Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

What if CO2 has nothing to do with the Earth's climate?

2012-02-01T12:49:00.008+11:00

There'd be a huge scramble of egg, vegetable and waste matter on the faces of, and obstructing the vision of, the vast worldwide army of over-sensitive and deeply concerned prognosticators in politics, academia, journalism, workplaces and kitchens, who have been scolding us all about our carbon emissions for nearly 2 decades.

And, make no mistake, this is now a completely legitimate question. Anyone genuinely interested in and curious about climate change must start asking themselves this in the light of the confirmation from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Institute and the British Met Office that there has been no no material change in the Earth's surface temperature in the last 15 years.

CO2 emissions have continued to rise unabated over that same 15 years but the planet has stubbornly refused to heat up. It looks mightily like there must be an explanation other than increases in atmospheric CO2 for the global warming in the 20 year odd period between 1976 and 1997.

Mike Stopa has now started the ball rolling on the rethink. There are many intriguing further questions consequent on this too, including, as Mike Stopa puts it, how will the history of this colossal mistake be written?

He suggests that:

"... They will say that the theory was seemingly invalidated by the decrease in global temperatures from 1940-1975, but that the adherents patched this up by explaining the cooling with pollution, specifically sulfur, from industry"...
"... They will say the theory was seemingly invalidated by the evidence that the atmosphere was already nearly opaque in the wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2 and so the additional CO2 could have, on its own, little effect, but that the theory was patched up by positing a feedback mechanism between the small temperature increases directly due to CO2 and the production of water vapor which is the main greenhouse gas..."
"... They will note that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proceeded much like any scientific theory (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in that it was modified and patched up and adjusted to fit empirical challenges until it finally collapsed altogether under the weight of incontrovertible evidence..."

[underlining added]

Most of the rest of the world have just entangled themselves in words and bureaucratic waste over this false alarm in the past decade. But Australia actually did something more than blow hot air in UN IPCC forums and at COP conferences. The Australian Labor government legislated last year to tax the country's largest 500 businesses with an impost of $23.00 per tonne of CO2 produced by those businesses, commencing 1 July 2012.

Now that it appears likely that CO2 probably does not contribute meaningfully to the warming of the planet, this tax is just a pointless handicap on Australian business. This pointless tax makes all Australian industry less competitive with the rest of the world. For no benefit. Not even the mystical benefit of "moral leadership" in the world. Just the dunces prize for being sucked in by all the smoke and mirrors from self-appointed important people who wanted to save us all from ourselves.

Just how this massive group-think folly is going to be backed away from by the educated opinion making elites in the West will indeed be intriguing.

These folk are not good at eating crow. So is there a face saving mechanism by which all the great and the good in the world who jumped on this absurd prosperity depleting bandwagon, can be redeemed?
We watch and wait.

It might take a while for these rubes to even realise that the game is over. But as it dawns on them gradually over the coming years that they got it so badly wrong, both the shrieks of pain and the silence of denial will be deafening. Indeed the deafening silence has already begun. This emergence of this clear conclusion of no warming for 15 years based on apparently rigorously collected and collated data remains pretty much unremarked on in the mainstream media to date. The dam will break soonish, methinks, especially here in Australia as the commencement date of the Carbon Tax looms closer.

So we might yet just be saved from both the oppression of unnecessarily intrusive world government edicts seeking to save us from climate perdition and the irritation of constantly being belittled by our betters for the mortal sin of high energy usage. Is it too much to hope that at some point soon it might even be possible to be able to resume creating prosperity for all without being told we can't use the cheapest, easiest and most abundant sources of energy?

Move along. Nothing to see here.

2012-01-30T17:05:00.005+11:00

It is now clear that Tony Hodges, Prime Minister Gillard's now former Media Adviser, rang UnionsACT secretary Kim Sattler on Thursday 26 January. Ms Sattler is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying:

"I spoke to Tony Hodges on the phone. He mentioned that Tony Abbott had made a statement about the embassy, that it shouldn't exist at all, ... I do now accept that wasn't what was Tony Abbott said."

The same day ("Australia Day") Ms Sattler according to the Herald Sun posted this statement on her Facebook page:

"Tony Abbott just announced the Tent Embassy should be closed down and a huge crowd from the Embassy went to greet him and he had to be rushed away with a police escort!"

On Saturday 28 The Prime Minister is quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying:

"At no point did Mr Hodges say to Ms Sattler that Mr Abbott had suggested that the tent embassy be torn down or removed in any way,"

Ms Sattler says Mr Hodges told her that Tony Abbott had said the tent embassy shouldn't exist at all. The Prime Minister says that at no point had Hodges made any such suggestion. So is the Prime Minister or is Ms Sattler lying to us about what Mr Hodges said to Ms Sattler?

I understand that Ms Sattler has now changed her version of events so she is now not seen to be contradicting her leader. Ms Sattler's Facebook site has also now been removed from public scrutiny. That's better message management Prime Minister. There may be still a few loose ends to tuck in about this but the press won't press the point. Umm.. was Ms Sattler lying before or is he lying now?

What is clear is that nobody involved in protesting at the Lobby Restaurant in Canberra on Australia Day bothered or cared enough to listen to what Tony Abbott actually said in Sydney that morning about the aboriginal tent embassy:

“Look, I can understand why the tent embassy was established all those years ago. I think a lot has changed for the better since then. We had the historic apology just a few years ago, one of the genuine achievements of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. We had the proposal, which is currently for national consideration, to recognise indigenous people in the constitution. I think the indigenous people of Australia can be very proud of the respect in which they are held by every Australian, and, yes, I think a lot’s changed since then and I think it probably is time to move on from that.”

The facts? Who cares about facts in the Press Gallery and the ALP when there are potential political points to be scored against bogeyman Tony Abbott at a bipartisan emergency workers' bravery awards ceremony in Canberra on Australia Day?

And how is it that the Prime Minister apparently did not know about Tony Hodge's phone call on Thursday afternoon to Kim Sattler, 'till late on Friday evening? The PM's office appears to have conceded that Tony Hodges told the PM's senior media adviser on Thursday evening about his phone call to Kim Sattler at the Tent Embassy earlier that day? Surely the Prime Minister was told that her own office was implicated in fostering the protest event at which she was put in peril. It's not as if the protest and the PM's rescue from it wasn't getting full media coverage around Australia and internationally on the telly on Thursday evening.
The Prime Minister probably now agrees with the Leader of the Opposition's original suggestion: "it probably is time to move on from that". Nothing to see here.

To employ or to contract?

2012-01-10T12:48:00.003+11:00

It is heartening to potentially see emerging to legitimacy in contemporary polemics the notion that employment, with all its attendant rights and long term benefits for the employed, may not be an optimal relationship for the encouragement and fostering of success and prosperity in small business.

This article, "The Growth Agenda - the Self Employment Option" by Dr Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute advocates for "all small and medium enterprises to treat their workers as self-employed people under contract". He argues that "employers could take on extra people on a self employed basis without imposing any additional burden on themselves".

This argument strikes me intuitively as quite compelling. Inevitably any discussion of possible changes to the existing structures for workers' rights can provoke unnecessarily over emotional responses from the entrenched conservatism of trade unions and their enablers in protecting prevailing guild privileges, but in principle this idea seems to have a lot to recommend it, if the frame of reference is for the well being and prosperity of the whole economy, not just the quite specific sectional interests of large employer and large employee associations.

It is interesting to observe the UK Conservative government potentially entertaining such a far reaching reform, whilst at the same time the Australian Labor government seems intent on discrimination against out-sourcing and independent contracting by encouraging the taxation system to create heavy disincentives to contractors who might further threaten the long term drop in the numbers of workers who join trade unions.

This looks like yet another example of how the allegedly "progressive" side of politics is "regressive" in reinforcing authoritarian legal rigidities, whilst the allegedly "conservative" side of politics is "progressive" in advocating for increased freedoms and flexibility in labour markets.

It seems, in Australia at least, to continue to support the "progressive" side of politics, is, ironically, to be an enabler of the preservation of institutional inflexibilitiy in existing workplace relationships and against the interests of a dynamic and flexible workplace environment susceptible to change and progress in overall societal prosperity.

With Havel & Hitchens gone, who now carries Orwell's torch?

2011-12-19T17:13:00.004+11:00

Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens both died this week.

They will both live on for a while though, because they each occupy a special place in my mind. They were both prominent fighters for human freedom against oppressive regimes. One, exorted the West with his intellect, wit and words to acknowledge its responsibility to fight for the ideals of freedom and against hypocrisy. The other was a politician, poet, playwright and philosopher who won a long fight with Soviet totalitarianism that will always inspire others. They were both in their own way heirs to the legacy of the contrarian genius of George Orwell, who helped define the 20th century's intellectual resistance to all forms of totalitarianism.

Vaclav Havel seems likely to go into the pantheon of our civilization's heroes of human freedom. In April 1975, after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring with tanks and installed a new puppet in power, Havel (in Matt Welch's words) "committed an act of such sheer ballsiness that the shock waves are still being felt in repressive countries 30 years later". He wrote an open letter to the Soviet installed puppet dictator, Gustav Husak, setting out why and how totalitarianism was ruining Czechoslovakia.

So far, you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power

This letter apparently was clandestinely distributed as a samizdat behind the Iron Curtain and has been attributed with being the catalyst for the growth of the dissident movement in Central Europe. "Absurdistan" he christened the Soviet Union. And that he was successful, with others, in eventually peacefully steering Czechoslovakia into democratic freedom is inspirational globally. Civilization is in his debt, because his example of resistance, dignity, courage and persistence can, and will be, drawn on for eons to come by those seeking succour under the oppressive yoke of totalitarian government.

Christopher Hitchens, though great in his own way: a brave contrarian and debunker of hypocrisy within the cultural cacophony of the West; and destined to continue be much loved by those that knew him or read his polemics whilst fresh, seems more likely to drift into obscurity. He will likely occasionally be dis-interned as a brilliant pamphleteer of our era by future scholars of the late 20th century, for this era could easily be forgotten, but for for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and 9/11.

Havel and Hitchens had much to say about both these events and their impact on our humanity and civilizational values. The future will of course determine its own version of history on these matters, but it is to be fervently hoped that both these men will find their deserved place.

They have both been compared to, and at various times have metaphorically fought in the minds of others for the title of heir and successor to George Orwell. Hitchens wrote a book called Why Orwell Matters. In reviewing it in the Weekly Standard David Brooks argued that the great man's mantle and relevance had actually passed onto a new contrarian's shoulders: "At this moment, oddly enough, Hitchens matters more than Orwell."

Whilst Matt Welch in the May 2003 of issue Reason argued:

At exactly the same time, the one man in the world of the living who could justifiably claim to be Orwell's heir was expounding almost daily on Saddam Hussein and international terrorism -- even while rushing through one of the most frenetic periods of a famously accomplished life. Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time.

So with both Havel and Hitchens now gone, who is to carry Orwell's great contrarian passion for human freedom forward?

It seems likely, and it is surely to be hoped, that the next chapter in this great and continuous battle for human dignity and freedom will be fought most intensely in the great rising super power of the East, China.

The inevitable huge tensions between the vast numbers of employers, industrialists and entrepreneurs gaining in wealth throughout China and their dysfunctional but all pervasive central and regional government overlords in the Communist Party, seems ripe territory for dissidence and courage of the scale and calibre that Orwell, Havel and Hitchens set. And even this analysis does not adequately acknowledge the role to be played by the "Power of the Powerless" in the vast social dislocation of billions of Chinese peasants transferring from the verities of their rural villages to the relativism of urban alienation in cities on a scale never before seen in human history. Somewhere there surely the new torchbearers for Orwell's passion for human dignity will be found and heard.

News Flash: Kim Jong-il dies.

So that illness finally got him (old and bad joke). A horrible tyrant, who oppressed millions of North Koreans for decades, goes in the same week as these two great fighters for the dignity and indomitable spirit of free people. Both the good and the bad have died this week. It emphasises the need to publicly revere the good where we can see it working, and to publicly revile the bad works of those who have not bettered the lot of their fellow humans.

Family debts

2011-09-28T12:01:00.002+10:00

US

Someone recently emailed me this quite compelling explanation for why Standard & Poors downgraded US sovereign debt:

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget:           $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt:             $1,650,000,000,000
• National debt:     $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut:      $38,500,000,000

Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

• Annual family income:                              $21,700
• Money the family spent:                          $38,200
• New debt on the credit card:                   $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card:  $142,710
• Total budget cuts:                                        $385

Hey is someone reading my mail.

EURO

What we need now is for someone to do a similar thing with the Euro family debt. I'd like to see what Daddy Deutschland's debt position is if it stumps up for the debts of all its Euro children: Greece, Portugal and Ireland and its profligate Euro in-laws: Spain, Italy and Belgium.

All these Euro family members have been borrowing on Daddy Deutschland's credit for decades and now the lenders want to be repaid.

Appropriately La Femme France seems to date to have been immune from such tawdry scrutiny. Uncle Ned is of course beyond reproach.

Some dumb questions:

Can someone explain to me why the market has all of a sudden become confident that the Euro experiment is not inevitably going to unravel over course of the next decade?
Surely some paltry public palliatives for Papendreou uttered by Angela Merkel are not seen as constituting something substantive to turn this slow motion train smash around?
Isn't that Wile E Coyote market just going to tank again tomorrow when it belatedly realises that it has just been duped by the Road Runner one more time, with the same old Euro political posturing?

Will the Carbon Tax enhance our economic freedom?

2011-06-29T11:59:00.003+10:00

It seems that there are many benefits flowing to people who live in societies that value and encourage economic freedom (lid dip to Glenn Reynolds).

A carbon tax seems inimical to more economic freedom. It raises the cost of energy. It requires a large and intrusive bureaucracy to collect and administer it. Business has more red tape to comply with. There are redistributions and reallocations of wealth that are susceptible to gaming.

How can the risk of taking such backward steps in our economic freedoms be considered worth it for the seemingly very remote possibility that taxing carbon dioxide emissions might help slow global warming if other nations do it too? Especially whilst the rest of the world just looks on?

Only people who put a nil or low value on economic freedom would be likely to treat such a trade-off as worthwhile. They do not seem to realise just what a valuable thing it is that they are imperilling with their fanciful hope of global climate salvation by introducing a local carbon tax.

Taxing CO2 in Australia now is a really bad idea

2011-06-22T12:21:00.024+10:00

If your objective is to save the planet, then this tax will not help.

If your objective is to create prosperity, then this tax will help to impoverish us.

Though if your objective is to increase the size and power of government, then this tax would have to be a winner.

Here we are, yet again, accidentally having some easily accessible stuff that other nations are prepared to pay up for, and we decide it would be nice, in the name of helping Mother Earth, to deliberately make it more expensive for industries to set up or continue here. And we are going to make it more expensive now, before the rest of the world has done it too, to show the world how morally sophisticated we are, even when such sacrifice won't actually help the planet stay cool.

Brave? Yes. Sensible? No.

A carbon tax will inevitably cost us economically productive jobs. A carbon tax deliberately reduces our capacity to create wealth from using the most economically available resources to create goods and services. A carbon tax is specifically designed and intended to artificially increase the costs of our most economic and abundant sources of energy so that currently uneconomic and more expensive sources of energy can compete. That is, a carbon tax intentionally raises the cost of nearly all our productive economic activity for the purpose, apparently, of helping to prevent the Earth from getting warmer. Except that this tax will not have any effect on whether the Earth gets warmer or not.

Here's the rub, as the recent Productivity Commission report makes plain, Australia will be alone in the world in having an economy wide tax on its carbon dioxide emissions. This is from a country whose largest export is, wait for it: COAL.

We are doing the reverse of subsidising our industries. We are, with this tax, deliberately handicapping our businesses and industries against our global trade competitors. In fact Australians are subsidising our international trade competitors by exporting to them our cheap and abundant coal. You see it can be burnt overseas without being taxed. Burning our coal here would put businesses at an economic disadvantage because we will have a tax here that is actually designed to make burning it here it too expensive. This tax will actually encourage more coal to be exported to the rest of the world. CO2 will still be emitted into the Earth's atmosphere when this coal is burnt. It will just now be burnt somewhere it is not taxed, although Australia will now no longer get the economic benefit of coal as a cheap source of energy, our competitors will.

Please someone explain how such a tax in these circumstances can work to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions.

Please someone explain to me why or how anyone can be morally sanctimonious about such a tax.

Please explain to me how fostering such outcomes could in any way be described as a sensible policy.

Please explain why a sane person who has the best interests of their fellow citizens at heart, could advocate for such a tax.

The suggestion that introducing this tax now prepares the Australian economy for the world's imminent low carbon future is based on wishful thinking or pure fiction. What world low carbon future? Where is it? Who else has one? Not who has said they'd like to have one or that they have a plan to introduce one. These are mere words. If Australia acts now on this we will be on our own in a spectacular folly.

China doesn't tax CO2. India doesn't tax CO2. The USA doesn't tax CO2. Russia doesn't tax CO2. Brazil doesn't tax CO2. Japan doesn't tax CO2. Korea doesn't tax CO2. Indonesia doesn't tax CO2. South Africa doesn't tax CO2. Not even sanctimonious and broke Europeans tax it. They have a market which prices it. Very badly, if your objective is to reduce CO2 emissions.

We Australians are about to shoot ourselves in the foot with this carbon tax.

Suggesting that a Carbon Tax now is a truly bad idea has nothing to do with denial or scepticism about man made global warming . Such an argument is delibrately distracting polemical fluff and a transparently irrelevant straw man. It's pretty clear that man's activities are having a climate effect. This is not the point of why this carbon tax is such a bad idea for Australia. It is also not a question of being opposed to having a world price for carbon that is determined by the market, so that long term sustainable investment decisions can be made for the betterment of humankind.. That might be a good idea when such a global market actually exists. But it doesn't.

The point is that to do this alone now, will cause Australians a self-inflicted economic harm for no climate benefit. No one else is going to follow our example in noble self sacrifice. The rest of the world needs to be actually with us, doing the same thing, when the whistle is blown and we plunge into the brave new low carbon world. They cannot just be waving us on from the officers' mess, sending us signals about our courage in going over the top for the cause. Alone. Such sacrifice would be in vain and an appalling vanity.

This tax is yet another episode in a continuous stream of spectacular intellectual misadventures that Utopian dreamers in power choose to inflict on trusting citizens, seemingly without remorse. It seems our bureaucratic elites believe the rest of us must just accept these morally superior soft headed policy idiocies, because they mean well.

Implementing this tax now would be a middle class moral self indulgence that will cost Australians dearly for nothing.

I believe it was Frederick Hayek who said

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. "

There is great hubris in store for all the politicians, economists, scientists, journalists and bureaucrats who are proposing and advocating for the massive "reform" of our economy that the proposed carbon tax necessarily entails. I guess this could be called "reform" if you take reform to simply mean change of any sort. There will certainly be a lot of change. But if reform is taken to mean change for the better, then this carbon tax is not reform. The Earth's climate will not change for the better because of it. Our industries will indeed now change so that they are less internationally competitive. The numbers of Australians in productive employment will change, downwards. Our national wealth will change for the worse. And the huge structural change required will substantially increase the size and intrusiveness of central government.

It is a curious thing indeed that so many of our economists have let their imaginings about the power of their fiscal designs take such a hold that they have convinced themselves that a tax implemented in Australia alone can somehow save the planet And then they proceed to have such grand designs imposed on their fellow citizens even whilst they know it must necessarily make us poorer.

This is truly a form of policy madness. And the Australian people implicitly understand that this is madness. Why can't our elected and taxpayer funded leaders in Canberra also see this? Is the maintenance of its power by placating the Greens so important to the Australian Labor Party and the rural independents in the Federal Government that they are prepared to persist in this self indulgent moral folly at the expense of the prosperity of their fellow Australians?

The only potential benefit in this for Australians is the tawdry and self defeating prospect of some much promised but as yet unspecified redistributive allocations to householders of large portions of the money obtained from penalising Australian industry with the carbon tax. That might feel good for some for a little while, until they lose their jobs because the tax cut or rebate they receive from the Government has come directly at the expense of making employers less competitive, and the employers have to cut back or fold as a result.

What kind of economic folly is this? What sensible and serious person who is concerned for the well being of their fellow citizens could support it?

Mad hatter bumps into ceiling at tea party

2011-05-19T15:59:00.003+10:00

Whatever toxins may come along with it, the Tea Party movement has been a wonderful example of grass roots democracy in action in the flagship democracy. Citizens holding their overlords in government to account for their sense of entitlement and profligacy with the taxpayers' dime, is an empowering and encouraging prospect. The Democrats former (and in many cases continuing) moral righteousness about Guantanamo, Global Warming, Iraq, Afghanistan and the well-being of workers, has not been met in office with any actions materially different from the previous Republican administration, even when the Dems controlled both the House and the Senate. Obamacare, the one possible legislative success of Obama's first 2 years, at the moment just looks like an even more gigantic bureaucratic fiscal snafu than usual, at a time when the US can least afford it.

And America seems to have gone morally backwards in many areas under Obama, in spite of all the hope: more wars, more unemployed, more drone killings, gloating over state sponsored assassinations, and continuing glacially paced military trials for enemy combatant detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

If, on the other hand, one sensibly sets aside such glib media-packaged morality shtick and concentrates on the hard nosed business of advances in delivering prosperity to and for the people, then the magnitude of the US Federal and State debt problem does look like the serious blockage to meaningful progress. Whatever else may be said about them, the Tea Party seems to have got that part of it pretty much right. Witness the US federal government now bumping up against its previously unimaginably high debt-ceiling of $14 trillion. Increasing taxes can't reverse the vortex of perpetual hole digging in a blackhole of that magnitude. Tax hikes would only impede the economic growth required to raise enough revenue to just pay the bills. Drastic, painful, socially dislocating spending cuts by a severely overstretched government seem essential if the US is not to become broke. People of responsibility will have to risk being unpopular in the populist republic and be given power by the people, if the US is to have any real chance of prospering again. The EU or China won't bail them out and the IMF is now on remand in Manhattan without bail.

In the meantime the A$ climbs to US$1.06 and more. The commentariat is now even talking here about the US$ halving in value in the early part of this century. My meagre mind goes numb with pain just trying to roughly game out such a scenario for the world's economy. And though Australia's prosperity is now inextricable linked to China's seemingly unquenchable thirst for its primary resources, we need the US to start growing vigorously again for the world to prosper. A return to high inflation now looks almost inevitable in the next decade in the US under current FED monetary settings. This might help ameliorate the debt problems, but the other consequences could be dire. Yes, interesting times. Buy gold?

25% of NSW now vote ALP: "a good outcome"

2011-03-28T16:06:00.004+11:00

According to Labor electoral genius, House Government Whip, former Minister of Defence and Federal member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, this electoral result was "a good outcome".

For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state.

The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern.

It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it governed mattered. The Union movement, who run the ALP, has a lot to answer for. It put the maintenance of its power over others above all other interests. After 15 years of refinement, this is the end result: dumped and abandoned by the electorate.

I reckon that if the ALP is ever to be a force again here it needs not to return to nineteenth century working class labour collectivist socialism, as some would have it. Rather it should openly proclaim advocacy of progressive middle class liberalism, including all its seductive shallow populist fallacies. We know that the electorate can still be suckered by such saccharine nonsense. Unlike the working class pathologies of Marxist rhetoric, which the electorate understandably no longer is capable of falling for.

Al least if they were clear sighted enough to badge themselves as trendy progressives they might claw back some ground from the Greens. They might also then be an electable alternative to a fiscally rigorous and socially conservative establishment. The good news is that this looks unlikely to happen, in the short term anyway, because the Union heavies and hard leftists appear to have gained ground in the rump of the party that remains.

Eve lures the innocent serpent to its doom

2011-03-15T11:50:00.002+11:00

You can''t make this stuff up.
This is what now happens to vipers who are clutched to the breast.
Satan is no match for silicon implants.
A parable for the innocence of merely biblical evil in the 21st Century?

Never fight a Land War in Asia ...

2011-03-09T15:07:00.002+11:00

(... except when you have to ?)

George Friedman in his peice at Stratfor wants this old and glib defeatist rubric (allegedly uttered by Douglas MacArthur to JFK and kinda quoted more recently in the movie "Princess Bride"), elevated to "a principle of U.S. foreign policy".

It looks to me more like a thin and easy assertion of tactical rhetoric masquerading as grand strategy (how apt therefore that its source should be the egomaniacal MacArthur). The more compelling proposition is probably something more like: now that China is a real military threat to the US, a land war in Asia is more likely than ever to be a disaster. This is just a statement of the obvious.

Friedman's (and MacArthur's) proposition however seems to wilfully elide some more important issues. Firstly, to publicly proclaim such a doctrine would be to unilaterally substantially weaken the US's ability to influence events in Asia. And that is just plain dumb. Secondly, it bespeaks of a Kissinger like return to mere realpolitik pragmatism in US foreign affairs that would represent a pusillanimous retreat from grander strategic goals. The US has since the Great War, with a few of isolationist intervals, seen itself and held itself out as being prepared to stand up for democracy and a belief in the primacy of human freedom against totalitarianism. If the US is to continue to stand for and support such ideals it must also, in extremis, still be prepared to fight land wars in Asia again, as it has done in the past

A brutal dictator was deposed and there is a now democracy in Iraq. The Taliban was removed from power in Afghanistan. The dominos of south-east Asia did not fall to communist dictatorships after the US intervention in Vietnam. South Korea is a prosperous capitalist democracy because the US stood up for it. These land wars in Asia by the US had huge costs in blood and treasure on all sides. Were such interventions worth these incalculable sacrifices? Only if one believes that the value of democracy and freedom is also incalculably great to humanity. Should we now just give up on fighting for these ideals in some geographic regions and not others, because the going has become too rough? None of these things would have come to pass if the US then had had a doctrine such as the one proposed by Friedman in this essay. The consequences of not standing up for what you believe in even when it is difficult and the risks are great is that other even worse adverse consequences are likely to prevail.

I disagree with George Friedman's proposition. Adopting it would be adverse to the strategic interests of the West and the civilizational values of humanity.

.

Govermentium

2011-02-04T17:51:00.002+11:00

An inert but harmful and all pervasive heavy element consisting of constantly re-organising dense neutron clusters. It impedes, constricts and then suffocates almost everything it touches. It was described in the literature in 2005, after observations of the automatonic responses of vast concentrations of peons combined with the recognition of the overwhelming atomic force of the moron.

Major Dick Winters has died.

2011-01-10T22:48:00.003+11:00

Major Richard Winters of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, passed away peacefully on 2 January 2011

He died in Pennsylvannia aged 92. He was a true leader and a hero. All who value the sacrifice and resolve of the generation who took on and defeated totalitarianism in the Second World War will mourn his passing. He is one of the finest representatives of that greatest generation. Most of us only knew him through the magnificent TV mini-series "Band of Brothers" or the book of the same name on which it is based, which narrated the formation, training and actions of Easy Company in the 2nd World War.

But we know him from there as the leader who 'hung tough' in the toughest of circumstances and showed us the true meaning and value of courage, loyalty and resourcefulness. I acknowledge my unbounded admiration for this man and celebrate his life as a testament to the lasting value of taking responsibility, doing your duty and honouring your friends and family by your actions. These are the words of his by which I will remember him:

“Your reward for a good job done is that you get the next tough mission.”

Rest in peace soldier. You will not be forgotten.

Progress v Freedom

2010-10-25T17:27:00.031+11:00

The 21st Century paradigm?

Left v Right was so 18th Century.
Collectivism v Individualism was so 19th Century
Socialism v Capitalism was so 20th Century

The cultural and political debates that are emerging in the 21st Century seem to be better framed in the related, but more informative, dichotomy of "Progress v Freedom", than the opaque, out-moded and blunt, " Left v Right ". Labelling that tries to be more descriptive of the political content of a person's ideas is more helpful than the arbitrary putative positioning of that person relative to opponents. Admittedly there is a residual problem that "progress" is also merely a directional indicator, that on its own doesn't indicate a destination. This means it can be appropriated as a label by anyone who wants to takes us to a different place.

"Progressive" is still used as a virtually inter-changable label for the Left today, even though the Left appear to oppose "progress", in its old 19th and 20th Century sense of building or placing more human infrastructure and services in under-developed places.  The Left originally appropriated the "progressive" label by contrasting themselves with "conservatives" who resisted societal change. As politics and society have evolved over the past couple of centuries this has become a little misleading. "Conservatives" or the "Right" have in more recent times become the party advocating the primacy of free markets. This positioning of the "right" is not "conservative". It is in furtherance of letting free market choices determine failure and success dispassionately, with a minimum overlay of moral judgement. Markets are inherently dynamic, not conservative.

The "Left" have largely become the party advocating the primacy of government intervention to solve social ills rather than allowing unregulated market processes to take their disspassionate course. This often sees "progressives" advocating preserving institutions and resisting market dictated changes that would create what they perceive as undesired social displacements. In this way progressives are the conservatives.  The continued appropriation of "progessive" by the Left depends now on a redefinition of the different places they want to take us. Rather than any developmental change it is now change of a more nuamced sort: only progress towards certain defined social equity goals and the betterment of the collective lot of humans and the planet, is now considered "progrssive". "Progress" thereby can still be used as a label by the Left even though Greens, such an important part of the progressive Left's current self identification, are passionate opponents of people being free to pursue progress in the physical developments of land and the environment.

More descriptive labels than Left v Right would seem to be more helpful . Confused political journalists and commentators might get a more realistic perspective on what is driving the Tea Party movement if they were more nuanced in their labelling. As it is many lazy, incurious or agenda driven reporters seem to just reflexively call the emerging grass roots opposition to both government's excessive intervention in citizens' lives and its fiscal irresponsibility, "right wing extremism". By doing so they thereby either deliberately or inadvertently, but certainly misleadingly, equate such opposition with fascism, which is its polar political opposite.

The problem is that the 20th century progressive "Left" has always seen itself as having permanently appropriated the political cause of the masses. Both the Left and many of those who who purport to report on our political process, are apparently too conservatively inflexible to see that this convenient long standing appropriation, no longer truthfully describes what is actually happening in contemporary society. The progressive project of the political Left has, with its successful decades long march through the institutions, become the default position of the ruling elites. The masses are now, with a slowly dawning new political consciousness, beginning to spontaneously revolt against the accumulating and accelerating intrusions of the progressive State excessively intervening in citizens' lives. This polar flip in mass political consciousness is potentially quite an exhilarating prospect to behold, even if it remains difficult to predict the the pace and places at which it breaks out.

What's amazing is that so many of our 'would be' disaffected anti-establishment radicals in journalism and commentary (who want to "make a difference" in their work) remain so blinkered by the ideological straight jackets of their educational culture, that they don't seem to be able to acknowledge that this growing inversion in populist sentiment is taking place at all. The evidence, as seen in the much disparaged but clearly massively influential Tea Party movement, is becoming plainer to see by the day. But it seems it is so much easier and politically more convenient to a contemporary journalist's "life's project", to just continue to stay with their old narrative of populist Left and elitist Right, even whilst such facile characterisations aren't holding water anymore.

One of the puzzles of humanity that has always perplexed me, is why otherwise intelligent, serious and curious people seem to be so ready to blithely prioritise their particular current notion of desirable collective social progress over individual freedoms. And this occurs seemingly without any regard being had to the accumulated consequences. This seems to be a common trait of the collectivist worldview: a reflexive willingness to sacrifice others' individual freedoms in the name of their perceptions of the collective good.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed one of the ways you might interpret the civilization we have inherited, is that it is the sum of the lessons passed down to us by our forebears about how we can satisfactorily resolve the conflict between individual freedom and collective good. My concern is that within the current paradigms of this perpetual battle for our political souls, there does not seem to be sufficient , if any, merit afforded  to the case for individual liberty in the contest with collectivist strictures. Although this long term imbalance may be beginning to be redressed.

If a political activist in a contemporary western democracy calls for "something to be done" about a perceived problem, then "being seen to do something" about that problem, has become almost the sole driver of the political narrative. For someone to observe, let alone advocate, that nothing effective can be done, or that the solution could be worse than the perceived problem, has become too difficult a case to make, lest the person putting such a case be characterised as uncaring or heartless. That such shallow polemics is often a complete mis-characterisation of the actual situation, because such observations or advocacy are often actually driven by a deep and real concern for the liberties and prosperity of the wider collective body politic, seems to be ignored.

We live in a world that is dictated to by 15 second sound bites, 140 character Twitter feeds and sensationalist headlines. These days an argument suggesting that there are net benefits to citizens from preserving their individual freedoms against the constant erosions to them of the state, risks ridicule by all the university (or wanna be) educated strivers for conformity to collective moral purity, amongst the self important opinion makers in the media. Surely, we say, everyone must acknowledge that seat belts save lives. Why should we be free to not wear them if we chose to take that risk?    (Can it not be legitimately argued anymore that this is something that is a personal choice and a personal risk for each adult to make and take responsibility for, and not something for editorialists and the Roads and Traffic Authority to dictate to society?)

Today's climate of disparagement of free choice and routine demonisation of advocates for personal freedom of choice, as reckless, uncaring and unintelligent, has seen the balance that is at the core of this perpetual political conflict, badly skewed towards collectivism. The dreadful lessons of the 20th Century's disastrous efforts to impose prescriptive notions of collective well being on humanity from above, seem not to have been heeded. By allowing collectivism to nearly always trump individualism, we inadvertently risk a steady descent into statist totalitarianism. We are all now live lobsters in a pot being brought without protest, by slow and imperceptible increments, to the boil, so that others may later dine on our carcass. And it is because we have an insufficient appreciation of the importance and value of our individual liberties, that we do not feel justified in protesting when some new minor stricture from the collectivist scolds in power is imposed on us.

The most prominent recent iteration of this persistent theme of contemporary political life is the global warming debate. Most progressives, who prioritise collective coercion over individual responsibility, are currently preparing to compel all of us to sacrifice many of our few precious remaining personal liberties and choices, in the name of the greater good of the planet. The collectivists would have us believe that; like other great progressive achievements of post-Enlightenment Western civilization like universal suffrage, the liberation of women and freedom of religion; endorsing and enforcing low carbon industry and life styles is a great human or planetary good that requires and demands great personal sacrifices from each of us. If needs be, this will be done by force of law with severe punishment for transgressions, and this is for our own good. And it is taken for granted that this is so, even if it means for each of us to be prepared to subsume ourselves under a vast and highly intrusive global bureaucratic apparatus that all non-delusional thinkers know will be not just be imperfect, but potentially totalitarian in character.

As discussed above, "progress" used to mean development of infrastructure for the improvement of living conditions for humans. Climate change alarmism seems to oppose this kind of "progress". Can being Green really be progressive? Well yes, provided you can change the object towards which you wish to progress. Even, it seems, if it means going in the other direction (from pro-development to anti-development), which is what the Green appropriation on "progress" has done.

This was all prompted by yet another thought provoking post in early October by David Foster on the Chicago Boyz website called "The Scribes and the idea of Freedom".  His post, amongst other things, takes a pre-emptive swipe at Richard Franzen's new novel Freedom, which apparently questions the sanctity of the concept of freedom. Could this be another new beginning for an interesting debate on "freedom" in contemporary academia? I note that the ABC's book review TV program, First Tuesday, has set Franzen's "Freedom" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" as its two novels for review on air in November. So let's get in and dabble a bit in this pond now before these TV literary elitists pontificate from their high cultural altar. Will the elitist "Scribes" class rally against this impending 'tea party" insurrection from the masses with scorn and ridicule, a la Franzen, for the little folks' misplaced love of "freedom", or will there be some revision in the intellectual ranks towards a new found respect for the chaotic creative power of individualism ?

I was quite taken by this from David Foster's Chicago Boyz post:

The question of why the conceptual and emotional traps that affect human decision-making don’t also apply to these elites–the question of “who will nudge the nudgers”–tends to go unanswered.

You get the distinct feeling Western intellectuals (pseudo and otherwise) are feeling compelled by unfolding events to scramble a justification for their apparently failed, almost universally leftist collectivist prescriptions for society since the second world war. Could this be the fear that is driving current efforts by the authorial class to re-contextualise the idea of "freedom"? The western social democratic hegemony now appears to be on the brink of being openly challenged politically from below by the Tea Party movement. Such a challenge must be confronted otherwise the elite's power will be eroded.

I also liked this observation from one of the commenters on Foster's post:

It is one of the major blind spots of leftist’s elitism that they can’t see that the behaviors that they see as corrupting individual decision-making and private organizations also affect themselves and government institutions. There is no way to evade our programmed impulses to selfishness. Almost all leftists ideas are ultimate based on the idea that an altruistic subset of humans exist who will only use the violent-based coercive power of the state for the good of all.

The Greeks, the Romans of the Republic and the Founders knew better. The farther we deviate from that hard earned wisdom, the worse we do.

I've got a feeling we are going to see from our academic elites and the commentariat in coming months and years, a lot more sanctimonious belittling of the plebians' inability to choose wisely. As the backlash against Obama's failed experiment in government beneficence gathers pace in the US and slowly spreads to the outposts of the empire here in Australia, all the enablers and apologists for statism in the educated cultural elites will desperately stretch to find something to cling to on the mountainside. All the time forgetting or failing to acknowledge how unwise the leftwing choices they have made or would have had us make, in the last century have been.

Capitalism is not pretty, but it has delivered prosperity to the majority who have learnt to survive its indifference to their fate. Socialism looks pretty, but it has impoverished the majority of those who suffer under its loud proclamations of concern for their well being. The cultural elites of Western Democracies do not seem to want to face up to this palpable truth, because it would mean their constant expressions of concern would be without content.

Questions on degrees of stupidity

2010-09-09T17:24:00.011+10:00

What is stupider than being stupid while calling other people stupid?

Nice question. It was put by Ann Althouse after reading this piece of stupidity from progressive US commentator Jonathan Chait in The New Republic, whilst he sought to ridicule as stupid an economic recovery proposal put forward by the Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels:

A proposal that seems remotely close to reality will be widely praised, as if we were watching a person with severe disabilities manage to finish a race. Wow, look at that! You have a plan! With numbers! Hooray for you!

Yeah. Wow. Just how stupid is that? This sanctimonious galah apparently feels so morally superior that he could not even contemplate that whilst carefully crafting these acerbic words he could also be caught in the act of transgressing a sacred tenet of the Talibanic moral code of political correctness: thou shalt not to be seen to belittle minorities or the handicapped. It's not like he wasn't warned that progessives can no longer always get away with such public displays of blatant hypocrisy. Obama made a similar "Special Olympics" gaffe about his bowling prowess on the Jay Leno TV program in March 2009 and was then forced to publicly apologise. Will Chiat or The New Republic now have to do likewise?

But is it possible that at least one thing stupider than being stupid whilst calling other people stupid, is quoting the stupidity of the person being stupid whilst calling someone stupid ? Now this is getting really stupid.

No independence on Independents at the ABC

2010-09-06T15:57:00.012+10:00

During this intriguing inter-regnum as Australia waits to see if a minority government can be cobbled together in Canberra between one or two of the major parties and the independents, we have again been shown the brazen double reporting standards of Fairfax and the government media.

As occurred throughout the Rudd Government, these influential news agencies have seen their primary self appointed role as holding the Opposition to account. As they see it, the Government is so clearly on track with their urban latte sippers' approved policy and clever news management systems, that independent press scrutiny can be focused on the easy sport of picking at the Opposition's failings, rather than the substance of holding the Government's actual performance to account. And some people still seem to wonder aloud why Australia was caught by surprise when the Labor party killed off their own Prime Minister late in his first term. The ALP, unlike their journalistic fan clubs in the ABC and Fairfax, could actually see that the electorate was going to punish them for their incompetence in government. But the fellow travellers of the ALP in the press corps apparently still haven't figured out that their failure to report on this government let the Australian public down badly then and it continues even now. The ABC and Fairfax failure of competence as independent reporters on the Government's performance remains a disgrace.

Last night I watched the ABC1's 7 pm evening TV news broadcast. The lead item was an allegation (unspecified) that the Coalition was "intimidating the Independents". I can't link to the story today because the dishonest weasels at that taxpayer funded news organisation have now substituted a link to a new and different story that will not be run on the broadcast evening TV news. The ABC now reports on its website that the independents do not feel intimidated. And check the time stamp on the story, 17.52 Sunday. So how come the Sunday 7 pm news didn't report this? Is it balanced of the ABC to continue to run with their "intimidation of the Independents" story even though the Independents denied being intimidated before the report went to air? Somebody should investigate this derogation of duty and manipulation of the media narrative by the ABC. But who has the authority? The ALP government or the ABC who are helping to put them in office?

As we moved from the newsreader's tele-promptings on this lead item on the Sunday evening 7 pm ABC1 TV news, to the accompanying visuals it became apparent that this "news" item was derived from a statement by ALP government minister, Anthony Albanese, some time earlier on Sunday declaring something to the effect that the Opposition were "clearly getting desperate and that they were almost resorting to intimidating the Independents". So this was just some tactical political trash talking of opponents by a government lackey. Only someone without an editor and/or without an independent bone in their body could decide such a piece of fluff would be "newsworthy" enough to run it as an item on the main 7 pm ABC 1 broadcast, let alone be a lead. I suppose it might conceivably have had some minor legs if an "Independent" had said he felt intimidated. But from the ALP's Anthony Albanese? This is just the ABC doing some convenient water carrying for the ALP by passing on the ALP government's preferred line on the state of play in the negotiations. How can the ABC credibly justify this act of doing the partisan bidding of the caretaker government of the day whilst that government is in the midst of negotiating for its survival? It seems neither fair nor independent. Maybe the ABC's Media Watch will tell us. Ha.

It's not like this has been an isolated event either. Tony Jones was disgracefully rude and dismissive of Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb when interviewing him on Lateline last Thursday evening about the dispute between the Coalition and Treasury over costings and independent, Andrew Wilkie's highly ethical betrayal of his negotiating tactics in coming out in support of the ALP. Let's see him do that with Treasurer Wayne Swan or Lindsay Tanner's replacement ( How about Adam Bandt Julia?).

As for Fairfax. Check out this morning's offering from the ALP's defacto communication spokesman at the Sydney Morning Herald, Phil Coorey. Abbott losing his grip on an Independent ? Abbott's the leader of the Liberal/National parties in Opposition. He's not in power. He doesn't have a grip on Independent, Tony Windsor to lose. That's why we have a hung parliament. We know that Fairfax journalists, along with their ABC brethren, cannot seem to adjust to the fact that the Coalition lost office three years ago. And even today they continue to seek to hold the Coalition to account, leaving the Government unmolested by inquiry or speculation as to its motives. After all such reporting might imperil their preferred team's chances of securing a majority on the floor of the House. Independence? That's for Independents. Not journalists.

Have we had a single prominent report from either Fairfax or the ABC critical of Julia Gillard's negotiating tactics with the Independents (without the usual inevitable weasel words also equally critical of the Coalition for the same purported offence) or which might have impaired her negotiating position with the Independents since the weekend of the election? Show me.

If, as increasingly seems likely, Prime Minister Gillard can do a deal with the rural Independents sufficient to get the confidence of the House, will we then predictably see an orgy of reporting in Fairfax and the ABC on Abbott's failure to win government? Or will they finally report to us adequately on the grubby compromises, inducements and attacks on the Opposition that this already deeply compromised Prime Minister has had to engage in to secure her pyrrhic victory to obtain a fragile and unstable government.

Will the ABC and Fairfax ever be able to report adequately or fairly on the manifest failures of their much loved, gender preferred, unreligious, unmarried and childless, Prime Minister Gillard in Government, rather than the unliked, wrong gendered, faith-bound and married parent, powerless Abbott in Opposition? It seems highly unlikely whilst they continue to recruit and retain the vast majority of their journalists from the inner urban hordes of fashion affected zeitgiest sniffers and sanctimonious academic crusaders for amorality. Can they change so as to report the news more accurately and reliably in future? Only if the light bulb wants to change.

Emily Dickinson blogging

2010-09-02T15:23:00.006+10:00

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?

Then there's a pair of us?

Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one's name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog

Emily Dickinson

Simple and easy. Not to be confused.

2010-09-02T12:44:00.002+10:00

HL Mencken: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem; neat, plausible, and wrong."

Ronald Reagan: "There are simple solutions, just no easy solutions."

Dirty Development Mechanism

2010-08-30T16:00:00.005+10:00

I reckon that if a bunch of well meaning central planning ideologues can choose to brand their artifical process for the global reduction of the main chemical element in all known life forms, carbon, the "Clean Development Mechanism", without recognising the hubristic over-reach and irony of such aspiration, they deserve to have this happen to them.

Inceptions

2010-08-30T10:58:00.025+10:00

There is something dangerously seductive about the idea of being able to deliberately plant an idea, cut down to its simplest form, so that it can take hold in the human psyche and self propagate like a virus. Whilst bravely putting to one side the whole of the advertising and marketing industries, I have recently been prompted to ponder the genesis and success of some quite influential ideas:

There is but one God.
Love thy neighbour as thyself.
Christ died for our sins.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs;
God is dead.
Survival of the fittest.
Anatomy is destiny.
E = mc2.
Let freedom ring.
Every man has his price.
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
You've nothing to lose except your chains.
You are only limited by your imagination.
Freedom is a myth.
Language determines how you think.
It's time.
The selfish gene.
The greenhouse effect.
The tipping point.
Reality is a dream.

But what if an idea is bad? Do we have choices about the ideas we propagate? Are we responsible for the ideas we foster? Or is it all just a Darwinian contest and to the victor goes the spoils? Can there be a meta-context, a higher perspective, from which it is legitimate to form a judgment on the merits of an idea, independently of its mere success in propagating itself?

Needless to say I saw Christopher Nolan's movie Inception for the first time yesterday. It was the inception for these musings, as it no doubt has been and will be for countless millions of other meanderings. It provides an opportunity to again posit the threalmic heuristic of this website, as one possible pathway to resolving such imponderables:

Truth beats Justice;
Justice beats Freedom;
Freedom beats Truth.

But Inception has now potentially given birth to another "scissors, paper, rock" heuristic trilogy:

Dreams conquer Reality;
Reality conquers Desire;
Desire conquers Dreams;

Nah. It doesn't seem to work quite as well as our existing threalmic trilogy, but there is still pleasure in experimenting with such ideas, even with this newly perceived risk of inadvertent bad idea inception.

Inception is a cinematic masterpiece; a surpassingly well executed rendition of a seductively illusive idea.

* * * * *
5 Threalmic jelly starbursts.

Questioning Mother Julia

2010-08-10T15:01:00.017+10:00

I watched Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with compere Tony Jones and a studio audience in Adelaide, on ABC1's Q&A program last night, 9 August 2010.

She's certainly a clever and accomplished politician, with a plenty of negative schtick for her opponents. My abiding impression however was that it was like watching an over-confident suburban school principal dealing with questions in assembly. No one dared challenge her on her display of well honed defensiveness about her ruthlessness, although there was the occasional cheeky little boy who tried to play it for some laughs.

It was not a debate and there was little policy substance. She returned whenever she could to her saintly parents, sacrificing themselves, emigrating from Wales and doing it tough in suburban Adelaide for the sake of the children, Julia and her sister. This stuff clearly must poll well in focus groups. And I must not be very focused. My mind wandered back to when another sentimental would be Welsh miner, US VP Joe Biden, plagiarised the UK's Neil Kinnock stump speech harping on about mine shafts and the boyos in the valleyos. The anglosphere seems to be rich lode for leftists seeking political colour. But I digress.

The most interesting observation of the night was a comment in the, mostly irritating, continuous Twitter feed at the bottom of screen during the show. Someone observed there that she had a very good technique in affirming a question and the questioner. Yes. You got the sense that she is very practised and carefully schooled in one-on-one inter-personal political combat, not just the politics of public affairs. If this was the real Julia, then she is one scary and calculating mother.

When cornered, like nearly all politicians, she goes to enormous lengths to avoid directly answering an awkward question. And, what's more intriguing, she seems to get a pass on this from her interlocutors, even when called on it. Tony Jones pressed her a number of times on whether she had apologised to Kevin Rudd. She couldn't bring herself to say that she had not, even on the third try. We just had to take it that her repeatedly reconfigured non-answer, essentially that she felt that what she did to him was necessary in the circumstances, meant both that she didn't think an apology was necessary and that she therefore hadn't given him one. But that's not what she said. Gillard's persistent lack of grace about her shortcomings requires us to draw the negative inferences about her conduct ourselves. By doing so she seeks to exploit to her own political advantage the generousity of spirit of many Australians. This deceptive trait could well bite her her on the bum one day. That's the day when the voting public (like Lindsay Tanner and John Faulkner before them) finally have had a gutful of her constantly holding herself out as a woman of conviction, when she is so clearly a purely pragmatic political animal.

I also continue to be mildly bemused by her brazen attacks on Tony Abbott over Work Choices and his economic competence.

It beggars belief for me that she gets a free pass from the media when claiming that Abbott's promise not to tamper with her Fair Work laws 'til the next election, should not be believed because he is ideologically opposed to the rigidities of her new labour laws.

How can this line of argument have any credibility coming from a politician who has been in the Left faction of the Labor Party all her adult life (she was even on the management committee of the Socialist Forum at Uni and was still a member of that quasi-communist front body as recently as 2002), but who now is spruiking herself in this election campaign as a fiscal conservative who believes in strong border protection and who doesn't have an agenda for pricing carbon. If, as she would have it, Abbott can't be believed on a clear promise to leave the existing labour laws in place for one more three year term, just because he's always been in favour of liberalising the labour market, where does that leave her promise to put the Budget into surplus within three years and not raise taxes, when 'til now she's always been a working class Union warrior reflexively sprouting all the usual big government pieties of the progressive Left ?

The commentariat have also negligently avoided challenging this Prime Minister on this line she is selling about an increase in the company tax rate for big business under Abbott's plan to fund his parental leave scheme, inevitably leading to higher grocery prices at Woollies and Coles. This argument of hers is misleading political voodoo economics. Commentators should be calling a foul on her.

Just a few short weeks ago Ken Henry, the Government's own Treasury Secretary, testified on national television before a Senate Committee, that the proposition that an increase in a tax on company profits increases the price of goods sold by the company, is a fallacy anyone interested in economics learns in High school. So why haven't the press pressed the Prime Minister on this?

Our friends at the taxpayer-funded ABC were delighted at the time to be able to embarrass the Liberal Party senators questioning Mr Henry on this, by broadcasting his testimony on their 7pm national news bulletin. So why are the ABC now being silent about this intellectual neanderthalism when the Prime Minister openly sprouts such economically illiterate bull for political point scoring in an election campaign?

Amazingly there was even the hint of a suggestion at one point, initiated by Tony Jones putting Abbott's re-opening of the Henry Report to her and the PM's somewhat ambivalent answer, that the time might be becoming ripe during the next parliamentary term for a genuine flat tax debate. Now that would be a debate with some true policy substance to it.

The Prime Minister's answer to the last question of the show from Lowitja O'Donoghue pretty much summed up the emptiness and hypocrisy of an old leftist, reformed from the folly of pursuing ideals, now that she has obtained power. Lois asked Julia why all the parties were silent on indigenous issues in the campaign. Julia answered that Labor has not been silent on indigenous issues in this campaign. She in effect said:

"..look; Kevin has apologised, my education policies are helping and Jenny Macklin is looking into constitutional recognition...".

There lies a politician.

It seems however that because she survived this "test", didn't look uncomfortable and there were no "gotcha" moments, that the media now think the populace is more likely to elect her. We really do set a low bar for public leadership these days. It's not about the quality of the political vision or the soundness of the policy proposals under analysis. Mere survival without major embarrassment through the glare of an intense public spotlight is all that is now required to be considered fit for leadership.

All the anodyne stuff you're required to say and do is just so much colour and movement for the cameras. It seems that if you risk getting in front of current perceptions of popular sentiment, then you will be humiliated publicly, so any opinion leadership on matters moral, strategic or cultural, is now considered too treacherous for an aspiring leadership candidate.

Slimy local leaders

2010-08-02T17:46:00.011+10:00

.
..Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard & ...Abbott ?
.
...
The election news in Australia over the weekend was more than usually depressing.

Yeah, I know it's just another election campaign and it is as always pitched at people who aren't interested in politics or policy: swinging voters in marginal seats. I'm not in that target audience.

And I know that this is, due to the absence of any actual leadership, a Seinfeld election; about nothing, other than the identities of the leaders. And yeah, the Labor Party has recently and unexpectedly taken a potentially election losing hit in the polls, which, as usual, none of the Fairfax or ABC experts foreshadowed (now why might that be?) But that's not why for me it's been so depressing.

It's because of what we've now learnt, from people who actually knew him, about our former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. It seems he was a seriously morally deficient little creep.

Mark Latham, Alexander Downer and David Penberthy are only the latest observers who are now piling onto the growing band wagon, along with the Union heavies who knifed him like Mark Arbib and Bill Shorten. It is giving us all a pretty clear picture that our former Prime Minister was a self absorbed, manipulative and untrustworthy back- stabber with a vile temper and a serious case of adult interpersonal immaturity.

He was also the leader of our nation.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it is still depressing to have your worst, most cynical, fears confirmed. This seems to be an all too common case of how manipulative, over ambitious, morally challenged individuals who are prepared to actively undermine perceived rivals, are the ones who reach the top, and thereby have the most influence over our lives. Good does not out in the end. Evil is too seductively attractive to be resisted by the ambitious. Nice guys finish last. Only the nasty succeed in politics.

Prime Minister Gillard has also now decided to play catch up in the polls by actively targeting Abbott the man rather than the ball of policy. This is a shameful tactic, and it should be called as such by the public punditry, but they are just salivating at the prospect of the campaign getting interesting now that it is to become openly personal. This just reinforces the deeply depressing nature of this campaign.

Can it really be that this power seeking, gender exploiting politician, who rose through the party ranks to the top job on a wave of sanctimonious leftist purity and identity politics, is now so predictably showing us that all her idealistic puffery in getting there was just that, a clever bluff? She seems to be now living out the same ugly truth about the powerful as her predecessor, whom she so brutally eliminated to get there.

I didn't think I particularly liked Tony Abbott's brand of moral politics, especially his alleged inclination to want to dabble in social engineering, but at least he seems to be who he says he is, including admitting that, like all of us, he lies at times. I like also that he at least seems to be talking, in this election anyway, about the limitations of government intervention, as if that is an OK thing.

The crumbs of comfort to be found in all this are in seeing that our politicians aren't really all that powerful, even if they can sometimes be pretty scary when wielding their huge taxation and regulation levers. But there's also the increasingly palpable feeling that the putative glory that is sought by these miserable shits is merely transitory. Ozymandias anyone?

For all its sub-optimal failings in so often putting the wrong people in power, democracy seldom seems to allow these self promoting moral cripples to stay in power for too long. Churchill was right. Democracy is the worst form of government. It's just the least worst form of government that humanity has so far been able to conceive.

I guess the flesh crawling sliminess of these politicians must come from the greasiness of the pole they've had to climb to get to the top. They can't have been like that from birth can they? Otherwise no-one would have fed them.

Rudd: another "greatest moral challenge" victim

2010-06-24T11:51:00.010+10:00

.
Kevin Rudd was right. Climate Change has been "the greatest moral challenge of our time".

First Malcolm lost the Liberal leadership trying to lead his party into a path of challenging the climate. Now Kevin has lost the Prime Ministership for being seen to avoid leading his party into challenging it.

So can Julia Gillard now survive the change challenge?

Or will Tony Abbott get away with evading the challenge ?

The political climate sure seems to be a'changin' at present anyway.

What with the recent demise of Gordon Brown in the UK and with the coming mid-terms in the US in November, there is much to chew on in all sorts of places. Then, as well as the Australian federal election sometime in the next 6 or 7 months, there's the NSW and Victorian State elections looming as well. It is going to be an interesting 12 months.

And amidst all this colour and movement in Canberra today, is Obama's replacement, in Washington overnight, of his hand picked commander in the Afghanistan theatre, General Stanley McCrystal, with General David Petraeus. Are we seeing here the inadvertent fostering of Obama's eventual nemesis? If Petraeus does execute a successful Afghanistan strategy over the next couple of years, as he did in Iraq, then he could become an almost unstoppable force as a Presidential candidate. But if Petraeus fails in Afghanistan then Obama and the US fail with him. For once, however, it seems to have been the right thing to do, so maybe this executive green-horn has finally made a good decision for his nation, rather than his his own self interest.

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Curling: the latest in libertarian insurrection

2010-01-22T12:38:00.004+11:00

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Check out this delightful story that has emerged from the current deep winter freeze in the Northern Hemisphere: emergency workers and Police prevented from preventing a curling contest on a Scottish loch by the very Occupational Health and Safety regulations they were trying to enforce.

From that well known curling website, Skip Cottage Curling:

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Apparently it was quite a day in Lochmaben. The ice had been checked by the local council and was 7-8 inches, and solid. However, someone phoned the police to say there were lots of people on the ice and they didn't think it was safe. Anne tells the story, "Six police officers arrived but they couldn't go on ice to warn people because of health and safety so they passed the buck to the Nith rescue who came with a rescue boat but because of heath and safety they couldn't go on ice either. So the Coast Guard arrived, lights flashing! But guess what? Because of health and safety he couldn't go on the ice either! A great day was had by all

Lid dip: Bishop Hill

Unfortunately the follow up to this inspiring story (from the Observer) shows that the regulatory over-reach of the modern bureacratic state eventually succeeded to squib out, as it always seems to, any further instances of such spontaneous outbreaks of human freedom. The tentacles of the nanny state this time reached even to the icy wastes of northern Scotland and have seemingly permanently snuffed out any prospect of convening another Grand Match, the ancient curling tournament between the North and South of Scotland, last held in 1979.

Ah well, such set backs, should only embolden us all to continue the perpetual fight for human freedom against the dread hand of the state.
Long live loch curling and the Grand Match !

Is "Nature" apologizing for disparaging by its edict against disparagement?

2010-01-21T18:40:00.007+11:00

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It seems almost emblematic of how poor Nature's communication skills are, that it can only bring itself to, sorta kinda, say sorry for its recent disparagment of sceptics, by sermonising to scientists about the perils of disparaging others:

"...scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in common with that other side..."

Maybe Nature could benefit from some research into how to communicate more effectively. But these clever scientific folk seem to have already thought of that. Here's Nature's prescription for preventing this malady of disparagement:

..Even as climate science advances, it will be just as important to invest in research on how best to communicate environmental risks. Otherwise scientific knowledge will not have the role that it should in the shaping of public policy...

But the communication bibful that this Nature editorial unexpectedly dribbles, is that it thinks science is about shaping public policy. Some of us thought science was about the rigourous pursuit of scientific truth, even if it loses you a role in the shaping of public policy. Could it be that it is this self glorifying public policy role that Nature sees for itself has distracted it from its former central mission: publishing unimpeachable peer reviewed scientific research? Just asking. Maybe if it had stayed focussed on the importance of the science rather than the importance of scientific knowledge's role in shaping public policy, Nature might have avoided the embarrassing predicament it now seems to be in. It looks like it's now going to have to walk back from its recent open advocacy of a settled scientific position on AGW. The clear damage that has been done to the credibility of science with the public, now that a more sceptical and less definitive perception of the state of climate science than previously openly espoused by Nature, seems to be emerging in the wake of Climategate, might have been prevented if Nature had been more focussed on the science and less on the policy.

Maybe some of the investment that Nature is looking for in how best to communicate climate risks can be spent in teaching Nature to at least look like it is capable of taking its own medicine a little more manfully when, say, apologising for disparaging sceptical scientists as "denialists".

For yes, Nature did overstep the mark and diminish its standing by taking an activist's role in the climate debate by launching ad hominem attacks on scientists it disagreed with. It's not just that it resorted to labelling appropriately sceptical scientists as "denialists", which alone is pretty egregious, it's that it continues to openly champion a hypothesis even it seems to concede is built largely on computer models' projections of nature. Yet, whilst making this seemingly quite significant concession (which seems to make these hypotheses quite speculative and vulnerable) Nature would still seek to punish those who participate in the scientific process of testing and critically analysing these models. This looks especially bad for Nature and its fellow travellors, when, as this season's unexpectedly bitter Northern winter has shown us, these models fail to accurately predict nature. This hypothesis testing process used to be called the scientific method, not denialism.

And no, this purported apology by Nature is not adequate. A truly rigourous self aware journal would be prepared to openly acknowledge its own transgression of a standard that it now sets for others. We are expected to live by the standards we publicly espouse for others if we are not to be called hypocrites.

Lid dip: Bishop Hill

Whether to report on weather reports?

2009-12-17T10:40:00.014+11:00

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With supposedly the largest ever gathering of national leaders in Copenhagen at COP 15 imminent, just as the whole global anti-carbon push seems to be unravelling, it's worth contemplating the role of reporters in this.

Apparently there could be up to 30,000 journalists in Copenhagen right now. Though many of them appear not to be getting access to any of the weighty deliberations in the Bella Centre. There is however some news that is falling on the very noses of these journalists.

It is snowing in Copenhagen (and London, and Paris, and Warsaw, and ... Nice ? ).

Ah. A white Christmas for the World's leaders ... sleigh bells in the snow. So where are all the usual soppy colour pieces from our news gathers during the slow Christmas silly season? After all Copenhagen is all about climate isn't it. What could be more climate-ish than snow in winter in friendly Copenhagen?

Nah. Not here in Australia. Instead cricket. Is it possible that it might finally dawning on at least some of these tens of thousands of journalists, that the Free World's main media outlets may have missed the really big story here? We have been duped.

But how can the mainstream media report this now? It would first take a major mea culpa, for the mainstream media have been complicit in this, by their almost complete failure to adequately scrutinise the offerings of our political classes. One possible line could be that they should be forgiven because it has been a noble attempt by the world's current ruling elites to save the planet against all odds, and the World's political Leaders needed the support of the media if they were ever to acheive such an ambitious collective act of will. They were only seeking to forge a new moral high ground from which to prevent humans from excessively pursuing their own personal prosperity at the cost of the greater collective good. But it now looks like this noble experiment is collapsing. So as journalists now find themselves needing to change tack, and start to paw over the entrails of this monumental failure, they'll find themselves compelled to tell us why it occured and why it failed. Sure some of them will just continue to blame the sceptics, but that does look a bit like blaming Christians for getting eaten by lions.

But for those who want to do their job, here's a bit of help for mainstream media folk whose focus has been elsewhere until now. This is just from some of today's random droppings, gleaned from the intertubes:

- Something's rotten in Denmark;

- Climategate - reversing the onus of proof;

- Eastangliaemails.com;

- The day the thermometer music died;

- Icing the hype;

- Is the U.S. temperature Record Reliable;

- Climategate's Harry_Read_Me.txt: We All Really Should;

- Central Park Temperature - Three radically different US Government versions;

And I haven't even read today's offerings at wattsupwiththat.com, climateaudit.com, Bishop Hill or climatedebatedaily.com, where someone could probably find much more even juicier material, if truly interested in unearthing controversial cover ups in high places on this.

There should be more than enough stuff there for intrepid searchers for climate truth to get stuck into. Recycle it or ridicule it in your organs for social justice and making a difference. So, even if reporters can't get access to the Bella Centre today, they could still strike a blow. There could even be a Pulitzer in it for someone . It would require some relentless investigative hound to pull some of the disparate threads together, but they might really be onto something here, Woodward and Bernstein style.

And this would also be truly transgressive, which should appeal to that disaffected radicalised cafe intellectual self image of the journalistic persona. After all the IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting this stuff and Albert Gore Junior got an Academy Award for his doco on it. How much more mainstream could it be?

And such an expose would truly be taking on the establishment as there is enough hypocrisy, emptiness and raw power lust in this climate racket to sate any bloodhound's appetite. And it would not even be necessary to put aside personal commitments to climate justice (just get the tone right: ... more in sorrow then in anger...). It would help though if all those apocalyptic climate nightmare scenarios that have been useful as storyline hooks up to now, could be ditched, at least temporarily.

Come on. Show us your mettle you journalistic wimps.
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News: "The Economist " behind climate data fudging

2009-12-14T14:54:00.018+11:00

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Tell me what's wrong with my header? Yeah, yeah, I know its unimaginative, badly parsed and amateurish, but it fits, and I can write it without making up a story to fit it. That's the point.

Is any one other than me absolutely gobsmacked that The Economist has taken upon itself the duty of publishing an article purporting to rebut the science in Willis Eschenbach's recent piece on instrumental temperature data adjustment at a Darwin weather station? The anonymous person who wrote the Economist article even admits they are unqualified to form any definitive view, but don't think that stops them from espousing a definitive view.

And for goodness sake, what kind of flagrant hypocrisy is it for a journalist to write a first person attack, in a supposedly august journal like The Economist, questioning the integrity and competence of another commentator in a live debate, without the author even giving the readers the benefit of the author's own name? Sheeze one of the issues being addressed is the integrity of the peer review process! The Economist needs to take a good hard look at itself. How can they not see that they will continue to lose credibility and readers very quickly, if they persist in publicly flaunting such hypocritical cant, when purporting to report on a vital issue the world is thirsty for reliable coverage of.

It's of a kind with the Associated Press writing a piece today on the findings of an investigation into the Climategate emails, which was published around the world, effectively saying that although the Climategate emails might make the scientists look petty, we can, rest assured, know that there was no fraud here. Move along. Nothing to see.

Thanks for that AP. So who did the investigation? Oh, it was by the AP itself. Well that's reassuring, not. It's not like they have an interest in one side or the other in this debate do they? Well, setting aside the AP's own partisan reporting history in this debate (no small issue), it even transpires that one of the guys who did AP's Climategate "investigation" and who co-authored its piece, is also the author of one of the Climategate emails himself. An email that, it turns out, started a thread of online dialogue within the CRU about trying to minimize the effects of an article to be published in a peer reviewed journal by another scientist the CRU didn't like. How's this for a case of conducting an investigation into yourself and giving yourself an all clear? So even if AP has decided there was no fraud at the CRU, what about at AP?

Aren't these news journals supposed to report the news, not make it? Where have the adults gone at these international news selling entities? Why hasn't an editor or a publisher told these reporters that it's not good for the paper's brand to be seen by its readers openly declaring partiality to a cause in reporting on an unfolding debate.

Don't they get that the we can see the stark hypocrisy and lack of integrity in such behaviour, and will think the less of the them for it? And yet they seem to flaunt it.

Do they really believe that openly supporting the political agenda of reducing world carbon emissions, is more important than supporting their vocation's responsibility to inform readers what's going on in a debate over carbon's effects on climate? And even if they do, are these journals so lacking in respect for their readers that they think they will be cut slack, when they are so publicly unprofessional?

The press has become the story itself. They have misused the trust we naturally give them to inform us, from habit and affection. I'm told the 100 year old plus Editor and Publisher magazine in the US has just been closed. No prizes for guessing where its editorial skew went in its dying years: supporting causes in the news. It even ran an article in August 2007 entitled: Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers .

AP and The Economist certainly took that advice to heart. But when their own industry journal goes under after deciding to become part of the news, instead of reporting on it, you'd reckon the people in the industry would get the hint. It ain't rocket surgery, but then journalists aren't paleo-aerospaciologists either.
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Religious dispute over Darwin's data

2009-12-10T11:22:00.019+11:00

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Willis Eschenbach at the website " watts up with that" has opened up more serious doubts about the integrity of adjustments made to the raw surface temperature data record relied on by the IPCC.

The raw data on historical surface temperatures from weather stations around the globe is held on a database called the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). This is basically the raw data used by the other two main global temperature research institutions, the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) for their definitive publications of adjusted historical surface temperatures. The IPCC has relied very heavily on the CRU and GISS publications in making its proclamations about the alarming warming in world temperatures in recent decades.

The contents of the Climategate emails from the CRU, that have recently come to light through unofficial sources, suggest that CRU's database could be seriously corrupted by errors, fudges and lost data on adjustments made to the underlying raw data. For some this may be disturbing but it is felt it does not undermine the fundamental global temperature shift picture painted by the IPCC, because even if the CRU has "lost" their records on why and where adjustments to the raw data were made, we still have the "homogenized" (adjusted) records and the underlying raw data, so there is still no real reason not to rely on what they are telling us.

OK, thought Mr Eschenbach, if that's so, let's compare the raw data with the "homogenized" numbers that the IPCC have published. He started with the first of the many thousands of weather stations used, Darwin Airport. He wanted to see if he could figure out from the raw data how GHCN and the IPCC made its adjustments (homogenised) to these raw numbers.

What Mr Eschenbach's article reveals is, that on a close examination of the GHCN's data of that one weather station in Northern Australia, and comparing that with what the IPCC has published about it, it seems the "adjusted" (homogenized) surface temperature data put out as the definitive temperature record from this weather station, appears to have been fudged to meet someone's pre-conceptions about global temperature increases.

The effect of the unexplained adjustments made to the historical raw temperature data from the Darwin Airport weather station looks pretty clear here. To my non-expert eye the main reason the red (homogenized) trend line slopes upwards, whilst the green (raw) trendline is flatter, corresponds pretty closely to the effects of the black line (the adjustments). That is the homogenised temperatures increase because they have been "adjusted" upwards. How can this be called science? I guess if we had some pretty convincing explanations for these adjustments you might allow it as a speculative kite, but even then you'd have to have very real doubts Read the piece.

If these kinds of adjustments are even partially repeated at a small percentage of the thousands of weather stations around the world that the GHCN rely on in publishing their "homogenised" historical temperature data, then their databases are corrupted and are unreliable. It certainly looks like, in defiance of good science and ethics, someone appears to have distorted the record to achieve the outcome they desired.

Is this just a species of 'confirmation bias' rather than deliberate dishonesty? Who knows? It's beside the point anyway. The point is that data can't be relied on.

And it is based on this "adjusted" data that our politicians are proposing to radically reallocate the whole world's economic resources at Copenhagen. Can that be a good idea?

I reckon Charles Darwin would have understood what is going on here. The IPCC is not publishing science. It is promoting propaganda that supports its religious conviction that man is wrongfully causing the Earth to heat up.

In Charles Darwin's case it was a long haul to persuade religious zealots that "The Theory of Natural Selection" was a better explanation for changes in the world we inhabit, than blind faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Some still haven't been persuaded. It is frightening to think that these modern day true believers, who adhere to the literal truth of their unnatural selection of temperature records, might take as long to be convinced that their pre-conceptions might be wrong, as the those that reject Darwin's theory of evolution.

The justifications we are beginning to hear for these apparent infelicitudes from climate scientists sound something like "look it might look like someone fudged it a bit, but since we know the climate is warming anyway, what's the fuss?"

You know, "it might be fake, but true nonetheless".

Now where have we heard that before ?

Strange bedfellows

2009-12-04T10:24:00.010+11:00

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There seem to be some unexpected eddies and whirls emerging in this changing climate tide.
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James "not the Muppett guy" Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute fame and Albert "Muppet model" Gore Jnr, Acadamy Award and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who are the two Arch High Priests of AGW Alarmism, both seem to be backing off promotion of the imminent Copenhagen conference, as our last chance to save the planet. Taken together with Bob Brown and the Australian Greens voting against Rudd's CPRS in the Australian Senate, it seems that the ETS or Cap n'Trade route to solving the World's climate woes, is facing concerted resistance from the the two principle opposing camps in the debate: climate sceptics and AGW true believers.
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What that suggests, to me anyway, is that it is only those who take this global climate issue as seriously as it deserves, who are resisting the economically destructive but environmentally useless prescriptions that the world's current crop of politicians are trying to achieve at Copenhagen.

If Hansen and Gore et al are right and most of us are going to fry or drown by the end of the century, then drastic environmental action is indeed called for. But if the expected changes in the foreseeable future are within reasonable limits that we might be able to anticipate from past changes in climate, then we humans can adapt, as we have done in the past. Then the kind of drastic economic reallocations being argued over in Copenhagen would be pointlessly damaging to human prosperity.

It seems to me, as a mild sceptic of the AGW science (but happy to be disabused of my scepticism by convincing replicatable and fully scrutinised data) and a denier of the environmental efficacy of the current prescribed ETS (or Cap and Trade) solutions, that, if indeed the AGW believers are right, then a carbon tax is a much simpler and more effective way to reduce global carbon emissions than a politically compromised synthetic market created by concocting an artificial scarcity in a super abundant resource, carbon.

It seems that those who take this issue seriously believe either that we are all going to get cooked with our bacon because we eat too much of it, or that in trying to stop the bacon cooking we will lose our nourishment. Those who believe that neither bacon nor cooking, are truly serious things, think this conundrum can be solved by having us all eat half cooked bacon. It's a very Danish approach, but we'll all get sick and the stove will still be burning.
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Climate's a-changin

2009-12-04T09:31:00.019+11:00

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The climate tide does seem to be beginning to turn.
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The East Anglia CRU emails have revealed the lack of integrity in the IPCC temperature database and those who control it. Phil Jones, one of those responsible, has now stood down pending the outcome of an investigation and even Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann is now again under formal scrutiny from Penn State U. Australia is today temporarily no longer under the threat of a pointlessly damaging CPRS. And Copenhagen is now looking like it will just be yet another mutual hot air recycling venue for blowhard warming warners.

It's worth having a look at this peice by Richard Lindzen published in the Wall Street Journal on 30 November 2009. Professor Lindzen's article suggests yet again, that the substantive causation argument at the heart of anthropogenic global warming alarmism; that "positive forcing" from increases in CO2 correlates to global temperature increases; is mere speculative posturing and lacks real evidentiary support. The historical and recent global temperature and CO2 concentration evidence clearly suggest that even massive increases in atmospheric CO2 do not have any significant effect on global temperature.

In such circumstances how can responsible people support insanely ambitious regulatory schemes to restrict and limit economic development that creates prosperity for everyone, by deliberately restricting access to the most economically viable sources of energy that fuel prosperity: coal, oil and natural gas? Our politicians would have us all take out insurance against losing wealth, with a policy of hindering us all from getting wealthy. This just smacks of the latest ideological crutch that bossy elitists have seized on, to use government power to legitimise and camouflage their personal need to control what other humans might do to gain wealth in spite of them.

We seem to be at one of those now rare moments when some sanity seems to be returning to the public discourse. For many thinking people It has been quite lonely for a long while legitimately independently hypothesizing about these issues, and having seemingly responsible and intelligent people not treat such thinking as serious or responsible. I still fear that this is only a temporary state and that there is still a long long way to go in walking our politics and our culture back from the brink of hysterical over reaction.

And that stuff you're breathing out right now, carbon dioxide, it has been officially labelled a dangerous pollutant. So you'll just have to find an alternative way to breath if you want to consider yourself a caring and concerned citizen of Earth.
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Malcolm the Manchurian

2009-11-27T10:25:00.006+11:00

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The Liberal Party of Australia is currently undergoing a purge. It is quite spectacular. A technicolour yawn of conflicting principles, ideology and power lust is being spewed out across the pages of the press, on the current affairs programmes and in the 'sphere.

Just over a year ago the Party Room removed Brendan Nelson from the leadership in favour of Malcolm Turnbull, ostensibly because Brendan was more circumspect than Malcolm about the pace at which or whether Australia should introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme. Brendan wanted to wait until after Australia had seen what the other nations of the world, mainly the big emitters like China, India and the US, were prepared to commit to before Australia made its commitment. Malcolm wanted to push ahead with an ETS before Copenhagen in the belief that this position would neutralise the electorate characterising the Party as unconcerned about Climate Change. Mal won. Brendan has now been given a gig as ambassador to NATO in faraway Brussells by his opponent Kevin Rudd. Boy does the Liberal Party now wish he was still around.

Most thought Mal's approach to climate politics was just tactics, to prevent Rudd positioning the Coalition in a perceived electorally unpopular posture. Whether they agreed with him or not on an ETS, they saw some political merit in Mal's argument and were prepared to give him a go at putting a dent in Rudd's popularity, since Brendan was languishing in the polls.

But as the year has unfolded we've now discovered something about Mal that few of us knew. He's not only forceful and ambitious, he's also a true believer. He was partially forgiven for his intemperance and unlucky judgement in prematurely going for Rudd's jugular on Utegate before the evidence was in. He was largely though reluctantly ceded the benefit of the doubt that this folly was just a temporary lapse and that he would regain his poise and luck and find new and better ways to take the fight to his Labor opponents.

How wrong this assessment has proved to be. Last night at a 7 pm media conference Mal showed us that he was not a clever tactician on this at all; he is in fact a passionate believer in Anthropogenic Climate Change and was supporting Labor's ETS because of the imperative for moral leadership in the world by Australia, in making economic sacrifices for the good of the planet and our children and our childrens' children.

Who'da thunk it eh?

Mal's media conference was an impassioned defence of the Labor Government's latest proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill. It is currently being considered by the Senate, after some massive changes and concessions that Mal had secured for all Australians in negotiations with the Government.

His stated position is that "We must be a party committed to action on climate change. Anything else is irresponsible ..."

The Liberal/National Coalition still has the power to vote down Labor's CPRS legislation by joining with with the Greens and Independents who oppose it in the Senate, where together they have the numbers. But no, Mal, the Party Leader reckons that this newly negotiated CPRS Bill, with much larger rebates being given to fossil fuel energy suppliers and with all agricultural industry being removed from the scheme, will not just mean less Australian jobs being destroyed because of the scheme, it will also be better for the planet!

He is clearly conceding, in saying this, that the CPRS does serious damage to jobs here. And at the same time he says that because the newly negotiated CPRS is kinder on carbon emitters, it will be better for the environment. Damage to jobs and prosperity is the main reason why responsible citizens in his own party are justly very wary of this scheme. And his claim that his new softer scheme is better for the environment, just looks plain silly. He seems to have inadvertantly made the case against supporting the CPRS for those who oppose him on this.

Yet, typically, the media commentators are not highlighting the manifest inadequacies of the content of his self defence. They are only interested in the outcome of the sporting contest. So the press ignores the ridiculousness of Malcolm's claims, only concentrating on his amazing open attack on the credibility and wisdom of other parliamentary members of the very Party he purports to lead.

It now appears that Malcolm is no different from Rudd on this. He just wants to be able to parade his moral vanity to the world by stating that he is standing for a higher cause than mere Australian prosperity. This ETS legislation is required in the name of the planet. All Australians and the other nations of the world, must follow his noble and magnificent self sacrificial lead on this.

I'm not sure if, when Malcolm gets rolled by his Party on Monday, Kevin will give him one of those cushy government jobs, like he did to Mal's earlier rivals for the Liberal Party leadership, Peter Costello and Brendan Nelson. But he should, because Malcolm deserves a big reward from the ALP. He has done more to contribute to Kevin Rudd's prospects of remaining Prime Minister than anyone in the Australian Labor Party itself. The Ruddbot can now go to Copenhagen and the next election with bragging rights, and the fawning media in Australia will see to it that he gets only credit and praise for this appalling piece of legislation, that can only seriously injure Australia's future prosperity.

Saint Albert's revelation on the road to Copenhagen

2009-11-05T18:43:00.018+11:00

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Seemingly un-remarked on so far, is an admission in the recent new publication from Albert Gore Junior. The Guardian says of his new book:

"...Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies - published only last week - that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide - while the focus of the politics of climate change - produces around 40% of the actual warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. "Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that's still justified," he told the magazine. " [Bolding added]

The consequences of this admission by Al Gore are not insignificant, especially in the context of the hysterical levels of this debate to date. Whatever your views are on the state of the climate science, the Arch High Priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming Alarmism is now telling us that CO2 only contributes 40% towards the projected global warming. 60% of this "problem" lies elsewhere. This admission only comes on the eve of the grand multi nation climate conference in Copenhagen, to agree to put severe restrictions on the economic productivity of the world's industrial economies, by asking them to cut back on CO2 emissions to save the world from CO2's projected bad effects in warming the planet.

But those effects are now 60% less than we were previously led to believe. We've been misled.

Al Gore's revelation means the IPCC's global temperature projections, which assume a much higher contribition from CO2 to this problem in their models, are a crock.

Can all CO2 emission reduction targets now be reduced by 60%, or is it only half?

Cancel Copenhagen!

Forget CO2. Methane and soot are now the number one enemies of planet Earth.

So, a global change of strategy is now called for folks:

1. Eat charcoal (even feed it to livestock; to absorb flatulence); and

2. Reduce your soot footprint (no more blacking your face for variety shows).

Horse race politics is now a losing bet

2009-11-03T11:30:00.012+11:00

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It's Melbourne Cup day in Australia: a day full of strained horse racing metaphors, lots of forced jollity, and much illusion about chance; hence the superficial inspiration for my segue to:

The interesting, refreshing and credible view now developing that "horse race" style politics is currently (if temporarily) on the outer in the big democratic conversation in the US. The argument runs along these lines:

The triumph for grass roots democracy seen in the presidential election of Obama last year, cuts both ways: to big central planning idealists like Obama, but also to small government idealists like Ron Paul.

This means that the previously dominant gamers and tacticians in politics (Karl Rove, Josh Lyman, Bill Clinton), who downplay substance and the ideas of candidates and who look primarily to the sport of political contests (the horse race metaphor), are now less important than they have been for ages.

Triangulating, seeking the middle ground between poles, which was the hall mark of Clintonian politics, is a process beloved of journalists and the media who seek to commentate on political contests without openly engaging with the merits of the ideas being fought over.

Obama's win was a win for a politician of ideas, however goofy (hope'n change anyone?). Grass roots conservative citizens have seen now that idea politicians can win. This has defused the logic and power of the once powerful political tacticians in the GOP, who would advocate non-confrontational moderates in contestable seats, because winning the idea debate wasn't the point, winning was the point.
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But in the current atmosphere in the US citizens want a debate about the ideas. The question seems to be: is more Government the answer? Enough electors are seeking authenticity from their representatives on this issue, that candidates who vacillate and triangulate and whose positions on such issues are suspected of being merely convenient, are losing. Hilary might even be characterised as having lost the Democratic presidential primary race for being identified as the smarter politician, but lacking authenticity.

The message of the current race for the New York House race for congressional district New York 23 seems to be the same. The old back room political wisdom that you need to find a compromise candidate who won't scare the horses if you are to win tight contests, is losing ground. Dede Scozzafava was a moderate Republican with a public profile as a former mayor of a town in the district. She was the "safe" moderate candidate for a New York district. Doug Hoffman was a boring accountant who nominated for the same vacant GOP seat, but was overlooked by the party grandees (there was no primary for procedural reasons) who nominated Scozzafava.

Apparently Glenn Beck on Fox TV and Rush Limbaugh on syndicated radio didn't think much of Scozzafava due to her "liberal" voting record, so they and other right of centre commentators publicly got behind the fiscally conservative climate sceptic, Hoffman. And what's happened so far?

Hoffman jumped out to a big lead in the polls early, with the Democrat, a Pelosi loyalist named Bill Owens, in second place with Scozzafava third. Next the GOP tacticians went to work on Scozzafava to prevent the conservative vote being spilt to let Owens through the middle. Over the weekend she did the seemingly honourable thing, and stood aside (that was big news), but then dropped an even bigger bombshell, she endorsed Owens, the Democrat. The GOP is not impressed. Boehner and Gingrich had put considerable weight behind her candidacy for the GOP and political donations of over $1 million had been put into her GOP campaign for the seat. She has thrown egg in their faces.

Now the question is, can a non-GOP "small government" candidate beat a Democrat on Tuesday in a New York State congressional district? The late polling suggests Hoffman has the "mo" to win.

This would be a serious blow to the O's political cred. If the current governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey also go to against the Democrat's (and even if they split), then the O's honeymoon is not just over, he could visibly be in the doghouse. This could permanently cripple his government run healthcare agenda and the carbon cap and trade legislation (Waxman Markey) would be doomed.

What it means for the GOP is even more interesting. The conventional wisdom in the press has been conspicuously wrong or confused on this to date. The press is a natural supporter of the horse race school of political commentary, which is a losing horse at the moment. They will interpret (spin) this development as a set back for the GOP, because it looks like the GOP is fragmenting. But the bigger picture is that there appears to be a real coalescing of conservative voter support for small government idealists. If the GOP can appropriately adapt to this by recognising the clear signals being given from voters, it could march back in spades in the mid-terms in 2010, and give Obama a real contest in 2012.

There are some minor echoes and repercussions for this in Australian politics (can Malcolm, the tactician, survive?), but the real casualty in the short term could be the Copenhagen Climate Conference in early December. If Nobel laureate Obama is now losing his political clout, then there is less likelihood that he would be prepared to risk what's left with a strong endorsement for really painful carbon reduction commitments in any accord coming out of Copenhagen. There are plenty of hints that the only real chance for meaningful commitments at Copenhagen would be if Obama appeared there in force, actively arm twisting other nations to accept steep carbon emmission reductions.

Is that likely?

UPDATE:

GOP has easily won the Virginia and New Jersey governor's races.

DEMs narrowly win the notionally conservative NY 23 rd congressional district, with the "moderate" GOP candidate (Deidre Scozzafava) finishing third after quitting the campaign and endorsing the DEM candidate over an independent conservative candidate, who finished a close second.

The lessons here seem to be:

For the DEMs: Obama's support can't save marginal Democrat candidates.

For the GOP: Conservative voters won't vote for non-conservative GOP candidates.

For Copenhagen Climate Conference: Obama unlikley to be able to deliver on US committments to deep carbon cuts.

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"Fredy Neptune - a novel in verse" by Les Murray

2009-10-13T18:26:00.011+11:00

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Below is my review of Les Murray's novel in verse, Fredy Neptune. I finally finished it last night and have been captured by its spell of poetic mastery. I reckon its a candidate for "the" Australian novel. There might be some resistance to that because it is not written in prose. But who said a novel could not be a poem?
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“Fredy Neptune: A novel in verse”

By Les Murray.

This novel was first released in 1999. It is arguably a candidate for “the” Australian novel. It is in verse. That is, it is written in eight line stanzas with a semi-rigorous metrical beat. Do not be daunted. You quickly forget that you are reading verse, and it is more than worth any little initial effort. The compression and lyricism that the poetic form allows, provides a loadstone in which Murray lavishly embeds polished gemstones of insight and he creates a word music that mere prose would labour too hard to emulate. It makes for a spectacularly rich and multi-faceted yarn, filled with action and drama a plenty, a driving narrative and humanistic and spiritual reckoning.

Fredy Neptune is the circus name given to Friedrich Boettcher, a German/Australian child of the rural back blocks, who travels the twentieth century world as a farm labourer, sailor, circus performer, film extra, Zeppelin crewman, fisherman and confidant of the famous and the forgotten. Fredy is infused with much of the flavour of Les Murray’s own life. But here he is nothing less than an Odysseus, an Aussie Homer Simpson like everyman, with superhuman strength and a Forest Gump like bent for bumping into history. His is a rough journey. He gets marooned in foreign lands unable to return home to wife and family, battling a hostile and implacable universe of forces beyond comprehension, indifferent to all caught in its sweep. We traverse the Great War, the Depression and the Second War; via Constantinople, Jerusalem, Paris, Switzerland, Hollywood, Hitler’s Germany, Soviet Russia, Shanghai, Egypt, Japanese occupied New Guinea, Queensland, Sydney, Newcastle and Dungog; befriending and alienating a large cast including Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence of Arabia, Chaim Wiezman, Basil Thoroblood and a mentally handicapped German boy Fred smuggles out of Germany and brings back to the Hunter to protect him from Aryan cleansing.

In metaphor, and in the telling, Freddy is confronted by some of the twentieth century’s worst moral atrocities, loses all feeling as a consequence and then struggles to find a way back to emotional and physical wholeness. He heals himself only when he realizes he needs to forgive the victims: Jews, the disabled, women, Aborigines. Only once he finds that he has forgiven them for the responsibility that he, as a non-victim, feels for their plight, can he “pray again with a whole heart”.

But this book is not turgid, stuck up or intellectualised. It is a tale that is, above all, Australian. Its idioms, its pre-occupations, its world view could only have been conjured by an Australian with a love for story telling and a poetic genius of Les Murray’s gifts. Read this Australian Ulysses without being intimidated. The great Dublin novel by the incomparable Joyce remains without peer, but this Australian homage to Homer’s epic poem, is also delight to read, especially to an Australian ear.

Cambridge: Political correctness is insane

2009-10-08T11:44:00.026+11:00

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I was going to post on the delightful news, via Garth Godsman, after a lengthy and curious embargo by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, that another dead specimen of the "extinct" Australian Night Parrot, has been found in Queensland . This is great news for ornithologists and Monty Python fans. It is also a refreshing change to have some developing news from the natural history world that is not yet another tale of environmental woe or human devastation (excepting that this night parrot was found decapitated by fencing wire).

There's been another piece of apparently good news that recently almost broke. It seems that based on satellite data this summer's Antarctic summer ice melt was at an all time recorded low. Presumably this means that waterfront property will continue to hold its value and Governments will now not have to spend taxpayer funds on the engineering works necessary to hold back the tides. This good news for mankind seems further enhanced by a developing understanding in scientific communities that the scary data the IPCC relied on for its frightening "hockey stick" projections for global temperatures in its 4th Assessment report, looks to have been flawed. This suggests that, if we do in fact have a global climate change problem, we could at least now have some time to solve it without going broke.

But amongst this good news is some more truly awful news from the UK today, via Drudge: the Cambridge University Union has just cancelled its scheduled debate on political correctness at which the radio jock Michael Savage was going to participate in via video link from the US.

I posted in May this year about my disgust with Her Majesty's Government that they saw fit to ban a radio jock in the US from entering the UK because they don't like what he can freely say on the airwaves in the US. I've never heard the guy speak so I can't comment on whether I agree with him or like him. That is beside the point. It does seem pretty clear that the Home Office is not accusing him of recruiting terrorists or inciting the violent overthrow of their government or any government. It looks like they simply think he is a right wing redneck loud mouth who doesn't like gays or liberals and says so to a large radio audience in the US. And they somehow think that justifies banning him from the UK. Where is this coming from and going to, I ask you?

I was subsequently heartened by the good news that the Cambridge University Union had invited him to participate in one of its prestigious public debates. He was to speak against the motion that "This House believes Political Correctness is sane and necessary" . Here is what the CUU said in its invitation to Mr Savage dated July 2.:

“ ... The Cambridge Union has been following you with great interest in recent weeks ... The decision to ban you has caused quite a stir and we are keen to know how your situation progresses ... "

Well not anymore. Here's what the CUU said in withdrawing its invitation by email on 7 October:

" ... It is with great regret to inform you of the difficult decision we have taken to cancel the event... We have reconsulted with our counsel, and been informed that there are numerous legal issues with Dr Savage speaking here, ... and so because of all of the technical, financial and legal problems involved, we have come to the reluctant conclusion that the event cannot proceed. ... "

Did you notice those chilling words "... reconsulted with our counsel". So it seems that CUU had initially consulted with counsel, presumably before it sent the invitation, but decided to consult with counsel again after its invitation was accepted (why would they do that?), and counsel then changed their counsel.

Just to spell it out for those who persist in believing that the good intentions of legislators and bureaucrats are enough to protect people from the pernicious evil of widely drafted, selectively enforced, politically correct laws; this is yet another travesty of justice.

The thing speaks for itself, but I will take the liberty to speak for it here nonetheless, lest this event not speak clearly enough to some.

A citizen of the US who had been banned from entering the UK, by its Home Secretary, for speech in the US that was legal in the US, is asked to participate by video link from the US in a public debate at Cambridge University in the UK on Political Correctness. The University subsequently withdraws the invitation because it receives legal advice that having that person participate in the debate in the UK will cause legal problems for the University.

The good news for Cambridge University is that it now doesn't have to go to the expense and bother of having a debate on whether Political Correctness is sane and necessary. The very fact that the University has chosen the timourous course, by acceding to the latest version of the vacillating advice of its counsel that it now not allow this previously invited person to speak at the University via video link on this issue, wins the case all by itself for the side arguing that:

"This House believes Political Correctness is insane and unnecessary".

The bad news for British citizens is that there is now no debate on whether Political Correctness in the UK is at insane levels.

Britain is now pretty much a totalitarian state. After 12 years of Labour government its citizens may no longer hear words spoken by people the Labour government doesn't like or agree with.

Fortunately this totalitarian Labour government can now be removed at the ballot box. Democracy is an escape valve against perpetual tyranny. It not however a safeguard against the tryanny of the elected, if the elected do not see themselves as having a responsibilty to protect freedom, between elections. Freedom is a higher order ideal than democracy. Democracy is just the least worst process we have found for keeping in check the necessary evil of government authority.

Earthquake tsunami floods explosion

2009-10-01T15:45:00.007+10:00

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Amidst the current surge of disasters in our region with tsunami in Samoa, quakes in Sumatra and floods in the Philippines, which provide more incontrovertible signs of the impending and inevitable Anthropogenic Continental Drift catastrophe, there is some good news for the Federal Labor Government.

This disaster deluge has provided the cover necessary to release the long awaited results of the NT Police investigation into the deaths of five asylum seekers in April 2009. You remember this don't you? The media was playing out its carefully crafted narrative that these desperate boat people were all tragic victims of turmoil in far away places who required our sympathy and support not hostility and rejection. The increase in their numbers arriving here was not due to a perceived softening in the Government's stance, but to heightened troubles in the world.

And then there was an explosion on a Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel. It burnt to the waterline killing five refugees and injuring twelve, whilst under tow by the Royal Australian Navy. The early indications then were that it was self destructive act of sabotage by the asylum seekers. But before this narrative busting fact could take hold whilst fresh and new, the Federal government went into overdrive to declare that the full circumstances were too complex to determine. A full enquiry by the NT Police was to occur and they, the Labor Government, would have nothing to say until the NT police reported.

Well here we are five months later on 1 October and the Police report is in:

"A BOAT that exploded killing five suspected asylum seekers and seriously injuring dozens more off the Territory coast was deliberately doused in petrol and set alight. Northern Territory Police - who headed the investigation into the blast - have revealed on completion of their investigation into the fatal blast that the explosion was a result of sabotage."

So the early indications were right all along. The press didn't need to be muzzled after all. Is the Government going to comment now? Or will they be "cautious" about rushing to judgement again and await the outcome of coronial inquiry. The SMH report:

"The Northern Territory coroner, Greg Cavanagh, will hold an inquiry into the explosion early next year. "

So if the inquiry starts next year it could be even be able to publish its findings as soon as 2011. We can all wait 'til then I guess. Meanwhile.
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Peter, Paul and Mary, no more.

2009-09-17T17:41:00.011+10:00

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Mary Travers has died.

Peter, Paul and Mary's songs were the songs of my childhood. It is melodies from pre-adolescence that live deepest in your heart; not the songs others would define you by from confused adolescence, yearning for cool. These songs transcend such callow transience.

Here she is singing "5oo Miles" and "If I had a Hammer".

A voice of beauty about justice and freedom.

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ABC TV votes Conservative. Who knew?

2009-09-16T09:52:00.027+10:00

Jonathan Holmes, of the ABC's Media Watch programme, was, as usual, fulfilling his institutionally self-assigned duty of holding the Opposition to account the other evening. He was gratuitously, but unsurprisingly, openly sticking the boot into a carefully chosen target, the former Coalition Government's Treasurer, because he had had the temerity to be critical of a public broadcaster for using its taxpayer funded media resources to favour a political party. In the process Holmes drew our attention to a piece of research recently published by some Australian National University academics.

Holmes crowed jubilantly, at the Coalition's expense, from his taxpayer funded ABC TV soapbox, and without a hint of irony, that, contrary to Mr Costello's suggestion, research showed that ABC TV did show a political bias in the research period: towards the Coalition. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it you Coalition whingers.

Just why would ABC TV choose to broadcast this? As Holmes himself seems to concede, perhaps it's because it is news. "News" that is, in the sense that such a claim is indeed completely "new". No-one has ever seriously suggested this before. And who is there out there, without an axe to grind like Holmes, that actually believes this claim?

Sure many of us continue to watch ABC TV's current affairs programmes notwithstanding its seemingly open pro-Labor slant, but we don't pretend for a moment that it is not left-wing biased. We make allowances for this bias because we quite are fond of Aunty from habit. It occasionally can be quite exasperating, but we can turn it off or switch channels. To a limited extent some of this bias is forgivable, if only because it is an almost inevitable function of the fact that those with the job security of a taxpayer funded job at the ABC, will naturally tilt their political allegiances (even if unconsciously) towards entities that they perceive are more likely to protect their own state funded economic security. As a consequence there is only one known employee of the ABC who is voluntarily out of the closet as a Liberal supporter, and everyone in the ABC seems to know who he is (some radio jock in Perth), because he is so unusual there.

But for ABC TV to openly disseminate that it has a pro Coalition bias, even whilst it is simultaneously bashing the Coalition, does seem a bit much, even for such brazen leftist provocateurs as Media Watch hosts. What new levels of political distortion does this suggest ABC TV might now be prepared to go to ? For such a manifestly ludicrous assertion to be given currency at the taxpayers' expense, both by a university and on a public broadcaster, undermines one's faith in such institutions. Could this be an elaborate hoax? It is doubly bizarre that it was revealed whilst the broadcaster was in the very act of doing what we all see it doing every day, sticking it to the Coalition in Opposition with its customary glee. It's also very amusing (if a bit disturbing) that the ABC can be quite so self unaware.

Are we now, as a consequence, going to see even more ABC TV political hacks exploit the well trodden ABC path to political power in the ALP, following the likes of ABC TV's former stars, Maxine McHugh and Allan Carpenter? This is only to be done of course in order to offset the blatant ABC TV pro Coalition bias. Are we going to see Tony Jones pitch even more gentle softball questions to Government Ministers like Penny Wong about the economic effects of her carbon trading scheme? Is he now going to treat Tony Abbott with even greater disrespect and with even more hostility than at present? Will Kerry O'Brien actually feel he has to get even nastier on air towards Malcolm Turnbull than he is already? Are they all now going to give Commissar Julia, the Minister for Everything, even more servile deference than they have displayed to date? Will Kerry perhaps now feel even more emboldened to admit electoral swings towards the ABC on election night? All this of course to provide the holy statutory "balance" necessary to offset the brazen pro-Coalition bias that ABC TV apparently carries.

Let's have a quick look at the methodology in play here. Not of ABC TV, we do that nearly every night. I mean of the academic "research". Here's the website of Andrew Leigh, the guy who, with Joshua Gans, recently published the paper: "How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant".

How did Messrs Leigh and Gans arrive at their conclusion? Here's their criteria:

"A good measure of media slant ought to reflect the ideological affinity between a particular outlet and one side of politics. In effect, such a measure plots media outlets onto a political spectrum, allowing us to answer questions like: "if this newspaper were a politician, how would it vote ? " (page 2)

That seems pretty clear. But how do they do this?

"To estimate the political position of each media outlet, we simply estimate a weighted OLS regression, in which the dependent variable P is the share of Coalition mentions * by a given public intellectual i in media outlet j in time period t, and the independent variable is a vector of indicator variables of each media outlet:

Pijt = ZIjt

j=0

... " (page 9)

Mmm. I'm sure glad their estimate of the weighted OLS regression is simple.

And what conclusion did they arrive at using this sophisticated academic model:

"Only one of the 27 outlets we study (the ABC Channel 2 television station**) is significantly distinguishable from the centre position. These results are robust to various specifications. We also find that there has been no systemic evolution in slant over time. ... " (page 4)

I think this means that their finding of a pro-Coalition slant at ABC TV is not a just temporary state, but has been pretty much a permanent condition.

This sure brings to mind that all too frequently recalled saying about statistics and damned statistics.

You also have to ask yourself how academics can continue to expect to be ceded credibility by the public when they publicise such findings outside academia. The only thing it really seems to prove is that an academic with a grant can demonstrate almost anything. Either that, or that the finding itself demonstrates conclusively that they stuffed up their methodology. What next an ANU computer model showing conclusively that membership of a trade union correlates with a vote for the National Party***?

The ABC would be as well to be little more coy about promoting this finding. It could generate even more derision at the ABC's expense than it receives already and in a lot more places than just the Liberal Party HQ.

* Mentions ? Could this be the explanation for their counter-intuitive finding. They count ABC TV mentions of the Coalition as being pro Coalition.? ABC TV has no compuction about bagging the Coalition out all the time. So Mr Holmes' reference to Mr Costello on Media Watch would thereby count towards ABC TV's pro Coalition slant. Are these academics this stupid or just partisanly dishonest leftists themselves?
** You'd ordinarily reckon academics doing research into the media in Australia would at least know that this is not how the ABC describes this component of its operations, but then you look at what these blokes say they found, and you know they live in a different universe to the rest of us.
*** By counting membership of a commodities co-operative as if it were a trade union.
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The Oval's dust turns to ashes...

2009-08-24T08:30:00.006+10:00

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A glorious spell of seam bowling on a rain affected pitch by English all-rounder Stuart Broad that cleaned up the cream of the Australian batting on the second day of the fifth test at the Oval, has won the match and the Ashes series for England 2-1.

Over night the improbable rearguard second innings fightback by Ponting's team petered out when a couple of incomprehensible run outs in the middle order took the heart out of the Australian batting again.

Australian men expect of each other that we resolutely stand by our unspoken code that none of us should ever publicly concede to an opponent that they have succeeded in efforts to inflict pain on us.

So here's the best I can muster in the circumstances: Well done England. Well done Andrew Strauss. A great series. You only won narrowly you Pommy bastards. We'll be back.

How does it feel?

2009-08-18T09:54:00.014+10:00

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Shouldn't Barack, Bob and that boy in blue now be sharing a bong in the White House?

You know, to give us all a "teachable moment" in peaceful coexistence ?

Lid dip: The Huffington Post
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Anthropogenic tectonic plate shift alert

2009-08-16T17:00:00.013+10:00

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Outcomes from computer modelling of continental drift by scientists working for internationally accredited organisations have recently revealed yet another imminent threat to the world we live in from industrialised society: Anthropogenic Continental Drift .

It is now plain that the millions of drill holes oil & gas and mining corporations have sunk into the Earth's crust to search for or exploit fossil fuels, minerals and metals over recent centuries, have now accumulated to such an extent that they seriously imperil the delicate balance of the Earth's tectonic plates by undermining their geological stabilty.

The consequences of this folly could be devastating: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, sea level rises, civil disorder, community dislocation, habitat destruction, property damage and loss of confidence in government.

We must do something. Now. If we sit back and do nothing about this we, and our children and our children's children, are doomed . The rate of drift will inevitably accelerate bringing untold catastrophe ever closer with every new hole that's drilled into the Earth's crust. The reckless pursuit of wealth by capitalists in the West who continue to seek to mine our planet's natural resources for their own enrichment, is undermining our very existence.

We need a United Nations resolution calling for a moratorium on all drilling in Western nations now. To settle for anything less would be a moral travesty of the highest order.

Lid dip: The People's Cube.
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Labor changes its mind on election... again

2009-08-16T10:14:00.023+10:00

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Its been harder than usual recently to keep up with what Kevin wants us all to think.

Kevin's usually reliable communication conduit to his people, political correspondents at Fairfax, have been sending out quite conflicting messages from one day (hour?) to the next the last few days.

After the Labor Government's "Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme" bill (a scheme formerly known as an "emissions trading scheme") was defeated in the Senate on Thursday 13 August, when all the Coalition, Green and independent senators combined to vote against it, there was a real whiff of politics in the air. A major piece of Government legislation had been defeated. The main issues appeared to be:

If the same bill is presented to the Senate again and rejected again after 3 months (ie after mid-November 09) then that would then give the Government grounds to call a double dissolution election.

The CPRS bill also had tacked onto it a piece of renewable energies targeting and incentives legislation that all sides of politics support, but which sank with the bill.

Here's what Fairfax have published on this so far this weekend:

FRIDAY, 14 August:

Kate Hannon: "Govt refuses to 'split' climate bills" ...

"Labor has rebuffed calls from opposition parties and industry to allow a separate vote on renewable energy targets (RET) in parliament next week. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Friday said he did not have the "slightest intention" of calling an early election but wanted the emissions trading scheme (ETS), with the RET included, dealt with later this year... ... despite speculation the government was considering re-introducing the RET section of the bills next week, Mr Rudd and the office of Climate Change Minister Penny Wong poured cold water on the idea, saying they intended to take all 11 bills back to the Senate in November." [emphasis added]

AAP: "Rudd denies he's considering early poll" ...

"... Kevin Rudd has emphatically denied he is considering an early election. "I have not the slightest intention of going to an early poll," he told Fairfax radio on Friday. Mr Rudd rejected as "absolutely" untrue suggestions the government was playing politics with its emissions trading scheme - rejected by the Senate on Thursday - by using it to force a double dissolution and an early election.." [emphasis added]

Phil Coorey: "Time bomb for Turnbull" ...

"The waiting game will force the Government to drop its tactic of linking the bill to legislation mandating that 20 per cent of electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2020. The Government had linked the two to try to get the emissions trading scheme through. The tactic created uncertainty and anxiety in the renewable energy sector, and pressure is now growing for the renewable energy bill to be separated and passed next week. A Government source said this was likely, as the threat of a double dissolution now existed. ''We need to get this scheme up, and we need the threat to get that.'' [emphasis added]

Things must have changed overnight, because here's what Fairfax were telling us the next day (possible after reading a contradictory story in a competing News Ltd paper?) :

SATURDAY 15 August:

AAP " Rudd to call Turnbull's bluff on ETS" ...

"Mr Rudd is expected to agree on Sunday to a demand that he split the legislation package into two separate bills, News Limited reports. The legislation will be split into one bill which forces energy intensive industries to meet renewable energy targets and the other that will set the ETS into action. "... [emphasis added]

How to make sense of all this? One day Fairfax report the PM saying that it was "absolutely untrue suggestions that the Government was playing politics" with its ETS, and yet here they were the very next day reporting in the above article that:

"Mr Rudd's move is reportedly an attempt to embarrass the coalition into passing in full the government's climate change legislation which is blocked in the Senate."

And then on

SUNDAY 16 August:

Josh Gordon in the Sun-Herald reports:

" Labor's election warning": ...

..."With an early election still a possibility, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's chief of staff, Alister Jordan, yesterday summoned 30 ministerial chiefs of staff to Parliament House for a secret election planning meeting... It is believed Labor is now moving into a new, more aggressive phase in preparing for the next election, with an early poll still a possibility. Labor also wants to exert maximum pressure on Mr Turnbull after his refusal to support the Government's emissions trading legislation"... [emphasis added]

But then at 10.40 am on Sunday the SMH website reports:

APP "No interest in early election: Gillard"

"The federal government is not interested in going to an early election, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard says..." [emphasis added]

Am I the only one getting mixed messages from Fairfax about my Government's intentions here?

The Government is/isn't looking for a double dissolution ?
The Government will/won't split the CPRS Bill ?

There could even be an opportunity for a decent journalist to write a story about how the Government is looking indecisive and divided on how to approach these two issues. There would of course be the risk to Fairfax that it could jeopardise its peerless ability to get the inside line on what the government is thinking. But then again, that hasn't been all that helpful this time. After all News Limited appear to have scooped Fairfax on at least one of the government's backflips on this over the weekend.

And could this also be starting to look a bit like Gordon Brown in the UK last year when he flew an election kite for a while before reeling it in when he lost his nerve. I'm not sure that worked out real well for him.

There does appear to be an opportunity to hold the Government to account here for spooking the horses. Isn't that's what serious journalists are supposed to do? (hold governments to account that is; not spook horses.)

Post Script:

Even if the government gets its double dissolution trigger in mid November, how can this give it enough time to realsitically call an election before Christmas? Even a very short 4 week campaign would see the election in the week before Christmas. The conventional wisdom is that if you call an election too close to Christmas the electorate punishes you. So electoral punishment would seem inevitable if they use this bill as the trigger for an election this year.

I reckon the earliest we can expect a Federal election is March 2010.

The Poms blink.

2009-08-15T10:38:00.015+10:00

This is a minor update and premature gloat on developments in the current Ashes series in England.

The Third Test was a pretty tame draw, due mostly to English wet weather (which doesn't seem to have changed all that much afterall). Michael Clarke did score a classy second innings century to make the game safe for Australia, but it will otherwise be a forgotten match.

The Fourth Test at Headingly in Yorkshire resulted in Australia inflicting a crushing innings defeat on England. There have been two main reactions from the English:

Firstly, the fickle and superficial British press have suddenly and savagely turned on their own. Their batsmen are now apparently too fragile for Test cricket and their bowlers inept under pressure. Yeah, I know, it's a return to situation normal for the English press, and we are reminded yet again that they know not the meaning of steadfastness, nor dignity under fire; but how quick was that?

Secondly, there is the betrayed hero: Freddy Flintoff. This story line has been trotted out to salve wounded pride and sell pommy papers. It seems England also lost because their limping and now retiring champion, Lancashire allrounder Flintoff, was not selected for the match, even though he had told his captain and manager that he could play. Oh please! How can anyone seriously buy this bill of goods after all the blather about him carrying his injury wracked body beyond human limits in the previous Tests? This truly is a sentimental pommy whinge on a grand scale.
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Finally, there is now the delicious prospect next week of the Fifth Test at the Oval in London, with the teams at one match a piece. But there is a minor issue niggling away at me in the lead up to this match: the likelihood of the rough treatment that the Australian selectors are to mete out to Stuart Clark, the Trojan seam bowler who played such an instrumental role in breaking through the English batting in his return from injury in the Fourth Test. Amazingly it seems the selectors seem likely to leave him out of the Fifth Test, because they reckon Johnson, Siddle and Hilfenhaus are better credentialled as fast bowlers, and that they need their sole spinner, Hauritz to take the fourth bowler slot.

Selectors aren't doing their job if they can't make tough choices when picking Australian Test teams. But this isn't even all that tough. Neither Johnson nor Siddle are well suited to these seaming English pitches and both of them have struggled for extended periods in the first four Tests. Just drop one of them for Clark. His record against England speaks for itself and any decent judge of the game will tell you he is in the ideal Terry Alderman/Mike Hendrich "line and length" mould for English conditions. Dear God if Mitchell Johnson's sensitive ego is too fragile to deal with the disappointment of being dropped, then just dump Siddle, who seems to be a robust and resilient enough character to take such a minor setback in his stride.

Australia's bowling attack would then consist of two "hit the deck" speedsters: Johnson and Watson, two canny seamers: Clark and Hilfenhuas, and the finger spin of Hauritz with occasional back up from Michael Clarke and Kattich. Not that shabby.

Roll on Thursday night.

Armchair umpires and perfidious Albion

2009-07-21T16:16:00.013+10:00

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Australia lost 20 wickets and the second Test at Lords in North London earlier this week. They had previously narrowly failed to get the 20 wickets they needed for victory in the first Test at Cardiff, when England ran out the clock on them.

The Ashes are a wonderful full bottle contest between two nations battling for sporting supremacy in a long fought over tradition of rivalry. For most Australian males this is the pinnacle of the game. And we care. Deeply. It hurts to lose.

It's a pity however that the people who run the game of cricket don't have a similar feeling for the importance of this contest. Australia had to be bowled out twice for England to win this game. And they were. 20 Australian wickets fell and England won by a little over 100 runs.

But....at least 4 of the Australian batsmen who the officials ruled out in this match, have been shown by television replays to have been wrongfully given out. That's the rub of the green and it happens in most matches, one way or another, but there is an edge to it this time.

During the first innings of this match an English batsmen was given the benefit of the doubt on a catch when referred to a TV replay, and the Australian captain was abused by the English press for questioning a referral system that doubted the word of a fielder that a catch had carried to him. That's what sporting captains have to expect I'm afraid. But the spectacular hypocrisy of the English press when, in the second innings, an Australian opener had a dubious catch to the English captain ruled out, with no referral to the TV umpire, cannot pass with the same sang froid. If it's OK for Australian Nathan Hauritz's word about whether a catch carried to be ignored and referred to the TV umpire in the first innings, then, it's OK for Englishman Strauss to have his word challenged on the same issue in the second. For Rudi Koetzen and Billy Doctrove, the two on field umpires, not to refer that second innings decision on Hughes and Strauss to the TV umpire is amazing, after what was said about the Hauritz incident in the first innings. Let's be clear about this. The patronising English media gave Ponting a right bollocking for daring to suggest that an Australian fielder's word should be honoured about whether a catch had carried. But this same ridicule doesn't apply to an English fielder (even if he is an imported South African).

We've now seen the TV replay It's clear that, whatever the English captain might have believed at the time, he did not catch Philip Hughes' snick. The ball clearly hit the grass first. Hughes was not out. And this is what makes the other wrong decisions of the umpires in this game so much more galling. Katich was given out off a Flintoff no-ball. Hussey missed the ball completely but was given out caught at slip to Swann. And Ponting's alleged catching dismissal in the first innings was a travesty. It was referred to the TV umpire, who clearly saw that Ponting had not hit the ball as it had only deflected off his pads. But, even though the laws of cricket expressly require a TV umpire to inform the on field umpires if a batsman has not hit the ball, the TV umpire failed to tell the on-field umpires of this salient fact.

The TV umpire's stated reason for this manifest failing was that he thought he was not entitled to tell the on-field umpires anything other than whether the ball had carried to the fielder. This error has occurred at the very highest levels of international cricket by a paid professional whose sole job it is to rule on such referrals. And he still managed to get this one rule 180 degrees wrong!

Darryl Hair was sacked as an umpire for enforcing the laws of cricket over chucking and ball tampering. The umpiring buffoon in this match who doesn't even know one of the tiny handful rules he is required to rule on, will continue to get paid.

And as any Australian male will tell you, the irony is that come October 2009, after the current Ashes series, international cricket will adopt the successful experiment of Tennis in allowing a team a couple of uncontested successful TV replay challenges to umpire's verdicts. That clearly would have been useful in 4 of Australia's 20 dismissals in this game.

There are still 3 matches to be played in this series. Watch out England. Australia feel justificably aggreived by England's boorish triumphalism over this minor victory. The umpires cannot continue to give appalling verdicts to only one team. England will be crushed now. Only the English climate can save them, and we keep being told by the BBC that that is changing.

Rugby bureaucrats, Stalin's spawn?

2009-07-13T09:30:00.033+10:00

In recent weeks two larger than life Rugby players have experienced the tyranny of justice in a universe even more capricious and hostile than their sport: the world of sports officialdom.

First Bakkies Botha, the great and brutal Springbok second-rower, got a raw deal from some small minded and ignorant Rugby officials. They banned him for a couple of matches over an incident that any disinterested rugby fan will tell you happens at nearly every ruck in every game of rugby: the clean out. The Springboks protested this dumb decision by each Springbok player wearing an armband saying "JUSTICE 4 Bakkies" at the following Test match against the British & Irish Lions in Jo'berg. And now the Springboks themselves have been cited by the International Rugby Board for "bringing the game into disrepute" and breaching the "IRB Code of Conduct" by questioning the disciplinary rulings of IRB sanctioned bodies. From little stupidities, big stupidities grow.

Then there's Lote Tuquiri, the ex-Rugby League Kangaroo and now ex-Rugby Union Wallaby winger. He didn't even get a game in a Wallabies guernsey this season, but the Australian Rugby Union still found cause to terminate his contract. And the ARU aren't even prepared to tell us what he did to warrant such drastic action. Lote has now sued the ARU for wrongful termination of contract. The lawyers will now slug it out. Rugby will be the poorer and lawyers the richer.

What's going on here?

Firstly the most recent controversy about that hoary old Bok warhorse, Bakkies Botha. Checkout what he did in the second half of the second Test between the Springboks and the B & I Lions in Pretoria.

Bakkies can be seen here entering a ruck "through the gate" (i.e. legally) and cleaning out Welsh prop Adam Jones with his shoulder. The live commentator doesn't even remark on this unremarkable incident, nor on the next collision at the ruck by a Lions forward bashing into Bakkies from the side (illegally).

After the ruck gets pulled up for some now forgotten infringement, Jones has to leave the field, where it is found later that he has a broken shoulder. After the game finishes Bakkies gets cited for the incident by an off-field match official .

Now what Bakkies is seen to do here is what happens at nearly every ruck in every game of rugby. One has to assume that Bakkies was cited because Jones was injured by the force of Bakkies' shoulder hitting Jones' shoulder. I guess the citing might be justifiable on the basis that if someone is injured then it is worth checking later that it wasn't from foul play.

The disciplinary tribunal found Bakkies guilty of foul play and banned him for 2 weeks. And its decision was upheld on appeal.

Look at the incident again. Now I'm a Wallabies supporter. I don't have any love for the Boks, and even less for Bakkies, but any tribunal reviewing this incident who can decide that what Bakkies did here deserves special punishment or treatment, over and above what the referee and assistant referees at the match had decided at the time (ie that there was nothing in it), knows nothing about rugby. I'd even relucantly be prepared to concede that you might be able to find an infringement here by Bakkies of one of the nearly fifty mostly unenforced sub-rules that govern rucks and mauls, because you can do so at every breakdown, if that is what you are seeking. That being so, it is possible that the referee got it wrong on the day and the Springboks should have been penalised for an infringment of some sort there and then, because say Bakkies "wasn't binding properly", "touched the ground with his hand" or "had his head and shoulders lower than his hips" (seriously), or some other incomprehensible ruling. But how can a tribunal ban a player for 2 weeks for such an infringement? It's not foul play. If you ban players just for committing infringements of the laws of the game, when there is no malice or foul play involved, there would be no-one left playing rugby anywhere. There are approximately 50 or 60 infringments called up by a referee every game.

Get real. Rugby is a collision sport that has highly nuanced rules to differentiate fair from unfair contact. But it is vital that the game remain an uncompromising and wholehearted contest of human physicality. That's why we love it, for all its frustrations and the stupidities of the sportsmen who play it and the idiots who commentate on and officiate in it.

The officials who run rugby bring the game into disrepute if they rule that a hard ruck collision warrants imposing a ban on a player.

I get why the Springboks are incredulous. I am incredulous.

Spiro Zavos at the Sydney Morning Herald however feels the Boks got what they deserved. But Sprio does after all work for the Sydney Morning Herald's "Chief Rugby Correspondent", Greg Growden. Growden is the rugby illiterate tabloid controversionalist who is Rugby League's secret weapon at the heart of Rugby Union in Australia. Growden determines what's said about Rugby in the main paper in Australia's largest Rugby Union playing city. And that's mostly hostile attacks on his perception of the wrong upper middle class demographics of rugby supporters in Sydney and wilfully negative controversy beat ups about people who haven't given him the access or information he wants about confidential and private matters behind the scenes in the game. It's rarely about rugby as such. Spiro, who at least is a genuine, if patchy, student of the game (unlike Growden) therefore feels it necessary from time to time to pick up Growden's anti-rugby ball and run with it. So he loudly proclaims that the Springboks were arrogant for carrying out this protest against rugby officialdom's idiocy. That'll boost circulation. Spiro then seems shocked when he get's deluged with abuse from ardent Bok supporters for his wantom attack on their team's integrity. There go yet more subscriptions to the Herald from all the ex-patriot Jarpies on Growden's much derided Sydney North Shore.

And whilst some might feel justified in seeing the Bok protest as a little adolescent, the Boks were indeed the recipients of some pretty rough justice in Bakkies' case, and they didn't seem have too many other avenues of redress open to them, except being meek. By drawing attention to such idiocies by rugby officialdom they may in fact be serving the interests of rugby, and all those who love it. Otherwise the idiot officials at the IRB might think they can go on with this self defeating behaviour of selectively banning players they don't like by treating infringments as foul play. Such actions by officials bring the game into disrepute with its own constituency. Ross Hastie at Planet Rugby is on the same page as me on this, even if Julia Harris at the same website is more inclined to just trot out the convenient and irrelevant prejudicial anti-Bok narrative, that we've all heard ad nauseam from the likes of Growden and Zavos.

Clearly there are larger "narratives" at play here, ie there are other stories that people with conflicting agendas want told even more than this story. This story of Bakkies' little injustice is inconvenient to those other stories. The other main story at the moment is Schalk Burger's eye gouge at the first ruck of the same game, along with the astonishing stupidity of the Springbok coach, Peter DeVilliers, in jumping in to defend Burger's indefensible conduct at the end of the game. These other stories reinforce the existing and familiar story lines about 'Jarpie boorishness and barbarism.

The problem here is the cross-fertilization and conflating of these separate, though related, other "narratives". Rabid British supporters wanted Burger's head on a stick for his barbaric attack on the eyes of an opponent. The press also wanted DeVilliers head for foolishly defending Burger's indefensible conduct. And the IRB wanted to protect the game from accusations of barbarity. Amazingly Burger only got 8 weeks for his blatant fully televised eye gouge! Some other dumb rugby official apparently found that Burger had not deliberately gouged the other player's eye socket. So it was found to be inadvertent. Judge for yourself. Accordingly as they didn't find this behaviour deliberate, they logically didn't ban him for ever, or for a year a two, which consistency and deterence demanded. When Bakkies got cited for the ruck incident at which Jones was injured later in the same match, he became caught up in the rising wave of dissatisfaction and rage against Burger and subsequently DeVilliers.

It seems that Bakkies ban was not based solely on an fair assessment of the incident on the field for which he was cited. This therefore cannot be seen to be justice and it is not justice. It looks like prejudice and it probably was prejudice.

And as for Lote? Well, I don't think I actually care who is right in this legal bun fight over his player contract with the ARU. That's just a lawyers' picnic and, I can tell you from experience as a lawyer, it will therefore almost inevitably be barren, un-edifying and depressing for everyone but the lawyers.
Like everyone else however, I am curious about what Lote could have done to elicit this response from John O'Neil at the ARU. The gossip around the dealing desks of Sydney on the afternoon this story broke was that Lote had been caught in bed at the team hotel with a young woman who was not his wife. But surely having sex with a sports groupie isn't a sackable offence? Dear God, we wouldn't have any professional sport at all if this was the case.

The villain here seems to be the ARU players' "code of conduct". The ARU allege Lote breached this code in some unspecified way after being on a "final warning". As usual these days layers and layers of incomprehensible regulatory bilge are bolted into the legal relationship, most of these rules are never enforced because no-one ever really runs their life by the kind of high minded wishful thinking sanctimony contained in such codes. Except that is, if the political convenience of an official suits their enforcement.

It's increasingly what happens in all walks of contemporary society. Tyranny by over-regulation. Officials simply pile on vast reams of laws, rules, regulations, standards and codes. Just in case. Just in case that is, it becomes convenient to stomp on some individual whose behaviour or mere presence has become inconvenient to officialdom.

The Rugby Players Association is understandably concerned about this capriciousness, even if you can now see the political wheels moving as the Wallaby captain has the pressure applied by his employer, the ARU, for him to back off this dispute.

Is what we are seeing here a form of tyranny? I notice elsewhere in the press today that China has shown its true colours as a totalitarian state by stepping in to imprison an executive from Rio Tinto, and, like Lote, without telling us the specific charges, for acting in his company's commercial interests against China's. As John Garnaut put it in the Age today:

"...in China, with its enormous system of laws that are seldom enforced, the specifics of Rio's iron ore dealings are only the starting point in working out how things went so horribly wrong. There is always the question: why did they choose to go after these people at this time?..."

But it seems now that it is not just totalitarian China that has capricious officials who apply formerly unenforced and incomprehensible rules at their political whim. It is so even for rugby players in Australia and South Africa who incur the random displeasure of sports officials.

Rugby is becoming a rougher sport off the field than it is on it. At least there is some honour between combatants on the field. Off it, as it is now in all walks of life, it seems a player is at the mercy of hidden political agendas of capricious officials.

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Michael Jackson, martyr ?

2009-06-29T11:37:00.018+10:00

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Someone has to die for their beliefs to be a martyr. Drudge pointed to headlines last Friday saying that Jackson's was a "Death by Showbusiness". So in the sense that Jackson seems to have died for his belief in celebrity, yes, he might be called a martyr.

I never got Michael Jackson. Thriller didn't thrill me at all (Now Noel Coward, that's another story). But I did get a bit of a kick from seeing others get him. He was boppy and catchy and slick, as well as monumentally fluffy and hugely impaired.

What I struggle with is the apparently massive consequentiality of fluffiness and impairment like Jackson's. What is the fuss about the passing of a semi-talented song and dance weirdo from decades past?

Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, has had a stab at explaining it to we mystified souls who struggle to get with the programme. He reckons it's just like Princess Di.

And I agree, to the extent that I was almost as unprepared for and dumbfounded by this spectacular outbreak of mawkish sentimentality over Jackson's death, as I was by hers. But does the public really regard these super celebrities as martyrs, as Boris suggests?

He reckons "...in a world dominated by a demoralising canon of physical perfection, he [Jackson] was the patron saint of dysmorphia."

Dem's big words. What I think he's saying is that many people sympathised with Jackson's exaggerated dissatisfaction with his appearance because they are dissatisfied with their own appearance. Boris says:

...[Jackson] was a martyr, in the sense that Diana was a martyr. Her death evoked an astonishing response, partly because she spoke to every woman who has been let down by a man, every woman who has worried about her weight, every woman who feels the system is unfair to women. That is a lot of women.

I think I'm beginning to get it. These pop idols are an opiate for the masses in a world in which the established religions have become terminal. God really is dead. The pastor can't tell us what to think or who to believe anymore, but it's still too hard to figure it all out ourselves. So instead we reach out to whatever is presented to us out there that seems to correspond to our own emotional confusion. And, if we perceive such a display as being even slightly genuine, then we can draw some comfort from it.

So, whilst some of us see these celebrities as idiots flaunting cheap emotion and superficial gossip, others of us see them as a source of rationalisation for our own emotional inadequacies and thereby provide some meaning to our otherwise trivial lives. And because these celebrity folk are shallow enough, shrewd enough and narcissistic enough to wear their petty emotions on their sleeves for all to consume, the public has a real appetite for their exaggerated self indulgences because the desire for meaning is not being nourished elsewhere. By appreciating authenticity in vulgar displays of celebrity emotional shallowness, we can elevate our own emotional pettiness to something significant.

But as another Marx said: "Honesty and Integrity are the most important qualities of all ....
if you can fake them, you've got it made".

And Jackson both died for celebrity and was killed by his belief in it. He must truly enter the pantheon of martyrs alongside Joan d'Arc, who both died for the church and was killed by it.

But, because they are martyrs, conventional wisdom has it that they must also have been insufferable. And, for once, I agree.

Utegate goes Freudian ....

2009-06-25T10:58:00.011+10:00

I thought I was confused about Utegate and then I saw this:

This apparently is Godwin Grech's home in Calwell, South Canberra. The one the Federal police raided on Monday and that Godwin holed himself up in over the weekend. He is a single, mid-forties, senior public servant who has lived alone in this house for about a decade. That prominent, upright, emblematic thingy thrusting itself at us in the foreground is described in the Daily Telegraph, whence the picture came, as a "palm tree". Although it obscures our perspective of his mock Spanish home, it might not be entirely frivolous to suggest that it could be more telling of Godwin, than his home.

Certainly after seeing this for me the whole Utegate affair suddenly took on yet another unexpected and disturbing dimension: thwarted love and revenge gone wrong. The anguish we saw in Godwin's Senate testimony now can be interpreted through the lens of the torn heart of a smart but desperately lonely man being found out. It suggests the glimmer of a plausible idea why someone might have concocted an email from a former protege to embarrass an enemy in high places.

Until I saw this, my incredulous speculations about the motives for this fraud had been toying with fantastic conspiratorial notions of an elaborate sting operation by someone in the PM's department to ensnare Turnbull. Certainly the glee and haste with which the PM had arranged for his own Blackberry to be used to photograph Turnbull talking to the putative author of the email, Andrew Charlton, at last Wednesday's now legendary Parliamentary Winter Ball, had me smelling a rat that the PM had prior knowledge and was springing a trap. I have subsequently been told by someone who was there that it was Charlton who actively sought out Turnbull at the function, not vice versa, as Labor's water carriers at Fairfax would have us believe. Certianly taken together with Charlton's haste in promptly rushing back to the office to record contemporaneously his star-struck personal encounter with the Leader of the Opposition, at the party in a memo that the PM immediately released to the public, suggests that this event at least, was an orchestrated set up by Rudd and his media manipulators.

But now, what once was looking like developing as a fascinating, if miserable, conspiratorial political farce, seems to have potentially transformed itself into the makings of an ancient Greek revenge tragedy, in which lust and thwarted love have by some accident of fate co-mixed with lust for power and revenge, to bring down the mighty.

This just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

Who is Godwin Grech ?

2009-06-23T09:59:00.010+10:00

Holy utegate Batman ! What happened there ?

Friday 19 June was a fascinating day in politics. We were introduced to Godwin Grech at a Senate inquiry. He seemed a mild mannered Treasury official in anguish over testimony that contradicted the Prime Minister.

Monday 22 June was gobsmacking. The Federal Police raided Godwin's home in the morning. Found evidence on a home computer that the alleged damaging email from the Prime Minister's department to Godwin at Treasury had been concocted inside Treasury. By mid-afternoon the Feds had announced their findings to the world. And thereby exculpated the Prime Minister from the Opposition's assault on his credibility. Malcolm Turnbull's case against the PM for misleading Parliament collapsed. With a hiss.

Other than a gloating and more than usually sanctimonious Prime Minister, the big winner is going to be Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan. His goose was all but cooked by the actual emails tabled before the Senate inquiry on Friday that showed unequivocally that the Treasury officials had been asked to treat Kev's mate Mr Grant with special attention in his request for funding. Now no-one cares that Swannie misled Parliament about this. The allegation against the PM has collapsed and Swan looks like he will sneak through under the ensuing rush of emotions: disbelief, gloating, exasperation, relief and schadenfreud.

Mal has suffered a prosecutor's biggest nightmare. The key prosecution witness spectacularly failed to come up to proof.

It in fact looks a bit like he was played. There are a thousand unanswered questions here. Here's a few that leap out:

Who the hell is Godwin Grech?

Did Godwin concoct the email from Andrew Charlton in the PM's office to himself in Treasury which contradicted the PM's statement to the House?

Why did he concoct it?

When did he concoct it?

Why wasn't it found and released by the Government earlier?

Who did Godwin leak it to?

When did Lewis at the Telegraph get it?

When did the Opposition get it?

When did the PM's Office find out about it?

When did Treasury find out about it?

Why were Treasury officials trying to stop Godwin giving evidence about it to the Senate inquiry on Friday?

Why were Labor Senators trying to stop Senator Eric Abetz ask Godwin questions about it on Friday?

If the Government knew about Godwin and his email, why didn't they tell Parliament?

Why weren't the Police called in earlier?

Why did the Police make such an early announcement of their findings?

What more evidence do the Police have about Godwin?

The list could go on and on. But will we ever be told the answers to these questions?

Tell me again does anyone know what happened to that enquiry into how the people smuggler boat was burnt to the waterline off Christmas Island in January? The Navy wouldn't tell us at the time how it happened, and neither would the NT Police. It was kind of important then.

Will this be the same: the real facts forgotten because the main event has passed?

Kev gets a scare. Mal hits a snare. Wayne hides in the glare.

2009-06-19T17:14:00.006+10:00

The opportunity to upgrade the Treasurer may be passing.

An interesting day in Parliament on Friday.

In a Senate inquiry today a Treasury official admitted under questioning that offiicials administering the government's OzCar scheme were asked by members of the PM's office to look after a mate of the PMs. Nothing too egregiously scandalous about that, even if it does smack of ethical dodginess, but that's not the real issue. It's Rudd's sanctimony.

The real problem is that the Kevin stood up at the despatch box last week and loudly proclaimed that neither he nor his department had ever made any representations to Treasury on behalf of this chap.

On its face it looks like Kev has lied to Parliament, since that not what Mr Grech, a treasury official, has said under oath. By the accepted standards of Parliament recently affirmed by Kev in his dealing with Joel, Kev should now resign.

That won't happen of course. There's this massive distraction campaign on pointing to some dodgy email that was circulated in the press on Friday. Someone will eventually have to take the blame for this as it is clear that this gully is not dry. The best candidate is Wayne "dry gully" Swan himself. He set up the ridiculous diversion that the Fairfax press fell for about the Opposition Leader being mean to a Rudd staffer about this at a party on Wednesday evening. But the real issue now seems to be that Treasuer Swan denied last week to the House that this second hand car dealer in Brisbane had been given any special treatment by the Government. There are clearly authentic emails now tendered to the Senate enquiry showing that Treasury treated this 51 Club member as a special case. This seems to flatly contradict Wayne's protestations of innocence to the House.

If Rudd is even partially ethical and consistent Swannie should be asked take a dive for him. Australia could then have Lindsay Tanner as Treasurer, a marked improvement over Swannie. We'll all be winners.

If only we had a press we could trust to report this without getting distracted by the government's spin it would be quite interesting instead of infuriating. As it is Fairfax sat on this story all day on Friday, allowing Swan's distraction tactic to fill the news, thereby protecting Kev from unnecessary embarrassment of having this story actually, you know reported. And Fairfax still ended up spinning it late in the day with a weasilly AAP straddle.

Check out this peice of selective Fairfax news bias in its breaking story, ostensibly about the Labor PM getting caught in a lie to Parliament by testimony of a public servant to a Senate enquiry :

"Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull was accused of bullying one of Mr Rudd's
senior advisers earlier this week over the existence of the document.

The government released a file note from economic adviser Andrew Charlton on Friday, in which he alleged Mr Turnbull threatened him on Wednesday.
The opposition believes Mr Charlton wrote the document to Mr Grech.

"This whole OzCar issue will be very damaging for you," Mr Turnbull reportedly told Mr Charlton."Let me give you some friendly advice. You should not lie to protect your boss. You know and I know there is documentary evidence that you have lied." AAP

Why do these earlier diversionary allegations of bullying get referred to at all? We now know why Swan was so keen to point the press to something other than the real issue. It now looks like Turnbull was giving the PM's staffer a pretty prescient warning. But the gooses at AAP and Fairfax, just can't pass up on an opportunity to try to besmirch Turnbull, no matter how lame.

Persian democracy: the legacy of a despised US President?

2009-06-18T16:01:00.016+10:00

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Persians have seen their Iraqi and Lebanese neighbours get democracy. Now they want it too.

So who has dared to point out the elephant in the room about the current upheaval in Iran over its disputed election result ? Of all people its, Thomas Friedman in, of all places, the New York Times. Here's what he let slip:

"... for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

So even this feckless sanctimonious leftist from the New York Times echo chamber has been unable to deny that one of the central tenets of the despised "neo-conservative" (or should that read "neo-liberal", the new way that this outlook seems to be labelled) world view: that creating the conditions for democracy and freedom around the world was the West's best strategy for peace and continuing prosperity - is in fact playing out in Iran. Who'da thunk it eh?

There are any number of delicious ironies and contradictions at work here too. It is after all the Middle East. Obama and his information machine are currently confused by this and are not yet appropriating the ideological prizes. Not before they see the outcome anyway. That will happen soon enough. You only have to see the knots that his enablers are currently twisting themselves into as they try to parse this unexpected development to their advantage, without knowing what the immediate outcome will be. This is happening even as they try desperately to not be seen to be influencing the outcome. Oh the back sliding and somersaults we will see soon from the Obama administration if the Opposition forces in Iran achieve a new election or a re-count. Obama will then need to claim any such victory, as the fruit of his own actions: no doubt that speech of his in totalitarian Cairo.

I also should say early what the NYT's Middle East expert above forgot to say in his piece at all: Persians are not Arabs. Notwithstanding this, the larger geographic and aspirational points still hold about the force of the spontaneous march of freedom and democracy, once people are given realistic role models and the opportunity (in this instance the "social media").

I have previously not had much regard for Thomas Friedman. I first saw him interviewed by Tony Jones on the ABC's Lateline a few years ago. On the show, whilst being held out by Jones as some kind strategic policy wonk on the Middle East, he honestly proffered in public, when being asked his view about possible solutions to the Iranian nuclear threat to Europe and the West, the opinion something along the lines of: "Get America's best negotiators and stick them in a room with the Iranian Government's leaders, and not let them go home 'til they have struck a deal."

I was gobsmacked at the feckless naivety of this view, and even more amazed at the sycophantic praise that Jones ladled out to Friedman after he had expressed this piece of bar-stool bore bullshit as credible commentary on world affairs on national free-to-air television.

I am happy to to re-assess my view of Friedman , now that he has shown that he is at least honest and enquiring enough to acknowledge Bush's strategic contribution to the way things are currently unfolding in the Middle East.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting that this is all going to turn out rosy and nice anytime soon. But, as I heard the current heir of the former Shah say on tele the other night, the "genie is now out of the bottle". And it can't be put back, no matter how brutal the repressive crackdown by the mullahs supporting Ahmad-nedinejad may be.

My current ill-informed view is that the Iranian Mullahs will do a Tianamin Square job on the Iranian populace. That might keep 'em bottled up for a little while, but we now know the flame of freedom can stay alight even under the most extreme duress (Gulags anyone). Iran has tasted western decadence and freedom before, so this is a fire that is very unlikely to be snuffed out completely.

Am I also beginning to see here the first very tentative signs of a shift in attitude away from George W. Bush's vilification? I can remember the evolution in the attitude to Ronald Reagan in my life time. He went from being universally ridiculed by the world's media, and all self respecting undergraduates of my generation, as a bumbling dementia riddled former Hollywood actor, during and immediately after his Presidency, to being hailed in the nineties as the great and far-sighted architect of the West's victory over the USSR in the Cold War. Is this unlikely evolution in attitude soon due to start happening for W? Clearly not if the world's press has anything to do with it. Except that the early indications today are that their love affair with Obama may be starting to end. This could be a necessary precursor to the commencement of this evolution. It will be fascinating to see the how this does evolve over the next 10 years.

Accidental insurgencies

2009-06-10T11:26:00.009+10:00

No, this not more commentary on Joel's barely veiled accusation that his own Defence Department plotted his undoing.

At "Read More" below is my review of a recent book by David Kilcullen on counter-insurgency warfare: The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the midst of a Big One .

I recommend it highly to students of geo-politics and strategy. It's challenging, but does repay the effort.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
By David Kilcullen

Lt Col David Kilcullen, apparently rose to fame in the US whilst serving in the Australian Army, when his article “Twenty-Eight Articles: fundamentals of company-level counterinsurgency”, was published in the Military Review and read by General David Petraeus. Petraeus was so impressed he sent it by email to his officers in the US Army. Kilcullen was subsequently recruited by the General to serve with him in Iraq, helping implement the successful “Surge” strategy based around some of the principles he espouses. And it seems that the “Surge” may have salvaged that war for the US and the Iraqi people. Kilcullen is currently such a hot property that even our own ABC is prepared to entertain his views from time to time in interviews on its current affairs programs.

In this intriguing book he develops that article into a more detailed analysis and broadens its scope. It challenges us in a number ways: On one plane he is summarizing the current state of counter-insurgency doctrine, with an emphasis on recent developments, including his own contributions. This is mainly his insight into how, in certain theatres, warrior-like tribes people join insurgencies just for sake of the fight, not for the cause. These are his “accidental guerillas”. He makes some carefully thought through observations on how to minimize this phenomena, as part of his wider discussion of counter-insurgency tactics. On another plane he gives us a partial version of the story of his own journey to acquiring these important tactical and societal insights. His account of his time as a young officer serving with the Australian Army in the UN sponsored occupation of East Timor, was especially illuminating. He then attempts to synthesize the current state of his thinking with some tentative, yet commanding, strategic conclusions about terrorism and Western military objectives. It is a fascinating and enriching mixture.

On one view he might be seen to be elevating his acute tactical insights to strategic overstatement. However his self awareness and the intellectual courage he displays in so truly grappling with the intractable but crucial geo-political dangers we face, is an inspiration. He observes that much of the way geo-political issues are now defined is in the negative, i.e. by what things are not, rather than what they are, e.g. COUNTER insurgency, NON state combatants, etc. He suggests that this limits us and we now need sharper linguistic tools to navigate in this area. And by his analysis he shows us how to re-appropriate words that post modernist academia has discarded; words like freedom and civilization.

Kilcullen's book takes us to the actual places we need to go culturally to help ensure our freedoms do survive. Although challenging, this book needs to be read to properly inform our debates with the rigour and complexity that the ideas we fight for deserve.
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Joel is no longer our Defence Minister. Good.

2009-06-04T16:30:00.009+10:00

Just off the top of my head, in his short time in this senior Ministerial role this belligerent and unrepentant, but clearly politically well placed Hunter valley unionist, has:

failed to get the US to sell us any F22 Raptors notwithstanding his idle boasting that he could when opportunistically simply aping some spectacularly ill informed, politically motivated and superficial views of the ABC's 4Corners programme, about the capabilities of FA18 Superhornets that had been ordered by the Coalition before the last election;
inadverantly been caught by counter-intelligence spooks whilst Minister of Defence sleeping with a Chinese government sponsored business women ( his "very close family friend") ;
failed to disclose gifts to him from Chinese nationals, including paid visits to military shows in China with his father (from whom he inherited his seat in parliament) ;
obfuscated the future funding of proposed new Labor Defence projects so completely that defence industry experts are now unable to realistically cost his ludicrous Defence White Paper big toy fantasies;
spent millions of taxpayers funds investigating his own Department for allegedly spying on him;
overlooked that his hotel accommodation in Brisbane whilst a minister was paid for by an insurance company run by his brother; and
permitted military officers and department officials to meet with his brother to discuss business opportunities with Defence in Joel's own Canberra office;

Good riddance. Fitzgibbon junior was a disgrace to federal ministerial office and potentially compromised our national security. He was way out of his depth in such an important portfolio. His resignation will not be mourned by his Department, whatever some Labor lackey at the Australian Defence Association quoted by AAP might say.

How does an honest person reconcile the statement of the Prime Minister that Joel's resignation was of Joel's own volition, with Joel's statement that he does not feel he has done anything wrong? Kerry O'Brien at the ABC didn't even seem to think that this glaring contradiction needed to be addressed by the PM and, unsurprisingly, as usual it didn't even occur to Phil Coorey in the SMH to explore something that might end up reflecting badly on his Labor mates. It just goes to show yet again how love can make you blind. But why are these pundits ceded any credibility when they fail to do their job as journalists in holding a government to account?

But who will get this much coveted gig now? Greg Combet or will Kev give it to one of the other girls?

The "Third Way" leads to purgatory

2009-06-04T10:38:00.004+10:00

Warning: The current state of the UK is where feel good populist politics built on "clever" media management, rather than "good" policy, takes a nation.

Brown looks like he will imminently be just a short skidmark on the surface of the body politic of Britain: a Prime Minister who not only never had an electoral mandate, but who never even led his party into an election at all. After 12 years of New Labour cleverness, Britain is a complete mess economically and culturally. Character matters. If politics becomes only about winning by appeasing the noisest special interest pleaders and serviceing the appetites of the parasites on power, the body politic loses. Leadership really is about taking tough decisions in the nation's interest. If courage becomes a dirty word in politics then the nation those politics serve becomes cowardly.

What chance the opinion leaders who will get published in the mainstream Australian and US media will even acknowledge this salutory lesson in the midst of their current passionate embrace of Kev and the Obama One? Buckley's.

We are destined under this current batch of over confident intellectually bankrupt leftists to go down the same path, to the same amorphous amoral yet sanctimonious, economically stagnant pit that the UK has shown us that clever post modern progressive politics inevitably takes us.

Get governments out of the way. Whilst governments have their uses they are limited: a social security safety net for the vulnerable, security of the nation, developing targeted transport and communications infrastructure, and fostering trade. Other than for this public servants and public funded projects simply suck wealth out of the community, leaving it poorer and less resilient. Good governing isn't about the grandness of schemes for the community. It's about getting out of the way of communities self organising to acheive their self defined objectives.

More smart people in our society need to step up a notch in their meta-context perceptions of their roles and contributions and recognise that their aspirations for taxpayer funded pet projests are most likely detrimental to the common good, no matter how much those projects are loved. Let them self fund. Let them find mechanisms to foster risk capital for private projects. Let them communicate and persuade with performance and inspiration.

Labor backflip again - Conroy confirms he's out of his depth

2009-05-28T15:10:00.020+10:00

For anyone following the story of Labor's policy assault on Internet freedom this development constitutes yet another remarkable backdown by Communications Minister Stephen and Kev Labor :

ABC News, 31 December 2007:

Conroy announces mandatory Internet filters .

The Australian, 26 May 2009:

Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory Internet filtering plan

Along the journey between these two opposing positions Minister Stephen has vociferously lambasted critics of his proposed intrusive mandatory censorship of ISPs, calling them alarmists and even suggesting that their position was tantamount to encouraging and enabling child porn.

Minister Stephen surely deserves to have these criticisms of the opponents of his mandatory censorship regime thrown back in his face, now that he has moved to the position they advocated. Although it's what Stephen deserves, for being so dismissive of legitimate concerns, it's probably better for all of us that this not happen; at least not yet, because we need the Federal Communications Minister to take his more sensible new position forward. Industry observers will surely continue to follow developments . They intuitively understand that if Labor can back flip once on this, then it means they are jelly backed enough to flip again, if they sniff another wind shift. Minister Stephen needs to be closely watched, if he's to be kept honest.

He was clearly above his pay grade trying to implement even this comparatively minor logistic catastrophe of a Labor policy. Can this augur well for Stephen's ability to provide the stewardship necessary to implement Labor's spectacularly over-ambitious plan to roll out optical fibre Internet broadband cable to 90% of all Australian homes within 6 or 7 years? It wasn't looking plausible when they first trumpeted this in March 2009. And it just keeps looking more implausible with time. But that's unlikely to stop Labor re-announcing this again and again in the coming months and years. It might just dawn on the electorate that they have been sold yet another pup by these leftist fantasists in about 3 years time. Long enough for them to get re-elected, and that's all that matters.

And they still haven't told us just where are they going to find the $48 billion for this fantastic boondoggle in this market? Neither Federal Treasurer Wayne and nor his pinch hitter when cornered, Treasury Secretary Ken, a servant of the public, enlightened the public about this in their fake "tough budget" in May. Is a budget "tough" when the minicule spending cuts were to the unrepresented: the youth allowance and those not yet in existence: people becoming pensioners in 2020. Such courage Wayne. And even then Labor's attempts to rein in the supposed tax rort of "employee share plans", only proved that these Labor geniuses know nada about either the private sector workplace or wealth creation. So what is it that they are good for again? Oh, I forgot, increasing public sector employment. Great. And remind me just how does that help turnaround the economy again?

And right up there with all this flip flopping is Labor Defence Minister Joel's spectacularly over-ambitious announcement last month in the midst of the GFC, of a new Labor plan to build 12 new submarines and 8 new frigates for the Navy. Yeah, right Joel. That's about as likely to happen as your earlier announcement that you were going to persuade the US to sell us F22 Raptor stealth fighters instead of those terrible FA18 SuperHornets that 4Corners reckoned a month before the Federal election were lemons. Remind me again how believing the ABC on that played out for you Joel. About as well I suppose as your ministerially weighty decision not to comply with you obligation to disclose gifts of numerous trips to China for you and you family funded by a Chinese national. I guess that's OK for you though, becasue that'd be about the standard that you've been expected to meet to date from your extensive experience in the Union movement. And we voters shouldn't expect a Labor Defence Minister to be able to recognise that there might be strategic implications in such trival guff.

And now even the Herald has started to publish doubts about Joel's defence White Paper dreams. And the Fairfax media has been giving Labor a free pass on just about everything theyve announced up 'til now. Wow.

But this is just more classic Labor magic pudding politics. They have already become world class specialists at this at State government level, especially in New South Wales and in the land where Kev learnt his manipulative dark arts, Queensland. They just keep announcing new stuff regardless of the government's ability to pay for it or implement it. Great politics I'm sure. But what does it do for the citizens whom these governments exist to serve, when these projects fail to materialise? Just ask the voters in New South Wales at the moment.

Labor buggers it up, yet again.

2009-05-25T15:52:00.013+10:00

.
That's a headline which Fairfax publications seem unable to use no matter how severe the provocation from incompetent Labor Governments around Australia for any length of time . They have never found cause to say that, or anything remotely like it, even once about the fantastically incompetent 12 year old "New" Labour government in the UK. We have wall to wall Labor governments in Australia, other than in WA, with equally spectacular levels of incompetence, as Gordon Brown, yet will Fairfax seriously hold any of these Labor governments to account?

Let's look briefly at some of the items available just from today's online news services that could easily justify such a banner headline:

SMH 25/5/09: Labor PM Rudd interferes personally in diplomatic appointments, preventing important international postings being filled for extended periods.

SMH 25/5/09: Labor PM Rudd engages in publicity stunts to fool the electorate into believing he is doing something useful.

The Australian 25/5/09: Labor Government accused yesterday of "shamefully implementing a discriminatory policy''

Daily Telegraph 25/5/09: Thousands of ordinary families have lost their jobs and their homes under the Labor Government as the recession begins to bite.

Australian 25/5/09: Labor PM Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan have been criticised for avoiding the use of "billion'' .

SMH 25/5/09: Labor politicises the office of Governor General with lobbying for UN Security Council seat.

SMH 25/5/09: NSW Labor announces with yet another half-baked rail project and it again conflicts with its previous rail infrstructure announcement.

The Australian 25/5/09: Unions demand Labor PM Rudd dump his plan to lift the pension eligibility age .

Courier Mail 25/5/09: Senior Queensland Labor MP has doled out taxpayer cash to family and friends.

Herald Sun 25/5/09: Victorian Labor Government preside over waiting lists for public housing of 36,000 needy Victorian families.

There are just 10 articles I have selected and linked in the last 20 minutes from today's press. Each is consistent with a meta news analysis that Labor is currently incompetent at governing the Nation. Labor holds office in 7 of the 8 provincial governments and is in power at the Federal Government level.

So what are the opinion pieces in the Fairfax press about today? Government incompetence ? No that would be reporters doing their job. No they've decided that the story of the day for comment is the Federal Opposition. And not because of anything that's like actually happened or anything. It' s just about what Fairfax would like the Opposition to be doing, you know, supporting the Government, just like Fairfax does. They truly are that arrogant.

Phil Coorey, the official Kevin Rudd publicist and apologist at the SMH, has a go at the Opposition Family Affairs spokesman, Tony Abbott for being a troglodite and not helping Turnbull on climate policy issues. Michelle Gratton gives Opposition Leader Turnbull some sternly worded and quite direct Fairfax advice on how he should configure the Opposition carbon emission policy. And for free too (no agenda there of course). And today's lead SMH Editorial preaches: "As it struggles to resolve deep internal divisions, the Liberal Party risks short-changing Australia as it attempts to delay the scheme for narrow political ends."

It is fair to ask just whose narrow political ends the SMH is seeking to promote by taking such a shallow partisan position on such a spectacularly complex and difficult policy issue. This is especially so when the only real urgency in this lies with the perception of political credibility for the Australian Labor Party's in defending its premature, reckless and highly compromised ETS regime, for the sole purpose of jockeying for cheap and unimportant moral high ground at a UN climate talkfest later this year in Copenhagen. The world is in a financial crisis and a deep recession. The accelerated introduction of massive micro-economic cost increases on Australian industry during such an economic slowdown is not stimulative to our economy, no matter how much the SMH's editorial board might wish it were so. Imposing tax or permit burdens on industry will slow any recovery. To suggest otherwise, as the SMH seems to, is a spectacular denial of economic reality.

The SMH's level of economic ignorance is so profound that they are even prepared to use the analogy in their Leader today of the success of tarriff reductions in the eighties as a reason to embrace the imposing of a brand new form of carbon emmission tarriff on our industries now. Go figure how these intellectual giants justified to each other that piece of rhetorical lunacy in their group think editorial committee room.

Love makes you blind. And the Fairfax press loves Labor. But they love believing that they have a moral mission to stop Global Warming even more. I bet you didn't know that the floods in Northern New South Wales this past week, and the bush fires in Victoria and the drought on the Monaro (but not the filling of Lake Eyre) were all caused by Australia not having an ETS. Well that's how the SMH editorial would have it today. How could any honest and engaged thinker trying to make sense of this complex issue be expected to take such outrageously inflammatory and wildly inaccurate statements seriously?

Truly the Fairfax press now sees itself as having a sacred duty to carry water for the Labor Party cause and its own self appointed passion for the cause of government meddling in private wealth generation. It no longer has any sense that it has a responsibility to hold Governments of the day to account whatever their political stripe. Its now sees its role is to prevent the Australian Labor Party getting any bad press it thinks it does not deserve by diverting its readers attention to the non-problems of the non-government parties.

The Fairfax press has become ethically bankrupt because it has found a moral mission for itself. It believes that because it has the higher moral purpose of preventing runaway global warming from greenhouse gas build up in the Earth's atmosphere, it can sacrifice any role it may have had in being a fair conduit for information and a forum for balanced debate in a democracy. It now seems to have unapologetically adopted a partisan political agenda and no longer sees itself as having any other societal responsibility than its over-riding mission.

Curiously when confronted with this proposition Fairfax denies it. Their journalists now behave like the slimy politicians with a cause that they themselves have become: never concede an obvious adverse point lest it weaken your political advantage. Fairfax has effectively become Labor's Pravda. It now seems impossible to hope that someone in that organisation can show the leadership and moral integrity to give them back their sense of ethical duty to perform their role as an independent fourth estate, not some ardent promulgator of their personal belief systems. At present that would be just too un-cool for the de rigueur intellectually hip post-modern urban cat posture that Fairfax staffers must adopt: everyone believes in AGW you know, no one could comfortably work at Fairfax if they openly held a sceptical position on this.

And meanwhile the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is even worse. Taxpayers pay to be fed a constant diet of its pro-Labor and pro global-warming morality propaganda. But my beefs about Tony Jones' blatantly unfair treatment of Opposition politicians, Kerry O'Brien's outrageously soft ball treatment of Labor Government ministers, and the ABC newsroom's permanent selection bias in choosing news stories favourable to Labor and negative to the Opposition whereever possible will, mercifully for you, have to wait for another day.

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UK names and shames the people to hate ......... Isn't it breaching of its own "hate crime" laws?

2009-05-06T18:12:00.027+10:00

The UK Home Office yesterday released a press release :

"Home Office name hate promoters excluded from the UK

5 May 2009

Individuals banned from the UK for stirring-up hatred have been named and shamed for the first time, the Home Secretary announced today.

The list covers people excluded from the United Kingdom for fostering extremism or hatred between October 2008 and March 2009.

It follows the Home Secretary’s introduction of new measures against such individuals last year, including creating a presumption in favour of exclusion in respect of all those who have engaged in spreading hate. ...

...In the period from 28 October 2008 to 31 March 2009 the Home Secretary excluded a total of 22 individuals from coming to the United Kingdom. ...16 individuals are: ...

... Michael Savage
Controversial daily radio host. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.

The tougher exclusions policy follows the Prime Minister’s commitment in the National Security Strategy to take 'stronger action against those we suspect of stirring up tensions' and the Home Secretary’s decision to introduce a presumption in favour of exclusion for extremists promoting hatred or violence. Under the new policy we are preventing more promoters of hate from coming to the UK than ever before, with more than five being excluded a month as opposed to two a month under the previous policy.

Just how an American radio host who broadcasts only in the USA can be suspected "of stirring up tensions" in the UK is not disclosed. This is even more perplexing now that Mr Savage has indicated that he hasn't been to the UK for 25 years and has no current intention to visit. Who is it in Britain that "considers" Michael Savage is "engaging in unacceptable behaviour"? What serious criminal acts is he alleged to be provoking ? Which communities in the UK might be led to violence by this alleged behaviour in the USA ?

It seems that this new British government policy is that anyone anywhere in the world who comes to the Home Office's attention and who it believes are "engaging in unacceptable behavavior" will be banned from entering the UK, whether they want to go the UK or not.

Heh! Home Office! There is an old grey haired codger who wears Khaki shorts and a shearer's singlet in the pub at Woolgoolga who loudly proclaims to all and sundry nearly every day, that all Scientologists should be shot on sight once they identify themselves as Scientologists. That sounds like the kind of stuff you're trying to name and shame in your press release. Such pronoucements could afterall provoke violence in the Scientology community in the UK if they knew about it and he entered your country. If you want to add his name to your list, you could send one of your public servants on much coverted taxpayer funded trip to New South Wales. The pub in questions is about a 45 minute drive north of Coffs Harbour on the North Coast. The guy you're looking for sits on a bar stool in the left hand corner of the main bar after midday every day except Sunday. You could be doing your country a service banning him from going there, although Idon't believe he's planning a trip there any time soon. But I guess you can't be too careful.

I don't know Micheal Savage and have never listened to his radio programme, and I am most unlikely ever to do so. I live in New South Wales, not the USA, and in any event it seems highly unlikely that he would play the kind of classical music I listen to on radio. Furthermore if he is the typical "shock jock" of stereotypical fame who loudly expresses robust and prejudical opinions about his fellow human beings, then I can do without him, like I do with the ones of that ilk from round here. But banning him from entering the UK?

What could he possibly have said on his radio prgramme that warrants this kind of totalitarian treatment? Did he call Nelson Mandela an ignorant and immoral house boy? Did be say autistic children needed nothing more than a good clip behind the ears? Did he tell people that voting for Obama was tantamount to electing Joe Stalin? Did he express hatered and contempt for some people who espouse a rigorous and provocative form of religious fundamentalism? And even if he has said something even worse than this on a radio programme in America, why would the UK authorities care about him entering the UK. No-one knows him. No-one has heard of him and no-one listens to him in the UK. Why does a government need to do this.

[ I know. I know. It's really just a politcally clever magician's mis-direction feint, so that people will not be able to say that all the people on the list are arabs or non-whites. But does such political convenience really justify a totalitarian assault on free speech? If you and your party think so, fine, but you can hardly justifiably complain when people call you unprincipled or dishonest.]

most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l'esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire. Her interpretation does capture the spirit of Voltaire’s attitude towards Helvetius; it had been said Hall's summary was inspired by a quotation found in a 1770 Voltaire letter to an Abbot le Roche, in which he was reported to have said, “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”[10]

The UK Government has lost its moral compass. I have accordingly sent the following completely futile email to the UK Home Office in protest:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith MP,
Palace of Westminster,
London W1
United Kingdom

Dear Secretary,

The West fought and won two world wars and a cold war last century at an incalculable cost in human suffering, defending the idea of freedom of speech. By your totalitarian actions in banning foreigners who you disagree with from entering the UK, you desecrate the memory of the millions of all nations who lost their lives in that long fight against totalitarianism.
Britain once led the world in understanding the civilisational value of human freedom. No longer. Under the Brown Labour Government the UK has become the first developed world democracy in peacetime to ban from its shores people who it disagrees with because their mere opinions are deemed a threat.

By your multiple dictats this year, first allowing an Opposition MP to be arrested by police inside Westminster, then banning a Dutch filmmaker and now a US radio host from coming to the UK, you have demonstrated for the world to see the profound failings of the Westminster parliamentary system. When those with a majority in the House of Commons use that power to ban from entering the UK those who have said or published expressions of opinion that they disagree with, on the grounds that those people might provoke violence, the UK government demonstrates it no longer defends or values freedom of speech.

If there was in fact a risk that words or images that these individuals have published elsewhere in the past, might provoke people in the UK to commit acts of violence when these individuals enter the UK, then a Government that valued freedom of speech would defend those individuals and their right to express their views before and after, not defend those inside the UK who would react violently to the mere presence of these individuals in the UK.

Your decision to ban Mr Michael Savage from entering the UK because of non-violent political views he has expressed on radio in the USA, is shameful and wrong. By making this misguided decision repressing free speech in the UK you have dishonoured the reputation and credibility of the Government of the UK and its people in the eyes of the world.

Yours sincerely

Bob Goldie
Sydney, Australia "

The email address I sent it to is as follows: public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Is it only me that is completely bewildered that all the promoters of anti-hate speech laws don't seem to have enough perception or interest in this issue to see that such laws themselves promote hate?

House of Fog and Sand

2009-04-24T12:43:00.009+10:00

Ben Kingsley's best ever screen acting performance. It enters the Realm's top 20 movie list. But who has heard of it?

Last night I watched for the first time this 2003 movie with the above singularly uninspiring name. A debut by director Vadim Perelman.

It is an unheralded masterpiece of Shakespearean stature. Ben Kingsley's performance as an immigrant refugee to the US from post-Shah Iran is as fine a screen acting performance as I've ever seen by anyone, anytime. And Jennifer Connelly's nuanced and edgy rendition of her flawed character was revelatory.

I have since briefly Googled, Wikipeed and Amazoned it, discovering it is based on a book by an Andre Dubus III. The Amazon book reviews are mixed.

Surprisingly the brief reviews of the movie I've seen also seem mixed. Some even suggest this movie lacks believability. They must live in some cossetted urban Westernised material uberworld in which the type of espresso they order is a defining existential choice. Do these post-modern latte sipping would-be cineastes not have human fibre enough to feel the palpable exhilaration, when, after suspending disbelief and daring to plunge into the void, a creator weaves a path for you through the seductions of relativism and beyond the barbarism of nihilism, to a fleeting moment of clarity that is participation in the triumph of humanity through art?

I am astonished that anyone with feeling and insight into the human condition could not be moved by so credible a use of a trivial clerical error as a fulcrum for epically realised human tragedy. Or could it be that such superficial dismissal of far reaching aspiration for meaning, is the chosen de rigure posture of a "post-modern" intellectual ?

The almost flawless execution of this archetypal ancient Greek drama in the atmospheric yet banal and menacing bureaucratic pettiness of Bay area California in the nineties, is an object lesson in how modern cinema can be truly great. If only more contemporary filmmakers could so deftly tap into the deeply nourishing wellspring of our civilizational heritage in literature and art, we might see many more such masterpieces. Sadly these are quite rare. As it is, the shallow cinematic emotional tricks of the thriller and horror movie genres of Hollywood dominate the style and direction or far too many modern fictional screen dramas. They leave us unsatisfied; non-replete. Good art well realised does not do leave us in such a state. And this movie was genuinely cathartic in its treatment of a modern suburban tragedy. Shakespeare would have envied the director the use of this magnificent medium to render such grand themes and he would not have been disappointed in its execution.

I can not recommend this movie highly enough to lovers of art, literature and cinema. It's entered the Threalm Realm's self coveted top 20 movies of all time. It is better than "Slumdog", and almost as good as "Crash". But why is it that so many of these modern cinematic masterpieces have such awful titles?

Right: wrong. Left: right.

2009-04-16T09:55:00.018+10:00

POST MODERN POLITICS : THE NEW RULES.

Fantasy rules because fantasists have the power to declare their fantasy true.

Truth is whatever the powerful choose it to be. The new Truths are:

All government spending promotes economic growth; and
Humans are causing our climate to change for the worse.

Anyone who looks for a different truth outside the current cultural zeitgeist is now the fantacist. Afterall post-modernism decrees; truth is the just the prevailing fantasy.

GET WITH THE PROGRAMME: THE LEFT RULE

The Left say government spending is good for us and that humans cause climate to change for the worse. Those who say otherwise are deniers of the Truth.

Resistance is futile.

You simply adopt your team's position on policy. Only idiots or fantacists argue for Truth. The Truth is what we receive from those who we make powerful.

It seems as if most of us are allocated a political team to support at birth or we choose a team in early adulthood, and that's it for life. You're either Left or Right. You're either for the team that reflexively goes with the idea that government is a powerful problem solver that can and should spend the money it prints or appropriates on causes it deems good, or you're with the team that instinctively thinks that government is only of limited benefit to humans even if it is a necessary element in the mix to help humans themselves solve problems and create wealth. (Justice v Freedom)

Whatever we actually think about the truth of an issue from then on, is of limited importance, unless the case for a truth is so good that it trumps the seductiveness of the perceptions in the public of the justice of the case. Freedom is quite vunerable in this process, although it is the true emancipator and wealth generator. Although freedom can trump truth, it only does so for those who believe in freedom. So because the "justice" tea, the Left, is now in the ascendancy the capacity of the "freedom" team to asset itself over the "truths" asserted by the Left is weakened.

The battle between the Left, the party of Justice, and the Right, the party of Freedom, is a battle for the Truth. The Right can only defeat the Left when it can demonstrate that Freedom is more valuable to humans than the mutable Truths asserted by the Left's perceptions of Justice.

And as the game is currrently played, if the team you are identified with has a position on the issue, then that is your position too.

Surprisingly this isn't seen to be bad by most people. They implicitly get it, because its just like the continuous popularity contest that they have experienced all their lives in school yards, supermarkets, work places, fashion magazines, media screens and entertainment events. If one team rules, they get to say what's true. That's just what happens on reality television, on desert islands and in the local netball/surf/soccer/bike club. So it must be so. Why resist the inevitable?
It's just so. An all new popular, friendly form of modern barbarism. Civilization and the seach for true meaning is so yesterday. Truth is just the thing that everyone agrees at the moment is the in thing.

There's just no room rational discourse on any policy issues now that this system prevails. Most of us were brought up in the old fashioned out moded belief that political leadership and media commentary was about striving to seek the best solutions for the whole polity. We all had a quaint notion that we had mutually interdependent roles to play in informing ourselves of the facts and distilling the truth, so we could make the best political and cultural choices for our communities in a democratic society. Not anymore. That's bunk. All that matters now for the enlightended post modern is which team is winning.

Even if the mainstream media always and inevitably muddled it up in the past by having biases, predilections and preferences, they still at least tried to play fair or tried to be seen to play fair, because they recognised that there was a more important context than their own beliefs, the desire to get it right for the community and for the democratic process to work for the good.

What seems to have happened is that because the cultural geniuses and marketing gurus of the Twentieth Century discovered that all truth can be characterised as relative not absolute, therefore the pursuit of truth is itself pointless. This then easily translated into the related belief that it was no longer necessary to even play lip service to the notion that you needed to play fair, because that too was a relative concept, and who was to say where the balance should fall.

So the media no longer sees it even has to try to play fair. It can indulge itself in its own proclivities with moral impunity. We live in a world fiercely and arbitrarily polarised over serious policy issues that are hard to even comprehend (GFC, AGW, NBN) , let alone to have concluded and passionate political views about. But it doesn't matter anymore what the policy is, it only matters which team adopts it. If you suggest even that a chosen policy certainty has some credibility issues you can legitimately be characterised as an unbelieving trog.

So if one were suggest something relatively uncontroversial as little as 12 months ago, say, that government fiscal stimuli seems rarely if ever to have been successful in the past in boosting economic growth independent of the business cycle, even though this is based on a genuine, if peripatetic, search for truth in readings of economics, this would immediately be characterised as wrong, because it is not the prevailing left view. But it is not wrong because it is not right. That would involve an enquiry into the truth of the matter. And the truth does not matter in a post modern world. What matters is the power of the entity asserting the position. It is wrong because it is not Left. And the left rules.

So what does matter now more than ever is whose team you are on? If our team supports fiscal stimulus, unless you do too, then you are wrong. And what's more it's immoral to disagree with our team's position, because it means you don't support the poor and the unemployed who we say we are supporting with our fiscal stimulus policy. Any argument that capitalism and free markets have created most of the wealth to date, not governments, and that giving people access for their products to freely priced markets have lifted more people out of poverty in a shorter time than government commands ever has, is dismissed as self justificatory nonsense. Anyway, these Left geniuses say, it can easily be demonstrated this is untrue because US banks mis-priced the sub-prime housing mortgages that governments compelled them to give to the poor and underprivileged, and when the banks bundled and securitised those loans and sold them into global capital markets, there was an international credit collpase when the mispricing was discovered. And because only governments could bail those banks out to prevent an economic armageddon, now only governments can get the world back to prosperity.

And all we can now do is wait to see if the new truths of these neo-socialists of the Left, emboldened by the failures of their enemies from birth on the Right, are indeed true simply because they say they are. Will discougaging people from chosing to risk investing in their business by increasing the tax burden on them when that taxpaying sector is shrinking, create prosperity as the Left declare?

If they are wrong as seems inevitable, the road back will be longer, harder and more perilous becuase the debt burden that these leftists have saddled us with will be so much heavier. The only true hope lies in the recognition that the power of free markets to generate wealth is so strong that it can even overcome the gross stupidities of Leftists medlers with fantasies about their own truths.

But such is the power of the leftist fantasy that governments can deliver prosperity, notwithstanding the clear evidence to the contrary in the vast catastrophic socialist failures of the 2oth century, that this fight will have to be fought all over again in another generation. We seemto be hard wired as a species to continuously make this mistake, so powerful is the desire of ruling elites to meddle in and impede the wealth creating instincts of free people making free choices.

Key didn't stop Baabarians crashing gates

2009-04-07T09:45:00.024+10:00

Media implicated in stampede. Dispute over cause of injury.

3 News report from New Zealand that, at the controversial annual "Running of the Sheep" in Te Kuiti:

"a woman was bowled over by the marauding mob, her injuries no laughing matter. .."

The event co-organiser, John Fagan was reported in The Waikato Times as saying:

"We underestimated the crowd at the beginning of the sheep run and they (the crowd) kept coming in on the sheep and the opening kept getting smaller and smaller and just baulked them a bit."

However, in a developing controversy, he denied the 3 News suggestion that injuries were caused by the rampaging sheep:

A woman was also injured, but Mr Fagan denied reports it was the fault of the sheep. "A lady who was watching stood back, and caught her heel on something and fell backwards ... it wasn't as if she was caught in a stampede or anything."

It seems the catastrophe could have been precipitated by the media itself:

Mr Fagan said a photographer jumped out in front of the first lot of sheep, scaring them.
"Once you turn them, it's hard to get them going again ... we were in a fair bit of trouble out there."

And 3 News itself report that:

What started as a trickle rapidly became a flood, and with the barrier down Te Kuiti's Sheep Run began to look very much like its Spanish counterpart. ...A short distance away things were going from bad to worse. Musterers and the odd 3 News reporter tried to stem the flow, but the sheep were not for the turning. All semblance of order completely broke down, the sheep crossing the main road and the train tracks heading into the hills.

Could the media's intervention have been the trigger for this out-of-control stampede causing injury to the crowd? Was the photographer from the press? Is this another case of not just reporting news, but making the news?

Meanwhile TVNZ reported:

With thousands of ewes and a party atmosphere, Te Kuiti was the place to be. Even the head shepherd, or own PM John Key, couldn't miss the world's largest sheep run, making time to attend the event

But the PM's presence and the party atmosphere were apparently insufficient to prevent the ensuing affray.

Lid dip Tim Blair

STEPHEN CONROY, Minister of Communications, misuses power to spy on Australians who criticise his policy

2009-03-24T15:33:00.020+11:00

Stephen Conroy proves that the critics of his policy were right.
Rudd Labor Government mis-uses its power to scrutinise citizens on the Web

The Australian Commonweath Government is apparently trawling the web looking for sites that are critical of the Australian Labour Party's broadband policy and ISP based internet filtering interventions.

If this is so, Stephen Conroy is a dangerous and stupid man who should not be trusted with power. In his capacity as the Federal Minister for Communications he is authorising taxpayer dollars to be spent to check on Australian citizens who express criticisms of his Government's policies on the Internet and broadband infrastructure. By doing this Senator Conroy conclusively demonstrates his unfitness for office. Australia is still, just, a liberal democracy not a totalitarian dictatorship of the governing party. As a minister of the crown spending the taxpayers' compulsorily appropriated wealth he is behaving unethically and illegally to exercise his power and spend government money for party political purposes. Does Senator Conroy not get this?

Has he not read the Gulag Archipelago? Does he not know what peril lurks in exercising a Stalinist desire to use the instrument of government power to control and spy on citizens ? Is he trying to emulate the Ayatollahs in Iran?

Do Minister Conroy and his henchmen think such comparisons far fetched?

"Come on", I can hear him saying, "this is just little old me, Stevie Conroy, a harmless lisping Aussie bloke who represents the workers and who's just doing his job ".

That's a quasi Nuremberg defence Steve: "...just following orders".

So Stephen, please tell us, what justifies you using your power as a Minister of the Crown in the Rudd Labor Government to seek out and identify those in the Web who are critical of your policies? Do you keep a record of them? To what uses will you put this information? Who oversees your use of this power and the uses to which you put it? Will you punish these critics of your policy by either withholding the government's largess and licencing power or actively target these critics with taxation and propaganda (Update: Just like you disgracefully did unprovoked and sub judice to iiNet on Wednesday?)

Think about it Stephen. The very thing that civil libertarians feared about your intrusive use of Internet filtering to protect children: that it could be and would be extended to other improper intrusions into the privacy and freedom of citizens of Australia, has already come to pass.

You have said of them often that "of course the Internet filtering power would not be misused to intrude on citizens other than for the protection of children and security". Well you were wrong Stephen. You misled us. You have already mis-used that power.

You have demonstrated how easily that power can be corrupted. In the very process of arguing for implementation of an apparently limited intervention into freedom of speech and privacy of Australian Citizens to protect children from porn, you have let it morph into an egregious misuse for partisan political purposes. And you haven't even had the insight or wit to recognise your folly. Shit Stephen. You're a member of parliament. A Minister of the Crown. What could you been thinking when you allowed this self contradiction to occur in the midst of the policy process?

Can't you see it Minister Conroy? You have made a liar of yourself . By the very act of having your department's officers read this site, simply because I dislike all government intrusion into my affairs, but especially the unwarranted intrusions self righteous leftists in the ALP, and that I am prepared to say it, you visit here to check that I am not subversive.

Well Minister, I am subversive. I am subversive of your misuse of power for this purpose.

Stephen Conroy, you are a Stalinist. The Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications under Minister Conroy's direction has misused its power and unjustly, improperly and unnecessarily pried into my criticisms of his incompetent administration of the broadband roll out and Internet filtering.

All power to those who seek to further undermine your Stalinist intrusions. If I could I would publish your list of banned websites here to demonstrate how technologically inept your policy is and how free speech will not be silenced by bullies and ideologues like you and your Department officials.

Stephen Conroy, you are a technological cretin. Stephen Conroy, your censorship of the Internet unjustifiably erodes citizens freedoms and their internationally sanctioned human rights. Stephen Conroy your Internet filtering policy will not be effective in achieving its stated aims. The risks to our freedom inherent in your clumsy intervention into the Net can not be justified when that intervention does not provide our children with the illusory protective shield you claim for it.

Stephen Conroy you should resign as Minister of Communications for your manifest failure to understand the nature of the powers you exercise. You have grossly misused your power. An honourable person would resign rather than persist in this flagrant exploitation of governmental power to silence or intimidate critics. Or do you like your Dear Leader, share your political principles with socialists Robert Mugabe, Nicholas Ceaucesu and Chairman Mao?

FAQs on GHG emissions and lentils

2009-03-20T16:07:00.016+11:00

What our current crop of neo-socialist Dear Leaders really need right now is a good ol' Inter-planetary Poison Pollution Preliminary Prevention Plan ("IPPPPP")

As I understand it from dimly remembered high school chemistry classes (which I hated but did dutifully persist with), carbon dioxide is a colourless odourless life cycle gas that is essential for photosynthesis and plant growth. I'm told biology classes (which irresponsibly I did mostly skip) taught us that CO2 is emitted in the respiration process by mammals and reptiles. That is, we humans emit carbon dioxide each time we breath out (Who'da thunk it?). And these social democratic geniuses currently running what was formerly known as the free world, now want to tax this life cycle gas as a pollutant.

Frequently Avoided Questions (FAQs) on CO2 and IPPPPPs

Why do our dear Leaders want to tax CO2?
Mostly 'cos it seems to be getting hotter and experts think the world's climate is changing.

Doesn't climate always change?
Yes, but the experts think this change might be caused by humans producing too much carbon dioxide, unlike other climate changes, so we might be able to stop or slow the change if we stop or slow our global emissions of CO2 .

Is there a co-relation between carbon dioxide and changing climate?
Sort of. The world did emit a a rising level of carbon dioxide between 1975 and 1998 (23 years) and the world also got hotter during that period (though this is difficult to mearsure globally). So, in case this possible co-relation during that 23 year period means that increased carbon dioxide production and increased global temperatures are also causally related (ie. one causes the other, not the casual sort of relationship that is othewise being described here), we all had better reduce human emissions of carbon dioxide. Just in case. This is the "precautionary principle" at work. The "precautionary principle" is of course a 'Good Thing'.

Why is the precautionary principle a 'Good Thing'?
Because, as it name implies, it's inherently cautious and therefore not reckless or foolhardy, like doing nothing would be.

On the subject of co-relations, have you heard about the problems encountered recently with some financial modelling that adopted a Gaussian Copula statistical correlation formula to price securitised mortgage debts?
No, heard nothing about that. What's it got to do with the imminent climate catastrophe that the UN says humanity faces anyway? Stop changing the subject.

And global temperatures between 1999 and 2009, I don't recall that these years were too bad, global-temperature-increase-wise. Were they?
Well, global temperatures haven't actually gone up in the last 10 years.
That's only because of a natural phenomena called La Nina, which is an inter-relationship between ocean water temperature cycles and raincloud patterns. OK. Next question.

Has the world been emitting increasing amounts of CO2 between 1999 and 2009?
Haven't you been listening to James Hansen, Tim Flannery, Penny Wong, Ross Garnaut and the Nobel Peace Prize laureats: Albert Gore Junior of Tennessee and the IPCC?
Of course we have been increasing our emissions of CO2. In record amounts! It still just keeps getting worse every year. A new coal fired power station is being commissioned every week. And still reckless ignorant genocidal Western Governments persist in dragging their feet, rather then get with the CO2 reduction programme.

What about global temperatures prior to 1975?
Well, yes in the 28 years between 1946 and 1974, the post-war economic boom, global temperatures did steadily drop even though carbon dioxide emissions were increasing, but that's because the temperature effects of the increased emissions of carbon dioxide during that time were masked by the dimming effects of particulates in the atmosphere produced by polluting factories. This was called "global dimming".

What happened to global dimming?
It stopped you dim wit. The world solved that pollution problem in 1975 with regulations and prosecutions and education and an all new non-littering civic pride. So the effects of increased carbon dioxide could then begin to be seen as the global temperatures resumed their inexorable rise...

What about prior to 1945?
Well global temperatures have been going up and down over geological time frames for ever, so let's not keep going there because there are some confusing things, like the medieval warm period , that are too difficult to explain here (you see it was only in the Northern Hemisphere). There is also that very eloquent graph that Albert Gore Junior of Tennessee, USA showed to us all in his popular and convenient movie, which demonstrated incontrovertibly that carbon dioxide build up follows build ups in temperature, not the other way round. ( I know. I know. It's confusing for me too.)

Will not higher temperatures mean that cold places will become warmer and more arable land will be released for human use, and create better conditions for plant growth?
Yes, but the ocean levels will also rise from ice melts which will inundate the lowlands and there will be more fierce hurricanes and cyclones and pestilence and raging infernos will be inflicted upon the earth as the inexorable rise in carbon dioxide consumes the planet. Even a United Nations agency has said all this. So we must listen.

Haven't bad weather events happened since at least biblical times?
Yeah, but not as badly as we can conceive from our computer models of the future climate of the earth. And these are United Nations computer models too, you know, with blue helmets.

Can humans adapt over time to living in on a hotter planet like we have in the past, if we can't stop the current rising global temperature?
Yes, but because we don't actually know how fast the change will happen, and what all the consequences of it will be, it is possible that any adaptions that occur will be very expensive, life threatening and chaotic.

So what can we do to stop all this horrible catastrophic future climate modelling?
That's easy. All we need to do is for all of us to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide.

Will reducing our CO2 emissions stop the impending climate catastrophe?
Not necessarily. See even if the whole world reduces its carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 (you know by converting to nuclear energy and killing all carbon dioxide emitting creatures), we will already have passed the tipping point of runaway climate catastrophe from the past build up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere anyway. And the only ones we will have to blame for this catastrophe are ourselves. For not having done more now, today, to stop carbon dioxide emissions, that are irreparably harming the Earth. So just stop emitting CO2 OK

Excuse me. Could that have been the lentils from lunch?
For shame! Don't you know methane is a greenhouse gas too. Think of the planet. Just don't eat lentils anymore OK.

So we should all stop emitting carbon dioxide (and methane) so the computer models don't get a chance to be proven right ?
Yeah, that's right. The computers our United Nations experts use have shown the experts that unless we humans stop emitting carbon dioxide then only computers will be able to inhabit the earth in future. So the experts have told all the governments of all the nations of the Earth that we humans should all stop emitting carbon dioxide.

The UN's computer models are clear:

Humans must either stop emitting CO2 now, or in future they will no longer be able to breath.

I finally get it.
Arthur C. Clarke got it right in "2001 -A Space Odyssey".
HAL is watching us.

Spooky eh?

Obama Onanism

2009-03-18T14:44:00.014+11:00

Fiscal stimulus: relief, but no lasting satisfaction.
Its almost organic. No wonder greenies love it so.

But to what should we apply this alluring and organically onomatopoeic label: "Obama Onanism"?

Obama himself and his imitators*, with their simply massive self congratulatory stimuli ? or
The Obamanics, who continuously spill their seed into such an empty vessel?
or
both?

What is it about modern democracies that allows all these ethically challenged moral high ground clambering Dear Leaders: Barack, Brownie* and Kevin* ; to get away with inflicting these massive expiatations of debt funded spending on their electorates, without regard to the long term consequences. Why aren't they called for being the wankers that they are by the fourth estate ?

Why are journalists in the mainstream media not holding these social democratic governments to account for this spectacular irresponsibility? (Ed: It could be because they don't want to. They enabled these populists institutionally in their publications in the first place and then voted for them personally. It would be to admit they were both wrong and unprofessional to now be seen to challenge the newly imposed political orthodoxy they themselves help create).

Veronique de Rugy in Reasononline adds an interesting perspective in her recent article "Stimulating Ourselves to Death". She indicates:

"Take the New Deal. According to the economists Christina Romer—chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers—and David Romer, New Deal spending did not pull the economy out of recession. In a 1992 Journal of Economic History paper, the Romers examined the role that aggregate demand stimulus played in ending the Great Depression. They concluded: “A simple calculation indicates that nearly all of the observed recovery of the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was due to monetary expansion. Huge gold inflows in the mid- and late-1930s swelled the U.S. money stock and appear to have stimulated the economy by lowering real interest rates and encouraging investment spending and purchases of durable goods.”

In other words Obama's own economic advisers actually already know about the illusory benefits of fiscal stimulus. How then can they, with this certain knowledge, then indulge the USA in this onanistic orgy of government debt of such a staggeringly large magnitude that I have lost the ability to meaningfully comprehend the numbers anymore (how many noughts are there in a trillion again?).

So this huge descent into debt by western nations, not only looks spectacularly reckless. It is.

And the reason they seem to do this is so that they are seen to be doing something. Anything. It doesn't matter if it is poor policy provided it is electorally plausible. It's a weak version of their much favoured "precautionary principle". They do it "just in case" it will make a difference. It simply wouldn't do for a control freak to be seen to let the business cycle take its inevitable course to recovery. If you tamper with the natural business cycle process you inevitably muddy the causal connections and you cannot be held accountable because you can attribute the inevitable (if delayed) recovery to your interventions even though they did the most to prevent it occurring.

Remember these are the same folk who are even now simultaneously plotting potentially still greater impediments to whatever wealth generation might take place in future to pay off their spectacularly destructive and unnecessary debt. They have in place meticulously crafted vast legislative programmes to impose an even more recklessly improbable version of the "precautionary principle" on their nations: carbon taxes and carbon trading schemes.

I was going to launch into an anti AGW rant at this point, but you are saved. I am now going to do that in the next post. Since these economic illiterates currently running the free world seem not only to think expanding the government payroll is a valid form of economic stimulus, they also seem to have completely bought the ridiculous notion that creating vast regulatory make-work schemes for compliance officers and government officials to measure and tax industries' CO2 emissions, will create wealth, sustainable employment and bring us out of recession.

The lunatics truly are running the asylum. And at nearly the worst time imaginable.
.

Labor to fell old growth forests in Victoria

2009-02-24T12:33:00.008+11:00

ALP considers tree preservation adverse to people's housing needs

The Victorian State Government appears to be seriously considering the idea that it may not be in the best interests of Victorians to have their housing and development planning being determined by environmental activists and conservationists. The Age, the Victorian outpost of Fairfax Media's plantation of green left enabling sheltered workshops, reports today (lid dip to Tim Blair) that:

LAWS governing the clearing of native vegetation are under review as part of the Brumby Government's response to the bushfire crisis. ... Ideas have included transferring responsibility for managing native vegetation in areas zoned for housing from the Department of Sustainability and Environment to the Department of Planning and Community Development....About 2000 homes were destroyed in the bushfire disaster. "We need to make sure that they treat native vegetation differently in areas approved for building," ...

So maybe I wasn't completely barking up the wrong tree in my post last week where I fulminated about the reckless loss of life caused by bad strategic Government planning in semi-rural Victoria. But I could, as usual, be getting a little ahead of myself. This is politics we're talking about. And this is the Victorian ALP. So the words spoken are unlikely to translate into any substantive actions by the Government, only the customary populist cosmetic bromides for consumption by superficial or dishonest journalists, who seemingly have no capacity or desire to hold anyone with responsibility to account, when they share their master's political allegiance.
.

Vaclev Klaus -v- Santa Claus Kev

2009-02-24T10:33:00.022+11:00

The Great Recession Cage Match

Rudd's tactic:

Give out cash prizes to the grateful punters.

(Hope nobody notices that the cupboard is now bare)

Klaus' game plan:

Treat it like flu: let it go through.

(If you don't cure it, it takes 7 days. If you do, it takes a week)

Quick quiz:

Which of these is good management and which is good politics?

On 19 February 2009 Vaclev Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic (not to be confused with his predecessor, as I have done, Vaclev Havel), addressed the European Parliament (Lid dip to Eric Falkenstein). Here is the text of his speech.

In amongst the many gems in this magnificent speech, which touches on the excessive restrictions on freedom and the absence of true democracy in the European Union, there is this:

. ... the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy. Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again. This results in a constant rise in both the extent of government masterminding and constraining of spontaneity of the market processes. In recent months, this trend has been further reinforced by incorrect interpretation of the causes of the present economic and financial crisis, as if it was caused by free market, while in reality it is just the contrary – caused by political manipulation of the market. It is again necessary to point out to the historical experience of our part of Europe and to the lessons we learned from it..

This speech is a wonderful statement of the resilience of the ideas of human freedom from the would be shackles and derision of authorities, whether those authorities are"democratic", "doctrinal", "dictatorial" or "divine".

Compare Klaus' inspiring statement above with the recent miserable global pablums of the desperate one eyed Scottish demagogue running Westminster and Nic, his Parisian action man fashion accessory.

Why do smart, insightful and caring people continue to get sucked into big government's self important self destructive vortex of delusion? Do these political harpies, who are just pieces of flotsam on the tide of economic history, really believe they are in control of their economies and that they are not actually making things worse by imposing their current partisan version of a big government spending non-solution on the governed? All these power junkies apparently know for sure is: if they are not seen to be doing something, anything, then they will be blamed, no matter what happens. For them any action, and the bigger it is seen to be the better, is preferable than taking no action, in order to protect their own political hides. And this is so even if the action taken is counter-productive. Their sycophant enablers in the life style media and from the protected groves of academia, egg these governments on with active encouragement for them to dip still deeper into the bottomless well of other peoples' debt. And what was it that precipitated this downturn again?

What if, as seems likely, spending as little of taxpayers money as possible, is the path to causing the least damage to a nation? A government that stabilizes or reduces its debt going into a downturn, maintains essential infrastructure, encourages private investment and give business incentives to expand seems likley to be optimizing conditions for a turnaraound.

Any leader genuinely interested in prioritising the best outcomes for the people they have a responsibility for, and not just in the maintenance of their own access to power and popularity, can clearly see from history, that large scale taxpayer funded make-work programmes (bicycle paths anyone?) are not solutions at all, they in fact make the problem worse by increasing debt and discouraging personal initiative.

So for we Australians, compare Klaus' approach with our Kev's Santa Claus approach. Mr Rudd radically and precipitously alters the nation's budgetary settings in the space of 6 weeks from boasting about maintaining a surplus, to going into deep deficit. How does he do this? By giving every worker earning less than approx $80 grand p.a. a cheque from Treasury for $800 or so. He also gives grants to councils to build cycle paths (what is it with leftists and bicycles?) and to primary schools to build assembly halls, music studios and changing rooms. That'll sure stimulate domestic demand for a quarter or so Kev and workers, parents and retailers will think you are Santa (Heh Kev, seen the polls?). But what then?

If the recovery doesn't come for another year or so, can you do it all again without bankrupting the nation's treasury? But if you don't the voters might see that your profligate generosity had no lasting effect on the recession or jobs, whilst weakening Treasury's capacity to recover when the inevitable private sector driven economic turn around does arrive.

The bushfires and the meltdown

2009-02-13T12:12:00.011+11:00

Was it a case of missing the forest of fuel, for the love of trees; or
missing the fire of trees for the forest of global warming?

Either way all the spending and commitment of communities and government was worthless because their strategic decisions were wrong.

Out of the despair and grief from the ashes of these horrendous fires there may yet be some forgotten wisdom to be re-learned.

Over-indulgence in feel-good greenish solutions and an excessive tilt towards fashionable natural rather than human shaped landscape in habitats in semi-rural Victoria, has contributed significantly to the appallingly high loss of life and injury from Victoria's February bushfires.

A failure to heed the outcome of numerous previous enquiries after bushfire disasters throughout the 20th century, nearly all of which have recommended hazard and fuel reduction by regular hazard reduction burning in forests and the clearing of vegetation around settlements, has significantly contributed to the scale of this tragedy.

It seems local councils and state government departments have for a decade or so deliberately fostered and encouraged green enclaves as part of the housing development strategy for Melbourne's urban fringe and in semi-rural Victorian countryside. These deliberate strategies have actively discouraged human intervention in natural forests from regular hazard reduction fires and the clearing of vegetation near homes. They also have actively encouraged residents to retain and plant canopy trees around their dwellings. This has been done due to a preponderance of green leaning political decisions at local council and state government levels which have focused on ways that citizens can contribute in their own small way to the war against global warming from the build up of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, by living more sustainable lives, friendly to nature and the natural environment.

This self gratifying process has caused responsible people to lose perspective on real and immediate threats to human life in their communities. People have died as a consequence.

If communities do come to appreciate that they did partially lose sight of the actual threats to themselves from the immediacy of fire by concentrating too much on larger imagined threats from global warming, then the refocusing and re-contextualising of threats that result, can be for the common good.

In Australia we have world class rural fire fighting infrastructure and real commitment from local communities to bush fire fighting. This was not enough. It did not make a sufficient difference to prevent the loss of over 200 lives. It seems that no matter how much is spent and how committed the people are to fire fighting, it will not protect the communities they serve if strategic decisions about management of potential fire intensity from fuel sources are ignored. Good decision making in the interests of communities has to be smart and realistic if the resources committed to protecting communities from danger are to be effective.

There are lessons here in other spheres about perspective and priority setting. The allocation of taxpayer funds to varying fiscal stimulus projects and programmes, ostensibly done to reduce distress in communities from the drying up of credit and the erosion of confidence in making new investments during a recession, is clearly brought into focus by this line of thought.

It doesn't matter how much Government spends on new projects and injecting liquidity into the community if it doesn't change people's actual spending and investment outlook over time. Government has only a very limited ability to create or stimulate domestic demand in an economy. It is the governed not the governors who turn business cycles around. Government spending that does not actually change investment attitudes and business confidence in the governed, can only have short term effects. It is essentially just a waste of taxpayers money unless a turn around occurs before the effects of stimulus wears off. Who honestly thinks that there will be a turn around anywhere any time in the next 12 months, even with the massive pointless injections of taxpayer's money and borrowings by government?

Only spending that is believed in by citizens and has real long term effects has any economic justification. Otherwise its just buying shiny new trucks that cannot put out fires because the flames are too large. The community remains unprotected, but everyone is deeper in debt.

The taxpayer's money and resources spent in projects like bicycle paths and giving low income consumers cash entitlements, is like pouring water into sand. Water that could be otherwise be stored to help when the inferno rages. People are not going to change their spending decisions to take investment risks that build for the future based on a perception of one off injections of liquidity. One off spending by government on such things are seen by citizens straight away for what they are: short term, one-off, stop gaps. Except what happens if they don't straddle the gap to the next up turn in the business cycle? If the stimulus effects fall short of that, then they have had no effect in preventing the onset of a recession, and the recession just contiunes inexorable march through the economy. The community still feels the pain of the downturn as it waits for business confidence to return. This largely happens independently of government spending. We get the recession anyway and the polity is just deeper in debt as it enters it worse phases.

The current massive round of fiscal stimulus spending by governments seems like a spectacularly foolish act of short term desperation. It may make people believe that government is doing something, but it in fact all the government is doing is creating financial repayment obligations for the future, with no benefit beyond the moment in the present.

If the government were serious and truthful about getting us out or the recession it would cut taxes, not give handouts. With tax cuts citizens would have reason to believe that in years to come people will have more to spend on a product or service and therefore expenditure to capture some of that wealth can be justified on a risk/return basis. In net, people need to actually believe that there is a source of personable replicable expenditure in future to take investment risks. Boondoggles and make work projects do not do this. The New Deal was a spectacular failure in getting the US out of the Great Depression. That depression became the Great Depression. It lasted more than a decade in spite of the massive expenditures of the New Deal in the early 1930s. The world recovered only after a world war focused expenditure on things that people actually then believed in . . .

Why do these social democrats in the US, the UK and Australia think their species of fiscal stimulus will serve us any better than the failures of FDR's New Deal expenditure? It is like buying new fire engines and implementing new warning systems that do little if anything to prevent loss of life, because they miss the most important priority: the fuel in the forest. In this case the priority must be on turning around the hearts and minds of those making business investment decisions in the community. Not giving handouts to people with jobs, building bicycle paths and school toilet blocks. Worthy as such projects appear they are not likely to create the meaningful investment confidence necessary to put an economy back on the road to expansion and full employment.