:50:00.000+11:00

Formerly an “opponent” of nuclear power, Ben Heard gives a more up-beat view than commonly reported of the nuclear crisis in Japan following last Friday’s horrifying earthquake and tsunami catastrophe:

When the earthquakes struck, Japan’s nuclear power stations did as they were designed to do and shut down with the insertion of control rods. This halted the nuclear chain reaction that generates the power. In response the plants rapidly dropped in power to around 5% of normal.

Other (non-uranium) constituents of the fuel remained “hot” i.e. reacting, which is normal.

Back up power systems (diesel generators) were applied to continue to provide cooling to the reactor core. This worked as expected.

Approximately 1 hour later, two power plants housing seven nuclear reactors were struck by a 7 metre tsunami. These plants were Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini. This disabled the diesel generators that were in use, and all other back-up generators that were available. It is this second disaster that triggered the problems at these power plants, as the plants began to experience a loss of cooling on the fuel.

Back-up cooling from batteries was applied, and provided cooling for approximately a further 8 hours

Other measures have then needed to be implemented as this power source ran out. This has included pumping sea-water into the reactor core. This is not a preferred action as it causes some damage.

Some portions of the fuel rods remained exposed from the coolant for long enough to heat up and melt. This is the meaning of “partial meltdown”

Some build up of radioactivity has occurred within the reactor buildings. This has been periodically vented in a controlled way to maintain pressure within the reactor at a safe level. The radiation being vented is of a type that is short lived, decaying rapidly to harmless substances

The venting gas has contained hydrogen. Unfortunately, perhaps due to not venting quickly enough, the hydrogen concentrations have become elevated and resulted in explosions occurring outside of the reactor building when the venting occurred

Presently the reactor cores are being successfully cooled and progressively moved to a state of cold shutdown, meaning fully under control.

Critically, throughout the disaster the integrity of the very strong Containment Structures, which separate the nuclear reactor from the outside world, has been maintained. The reactor building itself then contains the core of nuclear fuel, and these reactor buildings have also remained intact. This means there has never been a risk of a “Chernobyl-type” incident, with serious releases of radioactivity to the surrounding environment that would pose a threat to human health. The Chernobyl power stations had no such structure, which greatly increased the consequences of that accident.

The incident has received a severity rating of INES 6. It is clearly very serious. The Three Mile Island Accident was a 5. Chernobyl, however, was a 7 (the highest), and is a very different league.

...

The bottom line of the events at Fukushima and the nuclear power sector more broadly would appear to be as follows:

Zero deaths from radiation

Zero release of radiation levels of a danger to human health, except for brief periods for those working within the plant compound (not Public exposure). These workers would be well protected and monitored to avoid excessive accumulated doses

Minimal injuries (about a dozen) as a result of the hydrogen explosions

No significant or lasting environmental impact whatsoever

A major evacuation, which has no doubt been distressing for all involved

8 - 10 of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors known to have varying levels of damage that will impact their ability to provide electricity. The remainder will no doubt require inspection, but would appear to be relatively undamaged.

...

If Japan’s nuclear power sector can withstand the worst natural calamity I hope to ever see in my life and contribute no deaths, minimal injuries and minimal environmental impact, then nuclear power must be just about the sturdiest, best designed, best managed and least dangerous infrastructure in the world. And in a world that is quickly cooking itself through climate change, nuclear power must not be allowed to suffer from the hype, headlines and hyperbole that have stemmed from this tragic event.

We sincerely and fervently hope Mr Heard’s assessment won’t be requiring any major rewrites.

Disclaimer: I have no interests whatever in the nuclear industry.

Pell asserts his authority in stuffology

2011-03-15T11:00:00.004+11:00

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney has rebuffed the director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Greg Ayers, as “unscientific”.

Last month Dr Ayers told a Senate estimates hearing that a submission on climate science by Cardinal Pell was heavily based on Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, which has been soundly discredited.

Ayers (a BSc and PhD from Monash University) has now been dismissed by Pell (who played a lot of football for Corpus Christi College) as “obviously a hot-air specialist.”

Pell continued,

“I've rarely heard such an unscientific contribution... I regret when a discussion of these things is not based on scientific fact. I spend a lot of time studying this stuff.”

Readers may judge for themselves the quality of Ayers’ critique of the Pell-Plimer creed from the transcript reproduced here, but the opinion of this humble blogger is that it was chock-full of scientific stuff, in contrast to Pell’s lame rhetoric above.

Both climate ‘sceptics’ and committed Catholics should ask Cardinal Pell, as gently as possible and with all due respect, to please stop making a jackass out of himself and them.

‘No Carbon Tax Rally’ infiltrated

2011-03-13T17:50:00.002+11:00

This image is from a page of photos of the ‘No Carbon Tax Rally’ at the electoral office of Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Werribee, Victoria.

Note the gentleman at left holding a placard urging readers to “Google Gillard Treason.”

That relates to the bit of fringe lunacy described here, which is supported by such groups as the Australian 9/11 Truth Movement.

Worry...

Andrew Bolt’s dodgy fundamentals

2011-03-12T21:40:00.003+11:00

Andrew Bolt has today posed a couple of questions about the Gillard Government’s carbon ‘pricing’ plan that I’d have liked to have seen him ask John F. Kennedy in 1962:

There are two fundamental questions journalists never ask the Kennedy administration about its mad scheme to put a man on the moon.
They’re the two questions we’d ask whether buying an Electrolux vacuum cleaner or a Pontiac.
One, how much will this cost?
Two, how well will it work?

Actually there are some further fundamental questions the average shopper would probably ask, around costs-benefits and the like.

Of course, there are technological developments and innovations that would almost certainly flow from Kennedy’s, or indeed any, grand initiative. These were unquantifiable, of course, when Kennedy announced his grand vision in 1962 but are readily identifiable today.

The thing is, of course, that Bolt’s equivalence of the Gillard Government’s carbon pricing initiative with the mundane purchase of consumer goods is utterly simplistic and, well, just plain dumb.

If he’d have put that equivalence to Jill Duggan of the European Commission’s Directorate General of Climate Action, whom he lambastes in the above column for not answering his dodgy “two fundamental questions”, she might have been able to set him straight — failing which, you’d have to think maybe she really was clueless.

Unfortunately Prime Minister Gillard probably lacks the gravitas to convincingly deliver the Kennedy line about “we do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard...”

. . . because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

And it may be recalled that Kennedy, in his election campaigning, did not categorically say he would not put a man on the moon.

Longevity not so affordable in long-term

2011-03-11T21:00:00.002+11:00

From a discussion of various models for reform of the residential aged care sector in New Zealand:

Enhanced integration of aged care and other health services could improve older people’s outcomes and lower direct costs. It is, however, a complex structural change and international experience suggests that it may, in fact, not reduce total costs, primarily because initial savings are often offset by increased longevity.

Aged Residential Care Service Review: Summary of Findings (PDF)
Grant Thornton New Zealand

Always a catch, but then it stands to reason. Increased budgetary and other imposts due to increasing longevity is in fact a recurring theme in the Grant Thornton report above, as indeed it is in the Australian Productivity Commission’s Caring for Older Australians draft report.

McCrann and the great big new tax on dirty bits of grit

2011-03-09T08:55:00.002+11:00

“Astonishingly,” says Herald Sun columnist Terry McCrann, “the PM, the Cabinet and members of the Canberra Press Gallery don’t know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide.”

Apparently it has to do with nomenclature, because the Gillard Government wants to put a price on carbon, rather than carbon dioxide. McCrann seems to believe that carbon comes in only one form, namely “dirty bits of grit.”

The reason the term is used by Gillard is an exercise of quite deliberate despicable dishonesty. It is the modern political form of those subliminal advertisements that are banned.
To suggest that it is about stopping dirty bits of grit — the very real carbon pollution of yesterday’s coal-burning home fires which gave London its sooty smog and killed thousands every year.

Most people are familiar with the term ‘carbon sink’, which has been around for decades, but perhaps only a very few including McCrann believe it refers to something that absorbs dirty bits of grit.

McCrann also excoriates the Gillard Government for “peddling” another lie, that “putting a price on carbon is the 21st century equivalent of the tariff reforms of the 1980s.”

This lie has been peddled not just by the government but also by Treasury. Be afraid, be really afraid that we have a Treasury which is that incompetent.

I’ll indeed switch from being mildly amused if McCrann or somebody can refer me to exactly where Treasury said that.

There’s no doubt, however, that McCrann’s niche readership of the habitually afraid will find his exposition really, really frightening. They’ll indeed find confirmation that the guv’ment wants to tax human respiration.

The last word on this belongs to a commenter on an online forum, who seems to be precisely on McCrann’s wavelength:

Remember if they could kill you they would.

Writing off the invisible hand that feeds them

2011-03-03T18:40:00.012+11:00

[A recent study] surveyed all Harvard University Press titles published (in first edition) between 2000 and well into 2010, making 10+ years of publication, in the subject areas of Business & Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as a residual of Law titles. A large number of titles were initially removed from the survey because the book title suggested little connection or platform for political ideology. After making these removals, 494 titles remained, and the ideological outlook of each was assessed. The results show that Harvard University Press leans heavily to the left. In fact, over the 10+ years surveyed only eight of the 494 titles, or 2 percent, had an outlook that was conspicuously either classical liberal or conservative.

This is truly appalling — I mean, surely there must be lots and lots of exciting new developments in classical liberalism to write about in this day and age.

But Doctor Easychair gets to the nub of it: “Yet the books themselves are sold on the free market.”

No, don’t laugh — this is serious!

UPDATE

Another hypocrisy of our times: Books like these are sold in paperback editions.

I don’t say Andrew Bolt is relentlessly partisan

2011-03-03T13:30:00.008+11:00

. . . But, following news that the desalination plant at Wonthaggi, Victoria, looks like becoming a $23.9b “white elephant,” Andrew Bolt has declared it to be:

The greatest green folly in Victoria’s history.

The problem with Doctor Easychair’s analysis is that the Greens have always opposed the desalination plant as “a loser for the environment, greenhouse gases and the household budget.”

Moreover, as Jeremy Sear notes at Pure Poison,

Friends of the Earth have been long opposed. Likewise the Australian Conservation Foundation, and a coalition of environmental groups operating as “Watershed Victoria” with their Your Water Your Say campaign.
In fact, the Greens and environmental groups were the biggest opponents of the desalination plant. Where the Herald Sun columnist disingenuously pretends that “almost no journalists or academics even questioned this gigantic folly at the time” and concludes that the plant represents “what green madness, unchecked, can lead to”, it is clear looking at the record that there were many, many people campaigning vigorously against the proposal all the way through, and that the Greens and greens in general were those leading the fight.

I try to avoid Doctor Easychair’s writings as far as possible, but from what I’ve seen he’s only opposed desalination plants when his ‘warmist’ bogeyman Tim Flannery advocated for them.

All imarges by Jarcob, January 2008.

Assange guilty of anything and everything

2011-03-02T13:25:00.001+11:00

Interviewed recently on ABC radio, computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier pithily observed:

In the United States the reporting about the expulsion of Mubarak in Egypt has been entirely dominated by Google and Facebook, and to a lesser degree Wikileaks, and everyone talks about it as the Facebook revolution, and every headline is about the Facebook revolution in Egypt.
And the problem with that is that I think there’s sort of this orgy of narcissism involved where we’re seeing our own American tech companies as being at the centre of the universe. And I’m concerned that what it really does is it makes us find yet another way not to actually listen to what somebody in Egypt might really be saying. For all our talk about all this openness and connection, I think we’re just using it as a way to look at ourselves, instead of them.

There’s very likely some truth in Lanier’s off-the-cuff remarks. In an interview last August for The Observer, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange related...

. . . the story of the Kenyan 2007 elections when a WikiLeak document “swung the election”.
The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased.”

Assange here quite arguably has overstated WikiLeaks’ contribution to that “chilling statistic”. It’s clearly absurd to suppose that the people of Kenya had no idea, before the WikiLeaks material was published, about the tribal and clan-based corruption that has blighted the country. But apart from all that, much of the 2007 violence was in reaction to disputed election results.

It might more accurately have been said that the WikiLeaks material probably helped, to some significant degree, in bringing the problem of corruption in Kenya more sharply into focus. The extent to which WikiLeaks ‘contributed’ to the 1,300 killed, however, is at best a matter of loose conjecture. To claim otherwise is perhaps a symptom of the narcissism Lanier described above.

When in December Assange burst into the headlines with the Swedish ‘sex charges’, his self-aggrandising claims regarding Kenya allowed motoring writer and blogger Tim Blair to declaim wildly about Assange’s culpability in...

tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem.

Assange’s apparent non sequitir about 40,000 children dying of malaria was readily lampooned by Blair with the throwaway line: “So another 1300 corpses won’t matter much.”

Following Blair’s post, Andrew Bolt posted on his blog this brief item:

Tim Blair says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is claiming credit ... for inspiring the murder of 1700 Kenyans.

(Yep, Bolt inflated the 1,300 figure by about 30 per cent, but perhaps in his paranoid make-believe world, another 400 fictitious corpses don’t matter much.)

While Bolt seems to have taken (Blair’s claims about) Assange’s claims at face value, obviously because it suited his ideological position against Assange, Blair in the above instance seemed to view it all with some scepticism, presumably because he wanted to portray Assange as unreliable and given to exaggerated claims such as “attempting to take credit for the Climategate scandal.”

Blair is probably quite correct to be sceptical about WikiLeaks purported role in the Kenya violence, but when it suits him he’s quite comfortable about exploiting the factoid of Assange’s culpability for those 1,300 deaths, such as in a later post in which he juxtaposed Assange’s Kenya claim with the following more recent statement:

WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.

Neither Blair nor Bolt had anything to say, of course, on the crucial point of whether people in Kenya “had a right” to the leaked information. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all about Assange — and, of course, themselves.

If the people of “already-volatile” Kenya are permitted in the picture at all, it’s as hapless victims of Assange’s wicked meddling and volatility-tipping. And the brave resistance by many Kenyans during the 2007 crisis is reduced to being merely an outbreak of “further mayhem” whose only meaning is resolved as an indictment of Assange.

Assange will by now be well acquainted with the perils of being a ‘mover-and-shaker’. It may even occur to him what an easier gig it would be to just shout from the sidelines.

Comment hexed

2011-03-01T21:40:00.006+11:00

Below the fold (click READ MORE if you’re on this blog’s front page) is a comment by Caz that disappeared from this thread soon after she posted it there. I’ve tried to repost the comment several times, but then those reposts soon disappear again.

I’m re-posting Caz’s comment here partly ‘for the record’ because it’s worth reading, and partly to see what happens. I’ve taken the precaution, however, of enclosing it in a meme-proof layer... just in case...

Posted by Caz to Applied Hermeneutics at 27/2/11 3:20 PM

999,999th time I've seen this ad

2011-02-27T00:10:00.005+11:00

But godammit I was hoping to be the exclusiv price winner of a ƒυςќing iPod !

UPDATE: Just now received the following sms message, from number +27718898213:

CONGRATULATIONS: Congratulations your mobile have won US$9.8M for World Bank Award. To claim contact Mrs Hahn Doyle via wbaw1@yahoo.com.hk

Please feel free to email Mrs Doyle if you’re feeling lucky.

Plimer encouraged

2011-02-26T16:50:00.003+11:00

Not only does Cardinal George Pell believe in the Virgin Birth, he also believes nitrogen is a greenhouse gas.

The Cardinal’s latter error is perhaps inevitable, since he’s apparently invested a lot of faith in Professor Ian Plimer’s ‘anti-warming’ tract Heaven and Earth, which is not known for its veracity.

It’s all come out in Senate committee hearings, in which Dr Greg Ayers of the Bureau of Meteorology has felt obliged to make a statement to provide balance in response to the Plimer-Pell creed. Tim Lambert has background and details.

One of the highlights is Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s suggestion that, if Plimer desires a right of reply to Ayer’s statement, “He can publish another work of science fiction.”

Where’s Osama?

2011-02-26T15:00:00.004+11:00

Detail above is a small part of a much larger oil-on-canvas by Chinese artists Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An.

You can see the whole thing here. You can hover your mouse over individuals to display names, and click to go to a Wikipedia entry on a selected individual. (And yes, Osama is in the pic... somewhere.)

Latest ‘last word’ on Assange

2011-02-24T22:35:00.000+11:00

“I think Julian Assange’s personal life might be the saddest confirmation that all the information in the world, all the openness in the world doesn’t prevent you from being kind of a prick sometimes.”

Jaron Lanier — computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author

Julian Assange and the rise of nerd supremacy

Serious Lawyer Shit IV: My Sweet Law Suit

2011-02-24T21:20:00.003+11:00

One of the most well-known music copyright infringement cases was that of George Harrison lifting the tune for his 1971 hit ‘My Sweet Lord’ from a 1962 hit song called ‘He’s So Fine’ by the Chiffons.

Whatever one might subjectively judge the relative merits of each song to be, Harrison’s plagiarism — ruled by the court as “unconscious plagiarism” — was about as clear cut as these things can be, as can be appreciated from this youtube video.

Beyond his replacement of the ‘Doo Lang’ mantra with some perhaps more edifying ones, I personally prefer what Harrison did with the tune. He always maintained that ‘My Sweet Lord’ was inspired not by the Chiffons’ song, but by the Edwin Hawkins Singers 1969 gospel hit ‘Oh Happy Day.’

I’ve thrown together a mix that may give an idea of how Harrison may have conceived his version of the song.

The most remarkable aspect of the whole affair was the startling fact that none of the stellar crew who contributed to Harrison’s recording — not Eric Clapton, nor Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voorman, not even King-of-Pop Phil Spector who produced the record — not one of them did Harrison the service of tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “Hellooooo, George, isn’t this a bit of a rip-off of the Chiffons?”

Another interesting bit of trivia is that ‘He’s So Fine’ ended up being Harrison’s song after all, when he later bought the rights to it.

Hitch should know better

2011-02-22T21:45:00.007+11:00

This recent column by Christopher Hitchens is bound to confirm an article of faith of his fellow travellers: namely, that human rights groups and NGOs generally are anti-American just for the sake of it, if not because they’re inherently perverse, or even evil.

Hitchens’ rhetoric is, of course, characteristically effortless:

Even in a week that concentrated all eyes on the magnificent courage and maturity of the people of Cairo, a report from Kabul began with what must surely be the most jaw-dropping opening paragraph of the year. Under the byline of the excellent Rod Nordland, The New York Times reported: “International and local human rights groups working in Afghanistan have shifted their focus toward condemning abuses committed by the Taliban insurgents, rather than those attributed to the American military and its allies.” . . .
The story became more mind-boggling as it unfolded. One had to ask oneself what had taken the human-rights “community” so long. . . .
The turning point, in the mind of the human rights “activists,” appears to have occurred in late January, when a Taliban suicide-murderer killed at least 14 civilians in the Finest Supermarket in Kabul. Among the slain was a well-known local campaigner named Hamida Barmaki, whose husband and four small children were also killed. One wonders in what sense this was the Taliban going too far — women are killed and mutilated by them every single day in Afghanistan. Yet let the terror reach one of the upscale markets or hotels that cater to the NGO constituency in Kabul, and suddenly there is an abrupt change from moral neutrality.

Before joining Hitchens in his railing against the dastardly “moral equivalence” of those ironically quote-enclosed “activists,” it might be noted that Hitchens in his lazy reading of Nordland’s article seems to have missed the fact that, long before January, groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had been calling for the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by the Taliban.

Hitchens’ angle here, of course, is to retrospectively validate his long-standing support for the ever-lengthening war in Afghanistan. In a re-definition that renders the term concentration camp almost meaningless, he notes without irony that “during [the Taliban’s] period in power, it ran the country as a vast concentration camp,” etc.

No-one would deny the egregiousness of the Taliban’s authoritarian rule, which virulently and tragically metastasised tendencies already inherent in traditional Afghan tribal culture. But Hitchens’ looseness here with language is the hallmark of a partisan tract.

Hitchens should know better, and I believe he does and moreover is plainly capable of far better. But on certain topics, evidently requiring a retrospective twist, Hitchens can be quite unreliable.

Serious Lawyer Shit III: Hey Jude, isn’t it a pity?

2011-02-16T13:25:00.002+11:00

The Beatles released Paul McCartney’s composition ‘Hey Jude’ as a single at the end of August 1968, upon which it became, as the story goes, the biggest selling single in the history of the known universe, etc.

After the Beatles went their separate ways, George Harrison in May 1970 released his debut solo album, which included a song called ‘Isn’t It a Pity’ (faithfully performed in the video above by Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, et al, at the Concert for George, November 2002).

Upon detailed comparison, there are some marked similarities between the two songs:

Both have very similar structure, rhythm and meter.
Both fade out on an extended na-na-na-naah chorus.
Both songs, as originally recorded, were of almost exactly the same length, ~7’10”.

I don’t say that Harrison’s ‘Isn’t It a Pity’ significantly plagiarised McCartney’s ‘Hey Jude’.

But I do say that the similarities between these recordings could have been the basis for some serious lawyer shit to go down between the two former Beatles.

Then again, it’s said that Harrison’s song first appeared during rehearsals for the Beatles’ White Album, but in the end was not included in that opus.

And as it happens, ‘Hey Jude’ was recorded during the course of the White Album recording sessions.

I don’t say that McCartney’s ‘Hey Jude’ significantly plagiarised Harrison’s ‘Isn’t It a Pity’.

But I do say the whole thing represented a lost opportunity for a large-ish firm of lawyers to make their careers out of it. The proceedings conceivably might have continued to this day without resolution.

It’s perhaps a testament to the good sense and taste of both Messrs Harrison and McCartney that they didn’t embark upon such a ruinous course.

Serious Lawyer Shit II: Tin Soldier Samplethon.

2011-02-13T17:16:00.005+11:00

For the life of me I fail to see how the Stones (or their lawyers) got their case up against the Verve. Ever since John Waite sang Isn't it Time for the Babys in the seventies I've wondered why the Faces never lifted a gilded lawyer finger.

The Faces...

The Babys...

I do not say Andrew Bolt is a complete weasel

2011-02-09T13:50:00.001+11:00

But I do say that Bolt’s performance yesterday following Prime Minister Gillard’s tears in Parliament is a study in the use of weasel words.

I do not say Julia Gillard’s tears in Parliament today, in talking about the Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi, were anything but genuine. . . .
But I do say the tears follow much damaging criticism about Gillard being ”wooden” in responding to the disasters.
I do fear that to suddenly go from one extreme to the other will jar with many.
Again, I do not conclude that Gillard is insincere. I just suspect that they will not do Gillard the good they may have done had she cried in front of the victims instead.

I do not say that, if Gillard had actually cried in front of flood victims instead of in Parliament, Bolt would have written something like...

I do not say Julia Gillard’s tears in front of flood victims were anything but genuine.
But I do say there’s a time and place for everything, and though I do not lightly say so unless pressed to give my opinion, I suspect that a weeping Prime Minister unloading on already traumatised people may seem inappropriate to many people.

I do not say that alcohol is an effective remedy for a bad taste in the mouth.

But I do say that a drink after reading anything by Bolt might well be considered medicinal.

Back to profligacy

2011-02-06T23:45:00.000+11:00

Yesterday morning I was extremely concerned there might be something, well, not right with the climate."

By this morning it would seem I was being somewhat of an alarmist.

We are now able to drive to the Fountain Gate Shoppingdrome without hindrance, so the world is again as it should be in the best of all possible worlds.

Humans: 1

Nature: 0

musical interlude

2011-02-06T16:30:00.000+11:00

End of times approaches

2011-02-05T14:10:00.001+11:00

This is freaking me out.

The Telstra guy told us he’d never seen the intersection of Beaconsfield Ave, Kenilworth Ave and Soldiers Rd, Beaconsfield, under water in all the twelve years he’s lived in the district.

There’s something . . . um. . . not right with the climate.

Troll drollery assimilated

2011-02-04T22:30:00.003+11:00

Whilst visiting Andrew Bolt’s blog in the course of researching my previous post, I encountered the work of a commenter posting under the name ‘Tracey Conlan’.

On a post of Bolt’s concerning attacks by Egyptian government operatives on protesters in Cairo, Tracey wrote:

More disgraceful behaviour by Kevin Rudd — the man is a joke — he is directly responsible for these attacks and must resign.

In fact, I have no doubt evidence linking him to the attacks will soon be found. Keep digging Andrew !

On another Bolt post, Tracey wrote in relation to Ross Garnaut:

What a pathetic man — I mean really — everyone knows there is nothing out of the ordinary in having multiple 1 in 100 extreme events like black saturday, Brisbane floods and an extreme cyclone in such a short time frame.

And even if their is a link to mankind activity with more extreme weather patterns, who cares — we’ll all be long gone and won’t have to worry about it by the time it gets really bad !

Tracey is obviously some kind of blog performance artist who’s taken it upon herself to satirise Bolt and his fans. Bolt’s rusted-on regulars have begun to wise up to Tracey’s trollery, so it perhaps won’t be long until she’s banned.

But the elegance of her work lies in that, to date, the moderators of Bolt’s blog seem to regard her shrill inanity as completely in keeping with the tone of the blog.

Long may she troll!

In honour of Tracey’s work, I’ve thrown together an Australian version of the Twat-O-Tron, which may one day be perfected to automate the kind of work Tracey has exemplified. See ‘below the fold’ (i.e., click READ MORE if you’re on this blog’s front page) to experience the . . .

BOLTaTRON

Click the Refresh button for fresh turdspurt

Yep, admittedly it loses it’s entertainment value after a few clicks, but there could be huge potential here.

Note this version simulates ‘rightard’ turdspurt, but pending sufficient commercial interest I’ve slated development for a ‘leftard’ version.

The Aussies that Andrew Bolt wanted Rudd to throw to the dogs

2011-02-04T11:45:00.005+11:00

Over the last week or so Andrew Bolt has repeatedly savaged Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd for his reluctance to publicly condemn and call for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to stand down.

In a typical rant, Bolt ridiculed “in their miserable entirety [Rudd’s] comments today on human rights in Egypt”, selectively quoting some of Rudd’s remarks in an interview on Sky News.

But by glaring omission, Bolt failed to give any weight to a crucial consideration in Rudd’s approach to the Egyptian crisis.

Part of what Rudd said, but what Bolt did not report, was the following:

Well my more immediate concern is to the well being of Australians in Cairo... we are in a difficult security situation and our first and foremost concern is the well being of Australians in the country.

The title Bolt gave to his post was: “Why won’t Rudd condemn Mubarak? Still chasing your UN votes, Kevin?”

Well, if Bolt chooses to see, he may find his answer in the following:

Australia has protested to Egypt over the targeting of foreigners, including its diplomats and journalists, by pro-government protesters in the capital Cairo.

Attacks and raids on journalists and a confrontation involving Australian diplomats came as the Mubarak regime tries to stifle international scrutiny of political upheavals across the country. ...

Mr Rudd said he had protested to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit this morning about the treatment of foreigners in the country.

“I raised the problems that we have seen with the maltreatment of journalists on the ground from networks around the world,” he said.

“This is not acceptable and that message was delivered very clearly.”

One has to ask how clearly that message might have been delivered had Rudd stuck the boot into the Mubarak regime with the reckless abandon Bolt had been demanding. Does Bolt suppose the regime would have been at all receptive to our diplomacy?

In his hate-driven frenzies, Bolt tears apart anything to hand that represents restraint, order or the related discipline of reason.

UPDATE: Bolt in his latest post quotes from the same news item above, and wonders: “Were our people attacked on the orders of the Mubarak regime?” And he notes that “it’s getting ugly for our own.”

Will the penny ever ƒυςќing drop?

Probably not so far as his readers are concerned, since Bolt has chosen not to quote the part about Rudd’s efforts at diplomacy.

I’ve submitted a comment summarising my concerns as set out above. I conclude with the suggestion that he “try doing some journalism before it's too late for you.” The latter may tend to further limit its chances of getting by moderation, but hey, that’s life.

The 2008 Bush-Mubarak Love-In

2011-02-03T23:45:00.001+11:00

A bit over halfway between the rigged Egyptian presidential election of 2005 and that of 2010, US President George W Bush met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in January 2008 in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el Sheikh.

Bush opened with:

“Mr. President, thank you, sir. It’s a pleasure to be back in Egypt. This is such a beautiful sight, Mr. President. Thank you for hosting my visit here. As you mentioned, I’ve been on a long trip and I can’t think of a better place to end it than right here with you in this beautiful setting.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t get any less gushy than Bush’s opener, and there’s not even the most oblique reference to rigged elections, dictatorship, suppression of democratic aspirations, or anything uncomfortable like that.

Nope, it’s all about “building on important steps” led by Mubarak’s “leadership,” which inexorably lurched into the next rigged presidential election of 2010.

Tragically, Mr Bush couldn’t stand for yet a third term to set that all to rights.

But hey, maybe it wasn’t at all Bush’s murderous, deceitful war in Iraq that set Egypt aflame this last week, but rather Obama’s wide-ranging, visionary 2009 speech in Cairo.

If it all goes pear shaped, then at least you can blame it all on Obama.

Extreme event warning: IG Miranda

2011-02-03T09:15:00.005+11:00

After slamming into the northern Queensland coast, Tropical Cyclone Yasi seems to have triggered a related extreme event, Intemperate Grizzleguts Miranda:

“Anna Bligh makes a good news anchor”

This is thought to be the same IG Miranda that in 2006 wreaked the following in the wake of TC Larry:

“This is no New Orleans, so enough with the whingeing”

Doctor Easychair settles in

2011-02-02T13:20:00.003+11:00

Typically, now Andrew Bolt has ‘discovered’ Egypt he’s the instant authority.

Last December, Rudd visited Egypt, just after President Hosni Mubarak rigged another election and just before these huge protests to topple him.
Good time to talk about democratic reform in the Middle East, right? But clueless and hungry for the Muslim bloc’s votes for his United Nations ambitions, Rudd talked instead about nasty Israel, nice Egypt and scary Iran.

(Yep, it’s simply a disgrace Rudd didn’t see these huge protests coming, as did Bolt.)

In June 1998, then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer visited Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak had never contested a presidential election in over a decade and a half as president.

That would have been a good time as any to talk about democratic reform in the Middle East, right?

But Magic Alex talked instead about the great importance of the Australia-Egypt trade relationship, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop further cooperation and mutual understanding between the two countries.

“Clueless”, Andrew? There’s been plenty of that all ’round for decades.

POSTSCRIPT: Alexander Downer’s United Nations ambitions were fulfilled when, after resigning from Parliament in 2008, he accepted the post of UN envoy to Cyprus, a role he discharged with not unqualified success.

Sign of rift between Bolt and McGuire

2011-01-23T21:35:00.002+11:00

One suddenly develops something approaching admiration for Eddie McGuire when Andrew Bolt whines,

“Eddie McGuire means well, but clearly hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said.”

McGuire’s error, apparently, is to not regard Bolt as being supremely authoritative on everything.

It’s difficult to imagine McGuire actively working against Bolt, but McGuire’s transgressions may be more sins of omission than anything else. For instance, McGuire was curiously mute when Bolt boldly condemned then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for giving aid and succour to Robert Mugabe.

Still, at least Bolt regards McGuire as well-meaning. And we can be confident this has nothing at all to do with McGuire being a somewhat wealthy and influential figure.

Tim Blair’s epic bean-counting fail

2011-01-21T20:45:00.006+11:00

On the question of the purported ‘liability’ of the Australian coal industry for the floods in south-east Queensland, Tim Blair has been doing some number crunching:

Australia’s annual contribution to global carbon output is just 1.5 per cent, which works out to .000225 per cent of the overall human component. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the coal industry generates an entire third of Australia’s amount — a mighty .000075 per cent of the carbon emitted globally which ends up hanging around in the atmosphere.
On current estimates, the floods may result in damage worth $13 billion. The total bill owed by the Australian coal industry (and this assumes that the floods are entirely due to carbon-driven climate change): $9749.99.

I admire a dude who spreadsheets stuff, but Blair has, for his own silly argument’s sake, fluffed at least one significant factor, completely ignoring the contribution to global emissions of Australian coal exports.

Australia’s annual coal exports are around 263.4 million tonnes per annum. Around 2.93kg of carbon is emitted for each kilo of coal burned. Assuming global carbon emissions per annum of 29,321.302 million tonnes, Australia’s exports of coal would alone contribute 771.762 million tonnes, or 2.632% of global man-made carbon emissions.

So, employing the figure of 2.632% (rather than 0.000075%) would increase the “total bill owed by the Australian coal industry” to at least $342,171,231.

Fertile and fresh fields for tobacco in China

2011-01-15T10:25:00.001+11:00

This op-ed in The Lancet again highlights that China, while streets ahead of most western countries on some important indicators, has a long way to catch up in other respects, here particularly with regard to the scourge of tobacco.

It sounds like a public health nightmare: a country where smoking is socially acceptable, people can smoke in public places, cigarettes are cheap, cigarette packets are devoid of effective health warnings, government officials use public funds to buy expensive cigarettes as gifts, and the tobacco industry sits on public bodies charged with tobacco control. But this is, in fact, the reality in China today, as detailed in a new report by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
Given this situation, the statistics contained in the report are, perhaps, unsurprising. China has 300 million smokers and around 740 million non-smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke: tobacco is the country's biggest killer.
China did ratify WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2005. But the signing of the FCTC seems largely symbolic. The report finds that the country is doing poorly with implementation, with a performance score of only 37 points of 100 possible points. Underpinning this poor performance is lack of political will to tackle tobacco control and the tobacco industry.
According to the report, the tobacco industry in China has a Counterproposal and Countermeasure Scheme against the FCTC, it has distorted the Chinese version of the framework, denied the scientific evidence on the health hazards of smoking, abused public powers of government to counteract tobacco control, and encouraged tobacco consumption through covert advertising and sponsorship.
China's Government has allowed this situation to prevail because the country's tobacco industry is seen as a major taxpayer and employer. Although this is true, the report states that an integrated benefit analysis shows the net benefit generated by the tobacco industry is already below zero. In other words, the rapidly growing medical expenditures and loss of productivity from tobacco-related illnesses outweigh the economic benefits of the industry.
China has shown it can address health threats such as avian influenza and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is now time China tackles tobacco—its biggest health hazard and a serious economic threat.
For the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report see http://www.chinacdc.cn/n272562/index.html

It will be interesting to see how China fares in its struggle against the blood-sucking pushers of tobacco, whose resilience against public health measures in the west has been legendary.

Giving ideas a fighting chance

2011-01-11T21:30:00.003+11:00

George Monbiot reports on the lengths some people go to online to propagate their “ideas.”

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in ‘Liberal Books’. I go through and I say ‘one star, one star, one star’. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in ‘Movies on Healthcare’, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. ... If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”
(via Antony Loewenstein)

The following is how amazon.com stipulates what it expects from users of its online services:

Visitors may post reviews, comments, photos, and other content; send e-cards and other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions, or other information, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings, or any form of “spam.” You may not use a false e-mail address, impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of a card or other content.
(my emphasis: JAS)

Bitter sweet sample-athon

2011-01-10T18:00:00.006+11:00

The following video features a mix I threw together of the Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ laced with the guitar riff ‘sampled’ from The Rolling Stones’ classic 1965 recording of ‘The Last Time’.

I reckon The Verve should consider releasing this commercially, since one way or another they’re paying for it by way of the peculiar judicially-imposed royalties arrangement explained elsewhere.

The video shows footage of the guitar riff being played by Brian Jones — described by one-time bandmate Keith Richards as “a cold-blooded, vicious motherfucker, only short and blond with it” — who drowned in his swimming pool on the day I turned 12 years old.

Beer, wine, naked women and the week before Christmas

2011-01-10T11:58:00.003+11:00

'T'was the week before Christmas, when all ‘round the ‘Juck
Not a cloud wasn’t pouring, not a few with thunder struck.
The lures were hung by the loop knots with care,
In hopes that fat cod soon would be theirs.

The children with iPods all snug in the cottage,
While visions of monsoons turned lake to porridge.
And Mum with a white and I with a beer,
Had just settled our brains to spend the trip in here.

When out on the lake there arose such a clatter,
As the gale from the south did the porridge batter.
Again another morn’ as the gale did blow,
The Brindabella Ranges did deport in snow.

The moon on the water ne’er did appear
As the lake to the back door crept ever near.
When, finally to my wondering eyes should show,
But a modicum of sun, and above 11 the temperature did go .

With a favourite old diver, on the penultimate day,
Did I plough the topsoil from up Goodradigbee way.
The cav’ plate of the outboard nowhere in sight,
Was eloquent testimony to my luring plight!

When on the final day the summer did return,
The kids round the lake in the ring took turn,
And laying aside all the hardbody baits,
I turned to the spinner-blades without any takes!

I filled up the car and to the family gave a whistle,
And to the chocolate malted lake we waved our dismissal.
But I managed to exclaim, ‘ere I tooled round that switchback,
"Happy fishing to all, and to all I’ll be back!"

Serious lawyer shit

2011-01-06T23:40:00.003+11:00

Having at last finished my holiday reading of Keith Richards’ memoir, I have to report being somewhat disappointed that Keef had nuffink to say about the expropriation, by his and the Rolling Stones’ business machine, of royalties from Richard Ashcroft and The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony”.

Readers will recall how The Verve in 1997 had negotiated a license to use a ‘sample’ from Andrew Oldham’s orchestral version of the Stones’ 1965 song “The Last Time” in the production of their “Bitter Sweet Symphony” opus.

The — as it turned out — runaway success of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” prompted the late Allen Klein to sue Ashcroft and The Verve, on behalf of his and the Stones’ interests. It was successfully argued that The Verve had used “too much” of the Oldham ‘sample’, and the court ruled that copyright of The Verve’s song would revert to Keef and his long-time songwriting partner, Mick Jagger. So, now anyone who buys The Verve’s Urban Hymns CD album will find Jagger and Richards as the sole songwriting credit for the track.

Yes, Ashcroft and The Verve used the licensed ‘sample’ quite exhaustively in producing “Bitter Sweet Symphony” (indeed, the sample fairly rings through the entire production).

And yes, even the song’s melody in large part borrowed rather heavily from the original Jagger-Richards composition.

But Ashcroft and The Verve had in fact produced a synthesis of those parts with a ‘value-added’ dimension that was incalculably sublime.

And yet, the court ruled that the songwriting royalties should flow exclusively to Keef and Mick.

Worse yet, Klein had rubbed salt in the wound by doing commercial deals to use The Verve’s sublime work to sell Nike tennis shoes and Vauxhall cars. (For their part, The Verve gave the royalties from their performance rights to charity.)

All this warrants not a single mention in Keef’s memoirs. The great man has simply acquiesced in his business machine’s plundering of the work of a then-vulnerable, young, indie band.

To my knowledge, all Keef has had to say on the subject was in a 1999 interview in which he opined:

“I’m out of whack here, this is serious lawyer shit. If The Verve can write a better song, they can keep the money.”

Yeah Keef, how cool to just be part of a big biz machine.

Keef’s showbiz tips

2011-01-01T17:30:00.002+11:00

Business associate owes you money and refuses to pay? Here’s how it’s done, as explained by Keef...

One big setback we had was not being paid by Robert Stigwood for a tour we did with one of his acts... This was his modus operandi — late paying turned into not paying at all... One night at a club called the Scotch of St James he made the terrible mistake of coming down the stairs as Andrew [Oldham] and I were going up. We blocked off the staircase so I could extract payment. You can’t use a boot on a winding staircase

(please note this well)

so he got the knee, one for every grand he owed us — sixteen of them. Even then he never apologized. Maybe I didn’t kick him hard enough.

Keith Richards, Life, Chapter 5

Fortunately for Stigwood, this was in the days before Allen Klein looked after the Stones.

Our loss

2011-01-01T16:30:00.000+11:00

With the demise of Victorian Labor at the last state election and the ascendancy of Ted Baillieu’s coalition government, my mind has been turning to those halcyon days when Victoria was ‘On The Move’ under the Kennett Government.

Of course, the Kennett Government was more than just Jeff, it had an exquisite plume in its cap called Felicity, the Great Man’s spouse and Victoria’s First Lady.

Whilst recently reminiscing through old press clippings, tears of nostalgia welled in my eyes as I came upon the following searing cultural criticism from the Lady Herself:

“The worst thing about Australian women is the shit shoes they wear and the terrible handbags we get around with,” the Premier's wife told Mode.

“You would never find that in America. We have got to stop being cheap on the accessories. We think we can get away with it and we really shouldn't.” ...

“We've got to stop thinking of fashion as something frivolous which only people with loud voices and blonde hair play with, because it's not.”

The Age, 20 February 1997

Some Victorians knew what we had when we had it, for instance Ron Walker...

... head of Melbourne Major Events and mate of the Premier, says in the article that Mrs Kennett is one of Victoria's most valuable commodities in the quest to make Melbourne the fashion capital of Australia.

“She's so beautiful and so elegant; she's a great advantage for us ... She is a beautiful front door for us,” he says.

And at least some of the people knew it too, as evinced by the following supportive letter-to-the-editor:

Felicity Kennett has done us all a great service by pointing out the role of the shoe in contemporary society. As I understand it, the First Lady has implied that poor accessorising by Victorian women is undermining the social fabric. I couldn't agree more. If only nice girls from Kooyong to Canterbury would stop wearing those beastly workmen's boots! And as for moccasins, one should not be seen dead in Safeway without stilettos.

I believe the genesis of shoe dysfunction lies in the Australian habit of looking people in the eye when greeting them. One really ought to look down at the shoes. People of good breeding have always known that the shoes (not the eyes) are the window to the sole.

Kevin Rugg, Beaumaris

The Age, 1 March 1997

Hopefully Victoria’s new First Lady, Robyn Baillieu, can get our quest to make Melbourne the fashion capital of Australia seriously back on track.

sun sets on 2010

2011-01-01T13:10:00.001+11:00

Eagles Nest, Victoria, Australia
view from Inverloch foreshore

Debate rages over little-known factoid

2010-12-30T23:45:00.005+11:00

In his recent memoir, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones makes the following observation, in relation to blues legend Jimmy Reed’s 1956 opus ‘My First Plea’:

One of Jimmy’s lines was

“Don’t pull no subway, I rather see you pull a train.”

Which actually means: don’t go on the dope, don’t go underground, I’d rather see you either drunk or on cocaine.

Took me years and years to decipher this.
Keith Richards, Life, Chapter 4.

Ta Keef, works for me... but then the same line has also been ‘deciphered’ by various sources as:

“don't leave me, I'd rather see you gangbanged”

I have to admit I’m torn.

Objectivity polluted

2010-12-24T09:50:00.003+11:00

“We must expose the hypocrisy of human rights organisations that turn a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world — regimes that stone women and hang gays — and instead target the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.”

So blathered the Israeli government in response to a report from Human Rights Watch that criticised Israel for maintaining “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Israeli government mouthpiece and spin doctor Mark Regev whined in his uniquely tiresome way that “Human Rights Watch has allowed an anti-Israel agenda to pollute its objectivity.”

The proposition that Human Rights Watch “turns a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world” while victimising poor Israel is absolutely risible, as the most cursory glance at HRW’s website will attest.

The volume of HRW’s critical reporting against such repressive regimes is copious in comparison to its occasional focus on Israel’s performance.

Regev and his bosses might want to look a little closer to home if they’re truly concerned about “pollution” of objectivity.

WikiSPECTRE

2010-12-11T13:20:00.006+11:00

There's a neat post over at Pure Poison detailing an attempt by “ltd.news” to beat up a story about Wikileaks boss Julian Assange as being a modern-day “James Bond villain.”

Apparently Julian Blofeld has an underground headquarters (as in You Only Live Twice) where “all” ... no, beg pardon, just “some” of the Wikileaks documents “are” ... beg pardon, “have been” secreted.

The story features an image of the interior of Assange’s “suspended conference room”, furnished with an apparatus looking very much like Maxwell Smart’s Cone of Silence. It’s all very sinisterly futuristic, and one can almost see Assange sitting devotedly stroking his favourite fluffy, overweight feline.

Not surpringly, the story attracts ... beg pardon, has attracted comments from readers who wonder whether Assange is the anti-christ predicted by Nostradamus.

One might hope Rupert’s ltd.news campaign for "responsible journalism" may have some effect — on their shop.

Wikipissing in the Murdoch media

2010-12-09T21:40:00.002+11:00

For all its trilling about the “irresponsible” publication of “sensitive” documents by Wikileaks, it has to be said that the Murdoch media doesn’t hesitate to use those documents to serve its own ‘editorial’ purposes.

For instance, while Andrew Bolt — our own Doctor Easychair — has not been shy about condemning Wikileaks and its chief Julian Assange, he’s been equally quick to expropriate Wikileaks material when it supports his views on perennial hate-object Kevin Rudd.

So too with an unattributed op-ed piece today in The Australian, which takes the leaked cables about Rudd as vindicating — and indeed confirming the rectitude of — the paper’s long-time critical stance against the former Rudd Government.

The narrative of Mr Rudd’s chaotic government would be familiar to readers of The Australian, which began reporting on the emerging problems of the Rudd administration in mid-2008. Our sources, named and un-named, included senior public servants, politicians and diplomats. More than five months after the caucus revolt that brought an end to a regime Mr Rudd’s deputy argued had lost its way, these facts were finally reported yesterday on the front pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which gleaned its information from US diplomatic cables dropped by WikiLeaks.

Though not wholly unexpected, it’s unfortunate that the writer of this piece has conflated purported “facts” with what are, after all, opinions based on subjective assessments.

Whether the assessments are those of “sources, named and un-named,” or of hapless de-cloaked US diplomats — and whether one agrees or disagrees with those assessments — they remain as opinions, not facts. Not withstanding that assessments and opinions, when repeated often and loudly enough, can reify to become factoids.

For my own assessment of The Oz’s self-serving and self-aggrandising piece here, I can only conclude the paper has enlisted our friend Doctor Easychair to help write its op-eds.

As for our good Doctor, one might wonder whether he’s half-expecting a smoking-gun revelation that “Kevin Rudd gave aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe” in the next tranche of Wikileaks.

Stop Press: Abbott says lawbreakers should be prosecuted

2010-12-07T21:10:00.001+11:00

I presume that the US government is going after the people who provided information to Assange. As for Assange, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Thus opined Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott on the ABC’s Insiders program. Mr Abbott’s remaining statements on the topic of the Wikileaks controversy went on to drive home what he evidently considers a winning formula:

Well, as I said, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted. That’s what should happen. ... Well that’s up to the relevant authorities. If he's broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Well, it would be most unusual for a politician to profess that lawbreakers should not be prosecuted.

But Mr Abbott, like his opposite number Prime Minister Julia Gillard, was unable to say which law(s) Julian Assange is alleged to have broken, thus completing a deuce set of apparent cluelessness in Canberra.

Moreover, being in lock-step with US policy on the dreaded Wikileaks ‘threat,’ the Gillard-Abbott bipartisan chorus might also play well with US negotiators in Australia’s horse-trading for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Readers may recall how, the last time an Australian government prostrated itself before US policy demands, forty US trade negotiators filed into Australia on the eve of the Iraq War to hammer out the vaunted Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which in the end delivered bugger all of any real benefit to Australia.

A good Sunday drive spoiled

2010-11-20T22:30:00.002+11:00

A report from Queensland Health has found that the Whitsunday Islands off north Queensland are “the hub” of golf cart accidents.

. . . 75 per cent of all golf cart incidents in the past 11 years occurred on the Whitsunday Islands.

Dr Dale Hanson says people should drive golf buggies like any other vehicle.

Well, perhaps the problem on the Whitsundays is precisely that they do drive the things like they’re any other vehicle...

While excessive speed is thought to overwhelmingly contribute to these fairway pile-ups, there appear to be no metrics available on drink-driving as a causal factor, so more study of that dimension is urgently required. Another beneficial measure could be for hoon drivers to have their carts summarily impounded.

Olive branches required

2010-11-16T22:45:00.000+11:00

I’ve always quite liked the Bard’s Sonnet 107, in particular this passage:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

But what’s that about olives, hmm?

Olives?

The following commentary illumines the Bard’s meaning here:

In the ancient world olives were an essential commodity, but olive trees required at least nine years to establish themselves. This could only be done in times of peace. Marauding armies would frequently hack down olive trees in order to cause maximum damage to the places they had invaded. Hence production of olives was a sign of peace and stability.

How interesting then that, in a modern-day tawdry, intractable conflict, olive groves have become a “battleground”.

Dr Easychair runs foul of Google

2010-11-16T21:40:00.002+11:00

An old friend of this blog, Andrew Bolt – our Doctor Easychair – has been encouraging his readers to wantonly click on Google Ads for the Greens on his blog

The idea apparently is that each click on a Greens’ Google Ad will cost the party whatever the going rate is for clicking on a Google Ad, thus cumulatively sending the Greens into financial ruin.

Ingenious! . . . Except that prompting readers to click on Google Ads in fact violates the terms of the host’s (i.e., Dr Easychair’s) Google Ads agreement.

It was for a very similar offence that Tim Blair took Webdiary to task back in May 2006. I can’t actually link to that post of Tim’s because he’s apparently forgotten to pay the hosting bill for his old blog site. (Hit the link and you get the message: “The system path does not appear to be set correctly. Please open your path.php file and correct the path”).

But I can tell you Tim’s post was a riot of mirth about “ethical and accountable Webdiary” having violated the Google Ads terms, with dark hints of dire consequences. (I know this can’t be right, but it’s almost as if the Muftim was goading Google into clobbering Webdiary with all sorts of nasty consequences. Of course, we know our venerable Muftim is beyond such base impulses of Schadenfreude...)

Naturally we can now expect Tim Blair to do a searing exposé of Doctor Easychair’s recent naughtiness.

Or can we? Things’ve been rather quiet at the Muftim’s of late; when I looked today he hadn’t published a post since 5 November.

C’mon Tim, the blogosphere still needs you!

George W Bush leg-pull still a work in progress

2010-11-11T22:20:00.004+11:00

An editorial today in The Australian opines that the “legacy” of George W. Bush’s presidency is “still a work in progress.”

That’s right on the money, if by that expression the Oz means that it will require a herculean effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The Oz kicks off with the weasely admission that Bush “will never be top of any of the lists of best presidents Americans enjoy analysing.” The same was undoubtedly said of Richard M. Nixon, whose interment was respectfully attended by three former or current presidents. Such was the rehabilitation of a man whose criminal conduct brought the very presidency into disrepute, while his country teetered on a constitutional precipice.

According to the Oz, Dubya’s enduring achievements – aside from that Americans will “enjoy analysing” his presidency in only a very qualified sense – are to “have kept his country safe and created a new Muslim democracy.”

If the absence of any successful terrorist attacks on US soil since September 2001 is anything to speak of, then it is that Dubya’s presidency was not a failure of such epic proportions as generally thought.

“A new Muslim democracy”? Time will tell on that one. Prior to the ascendancy of Saddam, the Iraqis had a functioning secular democracy, but somehow managed to blow it. And the strongman Saddam was appeased and supported obscenely by successive US administrations including up to the period after his infamous Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds. But never mind, the bloodbath of the last seven years has put it all to rights.

What is missing, however, from much of the late apologia for Dubya, including the Oz’s little effort here, is any mention of the ‘Af’ word.

Alright, I’ll say it: Afghanistan.

The Dubya Administration’s dereliction of its ‘mission’ in Afghanistan – in order to pursue its Misadventure in Mesopotamia, which even the Oz piece admits was “badly blundered” – was a mistake for which ‘we’ will be paying in blood and angst for the next decade or possibly beyond.

Disgustingly, Dubya has been hitting the chat show circuit expressing his “disgust” over the conduct of some of the troops he sent to do his bidding at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Does the moron not remember that, by the time he and Cheney had finished dog-whistling up and down their country for the dogs of war, around 65 per cent of the US population believed Saddam’s Iraq to be responsible for the September 11 attacks?

It was, for Dubya, a cultivated and convenient misapprehension that undoubtedly was mirrored in the hapless service personnel he sent, thus making the Abu Ghraib abuses virtually inevitable.

Still and all, I will confidently predict that Dubya’s interment will be respectfully attended by at least three former or current US presidents.

If by then my mushy-grey succumbs to the scourge of dementia, I’ll at least have the consolation of not having the presence of mind to register such a grotesque spectacle.

emulate this

2010-11-11T09:00:00.006+11:00

Pictured above is the Tandy TRS-80 Model I, unleashed on the world in 1977 as one of the first mass-produced desktop microcomputers available to consumers. Unusually for its time it sported a full QWERTY keyboard.

These devices were a lot of fun at the time, and with some work and some highly-priced peripherals it was even possible to get some genuinely useful functionality – yes, even something approaching the modern concept of productivity – out of them. Users could either program the machine themselves in its native floating point BASIC programming language, or shell out a bit more dough for commercially available software to run the thing.

Naturally these machines are no longer available on the market, unless you can find a working relic on eBay or somewhere. So, users of modern-day 21st Century machines are unlikely to ever experience the thrills-and-spills of operating what was a cutting-edge product of its day. (Of course, if it’s thrills-and-spills you want, then there’s still Microsoft Windows.)

And yet, there is a reasonably low-cost and convenient way to experience the awesome technology of yore. The answer is to run a TRS-80 emulator.

Yes, it may seem outrageously implausible that you could emulate a

Zilog Z80-based, 8-bit, 1.77 Megahertz, 16 Kilobyte RAM, cassett-tape-storage machine

on your

Intel Quad Core, 64-bit, 3.2 Gigahertz, 8 Gigabyte RAM, multivarious storage, state-of-the-21st-Century PC

But through the magic of modern software technology anything is possible, requiring only the will to realise it.

If you have a hankering for the archaic and too much time on your hands, you might start here...

Point missed

2010-11-10T16:55:00.008+11:00

One of the best moments in the ambitious-but-patchy Charles Darwin biopic Creation:

Charles Darwin: I have been writing a book.
Doctor Gully: Madness! There are far too many of those already!

If he’d only known the content of the book Charles had been writing, Doctor Gully’s response would likely have been more along the lines of... “May God have mercy on your immortal soul, sinner!”

Rupert and the denegation of class warfare

2010-11-09T21:00:00.000+11:00

An editorial in The Australian last week panned the ABC’s “highly subjective documentary” broadcast the night before, I Spry, which attempted to document the career of ASIO boss, Colonel Charles Spry.

Counterpointing that was a piece in The Age next day that dealt with the 1928 war on Melbourne’s docks, in which police violence against unionists at the behest of captains of industry was allegedly improperly investigated and subject of a “whitewash”.

The Australian, needless to say, fails to recognise certain other “realities of the Cold War,” such as the open warfare practised by the State, in lockstep with powerful commercial interests, against working people.

Such open sores on the body politic perhaps inevitably further radicalised a significant segment of organised working people, arguably driving them headlong into the arms of the so-called “communist conspiracy”. It couldn’t really be helped because the ruling establishment couldn’t bloody help themselves.

Battle of the Jiradi Pass

2010-11-05T22:01:00.007+11:00

On the afternoon of June 22, 217 (all dates are BCE) Ptolemy IV “Philopater”, likely at the insistence of his generals and Sosibius in particular, had resolved to bring Antiochus III to battle. The two armies had been camped opposite each other for almost five days and the botched attempt on Ptolemy’s life by Theodotus, his erstwhile general of Coele Syria now in Seleucid service, was a product of this procrastination (Polybius, 5. 82.1; 81.1-6 – all references to this author unless otherwise stated). Two days previous Antiochus had closed down the distance between the two camps from 1.8 kilometres to a little less than one kilometre. As a result there “were frequent struggles at the watering-places” as well as “infantry and cavalry skirmishes in the space between the camps” (5.80.5-7).

Ptolemy, who had force marched his army “through the waterless region” from Pelusium to “the spot he was bound for” (5.80.2-3) some nine kilometres southwest of Raphia (near to modern Dikla) in five days – a distance of near 180 kilometres at 36 kilometres per day – had chosen his ground to a purpose. The Ptolemaic army, unlike the Seleucid, had not fought a major set-piece engagement in a generation with much of its work in the intervening years having been carried out by mercenaries. At the head of this largely untried conveyance Ptolemy’s general staff chose, as would other Egyptian generals 2,184 years later, to adopt a largely defensive strategy and block the Jiradi Pass...

Ancient Warfare IV.6

Sparta, Macedon and Achaea: The politics and Battle of Sellasia

2010-08-02T12:32:00.003+10:00

Sparta Journal V6.1

As the penultimate decade of the third century BC began Sparta, that ancient bastion of eunomia, found itself racked by stasis. More than two centuries of land and wealth concentrating into the hands of a few had reduced the once feared homoioi to mere hundreds. The rest were a disenfranchised rabble awaiting any chance to alter the current state of affairs. Once proud Sparta was, militarily and politically, an irrelevancy on the larger stage.

To Sparta’s north the Achaean League had pursued a strong anti-Macedonian policy for more than twenty years. By 229 the League had removed all Macedonian control from the Peleponnese and its members included not only Corinth but also Megalopolis and Argos. Under Aratus of Sicyon and with the financial backing of Ptolemy III Acahea, in an alliance of utter convenience with Aetolia, was at war with Macedonia. In the early spring of 229, Demetrius II of Macedon died facing an invasion by the Dardanians. Having already lost important tracts of Thessaly to Aetolia, Macedonian control throughout Greece was now, for intents and purposes, dead letter.

Within five years, though, Aetolia will have “ceded” several allied Peloponnesian cities to Sparta. What remained of the Achaean League, with Aratus’ assent, ceded the citadel of Acrocorith as payment for Macedonian aid. Such a turnaround in fortune – tyche – is due, in no small part, to the competing ambitions of the states and their leading men: Aratus of Sicyon, Antigonus Doson and last, but most importantly, Cleomenes III of Sparta. Those ambitions would meet, in decisive combat, at Sellasia on the Laconian frontier in summer 222.

A Climate of Silence

2010-07-28T12:53:00.003+10:00

Remember "Climategate"? This was the furore whipped up over the emails - thousands of them published via a Russian website - from scientists of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that then derailed Copenhagen last November. This was puported to clearly demonstrate the nefarious and sinister machinations of the many scientists involved designed to foist a scientific fraud upon a credulous world.

Typically the usual red-faced spruikers and urgers of the commentariat of the right launched into feverish denunciation of the science and, more so, the scientists involved. Professional reputations (of the scientists) mattered little to this crew. As Emeritus Professor Rodney Tiffen writes in today's SMH:

The echo chamber of columnists reverberated with angry and accusatory claims. In Australia, Piers Akerman said: ''The tsunami of leaked emails ... reveal a culture of fraud, manipulation, deceit and personal vindictiveness to rival anything in a John le Carre or John Grisham thriller.'' Later he wrote: ''The crowd that gathered in Copenhagen were there pushing a fraud.''
Andrew Bolt thought that ''what they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal'' of our time. ''Emails leaked on the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world - and Mr Rudd has fallen for it.''

Miranda Devine wrote: ''We see clearly the rotten heart of the propaganda machine that has driven the world to the brink of insanity.''

It transpires that three inquirires were set up to investigate the supposed fraud perpetrated by the scientists: a British House of Commons select committee, a science assessment panel within the Royal Society and one by the University itself. The first reported that the unit's scientific reputation and that of its its head , Professor Phil Jones, remained intact. The second, as Tiffen notes, found ''absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever'' and that ''whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly''. The third ''we find that the rigour and honesty [of the scientists] as scientists are not in doubt''. Importantly, it concluded: ''We did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.''

Tiffen muses that "you might imagine the media would be keen to report on authoritative conclusions about allegations it had found so newsworthy in December". Not on your nelly. That would necessitate that the Bolts, Ackermans and Devines of this world posessed the journalistic rigour to acknowledge exaggeration and hyperbole in the pursuit of a political point if not a politician. Never mind the reputations of those traduced.

It matters little what one thinks of the merits of the climate change debate on one side or the other. As Tiffen notes:

Rarely has such an edifice of sweeping accusation and extravagant invective been constructed on such a slender factual basis. Rarely does it do such damage.

It appears Emeritus Professor Tiffen is only recently acquainted with the "style" of these "journalists".

‘F’ word at last emptied of meaning

2010-06-24T12:35:00.003+10:00

An unidentified senior federal Labor figure, variously described as a “powerbroker” and “factional leader,” has said of fallen PM Kevin Rudd:

“This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party. Now that his only faction, Newspoll, has deserted him he is gone.”

UPDATE 28 June: Oh dear, seems there was nothing ‘crypto’ about Kevin after all...

Kevin Rudd's Downfall - Watch more top selected videos about: Kevin_rudds_downfall

(via Antony Loewenstein)

tweet shirt

2010-06-24T10:45:00.007+10:00

“to the live chickens carried around as ‘items’ on Amazing Race episodes – you beautiful, living, breathing, feeling, struggling, terrified beings – love”

Position made clear

2010-06-19T21:45:00.004+10:00

“When governments refuse to act in the name of civilised society to prevent gross abuses of human rights, we as individuals have a duty to act. The campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions deserves the full support of every thinking and caring Australian.”

Mrs Julia Irwin, Labor member for Fowler, adjournment speech concluding remarks, House Hansard (PDF), pages 90-93.

Ten minutes and two speeches later...

“I want to make it clear that, in making her adjournment speech tonight, the member for Fowler was not speaking on behalf of the Rudd government.”

Dr Craig Emerson, Minister for Small Business.

“And from Moscow to Washington, Israel stands utterly friendless. Dangerously alone.”

Dr Easychair, demonstrating the Bolt brand of accuracy and objectivity.

Penal innovations of the 1970s

2010-06-18T23:30:00.006+10:00

(That’s penal, not penile.)

1974 — Supertramp Crime of the Century sleeve art

1978 — Superman: The Movie still image

By the 1990s, we have...

Agonised decision

2010-06-12T20:50:00.012+10:00

Greg Rudd, the PM’s brother, has paid out on bro’ Kev, setting Andrew Bolt a vexing moral dilemma.

Sibling dynamics are so tricky and incendiary that I tend not to credit what one says of the other, especially when that one is much less famous than the other he’s criticising. But Greg Rudd has chosen to make this very public, so I pass it on, even though I do not give his opinion much weight, and am torn about even publishing it (which is why it’s taken me half the day to decide).

Priceless! — as if Doctor Easychair was never going to “pass it on” to his followers at Rudd Hate Central.

Yes, denial of schadenfreude can be so tricky sometimes.

Transport Trivia Friday

2010-06-11T09:00:00.003+10:00

Presenting milestones in Victoria’s transport landscape...

This week: 1979

September

Thousands turn out for a 125th anniversary re-enactment of the first train journey in Australia.

December

Victoria records an annual road toll of 941, down from 1,061 in 1970.

Source: Transport Research and Policy Analysis Bulletin, Autumn 2010

Next week: ...maybe something else for a change...

Orchestral manoeuvres and national emergency

2010-06-10T13:40:00.008+10:00

On ABC-TV’s Lateline last night, Tony Jones reported:

At a protest rally in Perth mining bosses, workers and Liberal MPs joined forces to denounce the [super profits] tax.

There was no suggestion this rally, which included billionaires and socialites, was anything other than a spontaneous uprising.

In contrast to the rally’s hostility to the Rudd Government, the Community Cabinet convened in Como by the PM seemed, though not uncritical, to be a rather thoughtful bunch. Reporter Dana Robertson was somehow moved to wonder “whether the audience was well vetted, or just very friendly.”

This just gets funnier by the day.

Only a day or so ago Clive Palmer “retreated” from his claims about scrapping mining projects because of the tax.

Fortescue Metals boss Andrew Forrest yesterday told the Perth rally:

“In China right now there’s a fierce debate about how to lower their resources tax to encourage the mining industry.”

Today we read:

Analysts in China were perplexed by Mr Forrest’s comments, as China is in fact taking steps towards imposing a resources tax, which Beijing sees as a means of conserving resources, slowing environmental destruction and rebalancing an economy that delivers bloated corporate profits at the expense of households.

These captains of industry couldn’t lie straight in bed. And naturally, unprincipled Liberal fronts and flakes go into bat for them without question. Andrew Forrest is ‘Twiggy’ to the basking sycophant, Doctor Easychair.

So maybe the Government’s hyperbole of ‘national emergency’, to describe the misinformation campaign being conducted by these people, isn’t so out there after all.

That al-Hazmi dude again

2010-06-09T22:00:00.016+10:00

The above image is another version of the image of Sheik Mohammed al-Hazmi I examined last weekend. This version was found on the Ha’aretz website (thanks to a commenter). The caption states the image was taken on 31 May, but doesn’t say it was taken during the storming of the Mavi Marmara.

Compare the above with the earlier image:

As can be seen, the Ha’aretz image is less tightly cropped than the offering from the One Stop Israeli Propaganda Shop. This would seem to prove my earlier conjecture that “the size and aspect of the image suggest it has been edited from a larger image.”

So the Ha’aretz image reveals, not only the Sheik “brandishing” his dagger, but also at least two fellow activists “brandishing” cameras. At least one of the others appears to be clapping hands. None of those pictured with the Sheik appear to be agitated, or in a defensive or offensive posture. Most appear to be smiling.

The dagger, by the way, is known as a ‘jambiya’, which is customarily worn by many males in Yemen. According to the wikipedia,

The jambiya should only come out of its sheath in extreme cases of conflict. It is also commonly used in traditional events such as dances.

It’s clear enough the images above do not depict a state of conflict, extreme or otherwise.

“To celebrate a marriage, men dance with jambiyas drawn.”

UPDATE 10 JUNE

I discovered this afternoon that Max Blumenthal apparently debunked this photo on his blog in the last day or so. I’ve been unable to view his post because the traffic to Blumenthal’s site has exceeded his bandwidth; but another blogger sums up:

... Blumenthal noticed something odd about the shot. The raid was conducted at night, but there’s sunlight streaming through the ship’s window. Turns out the fellow was a Yemini [sic] legislator, Mohammad al-Hazmi, who was showing journalists and fellow passengers his Jambiya, a ceremonial dagger carried by many Yemenis. ... al-Hazmi says he wasn’t even carrying the knife at the time of the raid, and with the Israeli troops so eager to shoot, it’s unlikely he would have escaped without a wound or two had he been threatening them.

At least my discussion here serves to show how it only takes a few minutes out of your day to do a bit of fact-checking — unless, of course, your aim is to willfully mislead.

Presumably those who instigated this fraud, and all the willing lickspittles who helped give it legs, believed they were acting in the national interest of Israel. Yet one can only wonder how much this reckless attempt to defame a prominent Yemeni figure may have further poisoned relations within an already fraught region.

UPDATE 2: Blumenthal’s post has been cached here.

UPDATE 12 JUNE

And the Yemen Observer reports that a “Palestinian source” witnessed al Hazmi on an Israeli television channel “fighting with an Israeli soldier and vowing ‘Allahu Aakbar’ before he was arrested.”

Next there’ll be a guy whose second-cousin claims an undisclosed source told his hairdresser that al-Hazmi blew spitballs at the helicopters.

I can see a lucrative line of picture books for children of the paranoid, titled Where’s al-Hazmi?

Lowlife on Saturn

2010-06-08T12:20:00.012+10:00

Scientists have apparently found life on Saturn ! !

Which is to say, they’ve found evidence of life on one of Saturn’s moons, called Titan.

Which is an imprecise way of saying they’ve found evidence which may suggest the possibility of a form of life on Titan.

Oh, alright, it may even be only a ‘precursor’ of life.

This ‘life’, it is thought, will possibly be methane-based — which should immediately ring alarm bells about “us” being invaded by “them” for the growing stockpiles of methane we’ve horded in our atmosphere.

The existence of exotic forms of life in the outer reaches of our solar system is a possibility Arthur C. Clarke foresaw at least three decades ago. In his sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey, Clarke told of how the Bowman Entity descended into Jupiter where he/it discovered life-forms based on the petrochemicals in the atmosphere of the gas giant.

Skirting the foothills of the drifting foam mountains were myriads of small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottlings. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city.
They were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the metre band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself.
Nothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes — but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth.
They were not alone. Moving swiftly among them were other creatures so small that they could easily have been overlooked. ... But they too were alive — perhaps predators, perhaps parasites, perhaps even herdsmen.
A whole new chapter of evolution ... was opening before him. ...
He was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organisation, were like the sharks in Earth’s oceans — mindless automata.
And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam... Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles...
Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. ... In an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.

Arthur C. Clarke — 2010 Odyssey Two

So... the Bowman Entity at the behest of his/its Masters nuked Jupiter, with all its living wonders. They had it coming.

Lies, damned lies, and corrections

2010-06-07T14:10:00.002+10:00

While the Sheik has now returned to Yemen to a predictable hero’s welcome, the propaganda battle continues...

The Israel Defense Force has admitted it doctored an audio recording of radio communications between the Israeli navy and vessels in the Gaza Aid Flotilla, in which activists are alleged to have hurled anti-Semitic abuse. The IDF has now released what they say is an un-doctored and completely faithful recording of the exchange in its entirety. Honest!

Meanwhile, one of the activist groups behind the Flotilla, FreeGaza, has denied the nasty statements attributed to Flotilla activists ever took place. Honest!

Today John Lyons in The Australian tries to untangle the facts, if any, from officially sanctioned IDF accounts of the incident.

Noting Lyons’ article, Dr Easychair tries valiantly and successfully to avoid the ‘L’ word, but concedes there have been “gaps and mistakes — or falsehoods.”

But he “can’t see anything in this so far that isn’t explained by rush, adrenalin, a lack of TV cameramen right on the spot of the worst fighting, and an unwillingness to show the IDF shooting people, no matter how justified.”

Needless to say the excuse of ‘rush’ and ‘adrenalin’ (to say nothing of mortal fear) is apparently forbidden the Flotilla activists for their alleged actions.

Know your enemy

2010-06-06T21:30:00.008+10:00

The above image has been put about as depicting Sheik Mohammed al-Hazmi, a Yemeni MP and delegate to the Gaza Aid Flotilla, wielding a dagger with intent to do harm to allegedly well-meaning Israeli commandos as they stormed the Mavi Marmara, a vessel in the Flotilla.

Presented as a poster boy for your worst nightmare about the Islamist bogeyman, the image has been posted on various sites such as here, here and here. At all of these sites the image is invariably accompanied with the following text:

Prominent activists in the Yemeni flotilla delegation were three MPs from the Al-Islah party, an Islamist party that is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. One, Sheikh Muhammad al-Hazmi, was photographed on the deck of the Mavi Marmara brandishing his large curved dagger.

The image and text have almost certainly all been sourced from this page at the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). It seems to be a quick cut’n’paste from your one-stop shop for all your pro-Israel propaganda needs.

MEMRI itself sources the image from this page of an online Arabic news source. Unfortunately the page is in Arabic and MEMRI unhelpfully does not provide a translation.

Those such as myself who don’t have Arabic may try running the url through google’s online translation engine. Although the output yields a somewhat mangled rendering, it seems to say something about the image having been published by Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, suggesting their use of it to be “defamatory.”

Well sure, they probably would say that, wouldn’t they? But at any rate, a quick search of the Ha’aretz site yielded nothing on al-Hazmi. It could be that the Arabic news source was mistaken; or that Ha’aretz indeed did publish the image, then took it down for some reason.

In any event, the ultimate source of the image, and the circumstances in which it was photographed, have not been satisfactorily established by anyone. Even the size and aspect of the image suggest it has been edited from a larger image, thus removing any further detail or context which may illumine its meaning.

And its meaning has, of course, been readily construed by hawkers of pro-Israel propaganda according to their own purposes.

You can read more about al-Hazmi in this puff-piece from The Yemen Times, and in this more critical piece from The Los Angeles Times, both dated in April. The latter article includes an image of the Sheik in repose, taken presumably at time of interview with the writer, in which he is wearing what appears to be the same dagger sheathed at his belt.

Notwithstanding the weapon could well be used to lethal effect, the ubiquity of the dagger around the Sheik’s person might suggest it has some ‘ceremonial’ significance.

Whatever, in my humble opinion it has not been established whether the Sheik’s dagger was “brandished” by him at, or even used against, IDF commandos during the storming of the Mavi Marmara. Or if he did, whether or not it was without mitigating factors such as provocation.

If, however, the image of al-Hazmi “brandishing” his blade is indeed such damning evidence of the Sheik’s murderous evildoing, one can only wonder why Israeli authorities so readily deported him back to Turkey. Surely an attempted murder charge or similar would have been in order?

The view from Salem

2010-06-04T20:50:00.003+10:00

Just a few years ago in a suburb not too far away, we were chatting with friends when somehow the subject of the Chamberlain case came up.

Our female host, quite a decent woman really, suddenly became tense, finally declaring, “I still reckon she did it.”

A beat of awkward silence, then: “I just don’t believe her.”

I guess I made some faltering noises of dismay, until her spouse then offered, “I don’t give a shit!”

I was under the, apparently mistaken, impression that most people did give a shit, given that, just for one thing, an innocent family was torn apart by the witch hunt that engulfed the nation.

Some of us will have had the maddening experience of arguing with someone who still believes Lindy Chamberlain was guilty.

And some of us will have had sporadic episodes of madness in which we still believe Lindy Chamberlain was guilty.

Former barrister, prosecutor and Supreme Court judge Ken Crispin is one of the former, with wide experience of the latter. He this week told Phillip Adams:

... I wrote a book and I was interviewed about it by a senior Melbourne journalist, who began the interview by saying, “Ken, I just want to let you know there’s a ground rule for this interview. As far as I’m concerned that bitch is guilty and I don’t want to know I’m wrong.” ...
You couldn’t persuade people by facts. I was on talkback radio and I had a fellow ring up and say, “Now look, I’m an old bushie, you can’t tell me a dingo could go in and out of a tent without leaving tracks.”
I said, “I don’t want to tell you that. It did leave tracks.”
“Oh yeah, who saw them?”
I said, “Well, there were the two police stationed at Ayers Rock, the Chief Ranger, the Deputy Chief Ranger, a queen’s scout named Murray Haby, several other searchers; the tracks were still there next morning when they were seen by the Detective Inspector and Detective Sergeant from Darwin, and from that day to this, the Crown has never disputed their existence.”
“Yeah well, you’ll never persuade me,” he said.

(No transcript, listen here — quoted audio from 11m 45s.)

Transport Trivia Friday

2010-06-04T08:00:00.001+10:00

Presenting milestones in Victoria’s transport landscape...

This week: 1978

January

The History of Transport Mural, painted by Harold Freeman, is unveiled at Spencer Street Station.

February

Melbourne’s first permanent pedestrian mall, in Bourke Street, is officially opened.

November

The West Gate Bridge is officially opened. A 60c toll applies for cars.

Source: Transport Research and Policy Analysis Bulletin, Autumn 2010

Next week: 1979 ! !

Floundering in flotilla facts and furphies

2010-06-02T22:45:00.025+10:00

Tobias Ziegler at Pure Poison notes that media pundits who excuse Israel for the Gaza flotilla violence have tended to “look at the event as starting when the ship was boarded — the reasoning and tactics behind doing so, not to mention the legality of doing so, aren’t discussed, as though there were no Israeli decisions that could have changed the events or their consequences.”

It’s true enough that Israel’s apologists want to portray her forces as well-meaning innocents who walked into a trap cunningly devised by the evil Islamists. Notably Greg Sheridan observed that the confrontation with Israeli forces was planned by the activists as “a kind of grotesque theatre, which is what all terrorism is really about, in this case to carry out enough violence to ensure a violent Israeli reaction.”

Meanwhile Andrew Bolt, our Dr Easychair, took much the same line, while further ‘reporting’:

Arab television showed one woman on board [the Mavi Marmara, a vessel among the flotilla] exulting: “We await one of two good things — to achieve martyrdom or reach the shore of Gaza.”
Added another passenger, Yemeni professor Abd al-Fatah Nu’man: “These are people who wish to be martyred for the sake of Allah. As much as they want to reach Gaza, the other option is more desirable to them.”

What our Doctor neglected to mention in his ‘scoop’ was that Arab television aired the footage last Friday, before the flotilla set out for Gaza. Those inflammatory statements by the flotilla activists had apparently escaped Bolt’s attention until he began googling yesterday for material to illustrate his narrative.

But the material surely wouldn’t have escaped the notice of Israeli intelligence. The Israeli forces, therefore, must have had some idea they could meet with some stiff resistance if they attempted to storm the ship. There are more than enough questions around Israeli intentions and actions to suggest that the activists weren’t the only party in this tragedy who might have been planning “a kind of grotesque theatre”.

Interestingly, Dr Easychair also omitted to inform his readers that the same “Yemeni professor” quoted above had further remarked that “the current fleet does not bear weapons or carry armies, but it carries ... believing men, armed with faith.” An inconvenient detail, hence the omission.

UPDATE 3 JUNE: A very troubling read from Craig Murray:

NATO HQ in Brussels is today a very unhappy place. There is a strong understanding among the various national militaries that an attack by Israel on a NATO member flagged ship in international waters is an event to which NATO is obliged — legally obliged, as a matter of treaty — to react.

Meanwhile, Mark Steel takes the Israeli government to task on it’s statement — “We made every possible effort to avoid this incident” — noting that...

the one tiny thing they forgot to do to avoid this incident was not send in armed militia from helicopters in the middle of the night and shoot people. I must be a natural at this sort of technique because I often go all day without climbing off a helicopter and shooting people, and I’m not even making every possible effort.

(via Antony Loewenstein)

An example of how Greg Sheridan has earned himself the title of ‘Doctor Pussyfoot’:

Any police operation that results in the tragedy of nine deaths is in some sense a failure.

And in another startling development, see the leaked BP’s Note To Israeli Prime Minister About Steps For Good Disaster PR.

Speaking of BP’s little PR disaster, by the way, I’m not sure if I mentioned before how Dr Easychair recently lamented that “a month after the great Gulf of Mexico spill, the wildlife toll is pathetically small.”

Now that BP’s top-kill operation has failed, and the oil seems set to gush forth for months to come, our Doctor may find the wildlife toll much more to his satisfaction.

Doctor Easychair, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying...

2010-06-01T22:00:00.003+10:00

“What courage has he, Doctor Easychair, the basking sycophant?”

Thomas Müntzer

Andrew Bolt — our own Doctor Easychair — decided last week that AusAID’s giving $5.5m to a Kenya-based NGO was “Rudd giving aid to Mugabe.”

This week Dr Easychair has decided that a bloodbath perpetrated in international waters by heavily-armed Israeli commandos is “the lynching of Israel.”

Now that Rudd has expressed qualified condemnation of the killings, it’s better than even money we’ll be reading tomorrow in Bolt’s column of how Rudd gives aid and succour to Hamas.

Skewed priorities

2010-06-01T13:40:00.002+10:00

“Understand the extraordinary power of various Federal and State Government departments and agencies and be under no misapprehension that their focus is on the provision of appropriate care and their only interest in respect of the viability of an individual facility is as it impacts on the quality of care being provided.”

Residential aged care – dealing with a business in crisis. KordaMentha, May 2010, p. 11. (PDF)

Worse and worser

2010-05-29T21:20:00.004+10:00

Senator Eric Abetz holds forth on the Rudd Government’s taxpayer-funded advertising blitz to sell its super resources tax:

“They have now done worse than we have done by setting aside their own guidelines.”

True, the government’s actions in this are quite troubling, but is it really ‘worse’ than having no guidelines at all? The Howard Government had an abysmal record of hitting on the taxpayer to advertise their policies. And the government’s “setting aside their own guidelines” is redolent of Howard’s ministerial code of conduct, and how meaningless that became.

More than anything, however, this all seems to be about Kevin Rudd. His government will become paralysed if it can’t neutralise the ‘KRudd’ factor... or jettison it.

UPDATE 30 MAY: ABC TV’s Insiders program this morning aired video footage of Kevin Rudd campaigning in 2007 in which he emphatically states he would resign if, as Prime Minister, he failed to honour his promise to clean up taxpayer-funded government advertising.

Kevin Rudd therefore should now do the honourable thing and fall on his sword — unless he can successfully take the ‘Abbott defence’, on the grounds that his off-the-cuff statement in 2007 was not a “carefully prepared, scripted remark.”

Andrew Bolt’s lost post

2010-05-29T11:30:00.004+10:00

The following is a post Andrew Bolt had apparently “dopped” but which has somehow been leaked to this blog:

In a rare moment of honest reflection, I thought I might take some time out to thank people like Jacob of the AppliedH blog for holding up to scrutiny some of my more deranged output.
For instance, most recently Jacob exposed my shonky claim that Kevin Rudd “gave aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”
None of you, my faithful readers, challenged me on this, and I thought I’d gotten clean away with it until, with jaw agape, I read Jacob’s searing critique on his blog (which I secretly, and with trepidation, read daily).
By the way, even if one of you had challenged me on that barefaced lie, a retraction and apology would of course always be out of the question. On my blog you’ll never read anything like: “Thanks to reader Joe Bloggs for pointing out my gaping error.” It just wouldn’t gell with the flow of my obvious genius.
Despite myself, I have to admit that in my frenzies I do tend to tear apart anything to hand that represents restraint, order or the related discipline of reason. I just can’t help myself, so it’s important that people like Jacob are out there, somewhere, calling me to account on this rubbish you all devour so willingly. But fortunately for me, AppliedH is Australia’s least-read blog.
To my legions of readers who’ve helped make my blog “Australia’s most-read political blog,” I’d like to try to tell you how very sorry I am for having sucked you all in with my manic bids for more attention, cash and power.
Here goes. The fact is I’m not very sorry at all. You’ve only yourselves to blame for falling for the heady brew of lies, half-truths and populist cant that I retail here so shamelessly. Truly it’s said that there’s one born every minute, and boy have I struck the mother lode.
I’d like to be able to tell you I will delete my blog and somehow earn myself an honest living, but even I have to acknowledge the bleeding obvious fact that I’m simply not capable of it.

Thanks Andy, I’m genuinely touched.

Bolt backflips blog

2010-05-28T23:10:00.012+10:00

(UPDATE - This title has been re-itemised, and the updated pre-originals drop bottomed to the post.)

A very strange rewriting of the Bolt blog:

UPDATE - This item as [sic] been retitled, and the original pre-updates post dopped [sic] to the bottom.

Bolt also “dopped” a later post featuring a rather fetching image of former PM John Howard toasting our present troubles with Rudd, with (from memory) the caption:

“How’s that change you wanted working out?!”

Thus has Bolt ditched the cardinal rule of ‘blogging’ which requires the preservation of ‘the record.’ Bloggers all may now freely rewrite their histories with a free conscience. Thanks Andy!!

Now’s probably a good time to switch-off your computer.

UPDATE (IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT)

That Howard toast to the people who have forsaken His Reverence has at last reappeared a mere 6 hours after Andy pulled it.

Never let it be said that the Australian Right would ever delight in the supposed misfortune of ordinary Australians.

PRE POSTDATE X

Please refer to the previous two updates which follow.

POST PRE UPDATE 2

This is to alert readers that there might have been an important update, but I carelessly dopped it.

PRE POST UPDATE 2

Yep, this post is still in the same place I left it. Just checking.

Sionara sci-whaling

2010-05-28T12:15:00.002+10:00

The Australian Government has just announced it will initiate legal action to end Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’ activities in the Southern Ocean.

This announcement can only be:

an attempt to distract your attention from pink batts, the ETS, the resource tax, and what have you;
an attempt to buy the votes of Muslim, African and non-whaling nations in Rudd’s quixotic bid to win a UNSC seat; and
an attempt to gratify Rudd’s manic vanity.

It goes without saying that this announcement has nothing whatever to do with long-standing, avowed Government policy on Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’ activities in the Southern Ocean.

Transport Trivia Friday

2010-05-28T09:00:00.000+10:00

Presenting milestones in Victoria’s transport landscape...

This week: 1977

February

Jacob begins driving (legitimately), coinciding with steady increase in demand for courses in defensive driving.

December

Stage 1 of the Eastern Freeway (Hoddle Street to Bulleen Road) opens.

Source: Transport Research and Policy Analysis Bulletin, Autumn 2010

Next week: 1978 ! !

Charles Darwin:	I have been writing a book.
Doctor Gully:	Madness! There are far too many of those already!