Back to politics

Footy's over, back to politics.

Glen Milne's article in the Australian this morning reports on a speech George Brandis gave, in which he made the point that funding for the arts has grown significantly under the Howard government, not that you would ever know that by listening to artists. (If there is something funny about those figures, we'll hear it from LP soon enough.)

I liked this from the article:

In a speech to the Sydney Film School in July, Keating declared: "It is no secret that the arts are having a very bad time of it in Australia these days; a bad time of it not simply in terms of funding, which is the thing most often discussed, but rather in terms of the milieu for its growth and prosperity."...

At a recent speech to the National Press Club, Brandis took Keating on, acidly dismissing his Sydney Film School remarks thus: "I suppose if you spend 11 1/2 years in a sulk things would tend to get away from you a bit."

Newspoll is stick stuck where it's been forever. But if Howard doesn't call the election this week, now that the sport is out of the way, he will suffer from the impression that he is clinging to power. On the other hand, he does need a long campaign to have any hope. What's the longest election campaign in Australian history, I wonder? Is 8 weeks out of the question?

Andrew Bolt on Insiders yesterday made the point that Howard does not seem to be getting much value out of the spending announcements of late (such as increased drought relief). I agree.

Meanwhile, I see Four Corners is having a show about Dr Haneef tonight, with an extended interview with him. Somehow, I have my doubts he will win more public sympathy.

An inconvenient consultation

Muslim dentist ‘made patient cover her head’ - Times Online

From the story:

A Muslim dentist insisted that a young woman wear an Islamic headscarf before he would agree to treat her for toothache, the General Dental Council was told yesterday.

The patient, a community nurse, alleges that she reluctantly told Omer Butt, 31, who runs a dental practice in Bury, Greater Manchester, that she was a nonpractising Muslim.

It is alleged that the dentist then told her that he would refuse to register her as an NHS patient if she did not cover her head. She was in so much pain that she agreed to borrow a scarf from a nurse at the clinic.

OK, so how does this work with the Muslim doctors we have in Australia? If they work in our public health system, do they have an issue with seeing Muslim women (of which we have an increasing number) if their head is uncovered?

On placebo treatment

Bad science: Pinning down a remedy for backache | Science | The Guardian

The apparent success of acupuncture for treating back pain this week got a lot of publicity with media reports on a recent study.

The article above indicates that acupuncturists should not to be too excited about this. It appears that "random" needle puncturing (where there were needles inserted, but at random points, rather than the carefully chosen points that proper acupuncture theory would dictate) proved almost as effective as "real" acupuncture.

Yet both "fake" and "real" acupuncture did considerably better than the normal medical approach.

I can't be bothered Googling for the details now, but it is my understanding that acupuncture had come out reasonably well from many carefully controlled trials for certain conditions. Although the esoteric Eastern quasi-mystical theory that is behind it is not something I am ever going to sign up to, I have long had the impression that it is the most credible of the 'alternative' medicines. Simply putting pins in people sometimes seems to work at a much higher rate than other therapies.

Anyhow, the article I've linked at the top goes on to talk about the placebo effect generally. Everyone knows it works, but the problem for Western medicine is that both ethically, and from a point of view of medical litigation risk, its widespread use can't really be contemplated.

This has always seemed quite a pity to me. Maybe doctors can argue that the natural therapies have placebo all to themselves anyway. But the natural therapists don't think they are giving placebo treatment. They won't give a sugar pill any more than a GP will.

Can't there be a category of doctor that is given licence to prescribe any therapy whatsoever without risk of litigation, including alternative therapies and placebo? I mean, don't those who participate in studies like the acupuncture one know and consent to possibly be in the group that is given the placebo? Yet it still works for some of them.

So can't we have doctors that the public knows are permanently licenced to try placebo?

Just a thought.

UPDATE: I should've guessed. Horses have been getting acupuncture too. Oh, but horses don't have a placebo response, says a doctor, so that proves it's not working just by placebo effect on humans too.

Look, horses are the last animals to trust in an trial of anything medical. They would just find it funny to put up with the pain of 50 needles, then prance about as if their sore back is cured, because they know that this doctor will be encouraged, resulting in thousands more humans being pricked every year. I bet they have a chuckle about that.

...in which the author seeks to discredit horses, but is in for a surprise

I started out to try to prove horses will be the end of civilisation, but the figures led me somewhere else. Follow the story:

From this site we learn that no one knows how many horses there are in Australia. It's between 900,000 and 1.8 million. However, I assume this is talking about domestic ones. Another site estimates there are 300,000 feral horses. (It also says there are up to 5 million feral donkeys! Who knew that?) Let's just assume 1.5 million horses combined, to be conservative and get round figures.

How much methane does a horse produce? Easily found (more or less) : 18 kg per year.

So let me get my calculator. That's 27,000,000 kg of methane a year.

But remember, methane is much worse than CO2 for warming. It is 21 times worse in fact.

So this leads us to horses making the equivalent of 27,000 tonnes x 21 = 567,000 tonnes of CO2 each and every year.

According to this site, the average car makes 4 tonnes of CO2 a year. So the horse population is making the equivalent greenhouse gases of 142,000 cars every year.

There are two ways of looking at this. If we had no horses in Australia, we could safely run an extra 142,000 cars on the roads with no net increase in CO2 - equivalent gases. But how many cars are there already in Australia? I am surprised to see it is about 10,000,000!

Hardly seems worth doing away with all those horses after all. Damn!

In fact, if one car makes 4 tonnes of CO2 per year, and a horse makes 18 x 21 = 378 kg of CO2 equivalent per year, then every car owner could run instead 10 horses a year (4,000/378).

For the average family of 4, they could give up the car and have two and bit horses each!

No, horses are our salvation, after all. (At least if you ignore the greenhouse contribution of their decaying excrement and the cost of growing and moving tonnes of feed around the country. Also, at least a car doesn't die from an upset tummy (colic) or get a fright every time it sees an inanimate object it doesn't like the look of. This last point was made by Stephen Fry in an interview on Parkinson, if I recall correctly.)

I still think they are stupid.

VITAL UPDATE (in which the author is vindicated by new information) : No, they are evil after all! Their relatively "green" greenhouse gas bottoms might make you think it is better for the planet to own ten horses instead of one car. But it is all a plan to lure humans to death and injury. Here, from the Australian Medical Journal, no less:

The risk of injury while horse riding has been estimated as between 1 per 320 to 1 per 1000 hours of riding.^4,6 The variation in reported population-based risk of horse-related trauma of between 18.7 injuries per 100 000 to 9.5 injuries per 1000 population per year illustrates the difficulties of accurate data collection and variable inclusion of non-riding injuries.⁷ Interestingly, the overall risk of injury from horse-related activity has been determined to be greater than that of car racing or riding a motorcycle, and the rate of hospitalisation from falls from a horse equivalent to that from playing rugby.

Hehe. I know what horses are thinking. "Get on my back, stupid bipedal feed provider. See how long you last. The earth will be ours! Hahahahahahahaha!"

No, I've upgraded them from "stupid" to "evil".

Nurse?

Lovelock's idea

Scientists propose 'plumbing' method to solve crisis of global warming - Times Online

James Lovelock mentioned this idea while he was in Australia recently, but here it is spelt out in more detail. The New Scientist version of the story spends more time on the skeptic's reaction.

(Short version of the idea: lots and lots of pipes in the ocean that use wave action to pump up nutrient rich water to the surface, leading to more plankton, and more CO2 uptake.)

This idea has been around in a slightly different version since the 1970's at least, as it was featured in Jerry Pournelle's book "A Step Further Out," which is still on my bookshelf. His idea was to use the water sucking tubes to generate electricity too.

In New Scientist last week they had a pretty good article on the proposals for fertilizing the oceans with either iron or urea. Unfortunately, it's not on line for free.

The article did point out that one of the unknown issues of any form of using plankton growth to take up more CO2 is that it is not very clear how much of it ends up at the bottom of the ocean, which is where it really needs to be for long term sequestration.

Still, even if fish eat a lot of the plankton, how much fish poop sinks and how much of it floats? In a post last year, I noted an article that said that krill like to poo at depth, which makes them a (literal) CO2 sink. So who knows. Maybe the concentration should be on fertilizing the southern ocean, which is where I think most of the krill hang out.

Seems to me worthwhile trialling these ideas anyway.

Promises promises

Mike Steketee has made many posts critical of the Coalition this year, so it's good to see him making some pretty cutting remarks about Kevin Rudd's propensity to make commitments that he is never likely to be around to see achieved:

The Government is wrong to characterise Rudd as a policy-free zone: he has announced reams of initiatives. It is just that many of them have an elusive quality. Take his promise to ensure that nine out of 10 schoolchildren complete Year 12. It’s a laudable goal, but when would it be delivered? By 2020 is the solemn promise. That is in the fifth term of a Rudd government, unless it is the Gillard or Shorten government by then, or perhaps the Turnbull government after Malcolm’s frustrated ambitions get the better of him and he switches over to the winning side.

Don’t imagine that Labor is not accountable for such a promise: it has set an interim benchmark of 2015 to lift retention rates to 85 per cent. That is only three or four elections away.

Are we getting slightly ahead of ourselves here?

And he then goes into detail on the other policies "on the never-never." (Funny, I did a shorter version of this Steketee column a few of weeks ago.)

Also, journalists have indicated before that Kevin is not personally genuinely liked even within his own parliamentary party, and his refusal to commit to anyone getting the job they currently shadow if they form government will do nothing to alleviate that. It seems a particular insult to Wayne Swan if he won't commit to him being Treasurer. (It's a marriage of convenience for both Swan and Gillard to be seen as so close to Rudd at the moment anyway, as I understand it.)

Update: Rudd has had to come out today and promise Swan, Gillard and Tanner their positions. A bit of a turnaround, and something to do with faction power too, I suspect. I imagine there were a few calls last night about his attitude yesterday.

Not so long ago

Research team says extraterrestrial impact to blame for Ice Age extinctions

From this report:

No one has found a giant crater in the Earth that could attest to such a cataclysmic impact 13,000 years ago, but the research team offers evidence of a comet, two and a half to three miles in diameter, that detonated 30 to 60 miles above the earth, triggering a massive shockwave, firestorms and a subsequent drastic cooling effect across most of North America and northern Europe....

The magnitude of the detonations would have been huge.

“A hydrogen bomb is the equivalent of about 100 to 1,000 megatons,” Bunch said. “The detonations we’re talking about would be about 10 million megatons. That’s larger than the simultaneous detonation of all the world’s nuclear bombs past and present.”

That's a lot of energy.

But let's not spend a paltry million dollars a year to help track down dangerous space objects heading our way, hey Peter McGauran. Just keep looking after the horsies with a $110 million plus assistance package.

I still think the horses are faking it for a rest. Go get a real job, horse people.*

* Readers are advised that this blog has an official policy of encouraging irrational dislike of horses.

More on gay Iran

The Guardian has two items of interest about sexuality in Iran.

The first story (which on the main page of The Guardian's website is given the very wildly understated heading "Doubts over Iran's no gay claims") explains how Iran in fact has a very high rate of sex change operations. Second only to Thailand apparently:

Sex changes have been legal since the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution passed a fatwa authorising them nearly 25 years ago. While homosexuality is considered a sin, transsexuality is categorised as an illness subject to cure.

The government seeks to keep its approval quiet in line with its strait-laced stance on sexuality, but state support has actually increased since Mr Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.

His government has begun providing grants of £2,250 for operations and further funding for hormone therapy. It is also proposing loans of up to £2,750 to allow those undergoing surgery to start their own businesses.

Am I the only one to find it very hard to imagine why Khomeini would be persuaded to be all kind and understanding of transexuals but still want all sodomites to die?

The second Guardian article is in Comment is Free by the author of an entire book on homosexuality in Arab countries. He makes this interesting point:

Of all the Muslim countries, Iran at the moment is probably the most active in persecuting gay people. This probably has less to do with religion than local political and cultural factors.

Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, argue that this was a reaction - at least in part - to sexual behaviour in the Shah's court. They refer to "a long tradition in nationalist movements of consolidating power through narratives that affirm patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, attributing sexual abnormality and immorality to a corrupt ruling elite that is about to be overthrown and/or is complicit with foreign imperialism".

That makes some sense. Political revolutions anywhere have often been been preceded by rumours of self indulgence and sexual decadence in the ruling class, and I suppose if the revolutionaries are Islamic they may concentrate on alleging homosexual decadence more than heterosexual.

Not a bad idea

Broadband beyond the grave offers web service for the dead

Users of YouDeparted.com can issue posthumous instructions for everything from their funeral to feeding their pet, cancelling bills and magazine subscriptions, organising their will and other financial matters, sending final letters to friends - and foes - and delivering a valedictory video address summing it all up.

All that's required in this life is a computer, some inputting, and a minimum of $9.95 (£4.93) a year. Once a user has died, and it has been confirmed to the site by designated family members or friends, the content is released as he or she instructed.

Being able to posthumously send a bunch of nasty emails to all and sundry has a certain appeal. I don't think there is anyone I actually want to do that to right now; but I like the idea of having the ability to do it.

Could be some new legal cases coming up as to whether electronic instructions can be legally constitute a will.

Also, Pauline Hanson could have used this service for her "if you are seeing this, I am dead" speech.

Wind power skepticism

Ill wind changes Rudd's course towards Gore | Herald Sun

All of this article by Terry McCrann is worth reading, especially if the figures he gives for the amount of power wind is actually generating in Germany is correct:

On average across the year, the 7600 MW of installed wind capacity produced 1327MW. That's an operational level of 18 per cent of capacity. In rational terms, it's insanity.

Indeed as E.ON Netz notes, installed wind capacity went up 12 per cent in the year but actual wind power fed in to the grid went up just 1.5 per cent. Because of lower "wind availability".

The way you 'solve' this is that 'traditional' power stations with capacities equal to 90 per cent of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently on line to guarantee power supply.

So not only do you have to install six to seven times as much wind capacity as the output you will actually get, but you also have to build 'shadow' coal/gas/nuclear(?) as well.

That's one power station for the cost of 12 or so.

Did I say insanity? Unless you can build big enough batteries to store the power generated when the wind does blow.

Funny I should say that. E.ON has actually pioneered exactly such a battery. It's the size of four shipping containers, uses 'undisclosed' chemicals and can produce all of 1MW for four hours.

So not only do we have to have windmills blanketing the country-side, but millions of 'super-batteries' as well. Plus some new coal stations anyway.

We had them all shot

Ahmadinejad speaks; outrage and controversy follow - CNN.com:

When pressed about the harsh treatment of women, homosexuals and academics who challenge Iran's government, Ahmadinejad painted a rosy picture, saying, "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom," he said.

He elicited laughter and boos from the audience at Columbia University when he said, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."

That comment reminded me of Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen, as I am sure I have read that he had to have someone explain to him what homosexuals did when the issue of law reform for sexual matters came up.

Ahmadinejad in fact has the same "folksy" image as Bjelke- Petersen, the main difference being that (as far as I know) Joh didn't secretly pine for nuclear weapons.

Evading the details

Media Watch: Have We Met? (24/09/2007)

People who read Catallaxy know the story that Phillip Adams claimed to have had a "chilling" interview on his radio show with Helen Dale.

This story was dealt with in somewhat peculiar fashion on Media Watch last night, which seemed to want to spend as much time on other issues as pursuing the truth from Adams. The transcript on the Media Watch website (above) does not cover all of what was on the TV version .

Clearly, Adams was being evasive in his semi-retraction on LNL. He admits he did not interview her on that show, but implies an interview, or at least a meeting, did occur elsewhere without specifying when or where.

Oh well, I guess he might be more forthcoming to the ABC complaints people.

Real big of them

Taliban Allows Polio Vaccinations:

Thousands of Afghan children have received polio vaccinations after the Taliban movement agreed to allow health workers to operate safely in the south, the United Nations children's fund said. ...

In the past, health workers have been abducted in the region, which has has seen the heaviest fighting between the Taliban and international forces.

UPDATE: I missed a lot of it, but Four Corners last night looked interesting, being all about Afghanistan and the continuing pretty dire way most women are treated there, even when not under Taliban control. Still, there were some optimistic signs of revival of girls' education again, for example.

I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept that the Taliban are happy to kill teachers who dare to educate girls, though.

Irony warning

The Times of India does report widely on domestic violence and the mistreatment of women, but also carries many advertisements for marriage matchmaker services. You would think they might be a bit more careful about how closely these items are placed on the same page (see above.)

The paper also picks up a story from the Daily Mirror about railway track suicides in London. It is said that it's a lot of unhappy asian women causing the high numbers in particular areas.

This kind of suicide is really the most inconsiderate type possible, but thinking clearly is not really high on the agenda of those who do it, I suppose.

Making no sense

Tokyo sanctions an extended cull of Taiji dolphins | The Japan Times Online

The Japan Times has taken a very front line position in running articles criticising the annual dolphin slaughter in one part of Japan.

The result: this year's quota increased, and the killing season extended.

Given that the meat has been convincingly shown as unsafe to eat, it is a really bizarre exercise:

The creatures' meat is even included in school meals, and though the government knows full well it is toxic — up to 87 times the permitted level of methyl mercury was found in a joint Japanese/New Zealand 2005 academic study of samples bought from shops (see JT, Nov.1, 2006) — it seems it will do nothing now, perhaps preferring some scapegoating and deep bowing when awful human afflictions arise in the future. And as for Japan's meek vernacular media, well don't wait for them to raise a stink.

China's social problems, again

In China, 190 children are snatched every day.

It's an interesting article about another unintended consequence of China's one child policy.

The one who really doesn't know when to quit

Rudd's post-birthday slip-ups | NEWS.com.au

Yes, Kevin does have a problem: he doesn't know when to let the issue of his heart operation fade away. The story above shows that he is still using it in an attempt at humour:

When asked how he celebrated, Mr Rudd said: "With great sobriety ... well they tell me I've got a problem," referring to revelations this week about a heart operation he had 15 years ago.

On the TV news last night, I saw him make a fake clutch at his heart after missing blowing out one of his candles on his cake.

My advice: No one sensible actually thought this was a damaging issue, Kevin; or at least it wasn't until you had minders who denied you ever had an operation, and you and your fellow parliamentarians started ludicrously suggesting that it took a Liberal Party private investigator looking at your medical records to discover you had the operation.

Leave it alone. Even by bringing it up in attempts at humour, it reminds people of an episode that has backfired badly.

(Matt Price thinks that "Labor’s contrived and co-ordinated squealing about alleged dirt units, private detectives, slime files and mud-slinging will work." I think he's wrong; it is now too transparently a tactic.)

UPDATE: the Courier Mail now reports that it has seen a sheet alleging a Coalition minister is a closet gay. Shock! Labor or its supporters actually circulate dirt on their opponents? Who'd have thought?

UPDATE 2: now it's said that the gay minister stuff was originally leaked to Laurie Oakes by a Liberal Party figure, as part of internal politic-ing for positions. Funny business, politics.

You know, the first time I ever heard the old one about Keating having an affair with a young guy was from a solidly rusted on Labor supporter and well connected member of her union. Clearly, she had heard it from someone within the Labor movement who sincerely believed it, as she had not immediately dismissed it out of hand.

Rumour mongering follows some bizarre paths in politics, and life generally I suppose.

Another springtime pic

From my backyard, again.

Ackroyd's unusual interests

Soul survivor | News | Guardian Unlimited Film

Follow the link to an interesting interview with Dan Ackroyd. I knew he was interested in the paranormal, but not the extent to which he is a true believer.

Just not very funny

Summer Heights High episode upsets ecstasy death family

Even before this story came out, I had been intending to post about my puzzlement over the (apparent) popularity of Chris Lilley's satirical "Summer Heights High".

The three characters he plays are intensely dislikeable, each in their own way. And yes, we have all seen irritating teen girls, heard smart-arse islander boys, and know that drama teaching may be particularly attractive to a self-absorbed (presumably gay) man; but is there any reason to try to blend these characters into a mockumentary of such length? To me, they are just not interesting enough, and show no sign of development from week to week. The story line of the drama teacher writing songs about the drug overdose girl became so unrealistic that it just became stupid. I don't blame the family of a real drug overdose victim being upset.

At least Kath & Kim is not entirely populated by unpleasant central characters. True, Kim is totally without redeeming features, but I always felt that everyone around her was written to have at least some good in their character.

Summer Heights High strikes me as very similar in tone to the dark Australian "comedy" films to which I have never responded either.