Random observations

*   I think Biden is doing a reasonable job in terms of response to the Middle East crisis.  I have been wondering for many months, though, about why he looks so stiff when walking.  I mean, he still rides a bike, I think, and looks younger than his age when he does so.  But watching him walk, he looks older.   In any event, whatever you think of him, and whatever (perhaps very strong) doubts you have about his running again because of age optics, surely if you have half a brain you would have to agree that we can at least give thanks that Trump and his weirdo crew are not the ones making difficult decisions at this time.

*  The whole Middle East situation is, though, (and obviously), depressing.  

*  Elon Musk seems to have gone relatively quiet, which is good.

*  I have a holiday coming up.   Doing enough work before I go to cover the cost of it is worrying!

*  I maintain my personal theory that a lot of the "food insecurity" crisis (at least in Australia) is caused by people who refuse to adjust their diet and purchases to take into account the continual variation in  market prices.   I mean, I shop for protein, fruit and vegetables for a few meals usually once a week, and simply don't buy certain vegetables when they are ridiculously expensive.   But different things are cheap at different times of the year.  This spring, strawberries and blueberries, in particular, have been really cheap for a good month.  Capsicum were really cheap for a few weeks too - as were eggplant, and (as usual in spring) asparagus.  Cans of tomatoes or chick peas can be on special for $1.   And rice - really, do Australians eat enough rice?  It goes such a long way in making a filling meal.  

I don't know:  maybe the national broadcaster needs to do a TV show devoted to showing dumb people what's cheap this week, and how to make it into a good and filling meal?

   

Stimulating

Surgery-free brain stimulation could provide new treatment for dementia

New Mexico seems an oddball place

I can't get my head around why prosecutors are so keen to see Alec Baldwin suffer:

Special prosecutors say they plan to present the New Mexico Grand Jury with a criminal case against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of the cinematographer on the movie set of Rust.

Even if he pulled the trigger (which seems to be what the "new evidence" relating to the gun must be about), why would a jury blame a guy who was obviously relying on the person he employed to provide a safe gun to use?  I mean, if the armourer was some unqualified relative, or something, I could understand it, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Some distraction needed

Man, the news is pretty depressing at the moment, so a few videos in distraction...

First, this one by Arvin Ash is not about anything new, but it's just a good and clear explanation of how new particles are "discovered", but not actually seen, by particle accelerators:

 

Second, I knew that Mt Fuji had accommodation huts way up on the side of the mountain, at which the typical thing is to eat some dinner, get a bit of a sleep, and then continue to the top in time for sunrise. But until I watched the Chris Broad video about his recent ascent, I had no idea that the accommodation was so large, or for that matter, that there was so much built right on the top of the mountain, overlooking the crater. It's pretty amazing, really, and I am unclear as to how all the building material has made its way up there: 

 

And finally: I am surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia has actually started some significant looking excavation work for the absolutely nutty "NEOM" city - "the Line" or whatever it's called.

I also learnt from this video that the country is building a ski resort on top of mountains where it barely snows! 

I can imagine how ecstatic that the architects and engineers must be - money flowing like water to them to draw up the most grandiose of futuristic schemes, but likely confident that they don't have to worry too much about the necessary construction details, given the very high prospects of the most complicated parts never being built.  

Oh dear

Noticed on Twitter, the non-binary aboriginal Professor (University of Sunshine Coast) who is currently in the USA doing stuff:

But "listening" means also making sure Sandy's feelings are OK, apparently:

 

Oh, and if you are wondering how the Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University (with which O'Sullivan has a lot of connection) are taking the loss, the answer is "not well".

The head of  the Department, Bronwyn Carlson, was recently funded by the Winston Churchill Trust to do this project:

To investigate community approaches to rethinking colonial commemorations and their wider impacts

The description:

Every year protests against colonial commemorations are led by Indigenous peoples. There are numerous cases where communities have worked together to rectify commemorations which often represent violent histories, in the hope to reconcile the past and imagine a shared future. Little is known about the journeys undertaken for such efforts, and what the wider impacts might be. This project will investigate case studies in New Zealand, USA, Canada and Norway, noting that local-level efforts have the potential for significant global benefit. The focus will be on the approaches taken by these communities, the challenges and lessons learnt, and resulting changes for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures.

Sounds like there might be travel for Carlson for her to write a report that will achieve nothing of significance, to be perfectly honest.

Update:   More Sandy:

Sandy's work at the moment:

Laptop's back

It's back, but with an undiagnosed understanding of what happened.

And the loss of an Outlook .pst file which means a loss of about a year's worth of emails, although they will be mixed up in the inbox of another computer in the office.  Inconvenient.

Anyway, I will finally be migrating to Exchange, which I understand means email history will never be at risk again.

 

Computer issue

For the first ever, in about 27 years of running my own business, I have had a computer crash in such a way that it seems to be preventing important data recovery off the drive.  Some data has been recovered, but a really useful part of what's on there is proving difficult to retrieve.

This problem also seems related to a windows update.  

This is...disappointing.  I have had a great run of not having unexpected crashes.  I did have a virus problem once, but it wasn't the worst kind.  

Oh well.

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".