So that's what Griff's been up to..

Travels with Griff Rhys Jones - Times Online

Only the other day I wondered what happened to the British comedian Griff Rhys Jones, who I used to find very funny.

Turns out he has done a bit of a Michael Palin and been doing travel shows and books. As far as I know, they haven't appeared here.

The article above contains some mildly amusing anecdotes, but overall, it seems to me not very well written.

Dr Haneef Part IV

Some more points I want to make about Dr Haneef's case:

1. Talk about not being able to win with journalists no matter what you do. This morning on Radio National Breakfast, The Age's Michelle Gratton said that Immigration Minister Andrew's suggestion that he may now be able to release the extra information on which he decided to revoke Haneef's visa raises the question of why he could not release it previously.

Bloody hell. At the press conference when he announced the revocation decision, the journalists were immediately asking him questions along the lines of "well, now that you've found him to be of bad character, how do you expect him to get a fair trial." You can imagine the journalistic outrage if he had actually gone into the extra information in detail at that press conference.

The difference, Michelle, is that the criminal case is now gone. Bleeding obvious that this may make a difference, isn't it?

I also heard mention on some other news report this morning that Peter Russo had indicated there may be a "legal problem" with the release of the additional information. Is this because the Federal Court case will still be heard?

2. As the doctor's 60 Minutes interview: I note that a Sky News poll on whether he should get his visa re-instated is close to a 50/50 split. I think that a Sunrise one this morning had a majority against.

Subject to my normal major reservations about such polls, it still seems that the interview did not overwhelmingly convince the Australian population that he should get his visa back.

I wonder whether this is to do with a cultural difficulty in judging the sincerity of Indians. Their politeness, body language and facial expressions are different from ours, and I think the end result can be uncertainty as to how to "read" them. I have found this in my professional dealings with people from the subcontinent. I don't raise it as any excuse for clear mistakes made by the Federal Police/DPP; it is simply an observation.

3. I was initially puzzled at the Minister's decision on Friday to let Haneef stay at "residential detention", which was clearly inconsistent with the earlier decision that he should go into Villawood (at least if he ever availed himself of the bail that had been granted.) However, the reasons now seem clear: Dr Haneef met with immigration and indicated he would be leaving the next day, after giving an interview with media. There simply was not much point in sending him to Sydney prior to his departure, given the timing.

4. Any lengthy inquiry into this case would seem rather a waste of time to me. Investigations into who leaked what when there are many possible sources (and there were hundreds of police involved in this) are not likely to come to any firm conclusion. Evidence of mistakes being caused by wrong information given to the Federal Police from the British would be interesting, and might go some way to partially restoring the Fed's image. However, I think it is already clear that the stuff up was shared by the Federal Police, the DPP and its barristers.

But all this talk of it creating a crisis of confidence in the ability to handle terror cases is just journalistic overkill.

At worst, some guy who deserved to have his connections to terrorism investigated was detained for a month, and released after a poorly considered charge had been laid but then quickly dropped.

You can go on about the political "interference" in the visa revocation decision, but again at the end of the day some non citizen has had a working visa lost in circumstances which many people think unfair. I would expect that a significant number of other people have been rejected for visas in circumstances that may also be considered unfair by half the population if you let them see the information on which the decision is based. It happens. It is not the worst form of injustice in the world, or indeed the country.

People should just keep what has happened in some perspective here.

I would even include terrorism law supporter Peter Faris in this: on Friday I heard him suggest on radio that Dr Haneef should be paid a million dollars in compensation! Just overkill.

5. As I have mentioned me before, what annoys me about journalists' role in this is that they do not acknowledge that they themselves are part of the problem when they choose to publish unsourced leaks from the Federal Police or elsewhere. The media is a willing party to the attempted public manipulation of events; they have the ability, yet not the ethics apparently, to chose not to publish information which they must know is being leaked to prejudice opinion in favour of the police.

Yet it seems to me that the media will not criticise its own for doing this. Instead, it will only seek to take credit for leaking the defence material in rebuttal of rumours the media should never have published in the first place.

Journalists deserve the low reputation they have.

Changing their tune on marijuana

Medical opinion comes full circle on cannabis dangers

You have probably read newspaper reports of this latest study, but the news@nature version linked to above (which, annoyingly, will likely disappear soon) makes this point which I have not seen elsewhere:

The finding, which comes from a new study that combines results from 35 previous surveys, represents a significant U-turn from previous suggestions that cannabis is harmless to mental health. The analysis is published in medical journal The Lancet, which in 1995 began one of its issues with the sentence: "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health."

Now their tune has changed, with the latest study having this dire conclusion :

This suggests that 14% of all psychotic illness in Britain is caused by cannabis use.

Yes, how dare one question the Lancet on anything, hey.

Antibiotic harm

Prescribing of antibiotics to children still at a level to cause drug resistance, warn experts

From the article:

A paper published in 1999 reported that over half (55%) of children aged 0-5 years in the UK (the group of patients who receive most antibiotics in the community) receive an average of 2.2 prescriptions for a ß-lactam antibiotic like amoxicillin from their general practitioner each year.

Although a reduction in prescribing (and the strategy of recommending a 24-48 hour delay before filling antibiotic prescriptions) has probably resulted in about a 40% fall in consumption since then, unpublished data suggest that community antibiotic prescribing is again rising, they say.

I would be curious to know how much Australian prescriptions have dropped over the last decade.

How to make space tourists nervous

Three die in Branson's space tourism rocket tests

This could be one of the shortest commercial tourism ventures ever.

Continuing the rat theme...

Lefties like to call our PM "the rodent, " as if that is an insult. But really, have a look at this video of an endearing rat:



One disturbing thing I have noticed while looking around Youtube rodent related videos are some showing snakes being fed live mice or rats. There is even an extremely gross video of a giant ugly pet frog eating live mice. (I am no fan of frogs at the best of times.) I will not link to it.

I really wonder about people who keep snakes and such like that (apparently) need to be fed live animals. You can't tell me that a snake, lizard or frog can respond to their human keepers in the way even a rat can, so I suppose they are kept mainly due to some sort of appreciation of their looks, or more likely, just for novelty value. But when such a pet involves the owner regularly feeding them other live animals, it just seems that it must involve some desensitising to cruelty.

The Grim Purrer

Oscar the cat 'predicts deaths' - World - smh.com.au

From the report:

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yes, Oscar is a clever cat, but dogs are more useful in that they can detect cancer before you die from it, you know.

Teenagers of all species a worry

Adolescent rats enjoy cannabis more than their elders - health - 25 July 2007 - New Scientist

Heresy

Renewable energy could 'rape' nature - earth - 25 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment

Quote:

Ramping up the use of renewable energy would lead to the "rape of nature", meaning nuclear power should be developed instead. So argues noted conservation biologist and climate change researcher Jesse Ausubel in an opinion piece based on his and others' research.

Save it for the gin and tonic

Lemon douche is a cervical cancer risk

From the report:

Lead researcher Dr Atiene Sagay, from Jos University in Nigeria, told the International AIDS Society conference in Sydney that women douched to avoid infection but it was totally ineffective.

"People suggested it could be a microbicide (but) we know much better than that now," Dr Sagay said.

He said the practice was not an effective contraceptive measure either, as semen kills the citric acid.

Dr Haneef, part III

New English PM Gordon Brown is proposing doubling that country's current limit for detaining terror suspects without charge from 28 to 56 days:

Mr Brown said an extended detention limit was necessary to sift through the volume of evidence needed in terrorism cases...

Mr Brown said that extensions beyond 28 days would be subject to scrutiny by a high court and by parliament in specific cases.

Quite the contrast to Australia, where a frenzy of complaint erupted in certain quarters over Dr Haneef being kept in custody for a fortnight, and only then with the apparent reluctance of the court, which was only approving extensions for days, not weeks, at a time.

The Australian terrorism detention laws may have no set time limit for total detention. But in practice, as it is supervised by a court from the start, there is no realistic prospect of it being endless. To think otherwise means you have to be paranoid enough to believe that the Federal government could control a State appointed Magistrate.

The DPP today advised that it would review the evidence relating to the criminal charge against Dr Haneef. Even if the charge is dropped soon, as many suspect it will, it should be no reason to question the reasonableness of our pre-charge detention laws, which the British example indicates are far from draconian by international standards.

Dr Haneef's lawyer Peter Russo says that, apart from the issue of reviewing the criminal charge, the immediate issue is getting his client out of custody. I saw Dr Haneef's cousin, here to visit him, confirming on TV tonight that the doctor is being kept alone in his cell for 23 hours a day.

I will say it again: as far as I can tell, if Dr Haneef had arranged for the $10,000 bail surety to be paid (and even members of the public were offering to do this, although I am not sure if that is acceptable to the court), he could have avoided being in a cell in a real jail for 23 hours a day, and been kept in the much more relaxed form of detention in the immigration detention centre in Sydney, where he could mix with people who are not criminals and have had access to many recreational facilities not given to any type of prisoner.

If he is stressing out over the kind of detention he is being kept in now, it appears to be his own decision, and one that makes less and less sense the longer the review/trial process goes on.

All you wanted to know about bonobos

Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Swingers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

This is a long (12 page!) article from the New Yorker about bonobos, the (supposedly) sex-loving hippy apes of the Congo.

As you may expect, all is not what it seems. The first page of the article is very amusing, pointing out the seriously weird attitude that some people have of bonobos as societal role models. At a fund raiser for bonobo conservation, the writer meets "Wind":

I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. He was a musician and a former practitioner of “metaphysical counselling,” which he also referred to as clairvoyance. He said that he had encountered bonobos a few years ago at Georgia State University, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist known for experiments that test the language-learning abilities of bonobos. (During one of Wind’s several visits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, was also there; Gabriel played a keyboard, another keyboard was put in front of a bonobo, and Wind played flutes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of “unconditional love.” They were “tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.”...

It was Wind’s turn to perform. “Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,” he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump. “Help bonobo and bonobo will help you.”

Yes, no doubt, if we all lived like bonobos, there would be no global warming.

The problem is, a lot of bonobo research was based on captive groups:

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Bonobos in the wild are not always nice. For that matter, nor are bonobos in zoos:

“I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ”

Stevens went on to recall a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo whose penis had been bitten off by a female.

I'll stick with the humans for the moment.

An insight into Hawking

Not Even Wrong - My Life With Stephen

Peter Woit's blog (Not Even Wrong) has a very interesting post summarising some of the memoirs of Jane Hawking, the ex-wife of Stephen Hawking. Go read.

More rat facts

Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats? - New York Times

It is the ongoing duty of this blog to point out the positive features of rats. This New York Times article summarises some things that have been mentioned here before (eg, rats can be tickled) but contains some information that's new to me:

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

I wonder how you give a rat "reason to anticipate great sex", as opposed to perfunctory sex with a partner they don't even like.

Anyway, there's more:

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

I wonder if a glum rat can still be tickled to help cheer him up.

Monbiot making some sense

Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are

George Monbiot may be one of the biggest doomsayers about global warming, but at least he calls a spade a spade when it comes to eco-consumerism. Here's an extract from his column above:

Dozens of new books seem to provide an answer: we can save the world by embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for instance, the Guardian published an extract from A Slice of Organic Life, the book by Sheherazade Goldsmith - married to the very rich environmentalist Zac - in which she teaches us "to live within nature's limits". It's easy. Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word. You can save the planet from your own kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment, and then summed up the problem in seven words: "This is for people who don't work."...

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing - one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk....

And this line:

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status.

He is being too polite when he says it is "in danger of becoming". I thought it was pretty clear that it's already here.

Go read all of his column, he gives many examples of silly eco-consumerism.

40% achieved

Hey, I know it's all statistically irrelevant when you consider a margin of error, but psychologically it is encouraging to see a poll where the the primary vote for the Coalition is back up to 40%. That "4" looks a lot better than a "3".

Pity the "Unnamed Family Member"

I stumbled across some Muslim blogs on the 'net today, and found this one: "A Muslim Wife". She lives in Florida, has not been married long, and wears the niqaab. I can't actually tell if she is an American convert to Islam, but given some of her expressions, I think that's likely.

She sounds a like a lively enough woman who really, really loves being a serious Muslim. From this post of a few months ago, she talks about how much she enjoys her friendship with the wife of one of her husbands friends:

I am especially fond of this couple; the brother is one of hubby's best friends and his new wife is also a niqaabi. It felt so good to be with someone - go out with someone, get ready with someone, talk with someone, walk with someone - who I can really relate to. Just the small things like knowing to talk in a whisper when the hubbies are around. Or when in public, to go out of our way so we don't have to walk near a man, or serving our husbands first, etc. Just all the little things that matter so much, that have become second nature to us, that are apparently FOREIGN to other sisters.

Hmm, yes I suppose wearing a niqaab in the stifling humidity of Florida is not enough to convince any man in the street that you are definitely off limits. You also have to go out of your way to cross the street to get away from them. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

But, spare a thought for her relatives. This post caught my attention. Called "Private Conversations," she relates some snippets of conversation with a family member who (by the sounds of it) is not a Muslim at all (or is one who doesn't worry about what angels think of dogs):

Dog: bark! bark!
Me: "So we talked last time about your dog, I see you didn't get rid of it yet?"
Another Unnamed Family Member: "Nope, I didn't. I can't have him killed."
Dog: bark! bark! bark!
Me: "(laughing) No one said kill him, just get rid of him. Give him to a shelter or something."
Another Unnamed Family Member: "I can't (the baby) is so attached to him, he'll be sad."
Me: "Oh. Well you know the hadith I mentioned last time, about the angels not entering your home and the loss of mountains of good deeds for every day you keep him."
Another Unnamed Family Member: "(looking over my shoulder into the distance at anything more interesting than me) Mmm hmm. "
(followed by cold shoulder for the remaining of the week).

Oh dear. I say give the "Unnamed Family Member" a medal for keeping the response to "mmm hmm" and a cold shoulder for a week.

Karen Armstrong and the Deathly Religion

Karen Armstrong has a peculiar sense of priorities. In her latest "Comment is Free" article, she notes the several absurd inconsistencies in modern Islam, starting with the surprising finding that although she was invited by the government of Malaysia to give public lectures there, she found on arrival that three of her books had been banned.

Yet she is always keen to try to show that the West also has "double standards":

For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonists' depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity on London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity.

But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as any other form of prejudice. When 255,000 members of the so-called "Christian community" signed a petition to prevent the building of a large mosque in Abbey Mills, east London, they sent a grim message to the Muslim world: Western freedom of worship did not, apparently, apply to Islam.

She made a pretty fundamental mistake there when she argued that free speech implies "respect" for the opinion of others. As several comments note, it only implies toleration of the expression of different opinion. No one has to "respect" the opinions of holocaust denier or 7/11 conspiracy theorist.

It's also pretty facile to argue that objection to a large mosque (seating up to 12,000) in London is an actual "attack" on freedom to worship in a Western country. The decision whether to let it be built is presumably going to be decided on planning laws, and one suspects that regardless of the motivation of the petitioners, "Islamophobia" will not be what actually decides the matter.

Contrast this to the actual situation on "freedom of worship" in countries with an even moderate version of Islam like Malaysia. Reuters reported last year that Malaysia was having a spate of Christian churches being actually demolished on flimsy grounds. Perhaps even more importantly, the article claimed this:

The issue of religion has also been controversial for Muslims. They are not allowed to formally renounce Islam, and apostates are sent for counselling and, ultimately, fined or jailed if they do not desist.

Lina Joy, a Muslim by birth who converted to Christianity, recently lost a six-year battle to have the word "Islam" removed from her identity card.

Karen Armstrong typically ended her article with this:

When Gallup asked what the west could do to improve relations, most Muslims replied unhesitatingly that western countries must show greater respect for Islam, placing this ahead of economic aid and non-interference in their domestic affairs. Our inability to tolerate Islam not only contradicts our western values; it could also become a major security risk.

The thing which Armstrong seems to never want to admit, even in an article like this one where she does criticise Islamic governments, is that the Western "lack of respect" is not institutionalised and is actually very minor when compared to legally enforced intolerance to freedom of religion that is evident in even moderate Islamic countries.

PS: That very last line of her article is quite a doozy too, isn't it? The clear meaning seems to be that the West had better learn to tolerate the (by her own admission) rather intolerant Islam, otherwise it will be its own fault if it is subject to terror attacks for showing such lack of respect.

Dr Haneef Part II

If the criminal case against Dr Haneef is as weak as media reporting is tending to suggest (but bearing in mind that there may be some evidence about which we have heard nothing yet,) then the proper thing his lawyers ought to be doing is making submissions as soon as possible to the DPP to consider not proceeding with the charge.

The DPP (and indeed the Federal Police, although having come up with the charge they cannot be the ones seen to make the decision to withdraw it) would surely have some sensitivity to their ongoing credibility if the case is one with a high likelihood of crashing and burning in a spectacular fashion.

If the charge is withdrawn, the main party that I see losing face would be the Federal Police. That would be no bad thing in its way; it would make them more careful and more cautious in future. It may make whoever it is who seems to have leaked wrong information to re-consider the tactic in future. It doesn't hurt for the Police to get a slap down, every now and then.

Meanwhile, I continue to see no substantial advantage to the refusal of the surety being paid so as to allow Haneef to be released on bail and held in Villawood in Sydney instead of as a terrorist on remand in Brisbane. I do not think the issue of getting instructions and providing him with legal advice in Sydney is that big an issue. There would appear to be little extra that Haneef can currently add to his Federal Court appeal, and the cost of getting instructions on the criminal case (even if it involved a personal visit for a day to Sydney) would surely not be huge.

Instead, it seems pretty clear that keeping him in Brisbane in normal remand is a matyrdom tactic of his own lawyers, who want political pressure to come to play on the visa revocation issue. In my view, Haneef would be better served by having lawyers who refused to play the media/political game, and took a quieter approach to ending quickly the incarceration of their client.

If the DPP did pull the criminal charge, then the astute thing for Minister Andrews to do would be to say that he has reviewed the case, and be more explicit as to whether it is the "secret" evidence alone which is sufficient to justify his decision to revoke the visa. If it is, then it's goodbye Dr Haneef and he can be deported. He has no inherent right to be here, and he would presumably be glad to be gone.

My current opinion remains that it is the Federal Police and Haneef's lawyers who have both played games here, with the media acting like a cheerleader to both sides of a game. (First half spent gee-ing up the crowd for the Federal Police, second half crossing over to the other team.) Of course the media has a job to do in reporting on justice issues, but I get peeved when they act as if it is a particularly noble role.

The history of losing your head

Earlier this week, I noted how I was enjoying reading "Across the Nightingale Floor", a story set in medieval Japan. I also said it would make a good movie.

I have now finished the novel, and I can see the difficulties of making this into a movie. (In fact, in the last 1/3, the whole story becomes very Japanese, in that most major characters want to kill themselves!) I don't want to give the plot away entirely but:

SPOILER WARNING ! SPOILER WARNING !

a pretty crucial plot point happens when a major sympathetic character gets beheaded in a way which was, apparently, not unknown in medieval Japan, but it was quite shocking for me with my Western sensitivities. It's not the technical means of the beheading as such, it's the circumstances.

I have always felt particularly repelled by the idea of watching a beheading, even a fictional one in the movies. The novel was written before the recent spate of Islamic beheadings in Iraq, and this renewed appearance of the activity in the real world is unfortunate timing for someone having the film rights to a book in which this act plays a central role.

This made me wonder whether someone has written about beheadings as a cultural issue, and indeed Wikipedia has a gruesomely interesting entry for "decapitation". (In fact, it is this entry which makes me think that what happens in the novel sounds culturally and historically plausible.)

Maybe it is modern Western urban sensibilities that find it so appalling as an act: I imagine that people who live in countries where the open slaughter of animals by throat cutting is commonplace find the idea of killing people the same way not so extraordinary. (My witnessing the killing of some chickens as a young child hasn't desensitised me, though. I don't clearly remember the chopping, but do remember my mother cleaning out the entrails. The not completely formed eggs were interesting.)

Still, I don't like thinking about the act, and wish all heads to be kept firmly in place in novels and movies.