verging_on_random

In case of death, call 000

There’s some sort of heart attack awareness campaign going on at the moment … here are the signs, don’t be embarrassed to admit you’re dying, just call an ambulance, that kind of thing. Naturally I’m morbidly curious, both of my parents having died of heart attacks when they were less than five years older than I am right now.

Anyway the ABC did their usual community health spot on the news tonight. They have one just about every night, I figure health researchers are so keen to enjoy their 15 minutes of being called ‘experts’ by Sophie Scott it never occurs to them to say no or charge money, so it fills a gap in the schedule for virtually zero resources.

Tonight’s white coat told us what the warning signs were for a heart attack. Chest pain … feelings of breathlessness … panic attack … unconsciousness …

Unconsciousness? Who would of thunk it? Anyways I’ve made a note to self … if struck by sudden unexplained unconsciousness, dial 000.

Sucking on the public teat

As somebody employed in the public sector I always get a laugh from the numerous blog comments that tell public servants to get off their lazy arses and find a proper job or words to that effect. Having spent most of my career in the private sector I can assure anyone who’s interested that I now work much longer hours as an academic than I ever did in the construction industry, and for about half the money (not even adjusting for inflation).

Today being Sunday I’ve written an exam paper and marked 10 assignments. I have another 6 assignments to finish before I can relax. Oh, except that I have to review some materials for a new course after dinner tonight, because I won’t get a chance during the week.

I’m not looking for sympathy, I chose this profession and it has plenty of non-material rewards. I do however get a bit snarky at this persistent myth that people in the public sector have it easy compared to all the sons of toil with real jobs in private industry.

Irrational escalation of commitment

American foreign policy seems to have succumbed to a tendency of the human race that has often been remarked, namely the inclination, when a certain course of action fails, to keep doing the same thing with redoubled effort.

Examples of this tendency are legion. In warfare it was evident in the behaviour of Union generals in the American Civil War. They would send a wave of infantry in a frontal charge against concealed Rebs, watch them get mown down, and send up another lot in orderly parade ground fashion. When there were no more troops left to despatch they’d go ask president Abe for some more. They did this for four years until the South had run out of food and ammo, whereupon they declared victory.

Generals on both sides in WW1 adopted roughly the same approach. First, launch a sustained artillery bombardment. Next, send thousands of infantry over the top to get machine-gunned while they try to scramble through barbed wire. After a day or two, dig new trenches half a kilometre in front of the old ones. Vow that next time you’ll increase the bombardment by 50% and send at least twice as many infantry get slaughtered.

When John Monash won a few battles in 1918 by attacking without a preliminary artillery bombardment, supported by these new-fangled tanks, it put a lot of noses right out of joint. That wasn’t how to fight a war, dammit.

Irrational escalation of commitment, as it’s called, is a reflexive pattern of behaviour that boils down to this: when something demonstrably doesn’t work, do more of it. For some reason, human beings are very prone to it. Like the parent who belts a kid for crying. The kid cries even more, so the belting gets cranked up a notch. Nobody’s happy. The parent isn’t getting the desired result. But they keep doing it anyway.

You see irrational escalation of commitment in business all the time. Some car companies are good at it. In order to boost flagging sales they make their cars cheaper, either by adding lots of free features, or with cash back offers, or just by cutting the sticker price. Result? Customers who paid full price are pissed off, resale values drop so the car becomes less competitive in the market, and the overall brand reputation is devalued. Hardly any of these price campaigns have improved a car company’s competitive position in the medium to long run. Yet what do they do the next time sales flag? Yep, good guess … cut the price again, only more this time.

So what’s this got to do with the yanks’ foreign policy? Well a few recent straws in the wind demonstrate how they continue to escalate their irrational commitment to a failed policy of regime change. This is the policy: ‘When you see a regime that you don’t like, use dirty tricks to cause the regime’s downfall’. The US has been doing it since forever, with a pretty much perfect record of disastrous results. For example, 100 years of interfering in the internal affairs of South American countries has left the USA with near neighbours who are the only hard left socialist nations surviving on the planet. And of course the success of attempts to dictate regimes in the Middle East is legendary. But does this track record deter the decision-makers in Washington? Not a bit of it. They just keep right on irrationally escalating.

Case in point: Ethiopia. North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, right? Except, apparently, when it wants to break UN sanctions and sell arms to Ethiopia, in which case the USA is happy to turn a blind eye. Because Ethiopia is fighting the damned Islamo-fascists so let’s not get technical about a few dodgy arms sales. The result is to cause further damage to whatever moral credibility the USA has left in the world and reinforce the belief that its guiding ethical principle is called ‘Expediency’. But no matter! It’s what they’ve always done so do it again, only more so this time!

Case in point: Pakistan. The USA’s record in making terrorist groups its proxies in regime change campaigns is a story of unremitting stupidity and blinkered short-term thinking. Support for Al Qaeda against the Russians in Afghanistan is only the most spectacular example; you can also think back to the way the CIA helped Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam before the lovers’ tiff. Well actually if you wanted to be scholarly you could go back to the days when American Indians were armed and trained to fight the British in the 18^th century. Who would of thought they’d turn round and fight the good white guys later?

Heedless of history the yanks are now supporting terrorist operations from Pakistan into Iran. Yeah well that Iranian regime’s gotta go, eh. No the terrorists won’t turn round and cause problems in a few years’ time, no way. This time the CIA knows what it’s doing, trust me.

Case in point: Iran. Sticks and stones may break my bones … but it doesn’t work that way in practice. Words are powerful things. The Bushistas have created the Monster in the Closet with their rhetoric about Iran, just like they did with China and Russia and Cuba and *giggles* Panama and Grenada. Once you convince enough people that the Monster is real and about to come out and eat you up, you have to do something about it. Especially if you have up to three naval carrier battle groups sailing up and down just busting to show the goddam army how to fight a war. So you keep accusing a country of supporting terrorism and sending weapons to kill your soldiers and having spies in Iraq and next thing you know you’re in a corner … if you don’t do something to kill this Monster you’ve created out of thin air you look like a girlie man. So it’s shock and awe time!

Why do people keep falling for irrational escalation of commitment syndrome? Well they’re like the punters who’ve just put the week’s wages into a poker machine … they’ve invested a lot of time and resources and they’re buggered if they’ll admit it was a silly thing to do. Economists would babble about sunk costs. Psychologists might use the technical term ‘pig-headed’. What it boils down to is that people have a mental model of how the world ought to work … a kind of invisible user’s manual that tells them what to do in any given situation … and lots of folk don’t seem able to admit that their version doesn’t work very well. They’re convinced that if they just give it one more try but this time make sure we don’t do what we did to screw up last time … they’ll be rewarded with a stunning success.

So expect to see the USA keep trying to bring down the regime in Iran, even if it leads to all-out war. After all, they’ve spent a lot of years practising regime change in the Middle East … you can’t expect them to just abandon all that expertise and try something new can you?

Dogs

I haven’t had any nasty dog encounters for a while but the average got back to normal today with two separate incidents. Both involved border collies who couldn’t resist the lure of a lone jogger on an empty beach. I blame violent video games - I think these animals had been playing far too much Fraser Island Dingoes.

The owners of the dogs stayed at a prudent distance in the dunes on both occasions, whistling and screeching and being comprehensively ignored by their loathsome pets. If I had bothered to go and confront them I’m sure I would have been assured that (a) their dogs weren’t usually like this, (b) they’d never done anything like it before and (c) they wouldn’t have bitten me. Yeah sure love, pull the other one.

In the USA, 1,000 people per day need treatment for dog-caused injuries in hospital casualty wards. In Australia, one dog in 38 causes an injury requiring hospital attention. On very old data ‘it has been estimated that Australian hospitals treat approximately 30,000 dog attack victims each year‘ which is roughly consistent with the American experience after adjusting for population. That’s just hospitals - god knows how many more get treated by local GPs, nurses, first-aid officers and the like. Yet most dog-owners look at you in wide-eyed innocence and swear that their darling puppy wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Many Australians look upon dogs the way Americans think about guns: the only way you’ll take their leash is out of their dead right hand. Except most of them won’t use leashes, regarding them as an unwarranted intrusion on their dogs’ personal liberty. Leashes are a breach of the second amendment to the constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to be accompanied anywhere they like by large aggressive canines and anyone who objects can go fuck themselves.

In my time up here I’ve seen a dog terrorise a female Japanese tourist by jumping all over her while she was trying to sunbake, while the owners told her it was ‘just playing’ and I’ve observed an unleashed doberman getting up to snarl every time someone came within 100 metres whereupon the beach fisherman owner would give a snarl that was marginally less attractive than the dog’s and kick it until it sat down again, which meant it was only a matter of time before he was preoccupied with something or other and the dog got away to do some damage. I’ve watched dogs shit on pathways while their owners smile indulgently and proceed to sweep sand over the turds so the next barefoot unfortunates who walk along won’t even see them before they tread in them. Moronic women merrily hold the gate to the nature reserve open for their frolicking mongrels, sneering at the ‘NO DOGS’ sign under their noses. If you remonstrate that the scent of dogs prevents native animals from breeding, which is the purpose of the nature reserve, they give you a pitying look and say their beloved doggies ‘aren’t doing any harm’. On more occasions than I can count while out jogging I’ve had to freeze until the pathetic owner of a crazed snarling dog came up panting to grab it, while going through the usual ‘isn’t usually like this/wouldn’t have bitten you’ bullshit.

This minority of dog worshippers either don’t care about the misery their wretched animals cause for other people or they are so besotted they refuse to see it. As a result of their actions dogs have been effectively banned from public places in cities and a good job too. The sooner it happens here the better.

Relativity and death

Another mass shooting in the USA with 32 people killed. It’s the lead story on every media outlet and all the major blogs have a post.

More civilians than this are killed in Iraq every day, on average. Often it’s much worse, of course. Nobody pays much attention.

The stories that the media report and the attention they get from the public reflect the values and attitudes of the bulk of the population. Australian people still have an exceptionally Anglo-American orientation to the world, which is a form of racism. I’m not suggesting that anything can or should be done about this, or even that it’s a cause for any particular feelings of shame or disappointment.

It would, however, be nice to see politicians and the media acknowledging the bleedin’ obvious instead of clinging to this absurd crap about us not having a racist bone in our bodies.

I’ll take the money

Remember when the ABC ran commercials trying to bolster public support? They emphasised that it only cost us eight cents a day each to run the national broadcaster. Well having given the matter careful consideration I think I’d prefer to take the money and leave, thanks.

Eight cents a day then is probably at least 10 now … that’s $36.50 a year. Enough for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black every Christmas, which would be better value than the second-rate stuff on the ABC these days.

All I ever bother to watch is the 7 o’clock news and maybe the 7.30 Report depending on the stories. Last night was a typical display of mediocrity. Most of the ‘news’ consisted of a rehash of the Sydney Morning Herald’s news pages, which is par for the course now. In the middle of this was a shameless cross-promotion for a show they were going to run at 8 o’clock about the Tasmanian guys who got trapped in the mine last year. Presenting it as ‘news’ was blatantly dishonest.

The 7.30 Report then gave us an extended story about … Kevin Rudd and the tremendous scandal surrounding the fact that people from Rudd’s office knew that a television station was trying to change the timing of an Anzac Day media event in Vietnam to suit the local schedule, or something, I haven’t taken enough interest in it to understand all the details. The ‘analysis’ was provided by Melbourne journalist Mark Day who did a nice line in empty pontification until I thought “Why TF am I watching this shit?” and turned it off.

Really, free-to-air television is on its last legs. DVDs had it on the ropes and true high speed broadband will deliver the knockout punch. Any pretence that the ABC was a bastion of high quality, impartial current affairs reporting has been comprehensively discredited by Howard’s mob. They should sell off the ABC while it’s still worth something and leave it to the market to cater to the TV audience. Some people might still be prepared to pay to watch John Howard refuse to answer Kerry O’Brien’s questions; I’m buggered if I can see why I should have to.

The sun sets on America the beautiful

I’m sure the author of this post thinks it’s hilarious. Me, I think it’s a depressing illustration of the mentality that afflicts a significant proportion of Americans. It reeks of their paranoia, their monumental disdain for any culture but their own, and explains their obsession with interfering in everybody else’s business while expressing outrage if other nations try the same thing.

Question: “If you could wipe one country off the planet with a snap of your fingers, which country would it be and why?” — D-Vega

Answer: “Wipe one country off the planet” seems so harsh. Let’s say, if, with one snap of my fingers, I could move everyone in a country to a lovely planet elsewhere, where they could live in harmony with the land while their neighbors stole their land back on earth, which one would it be?

Honorable Mentions: Pakistan, Mexico, France, Syria, Russia, & Somalia.

#5) Saudi Arabia: The intellectual wellspring of radical Islam is in Saudi Arabia. Anywhere you find radical imams or terrorists, you’ll usually find some Saudi or Iranian money not far behind.

#4) North Korea: A backwards country run by a tyrant with nukes. North Korea adds nothing to the world and is extremely dangerous. We’d be better off without them.

#3) Iran: The world’s foremost terrorist supporting state and currently the biggest threat to world stability. Not only would getting rid of Iran be a great step forward in the war on terror, it would make the nuke question irrelevant.

#2) China: Long-term, the Chinese are the next great threat to world stability. Plus, they support rogue regimes across the globe, they’re ramping up their military spending, and they’re greedily eyeing Taiwan.

#1) The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories: Well, at least they’d finally have their own state, right? The Palestinians are the most violent, quarrelsome, and degenerate people on earth and as a bonus, removing them would create peace in the Middle-East for a few weeks until Israel’s other neighbors could figure out another pretext to start a fight over.

I should explain that this bloke is not some obscure blogger with delusions of importance; he writes for one of the most widely-read right-wing (self-described) blogs in the USA and is a professional adviser to a declared Republican candidate in next year’s presidential elections.

His deranged rant about China is the most troubling aspect. The irony of an apologist for the Bushistas’ invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq calling another country ‘a threat to world stability’ is obviously lost on him. Likewise his whine about a nation with five times the population of the USA ‘ramping up its military spending’ to about 10% of what America spends each year. And the bit about ‘greedily eyeing’ Taiwan simply ignores the fact that until recently Taiwan was part of China. Once again, the irony is rich coming from an American who I’m sure would be the first to defend the Monroe Doctrine that declares the whole of South America a subservient region where the USA reserves the right to do whatever it bloody well likes without explaining or apologising to anyone, least of all the South Americans.

The writer, John Hawkins, is a deeply repellant creature but unfortunately he is typical of a group in the USA that isn’t going anywhere no matter who happens to win the next presidential election. They are incapable of self-knowledge, utterly convinced of their own rightness, contemptuous of the rest of the world including large swathes of their fellow-countrymen and absolutely dismissive of democratic principles or international co-operation. They regard global warming as a liberal myth and seriously believe that ‘Islamic extremism’ is the most important threat the USA has ever faced.

They are dangerous zealots and there are lots of them. No doubt I will be accused of exaggeration but I believe the days when we could call the USA a democratic country are over, and Australians urgently need to re-examine the nature of our relationship with America before we get sucked into the increasing ugliness that will characterise what was once a beacon and a model to the rest of the world.