Go Nuclear

Greenpeace is wrong — we must consider nuclear power - Opinion

Controversial ex-Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore sets out his view that Greenpeace must change its anti-nuclear stance if it wants to be serious about reducing CO2.

Way to encourage Australian culture

Miller attacks Howard in acceptance speech

From the first part of this report, Australian director George Miller says:

"We've seen over many years the utter emasculation of the ABC, the vitality sucked out of our universities as places of true learning and it just doesn't make any sense,"

"We're a very small country and we have very little culture distinct enough to call it our own, so why should we have a war about it?

"It's as ridiculous as bald men fighting over a comb, when we should be out there trying to grow hair."

I'll quickly brush over the fact that ABC TV, and Australian produced TV drama and comedy generally, just had a great ratings year, and move onto the question of what George is doing to help prevent the destruction of Australian culture:

His next project will be directing Justice League of America.

Cool car

Cars - Reviews - Honda FCX Clarity

The New York Times reviews a production ready (sort of) Honda fuel cell car. It sounds and looks very cool, even if precise cost is never really discussed. (They're not going to sell it, just lease it.)

Orchestra to follow

Well, Astroboy had a robot circus. A robot orchestra would be something I would pay to see. I think.

Maybe she's nuts

'I was terrified that the guards would come in and teach me a lesson' | UK News | The Observer

This report gives more details on how Gillian Gibbons (the English teacher jailed in Sudan for letting a teddy bear be named Mohammed) was treated.

Some highlights:

The open-air cell had three grey-tiled walls, a basic squat toilet in a corner and steel bars running across the facade and ceiling. 'I just stood there for three hours, thinking I was going home. It was filthy, there were ants all over the floor and in the corner there were rat droppings. There was a light shining into my yard that attracted all the mosquitoes, so I stood there and got bitten to death....

In a moment of almost farcical surreality, the teddy bear itself made a courtroom appearance. 'This clerk of the court got this carrier bag and produced this bear with a flourish, like a rabbit out of the hat,' Gibbons recalls. 'He put it down on the table in front of us and it flopped over, and the prosecution [lawyer] sat him up. And then he pointed at this bear in a dead aggressive manner and he said "Is this the bear?" It was Exhibit A, you see.

Her reaction sounds rather normal and understandable for the most part, until we get to the end of the article:

She retains a remarkable lack of rancour about her ordeal and hopes to take up another foreign teaching post, possibly in China. 'I don't regret a second of it. I had a wonderful time. It was fabulous.'

Does she blame anyone for what she went through? She pauses. 'I blame myself because I shouldn't have done it,' she says finally. 'Ignorance of the law is no defence.'

She sounds either like a particularly easy target for Stockholm Syndrome, or just a chronically self-blaming liberal.

And in this corner...(the battle of the fantasies)

There's a lot of attention being given in the to the new movie "The Golden Compass" and its source material: Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

Pullman has famously been quoted as saying of CS Lewis' Narnia series:

"a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice" and "not a trace" of Christian charity.

"It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," he added.

"The highest virtue - we have on the authority of the New Testament itself - is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books."

I don't say that the Narnia series is the greatest literature ever written, but that's just really silly commentary.

Readers may recall that I liked the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe very much. I recently watched it again, and my fondness has not diminished. If you dip into the lengthy set of user comments at IMDB, you will see that many folk agree. The public reaction seems to have been even better than a pretty good critical reaction, perhaps because it had a largely self-selecting Christian audience. (Of course, an emotional appreciation of Christianity no doubts helps one to be moved by the story. But hey, I am not stopping your conversion for better movie appreciation!)

Teenage (and older) LOTR tragics complained it was a poor imitation of Tolkien; I say that unlike that interminable writer, Lewis at least had real characters and a point.

So, of course, it gives me some pleasure to see the first movie of anti-Lewis Pullman's series get a lukewarm critical and box office reception.

All the critics say that the movie has largely been stripped of the anti-religion element; most people seem to also say that this will be virtually impossible to maintain if movies are attempted from the subsequent books.

As this article (in The Atlantic, so it must be true) notes, Pullman's stories ultimately have teen sex (or at least sexual awakening) saving the universe. (This reminds of the first Star Trek movie, which Pauline Kael - I think - said was notable as science fiction that ended not with a bang, but with a bang.) For a conservative's rebuttal of such an implausible take on sexuality, see here.

In the meantime, Prince Caspian, the next Narnia movie, is due out in 6 months or so, and its trailer has been released with some fanfare. It sounds as if the movie is not as close to the novel this time, and perhaps has been more Tolkien-ified than I would like, but here's hoping.

UPDATE: here's a very lengthy interview with Pullman, and it turns out we agree on one thing - Tolkien:

"I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

Hospitals

I've just spent most of the last couple of days with my son at the Mater Childrens' Hospital in Brisbane. (He had a minor procedure that had a bit of a complication. Everything OK now, thanks.)

Some observations about the Mater Hospital, and hospitals in Brisbane generally:

* I don't know whether it is because Brisbane's population continues to grown, but all hospitals here just seem to be in a continual state of construction/re-construction. Is it like this in every other Australian city?

* Of the few Brisbane hospitals I have visited for various reasons over the last few years, The Wesley is perhaps the nicest inside. It is, of course, having major building works at the moment.

* I don't know about nursing. There are complaints about their pay all the time, and the shift work would be a pain, but how come they all seem happy to me?

* From their website, I see that The Mater group of hospitals provides care for "some half million people a year." Even with 7 hospitals and 6,000 staff, that seems a hell of a lot of care.

* The Mater also has a new "high definition" operating theatre which sounds like it would be interesting to look at. If you can have public tours of breweries, movie studios and chocolate factories, why can't hospitals do this too for a bit of extra cash on the side on a Saturday or Sunday when the highest paid surgeons are off too. OK, maybe it's just me who be happy to do that.

Not the whole story

Welfare is not the key - Opinion - theage.com.au

Philip Martin writes here about the recent riots in the remote aboriginal community of Aurukun. He knows more about the place than the average commentator:

The research I collected over six months living in Aurukun while working for Pearson's Cape York Partnerships showed that Aurukun is chronically under-resourced in infrastructure and services. This is a source of major community frustration and a key factor in its social breakdown.

As it happens, I know a little about the place as well, due to having relatives who have worked there up to very recent times.

Martin lists the ways in which the community is under-resourced, and concludes with the line that "If there was so much infrastructure missing in Sydney, there would be public insurrection."

This is disingenuous, I think, as the whole resourcing issue has cultural aspects too, and devolved into a bit of a chicken and egg unresolvable problem.

I believe, for example, that the community had a brand new pool and sports centre built some years ago. (Great idea: aboriginal communities with pools have cleaner kids, and less disease.) I am not sure how long it lasted, but I understand the place was trashed and has not been in use since.

Martin notes the chronic over-crowding in some houses. He doesn't mention the custom there that if someone dies, the house has to be left vacant for a number of months and have a special ceremony before it is re-occupied. I don't know how many houses this may affect at any one time, but it surely would account for at some of the cases of over-crowding in remaining houses.

He also notes the lack of trademen to fix things such a broken pipes. He says there is no Centrelink office there to help people get "real jobs".

Well, just how many "real jobs" are ever going to be available there, I wonder. I don't know anything special about this for Aurukun, but it does puzzle me as to why remote communities cannot at least invest enough money in training a few locals to be able to do relatively straight-forward housing maintenance work (and pay for a basic supply of repair material).

Martin mentions packs of wild dogs roaming the streets. I do know that a white council worker's house got stoned after the council paid a vet to come in and put down some of these dogs. The locals can be very attached to their dogs, no matter how sick and scrangy they are.

The health clinic has had 50% drop in permanent staff. Yes, but of course it is hard to get staff to agree to work in a community that seems to be permanently on the edge of a riot, and does not show signs of appreciating the white staff who do work there.

Martin says the community needs 16 full time police. This is for a community of about 1,100 people! I think he should acknowledge that the huge disproportionate number of police that such communities need compared to white communities, as this helps account for the difficulties State governments have in providing such staff.

My relative says at the core of the problem is the complete breakdown of respect of young people towards their parents and elders. I don't know how that is cured, but there is no real indication a big influx of resources is going to cure that chronic problem.

Odd customs of Greece

Mad about the boy | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Yet again, a historian has a go at trying to work out the exact nature of same-sex love in ancient Greece.

Peter Davidson has a whole book just out about this, and this article is written by him too, presumably summarising some of his main points.

His goal is amusingly stated as:

So how do we begin to make sense of this truly extraordinary historical phenomenon, an entire culture turning noisily and spectacularly gay for hundreds of years?

Part of the answer is to note that:

"Ancient Greece" was in fact a constellation of hundreds of rivalrous micro-states, with their own calendars, dialects and cults - and their own local versions of Greek homosexuality. These revealed very different attitudes and employed very different practices: "We Athenians consider these things utterly reprehensible, but for the Thebans and Eleans they are normal."

The Cretans seem to have made a big production of it:

The "peculiar custom" of the Cretans...involved an abduction and a tug-of-war over a boy, a two-month-long hunting expedition, lavish gifts, the sacrifice of an ox and a great sacrificial banquet, at which the boy formally announced his acceptance or not of "the relationship". Thereafter he got to wear a special costume that announced to the rest of the community his new status as "famed".

In a review of this book, it is noted that at one stage at least:

In Athens, for which we have the widest range of evidence, both visual and literary, the ephebe - or young male aged eighteen to twenty - emerged from the naked sports of the gymnasium to find himself pursued by a lover; the ideal of chaste resistance and decorous pursuit was not always adhered to, but the resulting bonding often lasted a lifetime, through marriage and political careers.

Davidson writes:

In Athens these under-18s were vigorously protected, rather like the young women in a Jane Austen novel, although their younger sisters would have been expected to be married by the age of 15. These were the Boys who were escorted to the gymnasium by the slave paidagogoi and followed around at a distance by a pack of admirers. "A guard of his honour" is how one source describes it, trying to explain the contradictory custom.

It all makes Schoolies week seem pretty tame by comparison!

Davidson notes that the habits of the Greeks were well known:

The Romans certainly noticed what they called the "Greek custom", which they blamed on too much exercising with not enough clothes on.

I don't know what lesson anyone can take from reading about this: even those who have very liberal views today of same sex relationships would presumably have something of a problem with a society in which middle aged men more-or-less ritualistically pursue 18 year old boys who take their fancy. The fact is sexual customs in Athens and other Greek places were very idiosyncratic, even for other societies around them.

And my modern day question is this: why does England seem so gay now?

The fur solution

Comment is free: Bear to hear the truth you've spoken

George Monbiot finally gets really serious about climate change issues:

I am sitting on top of an excavator the size of a house, dressed as a polar bear. In a world that's gone mad this is the only sane thing left to do.

It impresses the kiddies, at any rate.

Meanwhile, one of the comments following that post points to another reasonable sounding report that the sun's sunspot activity cycle really may be at the start of the same protracted low which happened during the "little ice age":

Astronomers are watching the Sun, hoping to see the first stirrings of cycle 24. It should have arrived last December. The United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted it would start in March 2007. Now they estimate March 2008, but they will soon have to make that even later. The first indications that the Sun is emerging from its current sunspot minimum will be the appearance of small spots at high latitude. They usually occur some 12-20 months before the start of a new cycle. These spots haven't appeared yet so cycle 24 will probably not begin to take place until 2009 at the earliest. The longer we have to wait for cycle 24, the weaker it is likely to be. Such behaviour is usually followed by cooler temperatures on Earth.

It would indeed be a nice co-incidence if the sun's reduced activity gave civilisation a century or so to move to low greenhouse energy, and perhaps even remove some of what is already there.

Ken leads the charge

Australia can lead the way on climate - Opinion - theage.com.au

Kenneth Davidson tells us how important it is for Australia to commit to really serious greenhouse gas cuts. He doesn't say it directly, but notes that developed countries will have to cut emissions by at least 90% by 2050! (That is, to keep temperature increases to within 1.5 degrees.)

How can this massive figure be achieved? Ken starts with the far from obvious:

Here in Victoria the authorities might think twice about the Port Phillip channel deepening to avoid facilitating sea-level rises and tidal surges

Does that make any sense? How would not deepening the Port Phillip Bay channel prevent local sea level rise?

Ken claims that public opinion is way ahead of the politicians on climate change. I say that is only because no one, including Ken, has yet told the public how incredibly hard big greenhouse reductions will be.

Changing Japan

In Japan, Rural Economies Wane as Cities Thrive - New York Times

This article about the economic changes in Japan from the point of view of how it is affecting different regions makes for interesting reading.

It is true, as the article notes, that many smaller towns in Japan have old town centres which are stuggling due to new shopping malls in the nearby suburbs.

The thing is, Australian and other Western cities saw this same change from about the 1960's. But, over the years, many of the older small shop precincts have adapted and are again pleasant places to be.

In Japan, they are not so used to letting the market sort out such things.

The other point to make about the article is that it seems peculiar when talking about the decline of Japanese small towns to ignore the really fundamental issue for the future of the country: its rapidly aging population that is failing to reproduce or to accept reasonable levels of migration.

A danger for Turnbull....

Unleashed: An honourable, fidgetty, humanist Liberalism

This could be a very bad sign for Malcolm Turnbull: Bob Ellis likes him!

This column by Ellis starts off with a prediction (the Liberal Party will disappear from history) which Ellis claims is supported by his uncanny election predictive powers:

You mark my words. I predicted a Labor majority of twenty-eight or thirty and it's twenty-four, and I was right about every state.

Actually, Bob, the result is now predicted to be Labor 83 seats, Coalition 65, and 2 independents. A majority of less than 20, it would seem.

In any event, I actually recommend this article by Ellis, despite his typically overwrought style, because of the potted history it gives of Turnbull's past political friendships.

Of course, given that it is written by a recent loser in a political defamation case (a point Ellis himself raises here), you can probably take much of it with a grain of salt, but it's interesting nonetheless.

As a footnote, maybe it's just me, but that photo of his is such a posed attempt at basset hound charm that it just makes me want to slap him about the face a bit.

More Jesus talk

Comment is free: Jesus: Messiah or Bolshevik?

Is Terry Eagleton getting more conservative in his old age?

I know little about him except what I have read in Wikipedia. He is mainly known as a Marxist (or now just very Left-ist) Catholic literary critic.

Yet his recent attack on Richard Dawkins did not really show the signs of what I normally expect from very liberal Christianity (ie, a belief in nothing really metaphysical at all.)

Anyway, his piece above in the Guardian talking about the way to understand Jesus as a political figure seems pretty reasonable to me.

(It still doesn't really address the issue as to whether he is a realist or non-realist when it comes to the supernatural, but I have to give him credit for sounding like a relatively sensible lefty Catholic.)

He's not the Messiah

I can unite world on climate, says Rudd - Environment - smh.com.au

Unfortunately, it appears that headline is not a direct quote from our PM, just a paraphrase. That's a pity, as it would be quite funny for Kevin to start making silly grandiose statements so early in his Prime Minister-ship.

I note that Penny Wong is credited with having performed well in the election campaign, hence her reward of being made Climate Change Minister. (Sounds like it's her job to ensure climate changes happens.)

I don't know. I thought in any media appearances I have noticed she comes across as too earnest and humourless. Especially after her election night turn on the ABC, I can warm to Julia Gillard more readily, in the personality stakes anyway.

Penny has apparently received a fair bit of attention in reporting in China, but it is probably safe to assume this has not included details of her personal life yet. It will be interesting to see how (if ever) this is reported in Chinese media.

Back to Kyoto: this report in the Australian today did the useful service of explaining the issue of penalties under Kyoto in precise form. (I had become confused as to whether they really were a risk to any country.) Apparently not, is the answer:

experts outside the negotiating process think it is highly unlikely the UN will enforce the Kyoto caps because too many countries would be forced to pay up.

Deloitte emissions trading expert Lorraine Stephenson said a permit for each tonne of carbon over the limit would cost about $30 on current markets, putting Australia's potential Kyoto bill at up to $150 million.

That would be dwarfed by the bills facing other major industrialised countries such as Canada and Japan, which have already exceeded the targets they committed to when they ratified the protocol a decade ago.

On current projections, Canada would be required to pay about $6.8 billion to offset its projected 38 per cent blowout of its target. Japan would face a bill of about $4billion for being 10per cent over the limit.

European nations such as Greece and Ireland will avoid expensive Kyoto bills because the European Union will aggregate its total emissions.

The EU is expected to meet its target thanks to the inclusion of eastern Germany and the closure of the British coal industry in 1990, the baseline year for setting targets.

So, our risk of losing money is low. The risk of other countries worrying about missing targets is also low.

The effect of this treaty is that everyone agreed to try really, really hard. Many countries failed, by such a margin that they can't realistically be penalised.

But it's the symbolism! Yeah, great.

Supposedly, the great benefit of Australia signing is to be directly involved in fresh negotiations now. Well, what about the USA? Is it just being given "observer status" because it hasn't ratified. I don't think so. It has to be involved for there to be any meaningful outcome.

Regardless of what the Liberal leadership may now say, I still stick to my line that giving supremacy to the symbolism over the practical outcome is actually the thing that deserves cynicism.

Stupid ways to promote Green

Earthrace: the green machine - Telegraph

This is, to make an understatement, counter-intuitive:

Earthrace is not your standard petrol-guzzling powerboat. Its jaw-dropping looks have already earned it the unofficial mantle of the world's coolest boat, but it is also one of the greenest. Fuelled by biodiesel and made with environmentally friendly products, it has on-board recycling and all its carbon emissions are offset. But forget images of sandal-wearing sailors and lentil soup. This boat's performance in the water is what turns the petrol heads on. With its 13,000-litre fuel tanks it can travel halfway round the world at speeds of up to 40 knots....

What better way to prove the viability of "green" fuels that produce 78 per cent less carbon emissions than by smashing the decade-old record set by Britain's Ian Bosworth, who circumnavigated the globe in 75 days on the petrol-guzzling Cable & Wireless boat?

Err, how about by not worrying at all about how fast a small-ish boat can circumnavigate the globe, whether or not it is using biodiesel?

And it's not just CO2 that the biofuel is spewing out:

"It averages about 85 decibels at cruising speed. Without earplugs the crew would go deaf," Bethune explained matter-of-factly.

Bethune may also be certifiable, by the sounds of this:

Any doubts about Bethune's commitment were dispelled when it emerged that he recently had liposuction and converted the extracted fat into biodiesel. However before you think that cosmetic surgery might save the planet, it only produced 100ml of fuel.

Hmmm. Maybe if I save all my urine for 5 years and dry it out, I'll have enough urea to mix with biodiesel to make enough explosive to sink the noisy boat of this self-cannibalising wannabe greenie.

Your new moon house

Technology Review: An Inflatable Lunar Habitat

It has a photo too.

A cheery soul

The moral agent | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

It must be literary night here at OD. See the link above for a long article on Joseph Conrad.

I had liked Typhoon (a short novella) which was in a high school book, and many years later read Lord Jim. Although I finished it, it certainly put me off him as a novel writer. His writing style is just incredibly dense, although at first I thought that this might be my fault for being too wedded to "easy" reading.

But no, according to the article, he was even heavy going for his readers when he was alive. HG Wells wrote a review in which he described Conrad's style as being:

"like river-mist; for a space things are seen clearly, and then comes a great grey bank of printed matter, page upon page, creeping round the reader, swallowing him up".

As I recall, "Lord Jim" is supposed to be a tale told around a table in one night. Many reviewers must have found this an unbelievable conceit, as the edition I read included a foreword by Conrad claiming that this criticism was unfair, and you really could tell the tale in one night. (Maybe, if you are in polar regions in winter.)

Anyhow, the article shows that Conrad was the nervous type whose cynical, modernistic view of the world is summed up by this extract from a letter to a friend:

Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.

Yes, well. Joseph certainly sounds like the last person on earth his mates would have thought about inviting out for a few drinks and a yarn. If he got anywhere near a gin bottle, they would've had to make sure sharp objects were out of reach of his wrists.

No stopping him

The end of the affair and beyond | The Australian

There were reviews in the weekend press about a newly published collection of letters by sex mad author Graham Greene. This excerpt made me laugh:

His promiscuity, which his editor suggests was "often made utterly unmanageable by bipolar illness", added to that restlessness and led inevitably to the end of his relationship with Vivien (although they never divorced). Greene as sex addict does not figure strongly in these letters. But in his exhaustive (and, at 2251 pages, exhausting) authorised biography of Greene, Norman Sherry annexes a list of 47 favourite prostitutes scribbled down by Greene in 1948 when his mistress Catherine Walston challenged him about rumours that he paid women for sex.

And that was only his favourite prostitutes.

It sounds like a clear case of "too much information" being delivered to his mistress:

"Graham, are the rumours true? Have you been paying a woman for sex? What is her name?"

"I confess dear, I have needs. Her name is Hazel, but only on Mondays. Tuesdays and Wednesday are Betty. On the first and second Saturday of each month it's Ethel; the third Saturday is Mildred; the Fridays are either with Edith, Beryl or Babbs, depending on who's free; on the 5th and 10th of each month I have regular bookings with Marge, unless she's otherwise engaged, then it's....." etc, etc.

What does Penny Wong think about this?

Eat, drink and be miserable: the true cost of our addiction to shopping

Madeleine Bunting follows the George Monbiot line that, to realistically get to the CO2 reductions required, massive changes to society will be needed. Her last paragraph:

Hearteningly, we know it can be done - our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war. This useful analogy, explored by Andrew Simms in his book Ecological Debt, demonstrates the critical role of government. In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved - not by relying on the good intentions of individuals (and their ability to act on that coffee-stained pamphlet), but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax. This will be the stuff of 21st-century politics - something that, right now, all the main political parties are much too scared to admit.

Yes, that makes serious post-Kyoto targets sound attractive, doesn't it?

I am guessing that it will only be a matter of time before we have some greenie group or other seriously promoting sabotage of coal mining or power stations for the greater good of the earth.

I suspect Madeleine is partly right: very serious CO2 reductions can only be achieved with pain. But the problem is, if you bring Western nations' economies to a halt too quickly, it will inhibit the innovation that is needed to help as well.

It's probably nothing that a massive war between the US and China couldn't solve. (Just kidding, you know.)