Get a grip (and let's try to make the "practical and reasonable No" case)

Gee, how long will it take before we stop having to watch heads explode in columns and columns of over-wrought commentary on the (presumed) failure of the referendum before we can find any (even semi-prominent) commentator from the press gallery or the entertainment world (or academia - haha, just kidding) to make the following points:

*   It was inherent in the proposal that a new level of bureaucratic organisation with an unknown price tag would be inserted into the already crowded field of who governments could listen in terms of policy advice on indigenous matters.   What guarantee could anyone give that this would alter in any significant way the current outcomes?   

*  The argument that it "could do no harm" was spurious as it meant supporting an open ticket for the diversion of many millions of dollars every year in expenditure on advisory commissioners and support staff, a cost especially hard to justify when the proposal was that governments were not bound to act on its advice anyway, and could prefer the recommendation of already existing groups.     To argue that it was groundbreaking, and vital, and at the same time say that it was "safe" for everyone to endorse because it couldn't bind government anyway was inherently contradictory.

*  This was not the only way a constitutional right to involvement in government could have been proposed -  see New Zealand, for example - and while the Yes campaign was based on the idea that it was the minimalist version most likely to succeed, if that turns out to be wrong, it should be taken more as a  lesson of not putting all your eggs in one basket, rather than arguing Australians are racist and unreasonable and reject all ideas regarding recognition of aboriginal input in government policy.    (Incidentally, at least a guaranteed number of indigenous seats within government - perhaps within the Senate? - would be something with a clear and limited cost.)

*   Polling, and reporting, showed that the proposal was likely supported by a majority, but not an overwhelming one, of the "grass roots" indigenous people.   Surely that should cause hesitation in the overblown condemnation of all of those on the "No" side?

*   Indigenous disadvantage and issues are inherently hard to solve - governments simply can't and won't spend unlimited amounts of money, especially for services in the remotest areas.   Nor can they force health or other staff to work in remote areas, especially if they face danger to their personal safety and are not respected if mistakes are made.   The "Yes" campaign made a pretence of two issues - that governments had never been "listening" or trying to engage at community level to solve problems (demonstrably false for anyone with Google - and something illustrated by a recent string of reports about programs where community engagement, and government support, has shown good outcomes); and that inserting an advisory body in Canberra would "turn it around".    

*   None of this is to say that the "No" campaign by the Coalition was in any way admirable - it was in reality pretty cynical and disreputable.   But in fact, the way polling is indicating that the Coalition is not significantly benefitting from the "success" of their campaign likely means that some significant number of the "No" voters were not particularly swayed by the Coalition's efforts.   In other words - maybe reasonable people had reasonable reasons for not supporting this referendum regardless of wrong or stupid or racist statements made by some on the "No" side.

Claim and counterclaim

I think McGorry as a psychiatrist should actually be ashamed of putting out that messaging.

Gaza - limited options

A short piece at the Jerusalem Post by a former editor argues that Israel has no choice but to send ground forces into Gaza, despite the undoubted losses the army will suffer.

What I don't really know in all the commentary swirling around is this:   how feasible is it to remove Hamas from Gaza?   I don't know anything about how they are organised, the actual level of popular support within Gaza, and even the answer to the question - where did all those missiles come from, anyway? 

Disaster from the sun

From the Washington Post (and the story includes a comment from a University of Queensland researcher - yay):

In a study released Monday, researchers identified what appears to be the largest solar storm to hit Earth, estimated to be larger than the Carrington Event by an order of magnitude. The storm occurred 14,300 years ago, but is evidence of a yet unknown dimension of the sun’s extreme behavior and hazards to Earth.

“It’s clear that if one of these events [occurred] today … this would be quite destructive on our energy network and also internet network,” said Edouard Bard, lead author of the study. “This would really freeze, in fact, all communications and [travel] would be totally disrupted.”

Unlike the Carrington storm, the 14,300-year-old event does not have ground reports of bright, dancing lights or changes in animal behavior. Instead, scientists found traces of the solar storm in ancient tree rings in the French Alps and ice cores in Greenland.

More:

This 14,300-year-old event appears to be bigger than any on record, but is one of nine extreme solar storms to occur in the last 15,000 years, discovered in tree rings over the past decade. These extreme events are known as Miyake events, named after Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake, who first discovered the radiocarbon spikes in tree rings in 2012. No Miyake event has been directly observed, like the Carrington Event.

Pope said these Miyake events seem to occur at random, about once every thousand years. He estimated that could mean about a 1 percent risk of such an event occurring each decade, which is a threat to power grids, satellites and the internet.

“Even if these Miyake Events occur once a thousand years … I think [it] is pretty serious and definitely merits investment in understanding these events and how to predict and mitigate their effects, if any,” said Pope, who called it a really interesting study.

Yes, I wish some of the big tech companies could give us some reassurance that they have enough servers shielded that it's not like the entire digital record of the planet is going to be lost in such an event.  

Listen to who?

At the risk of sounding a bit obsessive on the matter of showing that it's ridiculous to think that the Voice would solve disunity and conflict within the indigenous community about government policy measures, I had to Google to remind myself who did, and didn't, support the Howard government initiated Northern Territory intervention that started in 2007.   Wikipedia says:

Some Aboriginal commentators and activists, such as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Bess Price, offered support, criticising aspects of the response while believing it to be necessary and worthwhile.^{[33][34][35][36][37]} The Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu initially supported the response, but by 2010 had lost faith in it.^{[38][39][40][41][42][43]} Following the announcement of the Intervention plan by the Howard government, Cape York Indigenous leader Noel Pearson offered support, telling ABC Radio National on 22 June 2007:

I'm in agreement with the emphasis on grog and policing. I'm in agreement with attaching conditions to welfare payments. But the difference between the proposals that we've put forward to the Government and the proposals announced by Minister Brough, there is a difference in that we would be concerned that those people who are acting responsibly in relation to the payments they receive, should continue to exercise their freedoms and their decisions, we should only target cases of responsibility failure.

Writing in February 2008, Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton rejected arguments that the Intervention had been a "political ploy" and argued that the policy in fact marked the death of a "wrong-headed male Aboriginal ideology":^{[44][excessive quote]}

There is a cynical view afoot that the Intervention was a political ploy – to grab land, support mining companies and kick black heads, dressed up as concern for children. Conspiracy theories abounded; most were ridiculous.

Those who did not see the Intervention coming were deluding themselves.

It was the inevitable outcome of the many failures of policy and the flawed federal-state division of responsibilities for Aboriginal Australians. It was a product of the failure of Northern Territory governments for a quarter of a century to adequately invest the funds they received to eliminate the disadvantages of their citizens in education, health and basic services. It was made worse by general incompetence in Darwin: the public service, non-government sector (including some Aboriginal organisations) and the dead hand of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) all presided over increasingly horrible conditions in Aboriginal communities.

The combined effect of the righteous media campaign for action and the Emergency Intervention has been a metaphorical dagger, sunk deep into the heart of the powerful, wrong-headed Aboriginal male ideology that has prevailed in Indigenous affairs policies and practices for decades.

My hope is that, as the evidence mounts of the need for a radical new approach, the shibboleths of the old Left – who need perpetual victims for their analysis to work – will also be dismantled.

Yet, in 2022, the ABC runs an article headed:

Residents who lived through the NT intervention plead for governments to 'listen', 15 years on 

It is, as you might gather, an article about aboriginal figures who thought the intervention was wrong and damaging, and suggesting that it all went wrong because the government wasn't listening.

No mention about how the prominent leaders of "but we need a Voice because government isn't listening!"  thought the government had done the right thing at the time....   

Update:  news this morning of polling (with a bigger sample size than earlier ones) indicating that support for the Voice even within the aboriginal community is hardly overwhelming:

The exclusive Resolve Strategic poll, published today by the Nine newspaper, put a variety of questions to First Nations voters.

“Our latest poll now puts Indigenous support at 59 per cent using a more robust sample of 420 people and a consistent methodology with those polls,” pollster Jim Reed told The Age.

“This tells us that the Yes vote has declined at much the same rate as [in] the general population over the last year. It’s still in the majority, but certainly not universal.”

Indigenous people make up about three per cent of the population, so the sample size of the poll is an “over-sample” that delivers a margin of error of 4.8 per cent, Mr Reed explained.

“We can be pretty confident that the result reflects the reality that Indigenous support is between 54 and 64 per cent,” he said.

 

Psychiatrist makes unhelpful suggestion

Noted from The Guardian:

Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry says his fear of “tremendous damage” to mental health if the Indigenous voice to parliament is rejected by voters drove him to spearhead an open letter from two dozen former Australian of the Year winners backing the change.

Gee, I'm no psychiatrist, but maybe it would be more useful to mental health to tell the people you are concerned about that they should take a No vote as being more about rejecting a proposed bureaucracy for dealing with their problems, and not a denial that they have issues that need to be addressed?  

The politics of the (presumed) failure of the Voice referendum

I feel a little sorry for Anthony Albanese, actually.   I mean, there must have at least been a chance that the Coalition would support a Yes vote, and as such, you would expect low blowback on the PM if it failed.   

Also, it is very unlucky to have timed it accidentally with apocalyptic events in the Middle East that  really make having to vote on a matter that could end in mere symbolism (it is, after all, to set up a body that the government can ignore - or if annoyed enough, reduce to a one person office in Birdsville) look like small change that is hard to get excited about, in the scheme of things.  

And, as I have been complaining, the hyperbole about the importance of a Yes outcome has only had the opposite effect from that intended - making many more cynical of the whole exercise, especially when there has been a significant number of indigenous voices on the No side.   (Not just Mundine and Price, either.)   

So, what do I think will happen if the vote is indeed No, as seems inevitable from the polling?

I don't think Albanese will lose that much political skin over it, to be honest.   I think he might be seen as doing something he sincerely thought was the right thing to do, with the "it's our way or the highway" approach by the high profile activists such as Langton and Pearson bearing a high proportion of the blame for its failure.  

His political judgement will be questioned as it does indicate a deaf ear as to how indigenous issues play out in the mind of the wider community, which is arguably more sharply attuned than academia, the non-Murdoch media, and corporate elites, to a lot of the Emperors New Clothes aspects of the last couple of decades of indigenous advocacy .  (My posts here and here on the Dark Emu attempt to re-write history, and here, about things anthropologists used to write about, show what I mean.  Also, as a few of my recent posts have argued, the whole premise of the Yes campaign has been that "listening" hasn't been happening, which is really a nonsense shown up by reading the ABC, or doing your own Googling.)   

But even so, it's not like there is going to be any institutional attacks against him, because they all rushed to say they were completely onside!  See this amazing list of professional bodies that said "Yes" is the way forward.    

And furthermore, with a sort of delicious irony, I don't see Dutton getting any significant boost from Albanese's woes - he is just too naturally dislikeable for that, and it's also such a transparently cynical game to tell the nation they should vote No, and then blame Albanese for "dividing the nation".   It's very close to a bully's "see what you've made me do" line that never works.

But, who knows, I could be wrong. 

 I also wouldn't be surprised if he (Albanese) lets it rest a while, and then reverses and does legislate a Voice organisation without the constitutional change first.   I don't think he'll be punished for that, at least if the amount of money involved is shown to be relatively modest.   It's the same as asking a leader in an election if they will stay in the job all of the next term - everyone knows they will say "yes", and everyone knows it's the type of promise routinely broken.     

We will see...

Update:   Oh my...Lidia Thorpe is now saying that the Voice ought to be legislated even if there is a no vote.  Some strange twists in all of this...

One has one's doubts

Miranda Tapsell votes yes: 'Knowledge passed down over 60,000 years will benefit everyone' – video 

It's this kind of romanticising of the value of indigenous knowledge that feels to me so patently like a game of "let's pretend".   

Depressing news day

What a day for seriously depressing headlines at the Washington Post:

 

That last story contains a table with interesting figures for the most overdose prone occupations:

No surprises in number 2, I guess. 

Also, the relationship between higher education and not overdosing seems really strong.

But anyway - back to the simply depressing:

I don't know, but if the aliens taking snapshots of us are really about to stage an intervention, as so many loose nuts on Twitter seem to think now, this would probably be a good time to distract the world from other things...

The Saudis as a regional leader for peace?

I will gift link this opinion piece from the Washington Post which argues that getting behind Saudi Arabia's hopes for resolution of the Palestinian issue is the only way forward.   

Feels odd, pinning hopes on Saudi goodwill, even though the West has had to be polite to it for most of my life...

Internal criticism noted

I don't know:  while it's appalling judgement for a politician to make a statement as simplistic as "I stand with Palestine" when its leadership has just carried out a terrorist attack aimed largely at civilians,  I also feel that if an Israeli newspaper can say this:

then the pro-Jewish lobby outside of Israel should cut some slack to Westerners who dare say something similar...

 

There is so much hyperventilation going on about this

Like this:

And this: 

And this:

Update:  Noel Pearson being ponderous and self important and unhelpful to his own cause -

 Noel Pearson says he will walk away from advocating for a “middle path” of compromise if the voice to parliament referendum fails, claiming reconciliation would not be viable in the event of a no vote.

The longtime Indigenous activist and respected community leader says he would instead allow a new generation of Indigenous leaders to chart a different path forward.

Pearson said he fears “for the future of my people” if the referendum is defeated on Saturday, making a late plea for voters to vote yes in recognition of Australia’s history and avoid a failure he says would be “ugly as sin”.

“We’re reduced to being told by the no campaign ‘leave it to the politicians’,” Pearson told Guardian Australia. “My pitch to the Australian people, is, ‘Guys, you know that will not work. You know that relying on politicians will not work. It hasn’t worked in the past and won’t work in the future.’”

It's good not to live in the Middle East

Apart from the terrible events in Israel and Gaza, it's very depressing to read the MAGA reaction in America, where they live in a fantasy conspiracy world that means absolutely everything bad that happens in the world is the direct fault of Biden/Democrats/Leftists (basically, anyone who isn't in their cult of "our Leader would have prevented this".)

Also depressing to see how the MAGA blame game spreads like wildfire through Twitter/X, and the mainstream press kind of ignores it, for now.

Anyway, I thought Max Boot's commentary on the whole thing was pretty reasonable.

 

More eggplant

Ok, just for my future reference.

Eggplant pasta casserole:  bake chopped eggplant and at same time, halve a red capsicum and put it in the oven too.  About 30 min at around 180 to 200 degrees.  The capsicum skin will be able to be peeled off when it cools down. 

Cut two chorizo sausages into discs and fry both sides.  Take out and drain off some of the rendered oil. Fry up a chopped onion in the same pan, and a few cloves of garlic.  Add around a teaspoon chili flakes.

Here's the bit I need to remember...I used 300g (dry weight) of penne pasta and wasn't sure how much sauce it needed.  I used a 400 ml bottle of passata, maybe 100 ml of pasta water, and about half a can of crushed tomatoes.  It worked out to be enough.  So, about 600 to 700 ml of sauce.

Cook pasta, and while that's going, add the passata to the onions, throw in the chopped up baked capsicum and chorizo.  I guess the eggplant could go in too, although I just added it to the casserole dish.

Anyway, the drained pasta goes in casserole dish and, of course, the tomato sauce with everything else goes in and mix it well.  Some green vegetable wouldn't hurt...I actually used fresh broadbeans for the first time in my life, but their taste got a bit lost.  I think broccolini would work well.

Sprinkle cheese and bake 20 min or so.

Nice...

It's good to not live in the USA

The Washington Post has a long article up that will annoy Republicans:

How red-state politics are shaving years off American lives 

Makes quite a strong case, though.  Some surprising parts:

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.

Like other hard-hit Midwestern counties, Ashtabula has seen a rise in what are known as “deaths of despair” — drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicides — prompting federal and state attention in recent years. But here, as well as in most counties across the United States, those types of deaths are far outnumbered by deaths caused by cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking-related cancers and other health issues for residents between 35 and 64 years old, The Post found. Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records.

Most of the article is about two public health issues - tobacco taxes and car seat belt laws. Libertarians are bad for health.

Just how big is this solar system, anyway?

From Science:

There just doesn’t seem to be enough of the Solar System. Beyond Neptune’s orbit lie thousands of small icy objects in the Kuiper belt, with Pluto its most famous resident. But after 50 astronomical units (AU)—50 times the distance between Earth and the Sun—the belt ends suddenly and the number of objects drops to zero. Meanwhile, in other solar systems, similar belts stretch outward across hundreds of AU. It’s disquieting, says Wesley Fraser, an astronomer at the National Research Council Canada. “One odd thing about the known Solar System is just how bloody small we are.”

A new discovery is challenging that picture. While using ground-based telescopes to hunt for fresh targets for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now past Pluto on a course out of the Solar System, Fraser and his colleagues have made a tantalizing, though preliminary, discovery: about a dozen objects that lie beyond 60 AU—nearly as far from Pluto as Pluto is from the Sun. The finding, if real, could suggest that the Kuiper belt either extends much farther than once thought or—given the seeming 10-AU gap between these bodies and the known Kuiper belt—that a “second” belt exists.

I like this bit of added mystery: 

Just as intriguing as the new objects is the apparent gap between 50 and 60 AU, says Mihály Horányi, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder who oversees New Horizons’s dust counter. “One way or another, something is responsible for maintaining that gap.” In other solar systems, planets orbiting within a dusty disk carve gaps by hoovering up material. But no large planet has been seen in the gap. The gap could also be a relic from the Solar System’s infancy, caused by waves of pressure in the disk.

Hey, I still like the idea that a very small, primordial black hole is rambling around the edge of the solar system.  

So, the ABC continues to explain how the Voice hardly seems necessary...

Thanks, ABC, for this article:

How different would the Voice to Parliament be from other advisory bodies?

It notes this:

There are currently 110 advisory committees or groups that "develop policies and provide advice on specific issues" registered on the federal government website.

Some of them you might have never heard of, or even noticed were advising the government, such as The National Blood Borne Virus and Sexually Transmissible Infections Surveillance Subcommittee or the Foods for Early Childhood Reference Group.

Each group holds a number of experts in their field, such as the 31 medical professionals who work for the aforementioned subcommittee on sexually transmitted diseases. 

The Voice is expected to work in the same way in that it would be set up to give advice to the government

Question:  is the expectation that "advisory committees" would in future not just be approaching Government directly with recommendations, but also (or alternatively?) having to urge the Voice to take up the issue?   Is the Voice going to be a "filter" for all, or most, or none, of the current groups on recommendations to government?

The Voice group itself is said to likely be something like this:

The government hopes the Voice would be the first body designed with gender balance in mind and the members peer elected on a national scale. 

According to a current proposal of the body, which is subject to consultative change, something else that differentiates the Voice from any other Indigenous advisory group is its geographical spread, of the proposed 24 members.

Two from each state and territory — 16 all up, five from remote communities, two from the Torres Strait and one representing Torres Strait Islanders on the mainland.

Individuals would serve four-year terms and would only be allowed to serve twice and two full-time co-chairs would be elected by the members themselves.

Now, for this group to be effective, and to potentially be on the receiving end of submissions from more than 100 current groups, there is no doubt at all that it is going to have to have a substantial staff.  What's the likely staffing ratio, and the travel costs?   I see that in 2004, an ATSIC commissioner got $136,000 or so in total remuneration.   Bringing that up to date, I would guess that $200,000 would be in the ballpark?   Times 24, that's less than $5 million, but does it include travel expenses, which I assume will be substantial.  But how many staff does it need?    The total cost might not be huge, in terms of government expenditure overall, but it's still a diversion of funds.  

All of which is to achieve - what exactly?    Essentially a "feel good" exercise in empowerment.

The fundamental reason for seriously considering a "no" vote is that such an organisation would be, essentially, an expensive duplication of advocacy that is already happening - and at least in some cases - already achieving results. 

The reason such bodies might work fine in some countries, but the same is likely to be an ongoing source of friction in ours, is because of the size of Australia, which results in the vast number of "first nations" competing for attention for very differing issues in different parts of the country.

In short - there are a lot of racist and bad reasons for arguing against it.  There are also solid practical reasons for at least considering a "No" vote...

Update:   May God forgive me for what I am about to do:  cite a Quadrant article with approval -

Is the Voice Redundant?

 

Perhaps the Republicans should let an AI be speaker?

 Truth be told, I don't really understand the significance of this.  More explanation needed...

An encouraging story

I hadn't noticed that there are some (not perfect, but pretty good) vaccines for malaria being deployed now.

As NPR reports, the disease is ridiculously widespread in parts of Africa:

For example, in Burkina Faso in West Africa, pretty much everyone gets malaria. Last year, out of a population of 20-some million, about half got sick. Halidou Tinto was one of them. He leads the Clinical Research Unit of Nanaro in the country. His six-year-old twins also fell ill with malaria this year.

"As soon as [the children] are febrile or they complain about headache," Tinto says, "you have to think about malaria and treat them immediately. And you can avoid any bad outcome of the disease."

The worst outcome is death. Tinto says 4,000 people died of malaria last year in Burkina Faso alone. In 2021, across Africa, it's estimated that 619,000 died of the mosquito-borne disease, most of them children.

"People are living with the disease," says Tinto. "But of course, we are not happy and we are not proud of this."

But on the "up" side:

They're the first vaccines designed to work against a human parasite.

The first, called RTS,S, was unveiled almost two years ago. The second one, recommended by the World Health Organization this week, is called R21/Matrix-M and is intended for children between 5 and 36 months, who are among the most vulnerable to the disease....

This is what makes WHO's approval of the second malaria vaccine such welcome news. Tinto ran the clinical trials in Burkina Faso that led to its recommendation. Across four African countries, these trials showed a 75% reduction in malaria cases in the year following vaccination of young children.

"I am very, very happy," says Tinto, "and we are pretty sure this vaccine will have a big impact in term[s] of public health."

 

Does pay to shop around

An increase in the cost of  house insurance has been in the news lately, and this year, yes, I was surprised that my RACQ Insurance home and contents cover went up from about $2,000 last year to $2,400. (I have not made a claim on it for perhaps 8 years?)

I rang them and asked if there was a way to trim the policy cost (for example, flood cover was automatically in it, and my house is far, far above any conceivable flood line.)  No, I was told, this is just standard, and (I didn't bother checking if this is true) they define flood to include all water entry, including from an overflowing roof, for example.

I did some online quote searching, and quickly found a company that would do the same cover (using the same cost of rebuilding, and the same contents cover as in the RACQ renewal.)  It was about $1,800.

I then did another search, and found cover at $1,700.

RACQ Insurance cover my family's cars as well, and I recently had to put a claim through them, and they are very easy to deal with.   Once, in the past, I even had to ring them on Christmas morning for some reason (I forget why - I think it might have been to do with whether my son was listed as an authorised driver for a car) and they were there, and able to deal with it immediately.   So, generally, I like dealing with them.

But when it comes to house and contents, something seems to have gone seriously wrong with their financial exposure if they are $700 more expensive than some of their competitors....

Various forms of insanity

*   Elon's plaything is still kind of amusing because of the way my version of it has been chock full of  the more nutty kind of UFO content in the last week.  I'm not sure whether this is happening to everyone who uses "X", or just me because I do click on some of those tweets.

*  Given Musk's boosterism to Right wing and Trumpian politics, there must be many, many users who would love to drop it, but the alternative app has still not appeared.   What is the problem??

*  The Republicans in Congress look, and are, a complete shambles.  Newt Gingrich says creepy Gaetz must go.  Gaetz leaves open the prospect of someone outside of Congress could be speaker.  (The only thing stopping him suggesting Trump is presumably the amount of time Trump has to spend in court - but as if lazy Trump would take on a job that requires long hours and understanding stuff.)   Even Fox News doesn't seem to know how to handle it.  

Update:  Hahahahahaha!

 

Climate change denial struggling with reality

This tweet:

is a result of this, from Roy Spencer's satellite temperature blog:

 Yep, that's some spike...

So, the ABC tells us that "listening" has been happening...

Once again, I give credit to the ABC in telling a story that shows how government programs have been working with aboriginal communities for health improvement (as I showed last week has also been happening with rheumatoid heart disease.)   This time it's improvement in trachoma rates.

On the pro-Voice side, it's being held as an example of why 'listening' works, and the implication being that the Voice will increase the amount of listening.

On the 'the Voice is completely unnecessary' side, we have the fact that, well, we didn't need the Voice to get these improvements.   Now, I really do think Warren Mundine is a flaky guy, but his point on this story is pretty valid, even if he goes over the top in the claim as to how much money a Voice organisation is likely to cost:

Warren Mundine, one of leaders of the No Campaign, said the success of trachoma demonstrated that Indigenous people already had a voice and what was really needed was better coordination of services.

"Through the Voice process, we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars when that money can be better spent actually doing similar things that this health project did," he said.

He said the problems of housing, health and education were largely state government responsibilities that would not be solved with a federal voice to parliament.

While I would agree that the "no" side has the nuttiest people on it, I also am somewhat amused as to how on the "yes" side you have so many on the arts and entertainment industry showing themselves as stereotypically completely captured by emotional arguments that are full of hyperbole.  I forget who I saw this morning saying "if you vote no, you want the indigenous gap to get worse".    It's like they refuse to think more deeply about matters beyond sloganeering.

 

Oppenheimer finally viewed

I'll be kind and first list the good points:  yes, I think the acting is fine, and Cillian Murphy is aged very realistically in the multiple periods in which he appears.  I like the fact that an incredible scientific and engineering undertaking is given attention in a widely watched movie, and that (as far as I can tell, in checking up on various websites since seeing it) the movie is mostly historically accurate.   As a rider to that last point, though, it is a tad annoying to find out that a really important - virtually the pivotal - scene is an invention*.   Still, it seems the truth is almost never palatable enough for dramatic re-creation if it's a bio-pic instead of a documentary.

OK, so for the bad points.  And the first is really bad.   I realised after perhaps 30 or 45 minutes that the orchestral soundtrack was always there, far from subtle, and would simply never shut up so we could have some dialogue experienced as in real life - in silence, or with just some ambient sound.   It felt like there was barely 5 minutes of audio calm (specifically, no orchestra, or the various "jump booms" which happen every now and then) in the entire movie.   At the half way point, I had already decided that it felt like the composer was using a hammer to try to beat me into submission.    

Now, I know, lots of people on line have praised the score.  But there are some on line who agree (and who complain that the audio mixing generally sometimes made dialogue a strain to hear.   Even my son agreed with that.)  Some examples of commentary I agree with:

Everyone talked like they knew they were in an Important Historical Drama and the music was constantly insisting on emotions the film wasn’t doing anything to earn....

The draining score was there to artificially inject superficial tension....

For me the sound was so unnecessarily loud that I literally facepalmed during the movie. The sound mix was so brazen that it made me wish I’d watched this on streaming with subtitles, it’s borderline disrespectful to the audience to make a movie so loud. I’m amazed that Nolan gets away with it. Surprising that the score doesn’t get an acting credit, it’s so blatantly front and centre in so many scenes

And, by the way, given that I am something of a Nolan sceptic (while liking some of his films), I didn't realise that loud and peculiar audio mix that interferes with hearing dialogue has been a repeat feature of many of his films.  There's an entire article about that here, from before Oppenheimer opened.  This film has only confirmed the problem.

On a bigger point, and why I think the movie is interesting but far from great, is it felt more like an exercise in  Nolan showing us how clever he is with his complicated and dense screenplay, rather than making something that could have been much more emotionally affecting.  And from a dramatic structure point of view, while I understand that the back and forth can make for a more interesting way to tell a story, I still didn't understand why it needed to feel exhaustingly frenetic from the start, and to have a sense of urgency during parts of the story that, well, didn't need it.  Arguably, I suppose, you could say that it does become less urgent in the last third - which is the opposite of normal dramatic structure, and does have the odd effect of making you wonder why the narrative has always been about a different character we don't really have any reason to be interested in.

In short, I don't think the dramatic structure works, and the movie would have been much better if it had some breathing spaces ever now and then, and let tension and urgency build more naturally.  The climatic explosion, by the way, felt somewhat "flat" to me, and I was disappointed that one true detail that has fascinated a lot of people (Fermi throwing pieces of paper into the air to see how the blast wave affected them, and using this to come up with a reasonable estimate of the blast yield) didn't make it into the movie.

I see that of the major movie critics in America, Richard Brody in the New Yorker was about the only one who didn't like the film, pretty much on similar grounds that I've outlined:

Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.       

Brody adds some interesting detail about the real Oppenheimer in this section:

...the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie.

That very last line is probably unfair - there's no way a History Channel movie would make the telling so complicated and with visual flair - but in terms of how it deals with character, I get his point. 

I'll wrap this up tomorrow... 

Update:   

*  well, as far as I can tell, it's invented.   I'm talking about the "Stauss introduces Oppenheimer to Einstein" scene.  It is clear that the content of the conversation is invented - Oppenheimer had never asked Einstein to check if the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire - but it has been harder to find any site which explains specifically whether or not the meeting with Einstein (while Strauss watched) happened at all.

OK, to finish up a couple of things which provide some interesting context -

a.    an article about his love life, with some amusing details

b.    a pretty good Youtube video showing what modern day Los Alamos is like, including the slightly surprising detail about the way radioactive waste has been buried all around the place:

Update 2:   I'm pleased to see there are quite a few people on Reddit prepared to criticise the film as being underwhelming for them, for similar reasons I outlined.   I haven't even mentioned the oddball scene that was tweeted about (in response to someone who said "see, no one is talking about Oppenheimer any more") as follows:

Ha.  :)

(Quite a few people think the female characters are a bit unfairly treated - there was a lot more to both of them than their flaws, which are pretty much the only aspect that make it into the story.)
 

A vegetarian recipe noted

Eggplants are very cheap at the moment, and I don't know why, but I seem to be enjoying them more and more lately, especially as baking them with a light oil coating has solved the "oil sponge" problem that used to be a bit a pain if frying them.

I made this curry last night, in which they are the key ingredient, and it came out very well.  The technique was just to chop up a big eggplant into 2.5 cm cubes, coat in a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and bake at about 200 degrees for 30 min.  

The curry is made in the usual way - fry onion, add garlic and ginger, then the curry spices;  add stock, tomatoes, chickpeas and coconut milk and simmer for 20 minutes.  Add the baked eggplant and simmer another 10 minutes.  Garam masala is supposed to go in at the end, but I forgot.  

To stop link rot losing this, here are the ingredients:

• 1¼ pound (20 ounces) eggplant about 1 very large or two small (+ 1½ tbsp olive oil, ½ tsp salt, ¼ tsp black pepper for roasting)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 medium onion chopped
• 2 cloves garlic grated
• 1 teaspoon ginger grated
• 2 teaspoon curry powder
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds or ground
• ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon turmeric powder
• ½ teaspoon ground coriander
• ½ teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 – 3 cups vegetable broth based on desired consistency
• 1 can (15 ounces) chickpeas or 1½ cups of cooked chickpeas
• 1 can (15 ounces) crushed tomatoes
• 1 can (14 ounces) coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon garam masala

Now, I did increase the curry powder to three teaspoons, and the red pepper flakes to about a teaspoon.  Instead of a whole can of coconut milk I used about 2/3 one of coconut cream.

The eggplant was the only fresh ingredient I used, but it was still great.  I guess I could try using fresh tomatoes next time, and perhaps add red capsicum too would be good.

I will definitely make again.

A completely unnecessary complication

The (rather dull, but harmless I guess) nerd Lex Fridman was all super excited earlier today about this:

My reaction, which only took about 5 seconds to occur to my sub-genius level brain:   "Oh, so you mean, you experienced something exactly the same as a high quality video call, but using - what? - twenty times the computer power??   Big advance...."

But:  I have scrolled quite a way down in the fanboy comments after this post, and still haven't found anyone making this point.   Instead we get many variations on this:

Excuse the shouting, but:

HOW??   YOU CAN ALREADY DO THIS OVER VIDEO!   IS NOT HAVING TO SHAVE OR COMB YOUR HAIR OR GET OUT OF YOUR PJ'S REALLY THAT BIG AN ADVANCE TO ONLINE MEETINGS?

 

Bones and bananas

Two somewhat surprising videos from Youtube today:

The first - I don't recall seeing this surprising ceremony from Madagascar before - where a huge number of people turn up to carry around the 7 year dead body of a beloved relative, in a very celebratory fashion.  (Although one child in it finds it pretty upsetting). 

 

And secondly - turns out that the bite of a spider in South America known as a "banana spider" was well known for causing priapism, and now the molecule derived from it is well on the way to being used in a ointment for erectile dysfunction (!):

Fanciful suggestion

As reported in The Guardian, Noel Pearson claims this:

Government ministers have spoken about the voice’s potential to bring together advice on complex, multi-disciplinary problems such as rheumatic heart disease, a little-known condition that the health minister, Mark Butler, described as “a disease of grinding poverty, poor environmental conditions, and not something the health portfolio can manage alone”.

Pearson called it “a problem only a voice can overcome”.

“It is a disease of the unlistened to. It is the disease of a people who have spoken, but have not been heard,” he said.

“No gets us nowhere when it comes to confronting rheumatic heart disease. Yes makes it possible.”

A Google search shows in fact a plethora of articles in medical journals and websites discussing the problem.   There are many recent articles, and to take one example from 2021:

A community-based program to reduce acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease in northern Australia

And by refining the Google search, you can see how much the problem was discussed, say, a decade ago.

Here's a screenshot of the first page when the topic is restricted to 2010 to 2012 search results:

 OK, so you might say "well, you are just proving that the problem was known, but the government wasn't listening to the aboriginal community about it."

The problem with that line is that Googling up the evidence of active government engagement to address the problem is also easy.  For example, here's a 32 page booklet from the Queensland government n 2018 with the title:

Here's some material from the Federal government National Indigenous Australians Agency (not sure the date, but it's after 2018):

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021–2031 (the Health Plan), released in December 2021, includes priority 5: Early Intervention; which emphasises place-based approaches that are locally determined such as preventing ARF from becoming RHD where needed, and promotes enhancing access to culturally safe and responsive, best practice early intervention (Objective 5.3). The Health Plan also supports community driven housing and infrastructure solutions (Objective 7.2) to consider targeted primordial intervention for housing-related medical conditions that are common to Indigenous Australian households, such as ARF and RHD, trachoma, and otitis media.

The Champions4Change Program has worked in partnership with RHD Australia since 2018 to meet a clear need for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-specific program that had self-determination and culture at its heart. The program is supported by nearly 60 Indigenous Australians with lived experience of ARF and RHD from 27 communities across Australia. The program was designed to privilege and promote the voices of its champions, to support them in their lives and work, and to put culture, Country and community at the centre of responses to RHD.

Gee, the bit in bold sounds quite a lot like "listening" to me. 

Some more material from the Feds:

The Australian Government is committed to ending RHD as a public health issue by 2030. To achieve this, the Australian Government is making significant investments to address ARF and RHD through:

• the Rheumatic Fever Strategy
• developing a vaccine against Strep A (funded through the Indigenous Health Research Fund).

The Rheumatic Fever Strategy includes:

• state-based register and control programs in the NT, WA, SA and QLD, to improve detection, monitoring and management of ARF and RHD
• developing clinical guidelines to prevent, diagnose and manage ARF and RHD
• developing resources and providing education and training for healthcare professionals, communities, and for individuals with these conditions and their carers
• piloting activities in high-risk communities to help prevent new cases of ARF
• national analysis and reporting on the data from state-based registers.

I could go on.

The point is, of course, that Pearson is engaging in pure rhetorical hyperbole when he says this is one example of a problem that "only a voice can overcome" because the indigenous are not being "listened to".

The truth, which it really doesn't suit him to acknowledge, is that the problem has been well recognized for well over a decade, governments have been actively working on programs to deal with it, and have been engaging directly with aboriginal organisations and advocates.

There is really no reason to believe that having another layer of indigenous representatives who say "you're not doing enough!" is going to achieve anything better.   

Antimatter not as exotic as it might have been

At the New York Times, a report on a physics experiment that shows antimatter is affected by gravity the same way as normal matter: 

In science fiction, antiparticles provide the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward in time.

A new experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out, antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. “The bottom line is that there’s no free lunch, and we’re not going to be able to levitate using antimatter,” said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley.

And:

Few physicists were surprised by the result. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.

“If you walk down the halls of this department and ask the physicists, they would all say that this result is not the least bit surprising,” Jonathan Wurtele, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an announcement issued by the university. It was he who first suggested the experiment to Dr. Fajans a decade ago. “That’s the reality,” Dr. Wurtele said.

“But most of them will also say that the experiment had to be done because you never can be sure,” he added. “The opposite result would have had big implications.”

A bit of a pity, really.  Anomalous results are more fun.

Panpsychism discussed

There's not much worth reading at Scientific American, I reckon, but I did enjoy this column about a recent meeting of science-y types debating panpsychism:

Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism 

As it happens, I agree that the basic criticisms are pretty strong:

Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

Perhaps I find these ideas more appealing:

Other ideas were batted around. The idea of cosmopsychism was floated—roughly, the notion that the universe itself is conscious. And Paul Draper, a philosopher at Purdue University who participated via Zoom, talked about a subtly different idea known as “psychological ether theory”—essentially that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness. In this view, consciousness was already there before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. If the idea is correct, he writes, “then (in all likelihood) God exists.”

On cosmopsychism, it seems I missed this essay at AEON about it.  

All good fun to think about...

Update:  surprisingly, if you have Twitter and search it, there are a lot of comments being made about the article.  I liked this one, for example:

 

Unexpected news day

First, Dan Andrews resigns.  The guy drove Right wingers absolutely nuts - maybe it was his air of general unflappability - but it was kind of funny reading some of the conspiracies spun about him.  For my part, I don't generally spend much time thinking about politics at State level, and don't really have any strong opinion about Andrews as a person one way or another.   But it's hard to deny that he has been electorally (perhaps culturally?) very successful, and a significant part of turning his State around from a Liberal stronghold to a Labor one.

Secondly:  it's rare to read a news story of aberrant behaviour so appalling that it makes you feel queasy contemplating that there are people in the world who do this.  But this is one of those stories.   

I admit, I did google to learn some more background of the guy, who I hadn't heard of before.  I thought maybe he was a damaged incel all his life, but no, he has (had?) a wife.   No mention of children on line, though, which is undoubtedly a blessing, given that it is impossible to imagine how damaging it would be to learn this about your father.

  

Noted

 I don't really know this person - seems to be a relatively centrist farmer and rural advocate?   Seems to have put many tweets against the Voice on basically these grounds - lots of rural/remote Aboriginal people don't think a Canberra level Voice is actually the right way to get their concerns heard. 

Given that I have noted at least three ABC stories where the reporter has talked to rural/remote Aboriginal groups and found this same distrust and lack of support for the Voice, it seems to be true, and something simply not addressed by the creators of the Uluru statement, who just insist that it was the result of years of consultation, etc.

Onion humour

I don't feel the need to comment on Russell Brand - a search of the blog will show I've been disliking him for many years.  But this is funny:

 

Bad polls, for some...

Interesting couple of tweets:

 

Let's admire Singapore, again

I'm pretty sure Australia pioneered this mosquito control technique, and Singapore has taken it on board in a major way. Their mosquito breeding and release program is shown in this video from CNA, and it's more interesting than you might think.  Once again, Singapore looks so - competent - in the way they operate:   

So my Pezzullo cynicism was well founded

In a rare change for a Sunday night, I actually watched 60 Minutes because I saw on X Twitter that a major story about Pezzullo actively trying to influence Liberal Party internal politics was coming out.  

The major online articles about it are behind a paywall (that'll change by the morning), so I only have this one to link to at the moment.  It is a major scandal, and I can't see how Pezzullo could credibly last until the end of the week.   He ought to fall on his sword by midday tomorrow - or perhaps I should say "metaphorical sword", because he strikes me as the sort of person who would have a real one in his office with a Home Affairs logo on it.

I have long questioned his strange sway over both sides of politics - and have noted before that Bernard Keane has muttered darkly about him for years.  Good riddance.