handmadesbylorri
• 18 March 2010 - Fly me to the moon
Dunno about you but I've never liked flying. Never flew at all until I was 20 years old. Then had to fly fairly frequently on business, and now just occasionally on pleasure or for family crises. When I did I just wanted to be able to get to the airport in time to catch my plane, find parking, process my ticket quickly, get on the plane and grit my teeth and close my eyes until in the air, and then again when landing, hoping that there weren't any obstructions in the way. It wasn't a process of such great pleasure and joy that you would say to the family - "Come on, we need a treat, let's go out to the airport for the day, hang out." But in recent times people with an eye on the main chance and a large bank account have seen airport car park entrances as a place to station highwaymen, terminals as places to pack with shopping opportunities, and runways as just so much wasted space to pack with ever more shops and offices. And if, as a result of all this, the airport roads become so clogged with traffic you can't catch a flight, well then, tough luck, maybe the public will pay to build new roads.
A little while ago, an airport, not a million miles from Yass as the crow flies, announced its plans for massive expansion. More planes, bigger planes, round the clock planes; more retail development filling up every available piece of airport land not actually used by parked planes; more clogged roads, and parking that you need to mortgage your house to pay for. And the justification for all this? It would bring in, it was said, more than a billion dollars to the region.
Now call me cynical but I occasionally treat such claims with just a little bit of skepticism. Suggestions about untold riches, and job creation faster than pink batt production, are always trotted out whenever some group wants to make a few gadzillion dollars by destroying some chunk of the environment, or degrading some public amenity, or increasing pollution. The benefit to the spruiker is always obvious, the cost to the society always downplayed or entirely dismissed, the supposed financial benefits to the community always exaggerated.
So if someone tells you that some development is going to bring in one billion dollars to your region or town, ask yourself who gets that money - is it divided equally among the residents of the region? Of course not. So who actually gets it, and of what benefit is their getting it to the average member of the public? Does the money somehow stay in circulation around the development, or does it flow away in profit taking and payments to outside contractors? Is there a temporary boost to some local businesses while they supply temporary workers or is there a long-lasting increase in income? And when someone claims 3000 or even 300 "extra jobs" what does this mean? Temporary construction jobs (whether by local or external companies)? Some kind of arbitrary estimate of additional temporary employees supplying the project? And who does the accounting at the end to see what the actual long term financial or employment input to the community was? Anyone?
Conversely who accounts for community cost? Who measures traffic disruption and government-funded solutions, and extra costs to individuals in time and new charges, and reduction of amenities, and noise and chemical pollution, and loss of biodiversity, and government-funded repairs to damaged landscapes, and the effects of new big businesses on existing small ones?
So how do the benefits compare to the costs, and who gets the former and who pays the latter? It's a question we need to ask about every local development. It's a question we need to ask about the planet as a whole.
If you were playing poker for high stakes, and someone threw a promissory note for a billion dollars into the pot in order to make the opposing players fold their hands, would you go along with it or say "show me the money"? Far too often governments just go along with it, accepting whatever the handsome stranger who has ridden into town tells them. We need to start calling their bluff.
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• 16 March 2010 - Got to know when to hold em
The other day the NSW government announced, rather incredibly, that it was selling NSW Lotteries. Well, I shouldn't say incredibly, because nothing that the NSW government does should surprise anyone any more. But in the real world, outside Wonderland, the idea of selling the license to print money, sorry, lottery tickets, would be jealously guarded as a sure source of money for the state for as long as, well, as long as people want to gamble, or infinity, whichever is longer. But, there it was, up for sale, and snapped up (who would have thought?) by a private lottery company. A one off injection of cash to make the bottom line look a bit better, instead of regular income. But the new owners announced that they would be chasing increased profits. See NSW people haven't, apparently (who would have thought?), been gambling as much as those in other states. You would think, wouldn't you, that a NSW government would want to maintain this happy state of affairs, would want, perhaps, to even further reduce the bad effects that gambling has on individuals, families, societies. But no, by selling the lottery, the government ensured that an all out effort would be made to increase sales, the way a private company needs to do to increase profits. So there would be new "products", new promotional pushes to encourage people to lose more money, happily.
It is an example of a major defect in the capitalist system. All companies need to sell more and more product to increase profits and keep shareholders happy. Now that's fine when the product sold has a positive benefit to society, or at least not a negative one. But when the product is of negative social value, the more successful the company the less the community benefits. And indeed the more assiduous the company will be in ensuring that no government will be able to stop, or even curtail, its sales in the public interest. Gambling is an obvious example of this, but so is alcohol, and coal, and petrol, and electricity, and motorways, and forestry. Cigarettes were another classic example. The battle to reduce cigarette smoking in society was fought every step of the way by cigarette companies (using their political influence and using "think tanks" to produce "doubt" among politicians and public), and is still being fought as each minor change in warning notices, advertising restrictions, place of smoking restrictions and so on is resisted. And even as they were losing battle after battle, cigarette companies were shifting operations to poor countries in Africa and Asia, where, free of restriction and regulation, they could set about getting millions more potential customers addicted to nicotine.
In recent times we have seen the NSW government privatising motorways and then actually closing roads to force people on to the tollways because they had made a deal to ensure high profits to the motorway companies. A company relying on cars going through toll booths will do anything to prevent that flow of vehicles diminishing. The battle over privatising power stations in NSW was fought for a number of reasons. But the major one was that a private company selling power will be in the business of ensuring that power use is never reduced. What is energy efficiency for community good is decreased profit for company bad. In WA a few years ago an attempt to build a new power station based on natural gas, a marginally less polluting fuel than coal, was met with massive resistance by coal unions and the local Labor member, outraged that coal use would be reduced. John Howard won an election with significant help from Tasmanian forestry unions, outraged that the Labor party might try to protect some old growth forest. And so it goes. The hardest thing to teach a man, they say, is something his job depends on him not knowing.
And now the biggie. Continuing, and growing, profits to be made by producing ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the air with no concern about tomorrow. Attempts by government to switch to more efficient energy use, and sustainable energy sources may cause a temporary reduction in the growth of profits until the new energy economy is established. And so, just like cigarette smoking, the big companies have swung into action to create doubt and block political action. Even, among the more cynical, simultaneously denying there is a problem while pushing for massive funding and development of nuclear power and "clean coal" (think "clean cigarettes").
They are happy to gamble with our future. Are you? And are you willing to gamble more and more as time goes on?
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• 15 March 2010 - Atheists, walk this way
Going through airport security recently I was pulled up when the scanners spotted a can of shaving cream in my bag. Out of the queue, unpack bag, find shaving cream among all your other personal hygiene items as people keep a wary eye on you as a possible terrorist.
And I felt like saying - "Hey, I'm an atheist, I'm off to the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, atheists don't blow up planes or anything else."
And then, in my spot a money making venture a mile away (eye on being part of next year's Forbes list of excessively rich people) mode I thought - how about flights for atheists only? Special treatment, no need for scanning luggage and body and handing over phones and being embarrassed by shaving cream, just walk this way Mr Atheist sir. Flights could be cheaper without all that security, and certainly quicker.
I reckon a lot more atheists would come out of the closet too. Come forward to claim yet another benefit of living the superstition-free life.
And so, just as special benefits for non-smokers encourage the giving up of the filthy nicotine habit, so special benefits for atheists would encourage the giving up of the filthy religion habit.
And eventually (after hell freezes over) all of us could avoid the embarrassment and delay currently caused by the potential, at any time, for some religious person to go bat-shit crazy. |
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• 15 March 2010 - Our Gang
Remember when Butch Cassidy and Sundance, endlessly pursued by a gang of vigilantes, unable to shake them off, looked at each other and said, in wonderment, "Who are these guys?"
Feel the same way about the gang of vigilante know-nothings hunting down every post about climate change all over the world, endlessly coming back, no matter how many times partly shaken off, to repeat the same kinds of unscientific nonsense learnt from denier blogs. Endlessly attacking, both in public (libelling scientists) and in private (death threats and abuse), science, the crowning glory and achievement of western civilisation. Determined to destroy science and replace it with extreme right wing ideology and religion. Back to the Dark Ages but this time into a society run not by king and established church but by multinational corporation and fundamentalist church.
And they seem to have appeared from nowhere, these rabid naysayers.
If you had asked me, say ten years ago, how the world was going to respond to climate change and the absolutely imperative need to reduce greenhouse gas production, I would have responded somewhat pessimistically, knew that it was going to be a battle between science and vested interests, just like earlier battles over DDT, tobacco, CFCs, acid rain, asbestos, tree clearing, and on, and on. Whenever there are trillions of dollars (minimum $1 billion per day lost to oil industry if there is co-ordinated action to restrict the increase in global temperatures to 2ºC) at stake then the gloves come off. Donations will be made to political parties and individuals, lobbyists will set to work bending arms, right wing think tanks established with tame scientists willing to manufacture doubt, the Murdoch Press will open its opinion and news pages to outright denial, unions will be convinced that their natural allies are the bosses, scientific bodies will be silenced, opposition parties will buy votes by offering to do nothing. I could see all that coming to pass but I would not say that the struggle nought availeth. I thought that dispassionate and disinterested calm statements and restatements of scientific truths would eventually prevail over the forces of the energy company bottom line. But "Good, too, logic of course, but not in fine weather". And so the labour and the wounds were in vain, the enemy fainted not, nor faileth, "and as things have been, things remain".
What I hadn't counted on was the help that the vigilante know-nothings would give to the big corporations. Who could have known that, just as the battle was in the balance, a damned near run thing, red devils carrying pitchforks and pitch would come screaming over the hill on a Saturday night and destroy the representatives of five hundred years of scientific endeavour. That science's regimental colours, with images of Galileo, Newton, Arrhenius, and Einstein, would be trampled in the mud by striped uniform heathens with banners bearing the images of radio shock jocks and right wing bloggers and hereditary lords.
A number of us have tried to understand this phenomenon of the new dark ages, for example Clive Hamilton, John Quiggin, and myself, but all of us, not being football fans, have failed to really come to grips with that always lethal combination of hatred and ignorance seen on blog after blog about the reality and dangers of climate change. Having read the incredible number of vitriolic responses to Clive Hamilton's climate change series on Unleashed, and the positive applauding "you go girl" responses to Joanne Nova's Unleashed piece (in which the forces of light, the energy companies, desperately poverty stricken and outnumbered, are fighting the good fight against the forces of darkness, the green peril who have untold riches provided by governments), an LED light bulb suddenly lit up in my cerebellum. This was football. This was Manchester United supporters coming into Arsenal territory, or Collingwood and Essendon supporters outside the gates of the MCG. This was overweight and middle-aged men wearing no-longer-fitting-if-they-ever-did striped or red football jumpers, singing "We are the Champions", or "We'll do you on the train".
And each gang is led by the biggest meanest s.o.b. of all, the denialist bloggers. These are the leaders who start off the slogan chanting, lead the rush to the enemy, smash opposing leaders, put the boot into prone figures. This is the stuff of secret societies, our gang, outsiders, bogans, the rejected, the unpopular kids in school. They can be convinced that the Other (the elites, intelligentsia, government, scientists, authorities, people who look down on the unwashed hordes) is the enemy. And now comes payback time, hit back at those who you blame for your unsatisfied life. Show them who is really boss. Very powerful emotions. Used to motivate mobs since time began.
Have always been around, these people. I once met a chap over lunch. Normal conversation until he mentioned his large gun collection. Why so many, I asked. For when the Indonesians invade, he said. I began to go along with the joke, as you do, ho, ho, yes, they'll be charging through Alice Springs any day now, when something about his expression and silence made me realise he was deadly serious. Seems that is exactly what they would be doing and the Howard government had a secret agreement with them, like the Brisbane Line of WW2, to give them the top half of the country, he had read this in his conspiracy theory magazine (secret UFO research, fluoride poisoning our children). My lunch companion was ready to take to the hills and fight them.
The other day I met an at first apparently normal truck driver who said he was "cured" of blindness by the laying on of hands, and how all sickness was the result of not obeying the exact word of the Bible. Another fellow, met in a country pub, discovering that I was working on Aboriginal archaeology, told me proudly that they had "got rid of all the Abos in this town a while back" (Myall Creek massacre of 1838, 170 years before our conversation, but still a source of pride). Ah, if I had a dollar for every nutter I have met I would be as rich as George Soros and could take over the world. Point is, the knowledge-poor have always been with us, but once upon a time they were left to bloom unseen and waste their ignorance on the desert air. Now, what with first talk back radio, and now blogs, they not only have microphones, but are welcomed as statistics on visitor counters. Fair enough, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public, or as some shock jock said - there's a sucker born every minute. Gotta make a living how you can, and if your living involves inciting mobs to trash science and prevent action on global warming, well, then, what of it? Ya wanna fight?
But always look on the bright side of life. The advantage of all this is that these people are making themselves known. No longer spreading anonymous poison in pubs or at a football match. The hidden casual racism, the conspiracy theories, the anti government rhetoric, the gun ownership, the hatred of environmentalism and science in general, the extreme nationalism, are now exposed to the light of the internet. It will take another ten years of science and reason, another ten wasted years that are going to see CO2 levels so high as to cause serious planetary damage, but at least the battle will be fought knowing who all the players are, and who is over the hill waiting to attack.
Football is not just a matter of life and death, it's much more serious than that.
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• 5 March 2010 - Kevin Rudds schooldays
When I was a schoolboy I quite often got reports saying "must try harder". Not very helpful really because there was never any indication of how trying harder was to be achieved, or how it could be measured, or, indeed, what the purpose of the extra effort was. So you were left with the feeling that the headmaster, teacher, other members of the class, family, community, perhaps the whole population of Australia was dissatisfied with you in some undefined way, and so you needed to pull your socks up, knuckle down to it, put your nose to the grindstone, or undertake any undefined metaphor that would make everyone feel happier about you.
Was reminded of my schooldays recently when Kevin Rudd, in that schoolmasterly way he has, said that people were disappointed in the government, and that he was disappointed in his government, and indeed himself, and that they deserved a "whacking" (this will hurt me more than it hurts you), although he meant in opinion polls and not in the "only poll that counts". But just like my old school reports, there was no diagnosis of the reason for the disappointment, or a suggestion of a cure, just a desire to try harder. That is, he was committing himself to do more of the same but do it faster and higher and stronger or something. Look, perhaps I can help Kevin here, given my experience of disappointing people in my school years.
So here it is - people don't want more of the same Kevin. They don't want you, and your staff, and your ministers, spending 19 hours a day in your offices instead of 18 hours a day. They don't want you working harder at what you've been doing they want you doing things differently. See when you arrived in school in 2007 as the new head prefect you showed much promise. People had great expectations of you. There seemed to be intelligence, and hard work, and ideas, and a determination to be a new broom sweeping clean a schoolyard that had been left in a mess by the previous head prefect. And all of it informed by a kind of mysterious benefactor, seen only as a light on a hill, who would help you to be a good person, help you make Australia a better place. But something went wrong, Kevin, and, in another phrase I used to get on reports, you are "not performing to your potential".
And the reason is clear. In every subject area you have studied - health, industrial relations, the environment, education, indigenous affairs, terrorism - you haven't done any of your own work but just got hold of an old exam paper by the previous head boy and copied his answers word for word. Your benefactor turned out not to be a mysterious stranger with a shining light, but John Howard. And the public, us, don't like it Kevin. If we wanted John Howard's answers we would have kept him on as head boy. We didn't want school league tables, and nuclear waste dumps, and union bashing, and state health systems conducting business as usual, and "intervention", and troops for Afghanistan, and uranium mines, and phonics, and censorship, and big money for coal mining companies and banks and religious schools. What we wanted, after 11 years of neoconservative government pushing Australian culture and society and economy further and further to the right, was a social democrat government that was at least notionally left of centre to redress the balance a bit. So do some homework Kevin. Get out your old text books by Tressell, Dickens, Steinbeck, Zola, Orwell, Swift, and Pratchett. Check out the work of those earlier head boys in Curtin and Chifley and Whitlam. Have a chat to that other head boy from the American School who also promised much and proved a disappointment, for the same reasons as you, Barack Obama, see if he has any ideas for improving performance.
Don't forget that there is a big exam coming to measure your performance in your first three years of study. Don't want to have to put "failed" on your report card and install a new head boy, do we? And you seem to have become aware of this, belatedly, with your hospital announcement, although even here the correct answer would have included more money, not Howard-era rubbish about "efficiencies"
Nose to the grindstone, young Kevin, must try harder.
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economic development
global warming
atheism
Kevin Rudd
