verging_on_random

The nanny state takes on Billy Bunter

I have a lot of sympathy for libertarians, with their rooted antipathy to governments interfering in the lives of individuals. It’s a pity so many of them are barking mad and/or downright psychopaths, otherwise I might even make common cause with them occasionally.

For example, here is a story of the kind that gives such a bad name to Teh Left:

LONDON, Aug. 16 (UPI) — Greatly overweight British children should be taken from their families if a nationwide obesity epidemic continues, says a governmental group.Parents who allow their children to eat too much could be considered guilty of neglect, similarly to those who don’t feed their children at all, say representatives of The Local Government Association. The group is calling for development of new guidelines helping authorities deal with the issue.

I think this is deeply hilarious. I have visions of a chain of institutions for chubbies springing up across the length and breadth of the British Isles, their presence easily detectable by the presence of furtive raincoat-wearing dealers in the High Street selling blackmarket cream buns and chip butties to corpulent eight year olds desperate to supplement the 1200 calories a day diet at the porkers prison. Kids will be dragged screaming from their homes while their mummies wring their hands and scream “No no he’s just big-boned!!!” In schools all over the kingdom, “They’re from the fat kids home” will become the ultimate playground insult.

In 30 years there will be an inquiry into the stolen pudden generation and shame-faced skinny adults will offer an apology followed by a distribution of free donuts and thick shakes to the victims.

I applaud the sentiments but I think they don’t go far enough. Let’s really sort out our kids’ problems by removing them from their parents if they are allowed to take up smoking or drinking or spend too much time on MySpace. There’s nothing like a dose of institutionalisation to fix aberrant behaviour - just ask the Roman Catholic Church.

Declaration of interest: The author was an overweight child whose life was ruined by a parental regimen of three meals a day plus morning and afternoon tea.

Layers of misrepresentation

I’m on record as being a fatalist when it comes to doing anything in response to global warming, and I’m bemused at the furious, ill-tempered tone of arguments where most of the participants are incapable of reaching an informed opinion because they lack the required scientific knowledge. The closest parallel I can think of is the early part of the 20th century when lots of people in Europe and the USA got all angry and vocal about the virtues or otherwise of remaining on the gold standard, throwing all sorts of idiotic arguments about as if they all had PhDs in economics.

It’s entertaining in a dark masochistic kind of way to watch the bluster and bullshit fly but lately it’s depressing to see how easily the deniers are scoring points. For example, they’ve started to use two arguments consistently which are actually very clever, because they are false on two levels but the keen-as-mustard save the planet mob only want to argue on the first level where they are doomed never to win.

The first false argument is the Y2K one - it claims that the global warming ’scare’ is like the dire warnings at the end of the last century that flaws in computer software would cause global catastrophe when the clocks turned over at midnight on 31 December, 1999. Since nothing like that happened, the giggling fuckwits chortle, it proves we are well-advised to take all these doomsday scenarios by alleged experts with a grain of salt.

Earnest proponents of the need to do something about AGW rebut this argument by saying that nothing happened because so much attention was given to preventing the problem. Which is fine so far as it goes but I have to say I don’t find it terribly convincing. I mean if the risks were as horrible as the IT folks were claiming you’d expect something to have gone badly wrong somewhere - surely not every organisation in the world was persuaded to take precautions? But in truth the point is moot.

The true response to this ridiculous argument is that the accuracy or otherwise of Y2K disaster scenarios has nothing whatsoever to do with AGW. If the same people were trying to get contracts to fix AGW as made a fortune from fixing Y2K, then it would be a reasonable point, but of course the experts involved aren’t remotely connected to each other. Therefore trying to connect the two situations is about as logical as arguing that doctors were right that smoking causes lung cancer so the IPCC’s analysis of global warming must also be correct.

In a rational world, people would calmly point this out and the AGW deniers would retire in embarrassed confusion. Unfortunately the frenzied arguments are anything but rational and the advocates of action keep falling into the traps set by the deniers.

This is even more evident in the other double-layered argument. This is the one where smirking smartarses sneer “If they can’t even predict the weather next week how can they predict it in 50 years?”

This question brings many people to the verge of apoplexy. “Weather is not the same thing as climate!” they scream, accurately but unconvincingly, and the stirrers’ smiles grow ever wider because they know they can use the line again and again and get the same predictable response.

The deeper and more persuasive response to the statement is to point out that they actually can predict the weather next week, at least with sufficient reliability to make anyone sit up and take notice when they predict global warming. When I was in the USA years ago I was amazed at the accuracy of the weather forecasts; if they said snow was expected at 3 pm next day, nine times out of 10 that’s what would happen. In the intervening years, Australia has achieved similar levels of weather forecasting precision, at least on the east coast.

If I was as confident in the predictions of global warming as I am that we will get a southerly change when the Bureau says we will, I’d be investing every cent in alpine housing. Subscribing to the tired line that ‘they can’t forecast the weather’ is just lazy repetition of a discredited urban myth.

While I don’t believe human institutions will be capable of acting systematically to meet the challenges of climate change, I have nothing but contempt for those who’ve decided to make the issue another front in their endless war against ‘The Left’. At least those who want to do something about global warming are motivated by concern for their fellow human beings and the environment in which we live. The deniers seem to be motivated mainly by a childish obsession with argument for argument’s sake - anything to avoid conceding that the despised left is right about something. I’d like to see the forces of righteousness doing a better job of demolishing the deniers’ specious arguments instead of getting ensnared in endless permutations of the same petty, irrelevant distractions.

One born every minute … and they run the country

Every now and then a story breaks that demonstrates just how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of allegedly intelligent people and institutions. Joh Bjelke-Petersen notoriously spent half his premiership promoting quack cancer cures and deals to swap coal for Roumanian locomotives and sundry other pieces of lunacy, and copped a hiding from the southern media for doing so, but he wasn’t really an aberration. He was just taking a common condition to extremes.

In support of which thesis I give you Tim Johnston and Firepower.

Incredibly, Firepower is a company that sells pills. Not pills that cure diseases, but pills that *cough* dramatically improve your car’s fuel efficiency. Yes folks, just one pill per tank of gas and we can all pull out of the Middle East. It’s the greatest breakthrough in automotive science since Peter Brock’s energy polariser that used crystals to align the molecules in your Toyota, or some such technical wizardry.

A child of 10 should have picked this as the purest horseshit, but Johnston and his company had a great time. He allegedly had stupendous contracts in Russia and Pakistan (even though he was a bit coy about disclosing any independent test results for his product). He had dinners with prime ministers and other notables. Instead of being greeted with howls of derisive laughter wherever he went, he was treated as a Serious Businessman.

Selling pills to cut your fuel consumption.

He convinced people of something so extravagant that they figured it must be true. Firepower had products to ease the world’s reliance on oil, products that would save the environment, products that were so good that they were going to make everyone he came into contact with extremely wealthy. And he would be the wealthiest of all.

There was a sense that this was a brilliant man. Some would later describe him as the Bill Gates of the environment and Firepower the next Microsoft. To potential investors, the message was clear: get on board or lose out on the investment chance of a lifetime.

It was blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of brains that this was all pure baloney, but none of our politicians or journalists seemed to think so. I don’t recall reading a single word of scepticism until it was obvious the company was in deep shit, whereas in any sane rational world people would have been shouting from the rooftops “This is an enormous con job and not even a very convincing one”.

The greatest suckers were the organisations that accepted sponsorship from Johnston, like the Sydney Kings, the Western Force and the Sydney Rabbitohs. Didn’t it occur to anyone that this guy was on a super-weird Walter Mitty trip where he had a sponsor’s box in every port? I know the Rabbitohs are as dumb as a bag of hammers but I never suspected they could be as gullible as this.

Now of course Firepower’s creditors have pointed out the embarrasing lack of costume on emperor Johnston and Firepower is in liquidation. But even now it’s being reported in a somewhat restrained fashion. The best the ASIC can do is investigate the company for allegedly selling shares without a prospectus. How about a bit of good old-fashioned police work from the Fraud Squad - you know, like they do when someone tries to sell shares in the Opera House?

I suppose however that we ought to be grateful to Tim Johnston. He reminds us how irredeemably inept are the members of our ruling class. If they can swallow pills to make their cars use less petrol, a little thing like an Islamo-fascist plot to rule the world is a piece of cake.

Software deathwishers

For years now I’ve used Mozilla Firefox. It struck me as a much more friendly bit of software than Internet Explorer and came with a lot of optional add-ons that made it very useful.

Last month, with a complete absence of fanfare, Mozilla launched Firefox version 3. Last week it automatically installed itself on my computer. In the process, it’s effectively screwed Firefox as a functional browser. YouTube videos take about half an hour to download. Download Accelerator no longer works (”this plug-in is no longer supported”, Firefox tells me cheerily). That by itself would be enough to turn me off Firefox forever (Download Accelerator downloads average mp3 files in about 20 seconds and reverting to the ordinary Windows download function would be a giant retrograde step) but other plug-ins are also “no longer supported”.

In short, in the great tradition of Microsoft downgrading from XP to Vista, Mozilla has taken a very effective piece of basic software and ruined it. WTF comes over these programmers? Is it a form of collective death wish or what? Surely the days of trialling beta versions of new software with a lot of volunteer geeks who just love spending their lives fooling arond with it and expect everyone else to do likewise should be well in the past by now. Customers are entitled to expect new versions of software to do everything that the last version did at least as well and hopefully better. Computers are no longer the esoteric province of nerds, they are basic social and business tools that should require no more specialist knowledge from the customer to operate than a car or a washing machine.

iTunes has been busting to install Opera on my machines for years. Come on down Opera, your 15 months of fame have arrived.

No more Mexican wave

Coming to a stadium near you soon … the Colombian wave.

Exit pursued by a bear

Hehe.

At least 30 hungry bears have trapped a team of geologists in their camp in Russia’s far east.

It follows a fatal bear attack on two workers at the same site last week.

Local emergency services workers say at least 30 bears have been roaming the camp on the Kamchatka peninsula, as they search for food.

As a result, scientists have been stuck in the camp and are too scared to move since two of their colleagues were killed by one of the bears last week.

Laying siege to camp: One bear killed two workers last week (www.sxc.hu: A Syed)

I bags the movie rights.

A precedent for Iraq?

The USA has been involved in so many major wars since its inception that it’s easy to forget the small ones. For example, few people would know much about the invasion and occupation of The Philippines that began in 1898.

It started almost by accident. The Philippines was a Spanish colony and the US got itself into a war with Spain over events half a world away in Cuba. A US fleet routed its Spanish counterpart in Manila Bay and eventually American troops landed, just as the locals were declaring independence and calling themselves a national government. The yanks quickly threw out the Spaniards and occupied their fortifications and a period of increasing tension ensued, during which the Filipinos kept saying “Thanks for that now will you please piss off and let us run our own country” or words to the effect, to which the US kept responding “Hang on, we’re still thinking about things.” Eventually an American started shooting and the next thing there was a full-scale conflict.

The yanks, having been ceded the place by Spain in the peace treaty, quickly decided that the Filipinos were incapable of looking after themselves and sent in more troops to pacify the place. A surge, you might call it. Having announced that they were the lawful government, they condemned any Filipino who tried to stand up for independence as an insurgent. More than 4,000 American troops lost their lives in the ensuing war, along with an unknown but much larger number of Filipino irregulars. Nobody knows for sure but it’s generally agreed that about 200,000 civilians lost their lives. Back home in Main Street USA, it was all justified as being for the Filipinos’ own good.

Sounding familiar?

Once peace was finally declared, the decision-makers in the USA spent years discussing what was to be done with the place. Naturally they professed nothing but altruistic motives based purely on the interests of the Filipino people, although strangely enough whenever an actual Filipino leader appeared in Washington to argue a case he was quickly told to shut up and go back to Manila. This was a Serious Matter that had to be decided by grown-ups.

A series of puppet administrations ensued under the control of American governors and generals. Eventually, after Macarthur had done his “I will return” schtick in the Second World War, and the yanks had secured the bases they wanted (or so they believed), they granted the republic independence, although they continued to dominate the islands’ commerce and interfered extensively in their politics. Within 20 years, The Philippines was under the control of the Marcos dictatorship.

To this day, The Philippines bears more resemblance to a feudal society than it does to any Western conception of a democracy, and the economic development that has occurred in most Asian countries has conspicuously passed the nation by.

John McCain and other apologists for the occupation of Iraq are fond of citing Japan and Germany and South Korea as precedents for what they hope will happen in Iraq.They might consider whether The Philippines provides a more informative case study for the effects of prolonged US occupation.

Gay marriage?

One of the many peculiar characteristics of politics in the USA is the amount of passion that the issue of gay marriage generates in the community. A recent court decision in California looks like it’s kicked the whole controversy off again:

PHILADELPHIA, July 11 (UPI) — Same-sex marriage is emerging once again as a divisive issue for the U.S. electorate, the Pew Research Center reports.As the presidential election approaches, more Republicans and white evangelicals say the issue is one that will be important when they decide whom to vote for.

Four years ago, when President George W. Bush defeated Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had recently made gay marriage legal in the state, and many states had referendums on the ballot opposing marriage for homosexuals. This year, a California ballot initiative seeks to reverse a state Supreme Court ruling that a legal ban on same-sex marriage violates the state constitution.

You might recall that Howard tried to get some mileage from the issue a couple of years ago. He introduced legislation declaring that marriage was the union of a man and a woman, which was thoroughly pointless because that was already the law. Maybe he just wanted to show solidarity with his best friend forever George Bush, who was canvassing at the time a constitutional amendment along the same lines; or more likely he hoped the Labor Party would get itself in a tangle trying to respond and he could do his usual snide trick of painting the opposition as crazy hippies who were trying to destroy the fabric of society. In many ways Howard spent his career preserved in the 1970s. He’s still there.

Anyway I could have told him he was wasting his time. There are just as many poofter bashers amongst union officials as in Australian board rooms (metaphorically speaking of course) and Labor supported the legislation with scarcely a murmur.

I doubt that gay marriage is an issue that stirs people up in this country. Sure there are a few crazies who froth at the mouth about the fatal damage that such a move would inflict on our society but by and large I suspect Australians are distinctly underwhelmed by the whole argument. I reckon a large chunk of the population would say “Nah don’t agree with it but I’m not going to lose any sleep about it” and most of the remainder would say “Ummmm like I care” or words to that effect.

For my part I do not agree with the concept of same sex marriage, if by that it is meant that gays and lesbians should be able to enter a relationship that is regarded as identical to that which straight couples enter into. On any objective analysis it is not identical; marriage connotes notions like a husband and a wife that are simply inapplicable to gay relationships. I don’t see why straight people, who after all comprise the vast majority of our society, should have to accommodate a change in the longstanding concept of marriage just to satisfy the small minority of gays who have decided they want it altered.

I also have to say that i would find the idea of participating in a marriage unacceptable. Some uninformed writing might perpetuate the stereotypes of ‘male’ and ‘female’ personalities in gay relationships but that is a terrible over-simplification of the true situation. Some gays in permanent relationships might think of themselves as conventional married couples who just happen to be the same gender but I believe a larger number don’t think that way. They regard their relationships as sui generis and I believe that’s how the law should treat them.

These are examples of situations where I want the law to change:

• When I die I would want my partner to be my lawful presumptive heir and to be automatically delegated decisions about funeral arrangements and the like;

• If I were to become incapacitated, I would want my partner to be the lawful authoritative decision-maker on questions concerning my treatment including whether to turn off life support

• I would want my partner to be automatically regarded as my lawful next of kin whenever the nature of that relationship arises, for example in cases of accident and emergency or in financial matters including superannuation;

• If my partner is not an Australian citizen I would want him to have the same immigration rights to this country as my non-Australian wife would.
  

Some of these things can be done now but only after completing lots of wills and powers of attorney and the like. Others cannot be done at all.

I believe parliament should create a statutory relationship that incorporates these rights. I don’t see any point in calling it marriage; it’s not, and it would not carry any of the implications for the status of children that go with the idea of marriage. I don’t much care what they call it … just let them create it so same sex couples can attain the same security in their relationships as is available to everyone else through the institution of marriage.

Once the legal relationship exists, gays and lesbians will be able to sort out the ceremonial aspect of things involving white doves and tuxedos and whatever else takes their fancy. However unless it creates a concrete legal relationship, these ‘commitment ceremonies’ will remain largely meaningless. A unique legal relationship for same sex couples creating rights like the ones I listed would be a great boon for many gays and lesbians, provide comfort to their families who worry about the twilight legal world in which same sex couples are forced to live now, and tend to enhance the stability of relationships. Moreover, it would not cause one shred of damage to the institution of marriage or to society at large.

The Rudd Government apparently intends to amend all sorts of laws to accommodate some definition of same sex relationship, which will presumably be hedged about with legal uncertainty and require people to prove the nature of the relationship before they are entitled to the benefits of the law. It would be much better served to cut the crap and create a new legal relationship into which same sex couples can enter, and with that one administrative act, create a coherent set of mutual rights and obligations.

Our Aussie Nicole

Nicole Kidman is a true blue Aussie.

She’s named her new baby girl after a genuine Aussie icon. No not, Victa, not Hills Hoist, not Slim Dusty.

Her baby has been named Sunday Roast.

On ya Nic.

In praise of the thong

Thongs seem to spark intense emotions in a lot of people; I’m not sure why. Many enterprises think they are an unacceptable form of footwear, banning them along with singlets. Maybe that’s a clue to the distaste they inspire in some people: they reek of K Mart and the working class and are defiantly non-aspirational (despite occasional attempts by innovative manufacturers to take them up-market).

Nevertheless I’ve always loved them and since I moved away from the cities I spend most of my time either barefoot or in thongs. It’s a real pain in the butt to have to put proper shoes on when I have to teach a class or go to a meeting. Having been comparatively shoe-less for 15 years now I can happily state that I have never suffered any of the dire health problems frequently predicted by those who want us to engage in the thoroughly unnatural practice of covering our feet with chunks of leather or plastic all the time, and I can only assume that these health warnings are covertly subsidised by the footwear industry.

As far as I know Australians are the only people who call them ‘thongs’, a name that inspires great hilarity in other countries. However I like the name; it’s punchier than the cutesie ‘flip-flops’ and less confusing than the Asian ’slippers’. For a long period in the 1990s they were practically unobtainable in Australia. A few surf shops used to stock outrageously overpriced Brazilian Reefs and I managed to find enough in my size (12) to see me through the drought.

Now of course they are ubiquitous, with souvenir shops and newsagents having racks and racks of the things and even chemists getting into the act with thongs that are allegedly better for your feet. Presumably we’re experiencing the end of the fashion cycle and in a few years time they’ll be hard to find once again, so I’m like a castaway rescued on the brink of starvation who compulsively hides food all over the place. I have a cupboard full of new thongs to see me through the lean times, although I can’t find any of the nice chunky ones that I used to be able to get. I think I’ll pick up another couple of pairs of the thin ones next time I’m at the shops, just to be on the safe side.

All this reflection was prompted by accidentally stumbling across a site with a vigorous discussion about the evils or otherwise of thongs. It was an American site, so it goes without saying that the comments thread was full of faux expert opinions about the alleged health problems. However, my favourite anti-thong flip-flop comment was along these lines:

You shouldn’t wear flip-flops because anyone who was wearing them in the World Trade Centre on 9/11 wouldn’t have been able to run fast enough to get away when the buildings collapsed.

Yes folks, even our choice of footwear has to be driven by our fear of an imminent terrorist attack. And the yanks wonder why so many people laugh at them as they huddle in their bunkers, clutching their Smith & Wessons and trembling at the thought of all the monsters in the closet who are just busting to do them harm.