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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

Atlas Shrieked

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through an imaginary land. I am, I ask you to imagine, a fanatic believer in ultra-unregulated nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw-and-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism. I am against any form of public ownership or activity - no public schools, hospitals, aged care, transport, communications - nothing for public good, all for private wealth. I am a religious fundamentalist, especially because I like the bit about man having dominion over nature, and I am against any form of environmental regulation of big business.

I have decided to set up the Murrumbidgee Science Institute. It has no buildings, no staff, just myself as President and CEO, and a web site. The prestigious (it will say so on the web site) Institute has a number of divisions, each charged with the task of asserting things I believe. One division will assert that Australian rivers have plenty of water, though when they dry up it is natural, and there should be much more irrigation; another will assert that there are more trees than ever before in Australia and farmers should be clearing them; another will promote the use of clean green nuclear power; another will press for the privatisation of all national parks, turning them into managed forests for timber and woodchips; another will press for the rejection of godless Darwinism and the teaching of creationism in schools; another will push the proposition that GM food is harmless, nay, beneficial; still another will assert that cigarettes are not addictive and smoking does not damage health (oh, no, sorry, that one was left over from my earlier Cigarette Institute agenda). And then the biggie. The A Division will assert that the planet isn't warming, or if it is the process is purely natural, and that there should be no attempt to curb greenhouse gases. I will of course be the spokesperson for all these divisions (and in fact the only member of each) since they will simply be asserting what I believe.

Each time an environmental issue arises I will phone the television networks and introduce myself as, say, the Head of the Rivers Division, Murrumbidgee Science Institute. The tv stations, desperate for balance, and faced with the unanimous opinion of all the freshwater scientists of Australia, will be delighted to hear a dissenting view. And so it goes.

After the first few appearances money will come flooding in, from farmer's associations, mining companies, business groups, foresters, providing the means for me to spread our messages even further. I will be able to monitor any media message which contradicts my beliefs, and instantly respond. No need to present actual research (there will be none), since I will describe the outcomes of scientific research as "opinion", and therefore my own opinions provide a perfect counterbalance. But I need something else, the ultimate killer application.

In September 1950 "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky, one of the first of the blockbuster "popular science" books was published and reprinted a staggering 13 times over the next ten years selling many tens of thousands of copies, and author and title were household names in the 1950s. The book was nonsense. Velikovsky's theory was that the planets had moved around the solar system in a kind of celestial game of snooker, and the collisions between them, and the after effects, could explain all the history of climate and geology of the planet, and the evolution of organisms, and all human development. The collisions and their effects had continued not only through the last few hundred thousand years but into historical times. The book was based on an obsessive belief in the theory and a willingness to force every piece of information the author could find, every reference to the heavens in ancient texts, into the mould of his vision. The acceptance of the book by the general public was understandable - a claim to explain everything about the past all wrapped up in a simple theory is enormously appealing. Why though wasn't Velikovsky's book immediately discredited by the scientists of the day? Because a cosmologist reading it would say - "well, the cosmology is of course complete rubbish but the geology looks very interesting". A geologist would say, "well the geology is nonsense, but gee there are some interesting ideas about biology here", an historian would say, "well of course his reading of history is insane, but this stuff about planetary movement is really intriguing". And so on (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/84979/Fire_and_Australian_Society.html).

Since I know how all this worked I can add another technique to my repertoire of Breakfast Show interviews and letters to the editor. Petitions. Here is a thing that will surprise you - there are lots and lots of "scientists" round the world. They range from people with PhDs from prestigious universities followed by a lifetime of publishing in major scientific journals and a laboratory or two named after them; down through the girl in the headache tablet advert who has a "science degree" and a white coat and is using them to see whether one tablet dissolves faster than another, by carefully placing the two tablets in, respectively, 2 glasses of water; and on down through people who have done first year remedial biology at a technical college, subsequently closed, in a very small rural town in Uzbekhistan. Anyway, hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom would be happy to say, with a little modest smile, "oh, I don't know if I would call myself a scientist, that would be up to others, but I certainly think of myself as one". And not many Albert Einsteins, or Charles Darwins, or James Hansens among them.

On the other hand, since these are, by and large, ordinary people, they represent the same range of wisdom and foolishness as the population at large. Among them will be religious fanatics, gun freaks, racists, political ultra-conservatives, foresters, talk back radio listeners, taxi drivers, and those who believe that capitalism will one day make them rich. So here is what I do. I set up an online petition - perhaps one asserting that evolution and "intelligent design" are equally valid theories, or one asserting that GM organisms are harmless, or one asserting that there is no such thing as wilderness and all forest should be managed, or one asserting that climate change is not happening but if it was it wouldn't be caused by humans. I know that real scientists who know anything about the particular topic will ignore me, but that people who don't will rush to sign up, to see their names on a list of "scientists". And, even among real scientists, just as with Velikovsky, chemists may think there is something to be said for intelligent design, physicists may see some logic in forest management, and geologists may think that recent climate change is insignificant. So among all the dross, there will be a few names of genuine scientists, signing up on an issue on which they have no expertise, and doing so because of some religious or philosophical or psychological imperative in their minds. Anyway, no problem racking up the numbers, and I will soon be able to make announcements - 20,000 scientists think schools should teach creationism, 25,000 scientists think national parks should be abandoned, 30,000 scientists think global warming is not caused by CO2, 40,000 scientists say GM organisms are good for you.

Not me saying those things you understand, but scientists, thousands of them. And I know that next time I go on breakfast tv armed with such a petition no one will question the make up of the list concerned (including the surprising number of "Mickey Mouses" who have scientific opinions), the quality and quantity of the "scientists" concerned. Even if I have to debate, say, James Hansen or the ghost of Charles Darwin, my list will trump them - 30,000 to 1 you see, take that James. And the success of such petitions in swaying public opinion through a scientifically-illiterate entertainment-obsessed popular media will impress politicians, making decisions on, say, whether a derisory 5% in emission cuts is enough or do they need to go to 10%. And, in turn, my ability to impress politicians and turn around some scientifically irrefutable, but giant-corporation-unpopular piece of public policy will lead to even more money pouring into my virtual coffers. A license to print money really.

And a license to impose my beliefs on a grateful nation, a grateful planet. Well, grateful eventually when they realise what I have done for them. Don't think anyone will be throwing shoes at me!

global warming

19 December 2008
Category Climate change
1 comments

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The Web gives false credibility

{ 9:03 PM, 19 December 2008 } { Posted by Pamela Poole }
Hi David.

Great post. I saw Chris Anderson, founder of TED, speak at LeWeb 08 in Paris last week. This is one of the issues he mentioned. He talks about a woman, a doctor, who was an AIDS denier. She had HIV and created a website with lots of phony science: http://www.aliveandwell.org/. Her own daughter got a cold at a year old and died of AIDS shortly thereafter. The crazy woman never told the doctors she herself was HIV positive. I doubt she ever had her daughter tested. I think she didn't believe it could be passed on.

I recommend Chris's talk. You can watch it here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/960322

I'm in the video, near the beginning at about the 2:44 point, when he is walking out into the audience! Lower right-hand corner. ;-)

Pamela

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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)

"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)