Green thought, in a green shade,
Green views
The Watermelon Blog 
Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
The Goodies
good television
good movies
good books
good poetry
more good books
good songs
good children
good boys
good people
good leaders
Try a lucky dip:
"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."
"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."
"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."
"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."
"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."
"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."
"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."
"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."
"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."
"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."
"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."
"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."
"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."
"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."
"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."
"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"
"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."
"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."
"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."
"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."
"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."
"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."
"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"
"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."
"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."
"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."
"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."
"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."
"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."
"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."
"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."
"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."
"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"
"but where are my slippers"
"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."
"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"
"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."
"the evening star is coming."
"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."
"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."
" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."
" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."
" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
"
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."
" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."
" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."
" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."
" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."
" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."
" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"
" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."
" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."
Strange
Bedfellows
John Howard
Kevin Rudd
Al Gore
George Bush
Malcolm Turnbull
Leon Trotsky
Thomas Huxley
Oliver Goldsmith
Kurt Vonnegut
Tony Blair
Samuel Pepys
Winston Churchill
Peter Costello
Joan of Arc
Fidel Castro
Sarah Williams
Peter Beattie
Ned Ludd
De-Anne Kelly
Barack Obama
Kylie Minogue
Tony Abbott
Alexander Downer
Barbaro
Sam Kekovich
Alan Bennett
Osama bin Laden
Rupert Murdoch
George Lakoff
Bjorn Lomborg
Adolf Hitler
Ayn Rand
George Orwell
Julia Butterfly Hill
Saddam Hussein
James Carville
Charles Darwin
Philip Cooney
Jacky Kelly
Irshad Manji
James Lovelock
Bob Hawke
Brendon Nelson
Barnaby Joyce
Robert Menzies
Robert Tressell
Slim Dusty
Noel Coward
Samuel Johnson
Walt Whitman
Edmund Hillary
Robert Byrd
Phillip Adams
Alisa Camplin
Arnold Schwarzeneger
Blogger's Cut
Best slices from the watermelon
Future to the back
Ox power
Whacko Texas
Ticked off
Inhaling the Sixties
God unwilling
Bakers Oven 5
Game over
All change for
Dog bites man
Whale tears
Flowers for bosses
Curtin spinning
Gotta love it
Dodgy intelligence
A glass darkly
Truth and consequences
Media-ocrity
Cant get me Im part of the society
Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state
You must remember this
A reminder - on a rare occasion when I can get on to this blog to do anything - if you have arrived here through a search, welcome. Check out your discovery, and then come on over to my new Watermelon Blog http://davidhortonsblog.com/ to see my posts from the last 6 months. Lots of good, no, great, recent stuff on the Australian election, for example. If you are receiving this post in a feed, you really must transfer your feed to the new address at http://davidhortonsblog.com/ (just click on the RSS feed icon, or on the feedburner icon). I'm missing you guys!!23 August 2010
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Now is the hour
Hullo there, if you haven't yet checked out my new blog http://davidhortonsblog.com/ or better still subscribed to the feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWatermelonBlog you will miss out on many of the new slices of watermelon. Miss out on the imminent announcement of the meaning of life. Miss discussion of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — of cabbages — and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot— and whether pigs have wings. So come on by, take a load off your feet - the kettle's on the hob, the cake's in the oven, the watermelon's in the fridge. All welcome.I'm feeling unloved and unwanted - worried that most of the subscribers to this blog haven't shifted to the new blog. If you are seeing this in an email or an RSS subscription, you need to visit the new blog and change the feed. If you are a regular visitor, you need to change your bookmark now.
Apart from the seemingly endless discussions of sealing-wax, the new blog has a number of features you will like, including links to all of the archived sources for the content here.
So come on, quick, I am worried I will get on to the internet one morning and find this blog has closed down and all my lovely readers and subscribers are wandering lost, wondering where to go. Better late than never isn't right - late may mean never.
18 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
They seek him here, they seek him there
They seek that demned elusive Scarlet Watermelon everywhere. But they'll find him at http://davidhortonsblog.com/. The new blog is now tidied up and tarted up and ready for action. I won't make any more posts here, but will leave this blog sitting as an archive. So if you are a keen member of Watermelon Land (or just a first time visitor), it's time to mosey on down to its new home. And while you are there subscribe to the feed (http://drhorton.wordpress.com/feed/), either through an email subscription, or RSS (see the feedburner subscription form in the same format as the one here). And speaking of archives, in case the host of this blog disappears, take a note that the National Library has archived all the 1100 entries to this point at pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/117782, my ABC Unleashed pieces can all be found at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2259100.htm, and my American pieces on Huffington Post are here huffingtonpost.com/david-horton. Thank you for all of your interest and enthusiasm over the last 5 years or so at BlogNow. I intend the new version to be bigger and better and brighter in the next 5 years. I will see you all at the new Watermelon Blog, so this is not goodbye, but simply ... au revoir.11 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Naughty government, bad government
A new post is up on the new blog http://davidhortonsblog.com/2010/05/08/watched-pots/ - when good governments go bad. Or something. Time you were subscribed over there, isn't it?8 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Come on down
Hi all, a new post http://davidhortonsblog.com/2010/05/06/breathe-in-breathe-out/ at then new blog site. One of those cross-posted from Huffington Post. A slightly tongue in cheek look at climate change deniers.Some subscribers have already made the move to the new site. My apologies for the inconvenience of this, but recent changes at blognow suggested strongly to me that it was time to have a plan B, rather than get caught out at the last minute leaving all you lovely subscribers lost in hyperspace.
So first in, best dressed, wait no longer, come on down!
6 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Anchors Aweigh
New post on new blog here http://davidhortonsblog.com/2010/05/04/not-cricket/ (what does Nick Clegg have to do with the Channel Seven worm?).The new feed address for subscriptions is http://drhorton.wordpress.com/feed/
4 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
All Aboard
Hi everyone. Sorry for the absence of updates. I have been without internet (and suffering withdrawal symptoms) for 2 weeks after (as it turned out) a rusted through connector on the satellite dish failed. Anyway, am back, and will begin doing catchup with the columns you have missed. I will be double posting them at my new site: http://davidhortonsblog.com/ to where I am gradually moving (for various technical reasons). I really don't want to lose any subscribers in this move, and it would be great if you could register at the new site (for either email or RSS subscription). Once I am happy everyone is on the life raft we will cast adrift and set sail for the new land. And if you are a regular unsubscribed visitor, please take the chance to subscribe, or at least bookmark the new site. I am still feeling my way with the technical structure of WordPress, so although the blog is up and running (with all recent posts copied) bear with me a little while I make fine adjustments for your viewing pleasure. All aboard my hearties.3 May 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Snake oil salesmen
Another day, another oil spill on the barrier reef. Ho hum. We all know the dance routine. The Queensland (beautiful one day, oily the next) premier will appear on tv looking serious. Everything is under control/not acceptable, emergency crews, taking it seriously, oil dispersal, ship probably won't break up, this is not acceptable, stiff fines, will get to the bottom of this, not acceptable, throw the book at them, blah blah. There will be demands by those pesky environmentalists for better control of these floating potential unacceptable disasters which will be dismissed because we are waiting for the results of inquiry which of course we wouldn't want to pre-empt. Photo opportunities for politicians, tropical junkets for reporters. A week/fortnight/month later the ship will have sunk/broken up/been towed away, the oil will have washed ashore/be coating the reef/be settled on the sea bottom by dispersants, the coal will be all over the sea bed/adding to global warming. Tens of thousands of sea birds, fish, crabs, sea snakes, mussels, coral organisms will be dead. Television presenters will be on to their next assignment, politicians working to the next news cycle. Everything will be so quiet that calls for better control of shipping in the Barrier Reef can be safely ignored/dismissed/described as the result of extreme greens/got to be careful not to upset Chinese coal importers. Until the next time.All a long way from Yass I know, particularly as jumpers and coats and long underwear come out of cupboards for another grim winter on the southern tablelands. But the grim media and ecology dance on the Barrier Reef should sound warnings to us all, anywhere in Australia. Development, especially development involving the excavation and movement of large quantities of noxious materials, seems to have returned to the days before environmental impact statements were even thought of. One loophole is that once a development is underway, has some time depth to it, environmental impact is the last thing on the minds of politicians. Instead of first thoughts being "prevent damage" and "what would be the consequence of human error/natural disaster/equipment failure?", first thoughts are "how much money can be made out of this?" Once something is underway then you can just keep adding more and more coal trains/ore carriers/holes in ground/roadworks, with no sense that the damage being caused is cumulative and the chances of disaster happening are being multiplied every day. What is a slight risk for one shipment of oil or coal becomes a certain catastrophe when there are thousands of shipments a year.
Both Bligh and Rudd responded immediately to the Shen Neng 1 wreck by saying that nothing was more important than protecting the Barrier Reef. So why did this ship go aground, why did the Pacific Adventurer spill Ammonium nitrate drums and then a massive amount of oil last year, why did an oil well on the other side of the continent leak oil for weeks in another sensitive marine area? Three major marine polluting events in less than a year. If the most important thing was "protecting the Reef" then the photo opportunities (sorry, that should read political opportunism), (sorry, that should read sincerely concerned politicians) would ensure, before a hole was drilled or a ship loaded, that everything that needed to be done to prevent the utterly predictable effects of human error, greed, carelessness, stupidity, ignorance, were all covered. In that famous Richardsonism "Whatever it takes" - whatever it takes to protect the environment must be done first. A few thousand dollars to put a pilot on a ship with a cargo worth millions? Shouldn't be a question. Tracking devices with alarm systems? Of course. Ships inspected for security of cargo, seaworthiness of ship? Whaddya reckon? Oil and gas wells with built in double fail safe mechanisms, ready made protection against spills, emergency teams with equipment available with a few hours? Is that even a question?
There is talk of fines in this case for captain and owner. The maximum was a million dollars. Anna Bligh seems to think this would show them they couldn't mess with her Reef. Nonsense. If a fine is $1 million and a company can increase its profit by $1 million and one dollars by taking an illegal short cut, saving money on maintenance, hiring cheaper unqualified crew, not having back up emergency equipment available, then that's exactly what it will do. But in addition, the fine is just an arbitrary amount of money. It bears no relation to the damage done, which in most, perhaps all, cases, is beyond price. Smash a line of coral several hundred metres long that took hundreds of years to grow? Priceless. Pour oil all over beaches and rocks leaving them polluted for decades? Priceless. Produce an oil sick hundreds of kilometres long through a marine national park? Priceless.
Still, this will obviously be the final wake-up call for politicians, right? From now on, prevention better than cure? Chinese told to sort it out or buy elsewhere? Sea snakes protected at all costs? You think?
And if politicians are willing to risk such damage to such obviously sensitive and important areas, is anywhere safe? Is Yass?
global warming
15 April 2010
Category Environment
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The worm turns
Those poor primitive creatures we call creationists have to live their lives in spite of many difficulties, and one of the most significant is the language. If you have ever tried to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as written by Geoffrey, or read a speech by Sarah Palin, as written by anybody, you will know that a language can look sort of like English but be completely meaningless. Words like intelligent design, Darwinism, dinosaurs, mutation, fossils, species, random, have conventional meanings to you and I, gentle reader, but to your average ten-commandments-in-courthouses-jesus-loves-AK47s-humans-riding-dinosaurs creationist they have other meanings, and that confusion in language leads to much misunderstanding in the real world. Never fear, I am always available to attempt a translation for you.Take a very common example. Whenever I, or anyone else, writes about evolution on HuffPo or elsewhere, you don't need to be a psychic to know that some commenter will always say "Huh, all very well to talk about darwinism, but you atheists can't explain the origin of life with evolution, can you now?" Now at this point most writers on evolution play with paper clips on their desk in an embarrassed sort of way and say something like "Oh dear, no, evolution has nothing to do with origins of life, quite a different department deals with all that, ahem."
I think this is a huge mistake. I have had a go at one alternative response which envisages a process of "natural selection" assisting in getting inorganic chemicals towards being organic and then self-reproducing, but back in those primitive days of my early attempts at translation I had misunderstood the question entirely, and other approaches are needed. You see when someone talks about the "origin of life" a scientist has an image in mind of experiments aimed at reproducing possible conditions on Earth, say, 4 billion years ago. Playing with combinations of organic molecules, different temperatures, different salinity, different substrates, with or without electric discharges, and so on. In addition scientists think about the earliest life forms found as fossils, the age and type of rocks they are found in, the relationships between simple life forms in existence today, possible analogs for early ecosystems around submarine volcanic vents, or in deep caves, or in extreme environments, and so on. So faced with that sort of comment a scientist will say, "yes, you are right, evolutionary biology doesn't have much if anything to do with the origins of life", and they leave unsaid, because it is so obvious, "but so what? That is a field of research involving geology and chemistry and cosmology and physics and paleontology".
On the other hand our mentally fossilised creationist isn't in fact asking anything of the kind; knows nothing, and cares less, about the different disciplines that make up scientific research. Isn't checking on whether the evolutionary biologist has also studied abiogenesis. Has no mental image of the conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago, or of what early life forms might have been like. Isn't asking (and this is another misapprehension of the hapless scientist dealing, as gladly as possible, with idiots) "how do you know that god didn't get life going 4 billion years ago and then provided the mechanism of evolution to keep it all ticking along?" Isn't saying "huh, you think you are so smart studying your darwinism, but god tricked you by creating life in the first place, and just let you think you were finding out something worthwhile. Try being an atheist now Mr smarty pants scientist."
No, they are not saying these things, because those things would make no sense at all, in their language. They don't think god started things off 4 billion years ago by "breathing life into" some simple unicellular organism which then began to speciate and evolve to produce all of the subsequent biodiversity of this planet. Of course not, what kind of a wimp do you think their god is, does the bible mention stromatolites? No, they think that god created the life forms we see today. Intelligently designed all of them to fit into their own niche and serve humans. Wiped out a few, accidentally, when he somehow flooded the whole surface of the planet to more than the depth of the highest mountain, while saving others by putting them, each with the most limited genetic diversity possible, on a boat, and then, when the water, somehow, disappeared, putting them ashore to go forth and multiply. And all this happened not 5 billion years ago but 5000, give or take a king or two.
These are people who not only have less sense of time depth than a 2 year old child, but who have absolutely no ability to imagine a world any different to the one they see now, looking out the back door, in, say, Kansas. The vision of the past that I have, where an ever increasing, ever more diverse, range of plants and animals, evolve through time in various directions, suffering major setbacks along the way with massive extinction events, succeeded by new bursts of speciation, and all occurring against an ever changing backdrop of different plant communities, different climatic conditions, and different arrangements of continents and varying sea depths, would be a vision as likely to be had by a creationist as the vision of America having a decent health care system, or sane gun laws.
So when you are asked whether evolution accounts for the origin of life, don't think bacteria, or stromatolites, or yeast, or amoebae, and say, oh, no, of course not. Think cats and dogs, birds, worms, frogs, snakes, pine trees, gum trees, petunias, and, yes, great apes and humans, and be the worm that turns - say, "yes, of course it does". Your average barely literate creationist hears the first answer as "scientist admits evolution didn't happen, accepts creationist proof of reality of god". The second answer would come as a shock, and it may be a second or two before they totally reject it, but in that time you can reiterate how evolution (combining, of course, natural selection and speciation), not creation, gives rise to those life forms. And one day, maybe, you can educate a creationist so much that they will accept the reality of evolution (and pigs may have evolved wings) and begin to explore with you the fascinating investigation into the origins of life on Earth.
Next week's translation - "How did the first male dog that evolved find a mate?"
I make monkeys of creationists every week on The Watermelon Blog.
Cross-posted at Huffington Post.
11 April 2010
Category Evolution
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The lights are on, but nobody is home
Easter again, and it got me thinking about holidays and celebrations in general. The United Nations alone has a list of 57 "days" (special days to do with women's rights, racism, water, press freedom, families, environment, refugees, population, literacy, peace, and so on), plus weeks, and months and years to emphasize some special issue. Every country also has its own set of important days. And finally, as a hangover from the Dark Ages when there were lots of "saint's days" and religious holidays ("Holy Days" of course, the only break the peasants got from lives that were nasty brutish and short), we still have some religious events on our calendar, and I'm writing this during one of them.While UN Days sometimes get passing mention in the media, many of them seem to me to be events that could well be incorporated into our calendar of holidays, replacing, perhaps, Easter Friday and Monday. Or the Queens Birthday (one day Charles' birthday I suppose). Or Melbourne Cup Day in Victoria. Or the various state "foundation days". Fifty seven days is too many of course, but perhaps each year we could rotate half a dozen of the United Nations ones.
But there is another date that I would like to see as a permanent holiday in Australia, the 12 February. In America there is a petition to ask President Obama to establish the day as a public holiday, and I think we might do the same with Mr Rudd. Oh, 12 February - Charles Darwin's birthday (he would have been 201 this year). Why a permanent holiday for young Charles? Well to bring to the attention of the public the extraordinary attack on science that has been underway for the last few years. There are several notable areas - the climate change denial industry, the creationists with their eyes on schools, the muffling of public contributions from the universities and CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology and abuse of these organisations, the derogatory comments about science from certain politicians, the media support for all kinds of bogus nonsense about UFOs and alternative medicines, and miracles and the "paranormal", the advertising industry with its claims that face creams are "clinically proven". In Britain a science journalist has been hit with huge legal bills after being sued by chiropractors because he pointed out that their claims were not based on science, and this will undoubtedly be a tactic used more often (Tasmanian forestry is another recent case).
It all seems a long way from Yass I guess, as we all go about our day to day business. But that business has been built on science - on communications, on medicines, on agricultural advances, on meteorology, on energy, and building, and environmental protection, on safe food and water, on mineral resources. Our understanding of the world around us also contributes to our enjoyment of it, and to our intellectual development. And we really don't want our schoolchildren being stunted intellectually by being told that one particular primitive creation mythology from one small part of the world from one particular time around 3000 years ago replaces all the scientific advances of the last 2500 years in biology, geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, genetics and all the rest of the science that underpins our civilisation. Nor do we want them unaware that in their lifetimes the planet is in big trouble as the climate changes.
Conservative politicians (from both sides of politics) don't like science because it gets in the way of ideology with pesky things called facts. Big corporations don't like science because it can document the way they are ravaging the planet and might reduce their profits if it came to the notice of the public. Religious fundamentalists don't like science because it disproves that primitive creation mythology. Much of that came together the other day when a group of conservative politicians in Adelaide pretended to celebrate a "Human Achievement Day" in competition with Earth Day. The latter is an attempt, in a symbolic way, to make people more aware of climate change and the need to both conserve energy and find renewable energy sources. These politicians don't want that message getting out there, and so their HA Day involved encouraging people to use as much energy as possible. Supporters obliged. Conservatives know the symbolic importance of awareness days. ''Don't be stuck in the dark with the communists. Turn your lights on!'' their web site said.
Write to Kevin Rudd. See if we can get a Darwin Day. See if we can become a science based society living in the real world again.
Don't be stuck in the dark ages with the conservatives. Turn your minds on.
Darwin Day
8 April 2010
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Believe it or not
A strange attack on atheists over Easter by a couple of clerics in Australia. We've obviously got them worried. All the usual kind of nonsense, The fundamentalist Anglican said ""It's about our determination as human beings to have our own way, to make our own rules, to live our own lives, unfettered by the rule of God and the right of God to rule over us. What we're really seeing, once more [is] an example of the contest between human beings and God over who rules the world." The catholic said "Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism, [It's] the illusion that we can build a better life without God." Elsewhere other foolish people queued up to denounce atheism as a "religion". It is as if all of these bits of nonsense are being said for the first time, thoughts arising anew from a careful contemplation of science and philosophy. Instead of course they are like the tired old refrains of the climate change denialists, swallowed whole from the communications of the mother ship, repeated endlessly to anyone who will listen.The first two need little comment. The Anglican seems to have missed the point I think - has no one told the good man that atheists don't believe there is a god, and his lot haven't proved there is? But if it's a contest between an imaginary fellow in the sky and real human beings here on Earth, hey, I'm on the side of the Humans, what a pity the Anglican isn't. And really, the catholics have a bit of a nerve talking about Hitler, don't they? And whatever was motivating Mr Stalin, it clearly wasn't his membership of a humanist society. What rubbish, how any one, unblinded by their own ideology, could possibly suggest that the nastiness of the twentieth century (and earlier centuries) was the result of atheism is beyond me. There may be some alternative universe where the religious are kind and tolerant peace loving people and atheists are rampant psychopaths who cause wars, but it isn't the one I'm familiar with.
And so to the final one - unsurprisingly trotted out when the religious perceive that rational thought might be gaining ground among the public. The sight of 2500 atheists in a convention centre for the World Atheist Conference last month must have really spooked them. Let's bury it now, once and for all. Human beings do all sorts of odd things - go to NASCAR races, secretly cross-dress, buy guns and more guns, go to Lady GaGa concerts, attend church, grow long beards and moustaches, watch Woody Allen movies, visit Disneyland, work out in gymnasiums, drink homeopathic water, go on holiday cruises, support football teams, collect stamps, tattoo their bodies - I recognise that these are all hobbies, quirks, interests, pastimes. I don't want to do any of them myself, but I am quite happy for others to wander off and do things like this among crowds of like minded people, or do them in the privacy of their own homes. You do them, I don't, both happy. I'm a very easy going fellow. I have my own interests, collecting old books and prints, for example, but I have absolutely no interest in getting anyone else to follow my example. In fact the fewer fellow collectors there are, the better, and cheaper, for me. I'm not going to knock on doors, bundle of books under my arm, to convince people of the merits of collecting early editions of Dickens books. Nor will I lobby my local politician to make collecting compulsory, or my local school principal to have book collecting become a core curriculum item.
Similarly, I'm an atheist. I'm happy in my atheism, there being no god means the world is a much more interesting and challenging place. But again, I'm not going to preach the word of Dawkins on street corners, or insist that the country closes down for one day a week while I follow my atheist pursuits (if I had any). On the other hand, I get really cross when homeopaths, and stamp collectors, and cross-dressers, and churchgoers, and Lady GaGa lovers knock on my door and demand that I follow their strange ways. Lobby politicians to make their hobbies compulsory, have Woody Allen movies playing in courthouses, demand that hospitals serve homeopathic remedies, insist that schools teach a particular old creation myth. Abuse me and say I have no morals, that I am like Hitler because I don't collect stamps. Insist that I can't run for political office because I have no tattoos.
You want to do that stuff, fine, do it, but leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone. The day I knock on your door and start preaching print collecting and atheism, that's the day you get to call my lack of belief a religion.
Oh, and you want to start a war, invade a country, kill and torture people? Try my neighbor, he's into god and guns. I'm not.
Cross-posted at Huffington Post.
4 April 2010
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Let them eat icing
I think it was the photo of a senator having his head shaved "for charity" that finally had me opening the window and screaming "I've had enough and I won't give it any more". Not a day, certainly not a week, goes by in Australia these days without someone growing hair, or shaving hair, or dying hair; or running somewhere, or cycling, or driving a car in the outback and smashing up the environment; or wearing funny clothes or not wearing other clothes; or eating something or not eating something; or batsmen hitting sixes or footballers kicking goals; all in the name of "raising money for charity". Look I know "when I was young" for most of my readers is an introduction to a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, but when I was young I don't remember all this silly activity going on in the name of charity. Nor do I remember there being anywhere near as many causes for which charity was needed. There was, as always, the Salvation Army, in uniform, holding out a tin on street corners. The Red Cross, likewise perhaps? And once a year our public school held its much anticipated fete (home made cakes, jam, second hand books, prizes for the best decorated bike) and raised some small amount of money, perhaps to add to playground equipment, or for new cricket bats. The local private school had a bigger fete with fancier goods and raised more money, perhaps to build a rowing shed or a new swimming pool.I can't think of anything else. Hospitals, and schools in general, got their money from the government (Chifley, then Menzies), ie, from the people. They got money based on their needs, and the idea that hospitals and schools should rely on the vagaries of charity money being raised by ever more ridiculous stunts for their normal running costs and infrastructure would have seemed crazy. What would happen to a hospital ward or a schoolroom if by chance the money didn't reach needs?
The first of these stunts (like the equally silly "world record" attempts on the number of boot scooters or kissers or eating hot dogs or water skiing) I can remember was when a rumour somehow got started that some company was going to make donations depending on how many of those little plastic bread sealer tags could be collected and sent in by some date. None of us paused to think how silly this was. What was in it for the bread company? Were people going to start buying more and more bread just to get the tags? Well, no, probably not, you bought the bread you needed. And why would the company be basing its donation on the number of tags otherwise? Why not just give what it could afford? Was it going to give more than it could afford if more than expected tags came in? Of course not. Anyway, all of us, well-intentioned, put saucers on our kitchen benches and religiously kept tags. Would have seemed mean-spirited not to. What sort of a person wouldn't make the tiny effort of keeping a tag if it meant a new children's hospital, or a refurbished school?
But it all came to nothing as I remember. The company I think became aware of it and issued a statement saying don't be silly or words to that effect, and all of us reluctantly and a little embarrassedly, dumped the collections of tags in the bin.
Look I think it is great that people want to be involved, want to help worthwhile causes. But it seems clear that the rise of silly stunts, not to provide some little extras for a school or hospital, but to provide the basic support for the fundamental tasks of keeping them going, coincides with the demand for ever less tax to be paid by big companies, and the rise of ever more sophisticated ways to take the company head office to Barbados or wherever, to avoid paying any tax at all. What this charity work is increasingly doing is trying to desperately make up for this tax shortfall. And whereas a government, responsive, at least at election time, to the public, does its best to allocate money according to function and need, charity work is absolutely at the whim of donors and organisers. Just like our two school fetes, popular, glamorous causes will do well; less glamorous but equally worthy ones will do less well. And success will fluctuate from year to year depending on media support (hence the ever sillier fund raising stunts to attract the television cameras) and economic conditions. Charity is fine for providing the icing on a cake, but when it becomes the only means of providing the cake itself we are in big trouble as a society.
By all means give generously to causes you believe in. But please, do it without painting your face blue or shaving your head; and do it while demanding that government, and big business, fulfill their proper roles.
charity
1 April 2010
Category Economics
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Its Good News Week
[Important - ignore any double-underlined words forming blue hypertext. These are links to a company I know nothing about, inserted without my permission, and with apparently no way to stop it happening. Regular visitors should note that changes occurring in this blog provider may result in me having to move to http://davidhorton.vox.com/ on a full time basis, please note that web address in case this happens unexpectedly.]Good news this week, that "God Less Australia: The Australian Book of Atheism", edited by Warren Bonnett will be published at end of the year (just in time for a certain religious festival) by Scribe. Yours truly hopes to have a chapter in it alongside an allstar cast.
atheism
30 March 2010
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
None so blind
A curious thing about creationists. I try to study the minds of these strange people, who still, 150 years after Alfred Wallace, retain the primitive mindset of the eighteenth century when people thought that animal species, including the naked ape, had been created, each in its own place, by a finger-pointing white-bearded figure in the sky. It is as if we still had, living among us, people who believed in phlogiston, or humours, or the heart as the seat of emotions; a glimpse back into a distant past of primitive ideas about the world around us.So I study them, much as a time traveller visiting the Dark Ages might, or a traveller to the deepest Amazon finding a previously uncontacted tribe.
And in the case of creationists, these strange throwbacks living still among us, I try to see the world through their eyes, wonder what strange shadows that imperfect organ is throwing on to the retina of these good simple people as they struggle to come to grips with the realities of several hundred years of scientific advances.
Here is one for you. What do creationists see when they look in the evolutionary mirror? What do they see when they look at Chimpanzee or Gorilla? Do they see both as just another mammal, like cat or dog, kangaroo or opossum, platypus or echidna? Do they not see the close resemblances to us in the face, the expressions, the hands and feet, the body, the behavior, the movement, the social groups, the young? Do they not say, well, my cousin is a hairy man, but he is still my cousin? Do they not say there but for the grace of Darwin go we? That these close cousins just travelled a different path from an obviously identical starting point?
And looking at the faces of their cousins are they not inspired to investigate further, find that the resemblance is not just skin deep but extends through brain and skeleton and into the most fundamental unit of evolution the DNA?
I mean it is one thing to believe that the old silverback in the sky created beasts of burden and sheep and cattle, obviously different to, and, from an anthropocentric view, inferior to, humans, as part of his reward of dominion over all as long as you didn't eat of the "tree of evolutionary knowledge" scheme. But the bronze age sheepherders typing out the old testament on a piece of goatskin didn't know about the great apes, or even the monkeys, come to that, none of them around what the desert nomads thought of as the centre of the universe, but we now call the middle east, a kind of evolutionary backwater with barely enough species known to fill a boat.
If there had been a band of gorillas living by the Dead Sea, or a band of chimpanzees living on the Mount of Olives, do you think one of the sheepherders might have modified the relevant bit of his creation mythology to read "And then Yahweh created the great apes, and he took a rib from a chimpanzee and it became the first human"?
With that kind of mythology one of Darwin's early ancestors, say living in Ancient Athens, might well have been inspired to discover the reality of evolution long before Alfred Wallace. And in that case, would the primitive members of the Texas School Board still be demanding that creationism be taught? How long does it take for the blindingly obvious to be accepted?
Think of me as your distant cousin on the Watermelon Blog.
Cross-posted at Huffington Post.
29 March 2010
Category Evolution
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The Golden Thread
It was the axe that finally drove me over the edge I think. Like everyone else I had grown accustomed to the cameras banged against car windows and paddy wagon grills; the microphones thrust into the faces of people entering and leaving court, with the idiot questions "Do you admit guilt?" "Are you sorry?"; the demands for the drawing, quartering and sacking of any magistrate failing to give less than a life sentence for any crime more than stealing a chocolate bar from a supermarket; the television series featuring, and glamourising, crime gangs and events; the failure to use the word "alleged" about evidence: the television crews accompanying police raids on suspects; the exploitation, for their signs of grief, of victims and relatives of victims; the demands for "remorse"; the hounding of those released after serving their sentences; the constant assumption that charges, even just accusations, equate to guilt; the endless reality shows featuring law enforcement with accused people being shamed, blinking into cameras; the constant second guessing of judges by shock jocks. But even I wasn't ready for the axe.A man goes missing in circumstances that bring television cameras like a swarm of locusts. A news bulletin describes (not alleges) the accused cutting up a body and burning it. "Did you smell anything?" the reporters ask neighbours who "thought it was a barbecue". And then the camera shows an axe in the backyard as the segment ends.
How did we get to this? A tv crew with access to an (alleged) crime scene, the camera lovingly focusing on material (an oil drum, a dark patch on the ground, an AXE) potentially relevant as evidence, filming the faces of suspects as they are driven away; a reporter interviewing potential court witnesses about the case. In other cases at random: A man in a motor vehicle accident is blood tested and the media reports (not alleges) he was "four times the legal limit". A reality show films a woman who "looks guilty because she is guilty".
In 5 years comes the 800 year anniversary of Magna Carta. Since then we have moved away from a society in which: the king could jail us at his pleasure, without charge, or trial, indefinitely; if tried in a court and found not guilty you could be retried indefinitely on the same charge until convicted, if released you could be simply thrown back into jail; anonymous accusers with unknown evidence could convict you; jails were full; you would be tried and judged by a member of the ruling class; a lynch mob could decide your guilt and punishment; so could trial by ordeal; sentences bore no necessary relation to the crime; death sentences were common; there were no rules of evidence; you were effectively guilty until proved innocent; there was no judiciary independent of the state or the ruling classes; punishment involved confinement in atrocious conditions; torture could be used to extract confessions; you had no right to legal representation; sentences were based on revenge by the victim, not on independent assessment by an impartial court; you were judged on your reputation not on the evidence in the particular case before the court. Finally, set in motion by Magna Carta, and hard won after long battles over the succeeding centuries, all those features of the law were changed, and we became a civilised society in which all are equal before the law, and you are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond doubt. All of those changes towards a civilised legal system have been cast aside, or are in the process of being cast aside, as a result of media pressure in the last few decades.
Sometimes Australians get into trouble in countries where law is either absent or of a very different kind. They find themselves held captive, indefinitely; convicted on flimsy evidence; given extended sentences for minor crimes. Judges will pass harsh sentences at the bidding of politicians, juries will not be used, cases will be prejudged in the media, police will be brutal, jail conditions abysmal, hearsay evidence admitted, defence lawyers restricted, previous cases admitted in evidence. To travel to many countries in the world and find yourself in trouble with the "Law" is like travelling back in time to a system of justice we once had but thankfully shook off. The Australian media will complain endlessly about this and how primitive the legal systems of other countries are, while doing all they can to make ours just as primitive.
The media are determined to take us back to an older time, or to a lawless country, where lynch mobs rule, where the media decides on guilt, where evidence and analysis is published and publicly dissected as the case proceeds, where judges do the bidding of politicians or shock jocks.
Reporting details of cases is often said by the media to be "in the public interest", when what they are really doing is whipping up prurient public interest in the salacious and sordid details, then reporting even more because of the "public interest" they created. In fact "public interest" is best served by ensuring that the accused gets a fair trial.
"How can we make amends?" I can hear the media barons asking, "how can we get back to the spirit of the water meadow, all those years ago?"
Well tell your young reporters that everyone, repeat everyone, is innocent until proven guilty (and that having a lawyer isn't proof of guilt). Remember that police evidence, all police evidence, is only "alleged" until tested in court. Leave witnesses alone, leave the accused alone, get away from the courthouse steps while a trial is underway. Accept the verdict of the jury and judge. Don't seek comments from the "victims" after the court case has finished (no victim will ever be satisfied with the length of sentence). Stay away from the gaol gates when a prisoner has completed a sentence. Oh and dump the reality tv shows. And just a note to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and other towns - don't take tv crews with you when you conduct raids, make arrests, you may be improving your image, but you are undermining justice.
Crossposted at ABC Unleashed
27 March 2010
Category Values
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Hands Up
A recent article by Julie Bishop yet again tries to pretend that the conservative preference for "voluntary voting" is a matter for serious discussion. She of course, like all her conservative colleagues is a compulsory voting denialist, and pretending there is a debate on the matter is like the tactics of climate change deniers. First of all she lists 15 countries that Australia has something in common with, that is "compulsory voting". But then someone asks her "why Australia was out of step with most major democracies in enforcing compulsory voting". As a super patriot she gives all the arguments in favour but "the arguments that support voluntary voting are aligned with my more libertarian views on the exercise of civil rights and the freedoms associated with democracy". Just as a snide aside, isn't it curious that such libertarians are against important "civil rights " when it comes to gay people, or drug law reform, or political protest, or indigenous affairs, or refugees, or censorship; but in favour of the minor civil right of "not voting"? But I digress.Julie pulls out all the stops in this piece, pushes all the buttons. The title (in the National Times) is "Vote - or else?", the phrase "compulsory voting" is used 13 times in a short article, and the piece de resistance is pitched for her targeted audience - "It doesn’t seem fair to force people to vote for candidates they don’t know or care about or want to support." You can see Julie marching down the street with a placard "You can't make us vote for democracy", and leading the chant "When do we vote?" "We don't." "When do we want to?" "Never".
It's hard to think of new ways to respond to this nonsense, no matter how many times you say "we don't have compulsory voting" they keep coming back with the desire to rid Australia of the terrible scourge, the plague of compulsory voting, shared only with minor democracies like Brazil. So, I'll just say it again. We don't have compulsory voting. What we have is the equivalent of the onerous demand placed on a school child when the teacher reads out the class roll to answer "Here Miss". Presumably Julie tells her children that this is an unjustifiable infringement of their precious freedoms and civil rights, and when teacher reads out their name they should just sit silently. When an election is on all you have to do is get your name crossed off the electoral roll. They make it really easy. You can do it on the day, you can do it by post, you can do it in advance, you can do it out of area, you can do it overseas, you can do it in hospital, you can even plead inability to do it under any of those circumstances as long as you have a good reason. So, hand up, here I am Mr Electoral Commissioner, all present and correct. Then you are given a bit of paper called a voting paper, and that's it. That's the infringement on the liberty that Julie's ancestors apparently died to protect - you get handed a piece of paper. "Please, no, give me liberty or give me death, but don't give me that paper". I mean Julie has voted, hasn't she? Knows that you can refuse to vote, make the voting slip into a paper aeroplane, or draw a picture of Menzies, or play noughts and crosses, and then put it in the ballot box? Or you could make a decision about which candidates might best serve your interests and those of the country, and number the squares accordingly - takes about 30 seconds, tops - and then put it into the ballot box, end of liberty infringement for another 3 years or so.
Look, if everybody votes everybody, at least in theory, has a chance of having their concerns addressed by whichever party wins. The people unlikely to vote in a "voluntary" system (ie one where you don't have to say "Here sir" once every 3 years) are on average more likely to need the attention and support of government. Get rid of their votes, and, as in America, you can forget about public health and social services and infrastructure and public schools, and just get on with serving the interests of the rich and super rich and obscenely rich. Surely that's not what Julie wants to see? Oh, and her party seems determined to make it hard for young people to vote - surely this isn't because she thinks her party can't attract the votes of young people who treat political propaganda with disdain? Instead of asking why we have "compulsory hand putting up at election time" it would be more productive for Julie to ask why other "major democracies" don't, and write a paper encouraging them to follow Australia's enlightened lead.
After all, a moment's thought back to her own recent experience would convince her of the value of compulsory voting. Voluntary voting, in the Liberal Party room in December, gave her Tony Abbott as party leader.
compulsory voting
25 March 2010
Category Politics general
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
My country is the world
Look I'm puzzled, and if there are any libertarians, neoconservatives, teabaggers, invisible-hand-of-the-marketeers, the-UN-has-black-helicopters readers out there perhaps they could enlighten me.See these are people who apparently believe in government of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists. Believe in the economy red in tooth and claw. Believe in the devil take the hindmost. Believe that life for the poor, the lesser breeds without the law, was meant to be short, brutish and hard. Believe in fact that of all the things humans can do and think and achieve, the only one that has any role in society is money. That there is some fundamental universal principle involved, similar to the theory of gravity, or the theory of evolution, or the theory of the role of greenhouse gases in climate, by which money in society will, if left unchecked by actual human beings, magically distribute itself through society in the most efficient and equitable way to achieve the greatest good and the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Now I don't know why they believe this. Might as well believe in some invisible being in the sky for all the evidence they have of an invisible hand in the till (sorry, that should read "on the tiller"). I mean the most cursory knowledge of history of even the last 200 years would tell you that markets running riot have only the intended outcome of making the rich richer and the poor poorer to their credit. That after spells of free market madness in any country we the people have to come back in and adjust the clocks, sort out the problems, deal with the disasters, behave with humanity. That people, actual visible people, elected by us, have to work with all the aspects of being human in the multi-faceted human society. Have to sort out matters of health care, and education, and environmental issues, of art and culture, of infrastructure, of law and justice, of gender and race issues. Have to deal with all the things in fact that in a democracy we elect human beings to deal with in spite of the madness of money.
But let's take this another irrational step further. Let us suppose, just for a moment, that there really was an invisible spanner (sorry, supervisor) in the works, tinkering away, working like clockwork except when messed up by the clumsy hands of the peasants meddling with what they do not understand. And that if we kept the peasant's hands off the controls the economic sausage making machine would go on turning out sausages for everyone, no problem. If that was true, we might, those of us on the progressive side of the human condition, grit our teeth and say, ok, I wouldn't do it like that, all things considered, but I suppose it's the best way to make sausages, better leave it alone.
Except that's not the way things are in the real world. Not only is there no single wise invisible hand lightly caressing the fly wheels of the economy, there are in fact hundreds of invisible hands gripping the wheels and levers hard and turning the great ship of the economy in directions that will most benefit they and their friends. So when the libertarians say they don't want the elected representatives of the people to control the economy in any way, they are not saying they want no one to control the economy, but that they want only their friends the back room boys in the counting houses counting out their money to control it. The choice was never about control versus free, but about who was doing the controlling. With all due respect to the derivatives traders, I think I would rather elect someone who would represent my interests in a modern complex society than leave them to it.
Today New York, tomorrow the world. The same people who would rather be part of a plutocracy than a democracy are also, it seems, scared stiff of "World Government" by United Nations bureaucrats. They hate the very idea that, in dealing with universal issues such as climate change, poverty, war, hunger, the marine environment, trade, the nations of the Earth, through their governments, should seek universal solutions. They believe, apparently, that there is a kind of invisible hand which ensures that all the nations acting individually in their own selfish interests for their inward looking and nationalistic populations will magically achieve the best for everyone in the best of all possible worlds. That any agreements or concerted actions between nations will damage the interests of Joe Public in small town Ohio or Alaska.
Again, as a theory, this might, just, be included as part of public discourse at election time. I mean, the evidence for this kind of invisible supranational hand is also non-existent, its existence in fact being disproved by world history for the last 6000 years, or so. But just as at the national level, the imaginary hand is in fact these days replaced by a number of invisible hands (and no, I don't mean the Mafia, although now you mention it ...) operating at the international level. Multinational corporations, with the help of their people at the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, and various bilateral trade agreements, already largely control what goes on in the world. Decisions made by individual countries about their economy, their environment, their workplace laws, their customs and quarantine arrangements, and so on, are all being limited by those whose financial interests are at stake on a global level.
We have, to all intents and purposes, a world government now, but it isn't one whose operations are transparent, it isn't one whose activities can be influenced by democratic processes, and it sure as hell isn't acting in the interests of the 7 billion citizens of planet Earth. Again, the choice is not between no international cooperation and world government, but between a democratic world government and a plutocratic one. The ability of the latter to calmly watch the world warm up while preventing action to reduce greenhouse gases is just the most blatant example of how the system is failing us now.
I must have obviously misunderstood something here, misread the signs or the blogs, so if any tea baggers have time to drop by after trying to prevent government involvement in health care in favour of health care by the health care companies for the health care companies, perhaps they could set me straight.
Cross-posted at Huffington Post.
22 March 2010
Category Economics
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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.
economic development
18 March 2010
Category Economics
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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?
global warming
16 March 2010
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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.
atheism
15 March 2010
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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.
global warming
15 March 2010
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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.
Kevin Rudd
5 March 2010
Category Politics federal
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Putting away childish things
Who was it who said we shouldn't tell children fairy stories, things that aren't true? I disagree. My grandchildren all love made up things, strange things, things "beyond the present world". Love pretending that odd things like flying and magic can happen. Love, in fact, stuff that children have always loved.But we stop, don't we, pretending about most of this stuff? Either when they ask a question, perhaps with some encouragement, or just let it slip away, embarrassed, when their friends spill the beans, one by one they lose belief in Father Xmas, Tooth Fairy and other fairies, Easter Bunny, witches and wizards, Superman, things that go bump in the night, and all the rest of the imaginary furniture of a child's world. And as parents, grandparents, we might regret the loss of belief in fantastic things, while appreciating more signposts, along with new teeth and pencil marks of height creeping up a wall, of a child maturing, growing wiser. Might in fact be a little worried if beliefs in unreality persisted too long, would drop big hints if a child was really still believing in obviously untrue things beyond, say, the age of seven, perhaps eight.
Except, in some cases, where the beliefs involve the obvious untruths of whichever religion the child has been indoctrinated with. Then the parents want the children to keep understanding as children, thinking as children, and never to put away these childish things.
Does it matter if grown people keep on believing in things that a seven year old child, given freedom of thought and action, would dump into the wastebasket along with the tooth fairy? Yes, of course it does, because if you can get an adult to keep on believing in untrue things in this area you can get them to believe untrue things in any area. Enter creationists, and tea-baggers, and climate change deniers, and birthers, and truthers, and WMD in Iraq, and death panels, and the global war on terrorism, and Obama is a socialist, and all the rest of this childish rubbish that is constantly being trotted out these days by children in adult bodies.
Going to take a long time to turn around this barrage of unreality that is corrupting political systems designed in and for more enlightened times. A good place to start would be to let children dump religion when they dump all the other fairy stories from their mental furniture.
atheism
3 March 2010
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Health nuts
Ah, you can take the Liberal leader out of the health ministry, but you can't take the health minister out of the bike rider. There was Tony exhibiting the usual obsession - sell, sell, sell. One day he was selling off Medibank, again, the day before he was making public hospitals in marginal seats in NSW and Qld an offer they couldn't refuse. You will be independent and have a businessman running you and prepare for privatisation. Oh, ok, I made the last part up, but if I had a dollar for every time I made up some apparently far-fetched Liberal policy that later came true I would be moderately well off. Well, less poor.Haven't had much personal direct experience in hospital, tonsils removed in about 1953, stent inserted about 55 years later, but I suspect that is two more experiences than Mr Abbott has had. What you have to understand about the "health policy" of the conservative side of politics is that there is no health policy, never has been, never will be. Conservative politicians have absolutely no interest in either public health or the health of the public. Health is just an area of potential profit making for corporations. Just like infrastructure, or the environment, or education, or indigenous affairs, or northern Australia. So sell Medibank - why would you keep it when some giant corporation, quite possibly overseas based, can make big money and phony claims about "retiring debt" can be made? What about the yearly return to the government, what about the presence in the market of an entity with an aim of keeping prices down and providing good service as a way of keeping some pressure on all the privately owned companies? Not interested - conservative politicians have no interest in real competition either, just the kind of fake competition that keeps profits high.
And put local boards in charge of individual hospitals? No mention of improved resources and funding for the hospitals, just breaking up the network into individual components. How exactly will this improve performance? Do they imagine competition between Yass and Goulburn hospitals? Ambulances racing along the highway hoping to be first on the scene to grab a new patient? Massive advertising campaigns to encourage people to turn left on the highway instead of right? How does it benefit the public if every local hospital is run differently with different priorities and staffing and facilities, and work to their own plan, not to an overall strategy that rationalises activities over a region, so that, to an even greater extent than now, what quality of health care you get will be absolutely determined by where you live. And then, since these hospitals are all independent, run by local businessmen in the same way as you would run a private company, why not sell them all off? And then, on top of the regional variations, taking profits out of each hospital will reduce services even more. And they will dwindle down to just performing the profitable activities.
Call me cynical, if you haven't before, but I think this is the extent of Liberal plans for the health system. They look with envy at the American system where huge profits are made by hospitals, insurers, drug companies. Where those who can afford it get the "best medical treatment in the world", and those who can't either go bankrupt trying to get treatment, or put up with debilitating health problems, or die young.
Look, I know it's too late for Tony - the conservatives got to him young and he was theirs for life. But surely there is someone left on the right of the political highway who could leave ideology behind like leaving suit, hat, and glasses behind in a phone booth, and think about what government action and funding is needed to provide quality health care to all Australians rich or poor, young or old, city or country. Propose asking each hospital what their needs are and provide them, rather than imposing a board on them with no new resources. Announce they were leaving Medibank where it is to keep the bastards honest. Work from the grass roots up, not from the ideology down.
I may be due for another hospital visit any time as my creaky bones reach the end of yet another 365 days. Hope they are not playing political football in the wards when I arrive.
Tony Abbott
27 February 2010
Category Health
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Three Strikes
One of those bad weeks recently for the environment where troubles come in threes. There was the Agriculture Minister the other day pushing, rightly, the benefits of research in agriculture as a way of helping to adapt to the coming climate change. Only to ruin it by forcibly demanding, in a kind of schoolmaster's voice that allows no dissenting opinion, that if all of this other research stuff didn't work, well, then, watch out world, coming, ready or not - GM crops. We will, it seems, eat our GM greens and like them. It is one of the most disheartening things about the battle to save the planet. Endless obstruction and denial of the most basic facts about a warming planet and its cause and effect. Deliberate obstruction to prevent public concern forcing political action. And then, every so often, an entirely cynical comment to the effect that if you greenies are so concerned about climate change then you would support GM organisms and nuclear power, they are the only solutions. Such people don't believe there is a problem, refuse to support real solutions (reduce CO2) and real adaptation (improving the efficiency of water use and cultivation practices in agriculture, making homes and factories more energy efficient), but see an opportunity for big profits (and massive government subsidies) if they can use public concern to ram through nuclear power and GM food. That is, add even more problems to those we are already faced with.And then there was Warren Truss. Perhaps trying to show Barnaby who's boss of the National Party (having waited years, without result, for Barnaby to say "you are the Captain, I am no one") Warren struck out on to the vast plains of northern Australia. For several years a parliamentary committee has been looking in detail at whether the agriculture of southern Australia, faced with extinction as a result of rising temperatures and reduced rainfall as the effects of CO2 take hold in a way obvious to anyone sitting on a farm, could pack up, fold its tents in the night, and silently steal away, leaving the cares that infested their days to try growing wheat and Herefords on the flood plains of Arnhem Land. Taking testimony from expert witnesses, reading submissions and research reports, considering the matter carefully. Concluded, finally, and this was probably like confessing to a murder, that there was only an infinitesimally small area that was suitable, and even then you would have to be very careful not to cause massive environmental damage to this fragile area by damming rivers, clearing trees, ploughing soils. You would think that, faced with such a carefully researched conclusion, Mr Truss might pause to read it before commenting. But no, just like a modern day Joh Bjelke-Peterson (gotta be fair, compared Barnaby to Joh, don't want Warren to think I am playing favourites), Mr Truss was outraged that anyone should suggest that the whole of northern Australia couldn't be flattened with a ball and chain pulled between two tractors, and concrete poured into every river valley that had sloping sides. Outraged. I mean, we have done such a good job looking after the south that it is only fair that the northern half experience the same stewardship. And later Bill Heffernan was outraged that scientists had been asked to study the question on the task force because "all academics think about is retiring down the coast", continuing the frightening anti-science ignorance-is-bliss approach of the Howard government.
And then (no favourites here) came Anna Bligh, standing, the body language speaking volumes in both directions, next to Clive Palmer, and announcing that, great news, a gazillion tons or two of black stuff could be dug out of the sweeping plains of Queensland and fast-tracked to the furnaces of China. Great work - what's good for the coal industry is good for Australia. A job or two available perhaps, driving trucks and bulldozers and trains, and a lot of money going to Clive and to China (who had financed the deal, although within a couple of days the details seemed to be uncertain). Questioned (and the question seems not to have occurred to Anna, determined to (a) show Queensland that she was the Captain at the helm and (b) not let Clive kiss her) as to the possible effects of burning a gazillion tons (or two) of coal on that tiny process called global warming, she smiled and said we all supported "clean coal". The smile looked as convincing as the smile on the face of a dog that has just taken a cane toad into its mouth.
Anyway, it was a week as depressing for me as for Chris Gayle. Just when you think there might be a glimmer of hope on the horizon the sun is blocked by dark clouds. For some time now we have been taking two steps forward and three steps back, and we seem to be heading ever further back to the future into the 1950s and beyond. Pretty soon will come the building of the Ord River dam. Any moment now we will see Don Bradman striding to the crease only to be bowled, like Chris Gayle, first ball. And after that what? War? Depression? Fires? Dust bowls? Cane toads arriving?
But in the real world we are still faced with two degrees, three degrees of warming, and still faced with the massively damaging clearing of land, and still faced with the threat of GM organisms spreading all kinds of nasty DNA into weed species, faced with them spreading like canola along the roads of the southern tablelands. Would be good if some of these people could take a step back and look at what is really going on.
Three strikes and you're in trouble.
global warming
18 February 2010
Category Environment
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