A New Year's Day Miscellany

Happy New Year everyone.

There's not much obvious to post about today. The Sydney Morning Herald gets off to a bad start by running an article by Bob Ellis which, even by his standards, appears to be written after an exceptionally long night on the claret. (It's about the death of Saddam, who he seems to think went to the gallows in a noble fashion, unlike how he imagines George W would behave.) It is truly a puerile read.

As for the future, reviewing psychic predictions for the year just gone is always a laugh. Have a look at this list of reader predictions from About.com. A more comprehensive list of inaccurate prophecy may be very hard to find. I like this one:

A book will be published in 2006 that completely explains existence. By doing so it will prove the world wrong on a Copernicus (flat-world) scale. The presentation will be that which will put traditional values on the defensive using simple logic that cannot be refuted.

How about this cryptic one in the "entertainment" section:

Harry Potter strikes again and again.

And under the "surprise predictions" category:

The Elizabethan collar will come back in style along with the poofy sleeves.

On another topic, I will be looking out for the figures on this New Year's Japanese mochi chocking deaths with interest. (It's a more interesting hobby than following the media obsession with holiday road accidents in Australia.)

Finally, the British Medical Journal has a more or less serious (I think) article that contains everything you ever wanted to know about sword swallowing. (And yes, it is often medically dangerous.) This extract about you learn how to do it is particularly interesting:

Some respondents swallowed a sword easily, but mastery for most required daily practice over months or years. The gag reflex is desensitised, sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The
performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper oesophageal sphincter with the neck hyperextended. The next step requires relaxation of the pharynx and oesophagus and particularly the horizontal fibres of cricopharyngeus, which are not usually under voluntary control.

The more mysterious question of why anyone still bothers to learn this is not addressed.

On the death of Saddam

Long time readers would know that I agree with Roger Simon's point. Captain's Quarters' take on the execution is fair enough too.

I note that some of the critics of executing Saddam talk about how it will not help Iraqi "reconciliation". Well, it seems to me that the main example of successful national reconciliation is South Africa, but the history of that country, and the circumstances of the change in power there, are vastly different from what has happened in Iraq. (And who is the equivalent national hero to Mandela who would make a similar kind of reconciliation process in Iraq even vaguely possible?) It also seems rather improbable to me, although I stand to be corrected, that Iraqis don't already know enough of the genocidal actions of Saddam in relation to the Kurds.

Somewhat surprisingly, The Guardian's obituary is the one that seems to go into the most detail about Saddam's evil character.

As for those from the West who say "Bush and Blair should be next", they are the people who really worry me for the future of a sane world.

Waiting for the apology

A few weeks ago the Fairfax press, and indeed the Murdoch press, both ran with a story that that John Howard and Alexander Downer had "distorted" advice to them when using the phrase "biological agent" to describe a white powder that had been sent to the Indonesian embassy. The alleged reason for this was because documents obtained under FOI from ACT Pathology and the Federal Police never used the phrase. Have a look at Tim Dunlop's Blogocracy post about this, where he ends with this:

You simply can’t take at face value a word that comes out of their mouths. It’s about time the media stopped reporting this tendency as ‘smart politics’ and started calling it what it is, dishonesty.

For those who love reading stupid Howard conspiracy theories, read some of the comments to that post too.

Today, the Sydney Morning Herald points this out:

ADVICE relied on by the Prime Minister to describe flour sent to the Indonesian embassy last year as a "biological agent" appears to have originated in the ACT Emergency Services Authority, according to documents just released.

Unsigned situation reports produced by the authority's Emergency Co-ordination Centre on June 1 last year, the day the powder was found at the embassy, say the material "has been positively identified as a biological agent", that further testing was under way and a result was likely to take 24 to 48 hours.

Yet, according to the original report in The Age:

Staff at ACT Health and ACT Emergency Services were stunned when the Government called the powder a biological agent.

Obviously, whoever The Age spoke to at ACT Emergency Services did not know what was in its own situation reports. Did the reporter really speak to anyone of significance there?

Any sign of an apology from the press over this? Of course not. From further down today's SMH story:

Earlier this month Mr Howard and the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, denied a Herald report that they had distorted test results on the material. Mr Howard said he and Mr Downer had quoted directly from advice provided by the Protective Security Co-ordination Centre saying it had tested positive as a biological agent and that further testing would need to be carried out to determine what the substance actually was.

The Government has not released the full protective security advice but the new documents show the centre was liaising with the Emergency Co-ordination Centre, suggesting their reports were probably used in the protective security advice to the Commonwealth Government.

There seems to be no suggestion that the Emergency Co-ordination Centre's situation reports picked up the phrase "biological agent" from John Howard himself. (The SMH report could easily have clarified this by telling us the time of the first "situation report" was issued. If it was prior to Howard's press conference, there is no wriggle room left for conspiracy theorising at all.)

But basically, it seems to me that the SMH story comes as close as they can bring themselves to saying they were wrong, and Howard and Downer's version was completely correct, without actually saying it.

Today's story tries to salvage some criticism of the government because:

The biological terrorism scare continued until June 2, when the Government announced the powder was not harmful.

This was despite an email from the federal police national manager of intelligence, Grant Wardlaw, sent to the office of the Justice Minister, Chris Ellison, at 6.35pm on June 1 making clear there was no confirmed evidence the powder was a harmful substance. Dr Wardlaw said the powder had tested positive to gram bacilli.

"Gram bacilli is a commonly occurring bacteria. If spores of this bacteria are found to be growing in the substance this raises the level of potential risk.

"Information to date is that no spores have been identified by pathology," he said.

So, it is still some sort of scandal that the "scare" (which presumably only affected anyone working at the Indonesian embassy in the first place) was in place for about 24 hours? Talk about trying to make a story out of nothing.

And by the way, don't bother looking for this story in The Age today. It doesn't even appear there at all. News Limited doesn't seem to have run it either.

This is why our press is so respected.

Speaking of the weather...

Maybe it is just that by mid-life, really hot weather starts to annoy everyone much more than it did when they were younger. Whatever the reason, it has seemed to me that most Christmas Days, and summers generally, in Brisbane over the last 6 years or so have been unbearably hot and uncomfortable. So I have been delighted that this summer has been so unseasonably cool. All those holiday makers on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts might be regretting paying $2,000 and more for a week by the beach, though.

Anyway, while browsing the web looking for more details about the Federation drought of 100 years ago (it's not so easy to find,) I stumbled onto this page from the Australian Bureau of Statistics about Australian deserts. They can be a lot hotter than I thought:

The most famous long hot spell in Australian history was that at Marble Bar in the summer of 1923-24, when there were 160 consecutive days above 37.8°C (100 degrees Fahrenheit). Even in those areas where the most extreme heat is rare, there are many hot days; for example, at Giles, where the all-time record high is a relatively modest 44.8°C, there are an average of 100 days per year of 35°C or above, including 69 in succession during the summer of 1964-65.

While I am not exactly a global warming sceptic, it is very important to realise how bad Australian weather has been in the past before you start to talk about how bad it is at the present.

What you may have missed in my absence

Here's a list of some interesting stories from the last week:

Let me do the panicking for you: If the Large Hadron Collider or an asteroid does not get humanity first, a series of supervolcanoes will make life miserable enough sooner or later again anyway. Here's a Christmas Day story that did not attract much attention:

Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought...

Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.

But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.

They have published in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America evidence that the eruption in the Taupo Volcanic Zone was actually two supervolcanoes 30km apart which erupted within days or weeks of each other.

What's worse:

Last year, other research at Taupo - on the more recent Taupo supervolcano of only 26,500 years ago - changed accepted theories that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the reservoir of molten rock, or magma, beneath a supervolcano to build up to an eruption.

They showed the period between super-eruptions can be much shorter, perhaps a few tens of thousands of years.

Dr Bruce Charlier, from Britain's Open University, showed the build-up at Taupo was no more than 40,000 years - a relatively short time period in geological terms.

A happy pre-Christmas report: having a drink before your head injury is a good idea. The trick is in making sure your drink does not cause you to have the injury in the first place.

Everyone's favourite cat borne disease gets noticed again: The Australian media noticed a toxoplasma story that talked about possible behavioural changes in people infected with it. (Funny, this was covered thoroughly in blogs, including mine, in August.)

But in fact, Science Daily notes recently that has been a cluster of new papers about toxoplasma. This part of their report was interesting:

Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Symptoms usually appear only in people with weakened immune systems, but on rare occasions, healthy people suffer serious eye and central nervous system problems from toxoplasmosis. Their babies can have birth defects. White said toxoplasmosis also may be linked to some cases of schizophrenia and bipolar disease. It can kill livestock and has devastated efforts to restore sea otters near Monterey, Calif. Because it's common, yet complex, toxoplasmosis is a potential weapon for bioterrorists.

Bioterrorism, when nearly half the world has it already? Sounds a little unlikely. But then again, it they gathered a ton of cat poo and put it in the local water supply, I guess it would put me off drinking water for some time.

Hitchens goes to Iraq

There's a short Slate piece by Hitchens about a recent trip to Iraq. Good reading, as always.

What I got for Christmas

They're boxer shorts, if you can't quite tell.

That Letterman Christmas song

I don't know if I have missed the 2006 edition yet, but David Letterman has had Darlene Love singing this song every Christmas for a decade. It is good. Here's the 2005 version:

The Guardian greens your Christmas

It's hard to find the right word to describe this article in The Guardian about how to have a green Christmas. Seeing it's from England, maybe "eco-naff" is appropriate?

Here are some of its suggestions:

"Use slightly fewer fairy lights, and try not to leave them on all day." (Just how "slightly" will this affect the amount of CO2 put out by your local power plant, which in England might be nuclear anyway?)

green gifts " include everything from giving a goat to organic underwear to recycled glass objects"

"Wrap those ethically thoughtful presents in old newspaper and string. " (I hope the goat stays still long enough.)

"...if you're flying for Christmas it's usually because you haven't seen your family for a while, and the trip is less likely to be negotiable. You could deny yourself air travel for the rest of the year, or make the rest of your Christmas so green that you offset your evil ways." (I would like someone to do the figures on how many millennia of using newspaper to wrap gifts it would take to offset a trans-Atlantic flight.)

The incredible shrinking country

Japan's population to fall 30% by 2055, study finds

The story is from the Japan Times. The longer term projection is more surprising (the total population is forecast to fall to 44.59 million by 2105,) but just how accurate can such projections be?

Of course, part of Japan's problem is its distrust of immigrants, but surely that is going to have to change soon to keep the economy going.

Comparative religion

For a provocative take on the differences between the great religions, you can't get much better and more succinct than this paragraph from a Christmas article in American Spectator:

All religions are not alike. Christianity, as it happens, is religion built around forgiveness. "Turn the other cheek," "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" -- you don't have to look very far. All this may seems natural, routine, inevitable -- maybe even boring to educated people -- but it is not universal. Hinduism is a religion that established a caste system and revolves around helping people escape the great chain of being. Buddhism is a reform of Hinduism that rejected the caste system but still seeks escape from the suffering of being by attaining non-being. Islam is a religion built on forced conversion and conquest. It does not put a value on forgiveness. The Shi'ia have still not forgiven the Sunni for the death of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D.

Well, I am betting that characterisation of Islam would have Karen Armstrong frothing at the mouth, and to be honest, I don't really know how fair it is. All of the article is interesting, though, and worth reading.

It does seem to me, as I may have said somewhere here before, that Christianity and Islam as religions must have had to approach violence from two opposite directions. In the former, being founded by a "peacenik" whose closest brush with violence was overturning some tables, the religion that follows him had to rationalise against pacificism as the apparent default position.

Islam, on the other hand, being created by a political warrior figure, has to come up with reasons why not to resort to violence as a legitimate way of promoting itself. (Of course there are parts of the Koran that emphasize the merits of peace, and Armstrong claims - with questionable accuracy, apparently - that at the end of his life Mohammed renounced violence, but my point is still valid I reckon.)

I am surely not the first person to make this point, but what the heck.

The Libyan HIV case

There is one thing the recent reporting about the Libyan conviction of Bulgarian nurses (and a Palestinian doctor) for infecting children with HIV does not cover much: what motive was alleged for the medics to do this?

Well, as the New York Times reported in 2005:

They were also charged with working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

"Nurses from little towns in Bulgaria acting as agents of Mossad?" said Antoanetta Ouzounova, 28, one of Ms. Chervenyashka's two daughters. "It all sounds funny and absurd until you realize your mother could die for it." Although the motive of subversion has been dropped, the death sentence stands.

I see that Judith Miller did a long article on the case in September this year. I missed it at the time, but it is a fascinating report. She says that the conspiracy theory originated with Col. Gadhafi himself, yet one of his sons has helped the defence case. Miller writes:

Saif al-Islam has challenged his father's argument that the outbreak was a foreign plot. "There is no conspiracy," he told me. "There is no hand of Mossad or the CIA. This was a question of mismanagement, or negligence, or bad luck, or maybe all three." Conspiracy theories, rooted in Libyan and Arab culture, had created a terrible dynamic in this case, he said.

Well, maybe it is OK for me to continue to believe Arab cultures to be peculiarly prone to conspiracy nonsense, now that I have Col Gadhafi's son supporting me!

Bound for the "odd news" columns

From the LA Times:

A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine....

A screener watching the machine's monitor immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt.

The infant was taken to Centinela Hospital, where doctors determined that he had not received a dangerous dose of radiation.

But you can't say the Transportation Security Administration has done nothing to prevent this type of incident:

On its website, the TSA posts extensive tips for travelers, including a section titled "Traveling With Children." One item reads: "Never leave babies in an infant carrier while it goes through the X-ray machine."

Hanukkah wars

A pretty funny column in the LA Times about the "war on Hanukkah". An extract:

These should be good times for Hanukkah and the Jews. After all, the Christmas story offers nothing besides a guy who erases all our sins, but the tale of Hanukkah centers on a magical, super-efficient oil that causes an eightfold decrease in carbon emissions. But instead of this being our year, we had the worst run-up to Hanukkah in 62 years: Iran hosted David Duke at its Holocaust denial conference; Mel Gibson got a Golden Globe nomination; Jimmy Carter equated Israeli policy with apartheid; Ehud Olmert — the least-smooth Jew since Jerry Lewis — accidentally admitted that Israel has the bomb; and the subtext of "Charlotte's Web" is that pork is irresistible.

I must admit to forgetting what Hanukkah is about. Wikipedia enlightens me:

Spiritually, Hanukkah commemorates the Miracle of the Oil. According to the Talmud, at the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem following the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, there was only enough consecrated olive oil to fuel the eternal flame in the Temple for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days - which was the length of time it took to press, prepare and consecrate new oil.

Escape via niqab

A pretty remarkable story in The Times about how a British man wanted for murder was apparently able to leave the country by wearing the niqab:

One of those who was wanted for this murder — Mustaf Jama — is believed to have fled Britain in the days after the shooting, disguising himself as a veiled woman. His brother was one of five other men left to be tried and convicted of murder or manslaughter. Jama was able to sneak on to an international flight at Heathrow dressed in a niqab despite extensive publicity about this murder....

While it is compulsory for those wearing the niqab to be examined (by a female immigration officer if that is what is preferred) when they enter this country, arrangements appear to be far less stringent if a woman (or in this dire incident, as it transpires, a man) is leaving a British airport, even Heathrow. According to the Immigration Act 1971, the authorities “reserve the right” to look at those who wear the veil, but it is not a legal obligation. In theory, the airlines should authenticate any passport photograph both as a passenger checks in and at the boarding gate immediately before departure. In practice, though, most companies are reluctant to make what might be considered an insensitive demand of people who are their customers, particularly on routes where it is common for those travelling to be fully covered.

I wonder what the equivalent rules and practice are in Australia.

The polonium lesson: don't trust the BBC and ABC

This time last year, Radio National's Science Show (run by the rather Left leaning Robyn Williams) had a show in which the risks of a radioactive "dirty bomb" were portrayed as being just a scaremongering invention of the media. He took extracts from a BBC documentary as follows (Adam Curtis is the BBC producer):

And the media took the bait. They portrayed the dirty bomb as an extraordinary weapon that would kill thousands of people, and in the process they made the hidden enemy even more terrifying. But in reality the threat of a dirty bomb is yet another illusion. Its aim is to spread radioactive material through a conventional explosion. But almost all studies of such a possible weapon have concluded that the radiation spread in this way would not kill anybody because the radioactive material would be so dispersed, and providing the area was cleaned promptly the long-term effects would be negligible. In the past both the American army and the Iraqi military tested such devices and both concluded that they were completely ineffectual weapons for this very reason.

Adam CurtisHow dangerous would a dirty bomb be?

Interviewee: The deaths would be few if any, and the answer is probably none.

Adam CurtisReally?

Interviewee: Yes. And that’s been said over and over again, but then people immediately say after that, but you know people won’t believe that and they’ll panic. I don’t think it would kill anybody and I think you’ll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise. The Department of Energy actually set up such a test and they actually measured what happened. The measurements were extremely low. They calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose, not life threatening but fairly high, and I checked into how the calculation was done and they assume that after the attack no one moves for one year. One year. Now that’s ridiculous.

I always felt sceptical about this story. Even assuming only a few people die relatively quickly from a dirty bomb, people are not going to feel comfortable about having a possible increased risk of cancer for the rest of their lives. To call the threat "an illusion" when it would also require the evacuation and cleaning of a large area, and probably involve the public not coming back into that area again for a long time, seems to be downplaying the significance of the economic threat too. I mean, if a dirty bomb was let off in Times Square, just how soon do you think the public would be comfortable living and working in any building within, say, a kilometer radius?

Anyway, a very disturbing article in the International Herald Tribune now says the polonium death in London has made analysts realise that a dirty bomb using such alpha emitting radioactive could make a very deadly weapon, capable of killing tens or hundreds of people if set off in a crowded area. The relative ease with which enough polonium could currently be purchased is also discussed, which seems a dubious thing to be explaining to terrorists who read the paper.

Back to the drawing boards, BBC and ABC, to find another way to portray a dirty bomb as a right wing fear invention?

A Loewenstein low

Glamour anti-Zionist boy Antony Loewenstein got a short segment on Radio National breakfast this morning, and a transcript of what he said is here.

The end paragraph indicates that he is joining Iranian President Ahmadinejad in hoping for Israel to disappear:

Israel's long-term future remains in serious jeopardy
- due primarily to its inability to make friends in
the Arab world, expanding the occupation and refusing
to recognise Palestinian demands - and the Australian
Jewish News wants to focus on "media bias."

Tick tock, Zionists.

An inability to "make friends" in the Arab world? Give me a break.

Funnily enough, host Paul Barry said that he could hear "the phones ringing out the back already" (not exact quote maybe, but close enough) when this segment finished.

Back to a favourite theme - toilets in Japan

This article in the Japan Times deals with that fascinating issue: why men's toilets in Japan are "open door" in a way Westerns ones typically are not.

Also, this bit of history:

Japan has a long history of privies in public places, according to Eiki Morita, a high school teacher in Chiba Prefecture who has written several books on toilets in Japan, including one that catalogs 1,114 different ways to say "toilet" in Japanese. Morita told me it was common practice in the Edo Period (1603-1867), and probably much earlier, for farmers to put out shallow wooden tubs to collect waste from passersby, which they then used as fertilizer. Later, the government took over; the first privies paid for with public funds were built in Yokohama in 1872, largely as a public-health measure in response to new information from the West about waste-borne diseases.

Reminds me of that old story about how the innuit have thousands of words for "snow".

Bryan Appleyard interviews Michael Crichton

There's a good interview of Crichton by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times.

I also recommend again Bryan Appleyard's blog.

Hitchens' latest on Iraq

From Slate, Hitchens' latest column sounds a sensible analysis. His short columns manage to add much more usefully to the debate than the endless words Tim Dunlop manages to find every week to complain about Howard's and Bush's role in this.