Amusing Reading Elsewhere

Maybe it's symptom of intellectual snobbery, but I'm often amused by people whose abilities fall short of their own estimation of themselves. One of my favourite psychological research papers purports to show that highly incompetent people tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities. This explains many things, not the least of them being widespread incompetence in workplaces. Job interviewers usually look for people who present themselves and their abilities confidently, and most of the standard how-to-get-a-job advice emphasises the need to do this. What they should be doing, if they want someone who actually knows their stuff, is taking on the interviewee who hedges, or even has the gaucherie to remark that the job sounds difficult.

I think this amusement is why I keep John Ray on the blogroll; he links to so many people who overestimate themselves. Today (Friday) he's linked to a couple of beauties.

Wendy McElroy at iFeminists has produced a wonderful piece of prose to match the background colour of her web-page:

The price tag for decades of gender warfare is usually expressed in general terms -- for example, through data-filled studies that reflect how "boys" are slighted in education. The ordeal of Michael Wright -- a student at Oklahoma University at Normal -- captures the human factor. And it leads me to a question: What does the devil look like?

Michael's ordeal started when he found another student's ID card at a copy centre. He looked up her details in an on-line student registry and telephoned, then e-mailed her, to let her know that he had the card and to arrange its return. When she didn't respond, he turned to card over to the authorities and thought no more of the matter.

Unfortunately, the card's owner was a little paranoid, and contacted the police, accusing Michael of stalking her. The police visited Michael to investigate the complaint:

two police officers appeared at Michael's house, apparently to investigate his stalking of a female OU student. Stalking is a serious crime which is defined as "the willful, malicious and repeated following and harassing of another person". It can place a young man on a registry of sex offenders that could haunt his future and limit his options in life. Indeed, Oklahoma is a state in which convicted sex offenders must register his/her address, which is made available to the public. No wonder Michael suffered "a great deal of nerve-wracking anxiety" before being exonerated.

Under those circumstances, I'd be worried too. But Michael's ordeal was mercifully short and ended well:

The incident is not a breakdown in "the system." According to Michael, the police exercised both common sense and common decency, with one detective eventually thanking him for "making the extra effort to protect the members of our community" by returning lost property.

From this distance, the whole incident looks like the sort of trivial misundertanding which, with a few days to recover from the nerve-wracking anxiety, you could turn into a good yarn, adding a lot of humorous embellishments over the years. To McElroy, it's evidence of something more insidious:

I was once asked to describe the devil. (I interpreted the question to be about the general nature of evil in man rather than about religion.)

I replied: If the devil is the living flesh of evil, then here is who I think he is. Far from appearing as a hideous demon, he is the average-looking person who walks into a room and shakes your hand with a smile. By the time he leaves, the standards of decency of everyone within that room have been lowered ever so slightly.

Perhaps he offers general statistics on divorce or child abuse to convince you to suspect your husband of infidelity or your neighbor of molestation. No evidence of specific wrongdoing is offered, of course. But since such "crimes" do occur, you are advised to be vigilantly on guard against them in your personal life. And, so, you begin to view your spouse and neighbors with a bit more suspicion, a little less trust, and with the tendency to interpret every action as possible evidence of wrongdoing. The very possibility of an offense is taken as evidence of its presence.

She continues in this vein for a few paragraphs, leading to this proclamation that the Antichrist is among us:

With no religious implication, I say: a devil is at large. He tells us that acts of kindness and common decency do not exist; the worst possible interpretation should be placed on acts that appear to embody those values. Individuals do not exist; only categories.

The other beauty is ChuDogg's refutation of the results of a study reported in the Washington Post which found that Fox News viewers were misinformed on the war in Iraq. The study found the following to be the three most common mistaken impressions about the war:

* U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
* There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.
* People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.

ChuDogg takes the first apart with the help of David Kay's congressional testimony. Here's a section of Kay's testimony which is totally irrelevant to ChuDogg's case:

We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis.

And here's a section which is:

A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from U.N. inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the U.N. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery – hidden in the home of a BW scientist – illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.

There's a photo of the vials, which ought to convince any doubters that Iraq really did have at least one weapon of mass destruction and that it has been found. And here's some photographic evidence that ought to convince you that Italians eat shit.

On the second, ChuDogg cites utterly reliable reorts from National Review On-Line, NewsMax, Rush Limbaugh and The St Petersburgh Times. On the third, he is oddly silent.

(Updated to include the missing third survey result. Well spotted Jeremy.)

Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer?

Via Tim Dunlop, news that Donald Luskin, a columnist at National Review on-line has
sooled his lawyers on the pseudonymous blogger Atrios. Brad de Long hoists Luskin here.

It seems prudent to mention that no aspersion on either Mr Luskin or his attorneys is intended in any part of this post. Particularly the title.

Whatever Happened to TFM?

Stewie got into home computers early; his first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 with an AWA television set for a monitor. He was one of the first people I knew to own a PC (a single floppy-disc drive IBM clone) and, as soon as modems hit the market, he was among the first to get one of those too. With it he was able to dial in to the various computer bulletin boards that were starting to appear and ... well he could connect to another computer over the phone line, and this was bound to be useful eventually.

Besides computing, Stewie's other abiding interest in life was thrift. He had a keen eye for a bargain, especially any new science fiction novels that might turn up on his friends' bookshelves. But when his passion for computers collided with his passion for domestic and personal economy, strange things sometimes happened.

In the early nineteen-eighties, Stewie lifted a moistened finger into the air to test the winds of change and decided that it was about time that he learned to program in C. He was already a more or less incompetent programmer in Basic, thanks to his experience with the VIC-20 and the PCs he had owned since. To learn C, he needed a C compiler, a piece of software that was not available as either freeware or shareware. So he got together with a friend, and they split the cost of a commercially released compiler between them.

The arrangement was that Stewie would get the discs to install the compiler, editor and help files on his computer, then they would be handed over to his friend who would keep the installation discs and the manuals. For some reason, Stewie never reached the same proficiency in C programming that he had achieved in Basic. Over the years, I lost touch with Stewie and, not coincidentally I suspect, a lot of classic works of science fiction (like Charles Harness Paradox Men) that are very difficult to find, even second hand. The last I heard of him he'd developed an interest in economics, particularly economic modelling, no doubt because it gave him a ready outlet for his two abiding interests in life.

Although, back then, I was skeptical about Stewie's plan to learn C programming without the then customary assistance of a set of printed manuals, I realise now that he was merely 20 years ahead of his time. These days, thanks to the development of larger hard drives which make it feasible to store the instructions for using a program inside the grey box on your desk, rather than in a set of books which some bastard will always steal if you leave them lying on your desk at work, it's actually possible to do what Stewie wanted to do in the early 1980s. And thanks to the internet, if the help files on your hard drive turn out to be completely useless - the usual story when the world's least popular but most widely used operating system starts to behave like a six weeks old Buerre Bosc - you can get on the World Wide Web and find help on-line. Unless, of course, it's your Windows PPP client that's decided to chuck a wobbly. If that happens, you're on your own.

These days, the manual is dead. Its place has been taken by the inadequate help-files on your hard-drive and on-line resources like the Microsoft Knowledge Base or Annoyances.org. For those who still have an anachronistic preference for the printed page, there's the ever growing Computing section of your local bookshop, where all that reference material software companies used to provide in the same box as your set of grey 1.44 Mb installation discs can be bought as a "third party" publication. You might think that it's a bit of a stretch to call a company a "third party" publisher when it is a wholly owned subsidiary of a software distributor, it only publishes books about its parent company's software, the books are written by the same technical writers who wrote those help files that aren't helping you and they often reproduce the same unhelpful content. I do.

However irritating it is for us end users, this arrangement makes commercial sense. Microsoft's ubiquitous Office Suite includes a lot of features that most of us will never use, so why include a lot of manuals that we'll never read in the shrink-wrap package? Those of us who decide that it might be easier to create Word document templates and macros if we had a manual sitting beside the keyboard will eventually get off our arses and go down to McGill's and shell out eighty bucks or so for the Microsoft Press printed and bound copy of the help files. Assuming McGill's have it in stock, but if they don't they can usually order it in. It only takes a couple of days to be delivered and they'll phone you when it comes in.

It even makes a weird kind of technical sense; with Windows XP installed on my PC, I'm constantly getting friendly little messages at the bottom right hand side of the screen telling me that I can keep my system up-to-date with automatic updates. You can set it up so that it downloads and installs updates to the operating system on a regular schedule. I think you'd be a bloody fool to do that. I'm also wary of the other options, which notify you when automatic updates are installed. I don't like the idea much at all; it sounds convenient, but what you end up with is an operating system that is continually changing itself. Most of the changes, no doubt, are patches intended to keep the system performing to specification but in the process, the specification itself changes. This makes a printed manual for Windows XP pretty well useless.

Aside: I have tried the automatic updating feature; after the first use I promptly disabled it. The updates might have been installed successfully - certainly the process ran smoothly. But at no time was I told what the updates were or what they were for. I was given the option not to install them, but little information on which to base a decision. As I said, if you set your PC up to run automatic updates without supervision, you're a bloody fool. Especially when you consider Microsoft's outstanding track record on system security issues.

There are a few serious issue posed by the death of the manual, which go beyond the resentment you might feel at being mulcted of eighty dollars for a publication that used to come in the box with the program installation discs. The manual is a little like a contract between you and the software company. If the manual says that "keying Control+S" will save changes to a file, you have reasonable grounds for complaint if, instead, it deletes the entire contents of the file from your hard-drive. But when your manual exists only in digital form, you have no permanent record where you can check whether you are correct in expecting "Control+S" to save, rather than delete, your file. It's stuffed basically. These days, if anyone tells you to RTFM, it's reasonable to ask them "WFM?"

Treasures in Their Own Lunchtimes

I've had a little time to think over the National Trust's need to find 11 new living ornaments for our national mantelpiece. It's an obvious opportunity for bloggers to make nominations of their own, so without further ado, here's my list.

The world of journalism is an obvious place to start. Paddy McGuiness seems an obvious candidate; no doubt he would welcome the chance to be a Living National Treasure in the same spirit that he welcomed his Order of Australia. However, perhaps out of personal favouritism, I'd rather see the honour go to Janet Albrechtsen whose sardonic wit, keen analytical intelligence and creative research make every Wednesday's Oz something to look forward to. With her legal background she'll fit in quite nicely with Willian Deane, Justice Marcus Einfeld and Justice Michael Kirby.

Elsewhere in the media world, Alan Jones and John Laws have both shown themselves to be broadcasters and commentators whose opinions are highly treasured, especially by businesses such as Telstra and the NRMA. Choosing between the two is a little difficult, so we might as well give them each a spot, and toss in David Marr to keep things lively.

Actor George Lazenby is long overdue for recognition for his outstanding work in films. After achieving international prominence in the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, George continued to work in film and TV, particularly in Hong-Kong. Through his work in martial arts classics such as Tie jin gang da po zi yang guan (aka Man Called Stoner aka Hong Kong Hitman), Chi l'ha vista morire (aka Who Saw Her Die?) and Bruce Lee's Game of Death George forged valuable cultural ties with our neighbours to the North. Lazenby saw that the future was in Asia, for one Australian at least, long before Paul Keating became Prime Minister.

It seems inevitable that at least one of our eleven new Living National Treasures will be a serving or former politician. Among our Several distinguished candidates present themselves: former Minister for Communications Senator Richard Alston, Wilson Tuckey, Bill Heffernan, Senator Santoro, Bob Katter, Nick Bolkus, Mark Latham, Carmen Lawrence and, of course, Alan Cadman. My pick is former Minister for Defence Peter Reith, although I'm hard put to justify it except on the McGuiness principle.

The existing list features two academic historians; Professor Geoffrey Blainey and the pin-up boy of the black armband crowd, Professor Henry Reynolds. It seems only fair that the autodidactic Keith Windschuttle should be included; in the past twelve months he's done much to revive general interest in Australian history. As a National Treasure he's at least the equal of a Murwillumbah Rembrandt.

Finally, all four members of tribute band Bjorn Again. They're Australian, they sing Abba songs, [they make up the numbers] - what more needs to be said?

Update: after reading The Libertarian National Socialist Green Party by Roop Sandhu, at Troppo Armadillo, I'm tempted to bump Reithy in favour of Senator George Brandis, who seems to covet the Billy Wentworth mantle.

Good News for Philistines

Rob Schaap's excoriation of the state of the Yartz, and avante gardism, has brought quite a few of the blogosphere's philistines out of the closet. I don't think I entirely share Rob's view of the state of the Yartz, particularly music. There's nothing wrong with the music of Karl Heinz Stockhausen, for example, that a good melody line wouldn't fix.

John Quiggin has posted briefly, endorsing Rob's position. Through a comment at John's blog from Jack Strocchi, I found this Washington Times article in which Steve Sailer interviews Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve:

It ignited controversy by arguing that IQ scores are one of the most overlooked tools for understanding how American society is structured.

You'd never know from this coy remark that Steve is actually a bit of a Murray fan (just as Jack Strocchi appears to be a bit of a Steve Sailer fan); however visit his website and it becomes clear where Steve stands on the relation between IQ and social status and that Steve is an energetic populariser of the "Science of IQ". He has little time for anyone who argues that IQ is mostly a load of bollocks, as this snide obituary for Stephen Jay Gould shows:

Gould's most famous and influential book was The Mismeasure of Man, which exemplified his trademark combination of antiquarianism and guilt by association in the service of character assassination. In it, he attempted to destroy the modern science of IQ by recounting the stumblings of 19th-century researchers working before the IQ test was even invented. Of course, that line of attack makes as much sense as trying to discredit modern astronomy by writing a book revealing that ancient astronomers thought the sun went around the Earth.

By the last decade of his life, Gould's moment had passed. His theories on human nature had proven sterile. Neo-Darwinism had triumphed. The bright young women on campus were flocking to evolutionary psychology, a field that the old leftist found deeply suspicious. Although Gould's slanders had slowed the scientific study of intelligence by helping starve it of funding, it continued to advance.

Murray has a new book out, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. It sounds like the sort of book you might buy if someone gave you an Amazon gift certificate and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin was out of stock. Murray's book is an attempt to rank the top 4,000 artists and scientists in human history. Steve seems to be fairly keen on the idea of top people; as well as being a working journalist, he's:

the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.

I don't know whether Murray is a member of the Human Biodiversity Institute but it's clear that Steve considers him a top public intellectual, so his line of questioning in the interview is far from aggressive. This works in his favour; his fawning approach allows Murray space to explain his work, and his approach to identifying the world's greatest artists and scientists in a little detail:

Murray meticulously measured how much attention the leading scholars in their fields pay to the top creators and discoverers. Reading "Human Accomplishment" is a little like browsing through the statistics-laden "Baseball Encyclopedia," except that instead of being about Ruth, Di Maggio, and Bonds, Murray's book is about Picasso, Darwin, and Edison.

...

Q. Can you truly quantify objectively which artists and scientists were the most eminent?

A. Sure. It's one of the most well-developed quantitative measures in the social sciences. (The measurement of intelligence is one of its few competitors, incidentally.)

My indices have a statistical reliability that is phenomenal for the social sciences. There's also a very high "face validity" -- in other words, the rankings broadly correspond to common-sense expectations.

So there you go; thanks to Murray we now have an objective, statistically reliable catalogue of history's intellectual greats. Murray makes it clear at the outset that he didn't allow his own opinions to influence his analysis of the data:

Q. Who came out on top of big categories like Western Literature, Western Art, Western Philosophy, and Combined Sciences?

A. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, and Newton -- the people you'd expect.

In Western music, Mozart and Beethoven were in a dead heat, with Bach third. A rather vocal minority is upset about Bach not being on top. I'm not. I love Bach, but it's awfully hard to listen to Beethoven's later symphonies and string quartets and figure out how anybody could possibly be ranked above him.

However, let me stress: I'm not the one who made those decisions. And occasionally I had to grin and bear it when things didn't come out according to my druthers. Rousseau and Byron are way too high in Western literature for my taste, for example.

You have to admire Murray's intellectual integrity here; a lesser person might have been tempted to fudge the figures, on the basis that Rousseau and Byron receive a lot of attention from leading scholars because their work is great in being bad (like the poetry of William Topaz McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee).

For some reason, I'm skeptical of the idea that by surveying lit crit, music crit and other fields of scholarship you can arrive at an objective list of the world's brightest and best. It reminds me too much of past attempts to assign IQs to historical figures; a topic Gould covers The Mismeasurement of Man. But it's probably better to reserve judgement until I've at least had the chance to flick through the book in a public library or remainder bin somewhere.

Shock and Awe in Early Australian History

"A party, consisting of two captains, two subalterns, and forty privates, with a proper number of non-commissioned officers, from the garrison, with three days provisions, &c. are to be ready to march tomorrow at day-light, in order to bring in six of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay; of if that be should be found to be impracticable, to put that number to death."

Just previous to this order being issued the author of this publication received a direction to attend the governor [Governor Phillip] at head quarters immediately. I went and his excellency informed me that he had pitched on me to execute the foregoing command. He added, that the two subalterns who were to be drawn from the marine corps, should be chosen by myself: that the serjeant, and the two convicts who were with M'Entire, should attend as guides: that we were to proceed to peninsula at the head of Botany Bay; and thence, or from any part of the north arm of the bay, we were, if practicable, to bring away two natives as prisoners: and to put to death ten: that we were to destroy all weapons of war, but nothing else: that no hut was to be burned: that all women and children were to remain uninjured, not being comprehended within the scope of the order ... That we were to cut off, and bring in the heads of the slain, for which purpose hatchets and bags would be furnished.

December 1790, His Excellency was now pleased to enter into the reasons which had induced him to adopt measures of such severity. He said that since our arrival in the country, no less than seventeen of our people had either been killed or wounded by the natives: - that he looked upon the tribe known by the name of Bid-ee-'gal, living on the aforementioned peninsula, and chiefly on the North Arm of Botany Bay, to be the principal aggressors - that against this tribe he was determined to strike a decisive blow, in order at once to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an universal terror, which might operate to prevent further mischief.

... [he] said, if I could propose any alteration of the orders under which I was to act, he would patiently listen to me: encouraged by this condescension, I begged leave to offer for consideration, whether, instead of destroying ten persons, the capture of six would not better answer all the purposes for which the expedition was to be undertaken; as out of this number, a part might be set aside for retaliation; and the rest, at a proper time, liberated, after having seen the fate of their comrades, and being made sensible of the cause of their detention.

December, 1790. This scheme, his excellency was pleased instantly to adopt, adding, "if six cannot be taken, let this number be shot" ... [my emphasis]

Watkin Tench, Sydney's First Four Years cited in Frontier by Henry Reynolds (Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1996 p 33)

Update: Geoff Honnor's comment prompted me to haul my bum to the Library, to check out Tench's account for myself. The passage in bold is quoted by Reynolds, in Frontier. Reading Tench's account settled those niggling doubts I was starting to have about whether Reynolds represented this incident fairly. He did.

Update Too: Wendy James (also from Troppo Armadillo) has also commented with a link to this discussion of Phillip's "scandalous orders".

Coming Soon ...

(To a Movie Theatre Near You)

Alien Versus Predator Versus Freddie Versus Jason Versus The Terminator Versus Charlie's Angels Versus Uma Thurman in a Yellow Tracksuit Versus Rambo Versus The Last Action Hero Versus Kickboxer Versus American Ninja Versus The Cook From Under Seige Versus Batman and Robin Versus The Pink Panther Versus Kramer Versus Kramer Versus Godzilla Versus King Kong Versus Highlander Versus The Evil Dead Versus Hellraiser Versus Pollyanna Versus Bladerunner Versus Abbott and Costello Versus Frankenstein Versus The Wolf Man Versus Joe Versus The Volcano Versus Wutang Versus The Ninja Versus The Karate Kid Versus Earth Versus The Flying Saucers Versus People Versus Larry Flynt Versus Gladiator Versus Spartacus Versus Billy The Kid Versus Dracula Versus Marco Polo Junior Versus the Red Dragon Versus The Lion King Versus Pocahontas Versus Shirley Thompson Versus The Aliens Versus Mary Poppins.

I'm looking forward to it. Once it's out of the way, they mighty start producing films again, instead of sequels, remakes and "hommage" riddled pastiches.

Living National Treasures. Or Heirlooms. Or Something.

Geoff Honnor at Troppo Armadillo has noted that:

The National Trust is running low on Australian Living Treasures and would like public assistance in replacing the 11 Treasures who have gone to Immortality since the program was initiated in 1997.

The idea of nominating people as Living National Treasures is a typically great Aussie idea; copied from overseas, adapted for local conditions and stuffed up in the process. The Japanese have been selecting Living National Treasures since (at least) 1955. Several Japanese potters have been awarded the honour (a lot of those listed at the linked page are, sadly, ex-Living National Treasures like the 11 Australians the National Trust proposes to replace), also papermakers and workers in several other crafts.

I was naturally curious to see which Australian artisans, working in traditional arts and crafts had been selected by the National Trust as our Living National Treasures. I was expecting one or two bark painters, those two blokes I saw on the television two decades ago who restored a slab-sided mountain hut using traditional methods or possibly a country baker renowned for his traditional meat pies, pasties, snag-rolls and lamingtons. But, of course, it's nothing like that and it makes you wonder what qualifications are required to be honoured as an Australian Living National Treasure.

Obviously outstanding achievement in the yartz no doubt accounts for the prescence of John Bell, Arthur Boyd (due for replacement), Don Burrows, Ruth Cracknell (due for replacement), Judy Davis, Ernie Dingo, Slim Dusty (due for replacement), John Farnham, Peter Garrett, Rolf Harris, Barry Humphries, Elizabeth Jolley, Thomas Keneally, Michael Leunig, David Malouf, Dr Colleen McCullough, Gary McDonald, Graeme Murphy, Les Murray, Prof Peter Sculthorpe, Dame Joan Sutherland, Anthony Warlow, Morris West, David Williamson, Time Winton and Roger Woodward. And it's not too hard to fathom the reasons for including Sir Donald Bradman (due for replacement), Raelene Boyle, Bart Cummings, Betty Cuthbert, Herb Elliot, Dawn Fraser, Cathy Freeman, Shane Gould, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Greg Norman, Kieran Perkins, Ken Rosewall and Gai Waterhouse.

A lot of the rest are a mystery, especially Senator Bob Brown, The Hon Don Dunstan (due for replacement), The Hon John Howard, The Hon Barry Jones, The Hon Paul Keating, Cheryl Kernot, The Hon Tom Uren and The Hon Gough Whitlam. That's a substantial job lot of politicians tossed in with our 100 Living National Treasures; obviously they had the numbers to make up the numbers.

Still, there's one name in the list I won't argue with; Margaret Fulton. She knows a thing or two about lamingtons.

Vale

CSL, the smelliest cat in Brunswick, died quietly in her sleep this afternoon a little short of 15 years old. Her spirit lingers on, somewhere, but a thorough mopping with Dettol will take care of that.

Parapraxis Watch

These archives are the richest source of documentation of settler attitudes towards indigenous people available in any Australian colony. Indeed, they constitute one of the best collections in the British Empire.

Keith Windschuttle, in that Quadrant Article, evidently having a little trouble with the literary present.

Bloggiversary

It's one year to the day since I started this blog. This is customarily a time to look back on what you've learnt since you started blogging and write a few tickets on yourself. Right now, I can't be bothered. It's not as if anyone needs reminding of exactly how brilliant I am, so writing a long, smug, self-congratulatory post about it would be a complete waste of time.

Update: thanks to everyone who's posted an encouraging (or at least non-disparaging) comment.

Bloody Arty-Farty Nonsense

With only 18 seats, the Liberal Party can hardly be said to have the numbers in Victoria's Legislative Assembly, however it's good to see that the Liberals' defeat in the last State election has left it with much of its Parliamentary talent and political acumen intact.

Opposition arts spokesman Andrew Olexander has shown the way forward for the Liberal Party on the arts front, with his call for the government to take responsibility for the program of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The Age reports that Mr Olexander was not impressed by the Belgian theatre production I Am Blood, which features a lot of genuine nakedness and copious quantities of fake blood. Mr Olexander found the show demeaning to women. According to The Age:

The show, created by Jan Fabre, is based on the premise that modern society has not progressed since the Middle Ages when it comes to torture and the acceptance of women's menstruation.

This sounds a little grisly (and definitely like the sort of show where you might expect to find content which, however inadvertently, is demeaning to women) but reading on, it sounds like a fine excuse for a group of Belgian actors to get their kit off and have fun in public:

The climax was a naked bacchanal in which all dancers were drenched with fluid from wine bottles before skidding and sliding across the stage.

I'm not sure if Arts Minister Mary Delahunty has seen the show, but she definitely wasn't impressed by Mr Olexander's call for the government to take more of a hand in planning future Arts Festivals:

"This is not North Korea," she said. "Melbourne is a sophisticated and tolerant community and such interference would pose a threat both to the artists and their audiences."

She warned it would result in an artistic program designed to suit the personal preferences and the political leanings of a particular minister.

So it looks like we may have to wait for the re-election of a Liberal Government before Melbourne is the sort of city where the Government takes a more positive role in the Arts and provides a firm guiding hand to keep the Arts community in line with general community standards. As it did back in the days when the only dirty books in Melbourne were read by Arthur Rylah.

Grumble

One of the things I've learnt over the past 364 days of blogging is that there are a lot of web-sites out there that do a good job of presenting the sort of information you need to make sense of the society you live in and the world around you. Then there are sites like The Australian Bureau of Statistics Website which just piss you off completely.

In their paper Australian Multiculturalism: Its Rise and Demise, Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts assert that:

... in Australia, however, because migrants are for the most part geographically dispersed; they educate their children in English along with other Australian school children; and those children have a high propensity to marry out of their parents’ ethnic group. Australia does not have distinct cultural groups that endure in any significant way. Boxing up the cultural differences that first generation migrants bring and the declining remnants that endure to the second and third generations makes little conceptual sense.

It occurred to me that one way to check whether migrants are geographically dispersed would be to have a look at the 2001 Census data. Some of it is available for free here. And the data has been sort of mapped. That last link won't work in Netscape by the way; to view the page you need Adobe's SGV viewer which is only available for Internet Explorer.

So, having downloaded Adobe's SGV viewer, and started up Internet Explorer I got into the maps and started looking for data. Drill down a few levels, say to the Whittlesea South statistical division, and you can get into a "Community Snapshot" where, finally I learnt (by clicking on the Ancestry link) that in this statistical division:

In the 2001 Census, the three most common ancestries identified with were:

Italian: 18629 people (18.5%)
Australian: 18354 people (18.2%) and;
English: 13652 people (13.5%).

As a quick comparison, in Whittlesea North:

In the 2001 Census, the three most common ancestries identified with were:

Australian: 5028 people (38.6%)
English: 4024 people (30.9%) and;
Italian: 1578 people (12.1%).

I can't provide links to either of those maps by the way; the Adobe SGV viewer doesn't support normal browser navigation. To add to my current frustration, Internet Explorer just decided (despite all evidence to the contrary) that I'm not currently on-line. So I'm unable to provide any more examples right now.

That isn't what I want to do anyway. What I'd like to be able to do, without shelling out a shitload of readies that I don't have, is quickly get hold of the data you'd need to map the distribution of ethnic communities across metropolitan Melbourne. This would go a long way towards testing whether migrants are, in fact, geographically dispersed and their descendants more so. Walk down Sydney Road in Brunswick or Victoria Street in Richmond and you get the distinct impression that, while Australia might not have any migrant ghettos or enclaves, there are few places where they're a little more congregated than dispersed. If the ABS provided useable access to all that data they collected on us three years ago, I might be able to put that superficial perception to the test.

Spot the Petard

Between transcribing The Annotated Henry Reynolds and making a complete ass of myself at trivia quizzes (but that may just be the hangover talking), I haven't had much time to do much on the Gilligan and Roberts paper Australian Multiculturalism: Its Rise and Demise (link via Troppo Armadillo).

The paper is obviously part of a larger work, as indicated here:

Throughout this book we argue ... that Australian citizenship entails being a member of a particular political community that has a primary unanimity supported by a distinctive political culture. Being Australian involves sharing in both, albeit in limited ways by first generation migrants who retain strong identification with their original cultures and traditions. In the rest of this chapter we show how the policy of multiculturalism was extended beyond policies of humane settlement and modified integration to become a full-blown prescriptive account of Australian society that distorted the understanding of citizenship.

It's also very polemical in tone, which is why I was pleased to find the following paragraph. Can you spot the petard?

Multiculturalism was part descriptive and part prescriptive: it purported both to describe an actual state of affairs and to impose a preferred vision of what ought to be the case. That Australia should be a multicultural nation made up of distinct cultural groups, all of which are of equal value and should be equally valued, is a normative proposition. That Australia is this sort of nation is a factual proposition. Mixing up the normative and the factual is typical of ideologies, and invariably produces a confusing picture in which preferred normative vision colours factual appreciation.

By Request (Classic Links)

The Pygmy Shrew.

Just Not Cricket.

The Annotated Henry Reynolds (Part 2)

More from the Coburg Library copy of the Penguin edition of the The Other Side of the Frontier with annotations by anon.

Why was this idea so pervasive? To begin with it is important to stress that far from being an example of childlike fancy or primitive irrationalitythis view of the European was a logical belief premised on important and widley shared beliefs.

does not want this to appear stupid (which they are not) but says this so our opinion is not left up to us

Chapter 2, "Continuity and Change", p 31

... A contemporary scholar has written that:

Owing to the Australian kinship system everybody is - or can be - related to everybody else ... The unknown regions outside the familiar lands do not belong to the 'world' - just as unfriendly or mysterious foreigners do not belong to the community of men, for they may be ghosts, demonic beings or monsters.

does not trust us the reader to reach the same conclusions

Chapter 2, "Continuity and Change", p 31

... The anthropologists Elkin, Berndt and Reay discovered the amazing vitality of the Aboriginal view of the world while working with fringe and mission-dwelling blacks in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1930s and 1940s one hundred years after the initial dispossession.

why "amazing"? He really wants us to home into the poin [sic] that we didn't understand them at all.

Chapter 2, "Continuity and Change", p 58

It seems probable that there were many stories like these ones. They were obviously important because they allowed the seemingly powerless and abject blacks to go on believing in the potency of their culture and in the ability of the 'men of high degree' to harm and humbel even the domineering white boss. Magic then was a crucial factor in the psychological resistance to the Europeans.

how do you know this for sure? I think that overall it would have "failed"

Chapter 3, "Resistance: Motives and Objectives", p 94

Once restored to European society Morrell appears to have made little attempt to shield his companions of seventeen years from the onslaught of the frontier settlers. Their attempt at negotiation was swept aside as being unworthy of consideration.

strong value judgement by Reynolds ... his opinion of what should have been ... tone is more than clear

Chapter 4, "Resistance: Tactics and Traditions", p 117

Between 1878 and 1880 the part-Aborigine* Johnny Campbell defied the police in a wide area of south-east Queensland during which time he was the 'sable terror of the whole Wide Bay District'.

* - use of offensive language

Chapter 4, "Resistance: Tactics and Traditions", p 119

... Discipline was maintained by the older men who managed both the pace at which the young were initiated and the bestowal of women and girls as they became available for marriage. While the fully initiated men controlled the only possible, or conceivable, passes on to the plateau of full adulthood their authority over the young remained unshaken. The Europeans, often unwittingly, challenged that dominance ...

was it really just the men who did this? Maybe the people just talked to the men expecting this to be the case & ignored the authority of women.

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 130

Where the old men continued to exert their authority they were able to use their control over the bestowal of women to discipline the young men. F. J. Gillen reported the case of a young central Australian man who ... had missed out on initiation and the related operations of circumcision and subincision ... Gillen explained the circumstances:

One day he came to me and said 'I think I will go and get cut' ... and I said 'look here Jim, you are a fool to submit to that'. He said in reply 'Well I can't put up with the cheek of the women and children. They will not let me have a lubra and the old men will not let me know anything about my countrymen.'

it sounds like in this tribe clan at least, that the decision of marriage was not exclusive to the old men.

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 133

Clearly the European invasion put great pressure on indigenous political organization and undermined traditional authority. But did the new patterns of leadership emerge as a response to the white challenge? It is by any reckoning a complex question and will take some time to answer. The problem is compounded because Europeans who provided most of the evidence often believed that either Aboriginal society had a system of chiefs or should acquire one ...

So too they could have ignored the authority of women.

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 135

The idea that rogue Europeans were responsible for tribal resistance served two functions - like any conspiracy theory it could be used to explain away black hostility while at the same time confirming white belief in Aboriginal incompetence.

Reynolds does not entertain the possibility at all perhaps because of the unfavourable connotations.

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 136

... The West Australian pioneer G. F. Moore was handing out Government rations to a group of blacks at York when one man came forward saying 'Give it to me, I, Darrama am the Governor among the Yoongar, as your Governor is among the white men'.

B so women's authority could have been undermined as it was in white society

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 138

The case of the Tasmanian woman Walyer is even more interesting although the evidence is fragmentary ... She spoke English, could use guns and had presumably adopted other aspects of European culture ... She was ... 'at the head of an Aboriginal banditti' and was known to issue her orders 'in a most determined manner'.

if men were so dominant in traditional society how then could she have been so influential?

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 139

It was difficult to persuade Aborigines to accept the inequalities of white society ... They do not 'understand exalted rank' wrote a Victorian clergyman, 'and in fact, it is difficult to get into a blackfellow's head that one man is higher than another'.

if men were in some cases superior to women how could this come about?

Chapter 5, "The Politics of Contact", p 151

Things to Think About

Ken Parish has posted a couple of interesting musings on Multiculturalism and the personal and familial impact of historical events at Troppo Armadillo. There's inspiration for some interesting blogging in both; give me a couple of days to think about it and I might be able to come up with something.

The Annotated Henry Reynolds (Part 1)

I borrowed the The Other Side of the Frontier from the Coburg Library on Sunday. It's an interesting book. Reynolds is a very lucid and accessible writer but, just in case I miss any of the subtleties someone has been through it and provided helpful annotations on some of the more difficult passages, starting with the Foreword by C D Rowley (p vii - this reference and all page references which follow are to the Coburg Library copy of the Penguin edition):

Henry Reynolds has been a pioneer in Aboriginal oral history in Northern Queensland ...

Yes he has, he was unafraid to point out the racism & misconceptions that existed at the same time (e.g. Blainey)

As you can see, the anonymous annotator has a great deal of insight into Reynolds' work and its place in the complete corpus of Australian historical writing. It seems a shame that these insightful comments should only be available to patrons of one municipal library, so I propose to reproduce them for a slightly wider readership here.

... Yet the book was not conceived, researched or written in a mood of detached scholarship. It is inescapably political, dealing as it must with issues that have aroused deep passions since 1788 and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. Many people may find it an uncomfortable book. It will challenge myths and prejudices embraced by both white and black communities and in so doing may please neither. I sought to put down as clearly as I could my vision of how the Aborigines reacted to the invading Europeans and to include as much detail as possible without needlessly clogging the flow of the text ...

It would also hold his own subjectivites [sic]

Introduction, p 1

... The fortitude and courage of Aboriginal clans which experienced the massive impact of European invasion demand our attention and respect. They may eventually earn as much, perhaps even more admiration from future generations of Australians as white explorers, pioneers and other traditional heroes of national mythology.

evidence of promoting his own ideologies

Introduction, p 2-3 (annotation p 3)

A good book but the experience of white women with Ab [sic] people is largely ignored, except when they're being tricked. Women did also exist on frontiers.

Annotator's introduction to Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 5

This is one of a number of traditional Aboriginal stories recorded in North Queensland a few years ago. It probably dates from the 1860s or 1870s but it has not been possible to relate it to a known historical event and the detail may have been significantly altered during a hundred years of currency ...

does value oral tradition but does not recognise the difficulties with it's [sic] reliability.

Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 5

For coastal tribes the sudden and unexpected appearance of Europeans was often an awesome event but away from the sea white men did not arrive unannounced. News of them travelled inland well in advance of the encroaching wave of settlement ...

importance in proving Ab people weren't static*

* - shattering misconceptions

Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 6 (annotation p 7)

But perhaps the most notable feature of such meetings [between blacks and whites] was less the terror induced than the courage displayed by people placed in situations of extraordinary tension. This was surely the hidden, perhaps the larger part, of the heroism of Australian exploration ...

Isn't this just the strength of humanity? Not Aborigines? I'd have thought this courage to be expected.

Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 21 (annotation top margin)

by pointing it out were we meant to have assumed otherwise? I think this reaction to be as normal as fear.

Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 21 (continuation of annotation down right margin)

But while the courage of the men who went forward to meet the Europeans was clear it was probably surpassed by that of the young women who were frequently dispatched by their male relatives to appease the sexual appetite of the strange and threatening white men.

why not say more about the women - men had more (a quote) on them?

Chapter 1 "Explorers and Before", p 21

There's many more equally cogent comments to get through, so this could go on for a little while yet.

History Wars? No, Thanks.

Ken Parish has invited comment on a recent Quadrant article, posted at Keith Windschuttle's blog "The Sydney Line". Like Ken, I've no real wish to revisit this topic at this stage. Perhaps the best thing to do is to recognise that the whole WIndschuttling debate won't be resolved here in Australia and get some overseas experts to fix up our history for us.

Reading Matters

Good writing can be inspiring, edifying, educational, uplifiting and generally good for you in all sorts of ways. It can also put a serious dent in your motivation to blog (this may be good for others). So I'd suggest you pass up Gunter Grass' My Century and Too Far Afield in favour of the latest Tom Clancy or John Grisham. If you insist on ignoring this advice, My Century is the safer of the two to read; it's only a couple of hundred pages so you can easily get through it in a couple of days but it will take at least a week to get over feeling that there's really not a lot of point when there are so many writers out there who are so much better at it.

Snob of the Week (with Bonus)

While I was poring over The Weekend Oz to find out the true state of the world and the nation, two excellent examples of intellectual snobbery caught my eye. First, here's Pearson, C arguing that while the Liberal Party has resumed its traditional status as the natural party of government, the Labor Party has reverted to its traditional role as the natural party of something else:

It ought to have been obvious to the dimmest in caucus that this [a standing ovation for President George the Second] is a salute to the office, not the man. It ought to have been equally obvious, having recently turned Labor's collective attitude towards the alliance into a problem for the Government to exploit all the way to the next election, that it is a symbolic, fence-mending gesture. The only constituents likely to get sanctimonious about it have no one else to vote for and are too few in number and possibly too stupid to worry about.

This is easily surpassed by Phillip Adams in his article in the Weekend Australian Magazine, which concludes with a magnificent dummy spit:

... We're dealing with a public that doesn't want to know. A public that chooses to ignore the truth about Tampa, the refugees, SIEV-X, the detention centres, the war in Iraq. A public that proffers the blind eye and deaf ear, preferring to live in the amoral world of blissful, wilful ignorance. Instead of being enraged by the lies of our leaders and the gutlessness of the Opposition, we excuse our failure as citizens by saying, "We're not to blame; they've made us cynical." Sorry that's not good enough. The public has to lift its game.

So there you go. Two old favourites in one; a Snob of the Week and a Dummy Spit of the Week. You can't get better value than that. Onya Phil.

What's True This Week?

Despite my own good intentions and the encouragement of others< I haven't found much to write about over the past couple of weeks. The Christian Science Monitor's Are you a Neo-Conservative test looked promising for at least long enough to write an opening sentence, especially if you combined it with the recent short-lived revival of the fad for on-line IQ testing.

In both instances the inspiration proved to be illusory. As far as the CS Monitor quiz is concerned, suffice it to say that I came out as a "Liberal". The most curious thing about the test is the number of Oz bloggers who take pride in being rated by it as "realists"; I'm not sure that a position that might be considered realist for a US citizen (surely the intended readership of the quiz) ought to be considered a realist position elsewhere.

To illustrate with an example from ordinary life, I have often thought it realistic, particularly when inebriated, to assume that the world is full of dangerous people and that the best policy to ensure personal self-preservation is to get them before they get you. Whether anyone else would consider this a realistic assumption is open to question, and they may well wish me to behave in a more moderate manner, especially in the matter of alcohol consumption. They might consider it more realistic to regard me as an aggro drunk, and someone best to be avoided. Unfortunately this is not as viable an option in global politics as it is in personal life.

As far as IQ testing goes, the first time I ever bothered to find out my IQ was back in the 1980s. One inebriated night I found a copy of that HJ Eyesenck Know Your Own IQ book. Although I was smashed out of my brains I managed a fairly respectable 130. Combining that result with the one I obtained on this test indicates that half a cask of Penfolds red produces a 17% improvement in IQ, while the result from this one indicates that it produces a 3% reduction in IQ (hopefully temporary) while according to this one the temporary IQ loss from excessive consumption of cask wine is 21%.

There's probably a test out there on the web where you can get yourself an IQ of 200, if not higher. Certainly there are plenty you can practice on and build up a score which will scrape you into Mensa. Here's a practice question to get you started:

Logically, "If Bill is up himself and Bill is a member of Mensa then all members of Mensa are up themselves" is:

* True; what else would you expect?
* False but logic isn't everything.
* Neither but it makes you think, doesn't it?

Now that the gratuitous realism and IQ jokes are out of the way, it's time to turn to the main purpose of this post, which is to catch up on the state of the world as it has developed over the past couple of weeks. To do this I bought the rainforest editions of both The Oz and The Age on Saturday. It's well known that whatever is reported in The Oz is reliably true (with the definite exception of anything written by Phillip Adams), while The Age as a Fairfax paper, only relates the half-truths and fabrications beloved by the out-of-touch latte left. Keeping these principles in mind it should be possible to build up an accurate picture of the state of the world as it was at the time the Saturday editions of The Oz and The Age went to press.

Some of the fabrications in Saturday's Age, while obvious, are a little puzzling. I'm at a loss to explain how the political agenda of the left is advanced by promoting the fiction that East Anglia is a predominantly flat area of England.

This assertion is made in an article in the Travel section of the paper. That it is a fabrication is obvious from the photographs which accompany the article which, tellingly, do not include any land features at all. Instead, they concentrate on man-made structures: Ely Cathedral, a "Fruit and Veg" shop which is alleged to be in Ely but could be in Southend for all we know and Cromer Pier. Not one photograph shows the Fens and marshes that feature prominently in the article's description of the East Anglian landscape, so I think it's safe to conclude that in reality East Anglia more closely resembles the Scottish Highlands or Cumbria in its land-forms and to take the assertion that it is a flat area of fens and marshland as an extreme and slightly misplaced enthusiasm for leftist levelling.

THe motivation for John Pilger's piece on Afghanistan two years after the war is much easier to penetrate. Typically, Pilger depicts Afghanistan not as a country flourishing after its liberation from the repressive Taliban regime, but a country in ruins where the people (particularly women) are prey for the US-sponsored warlords who have replaced the Taliban as the the scourge of ordinary Afghanis. It's a typical Pilger puff piece, complete with ilustrative photography as selective as that which accompanies the East Anglia travel piece and plenty of self-damning quotes from US officials past and present. Obviously Afghanistan now has a thriving democracy and free market economy, hence Pilger's consistently negative account of the current state of the country.

I'm not sure what to make of the upcoming visits of US President George Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao. Tony Parkinson's extended article in The Age suggests that this a historic visit and something of a political and diplomatic coup for the Howard government. The Oz' editorial says much the same thing which creates a bit of a quandary; it isn't possible for The Age to be completely wrong, in its typically off with the Fairfaxes fashion if it's saying the same thing as the editorialist at The Oz. This dilemma is easily resolved if we assume that The Oz editorial was written by Phillip Adams or Emma Tom, but the writing style argues against it. On this issue, the available facts are as inconclusive as the evidence (cited above) that all Mensa members are up themselves.

Lead Balloon

Two days ago the Remuneration Tribunal floated a proposal for Federal MPS who lose their seats to receive a $15,760 redundancy payout to assist them to "resettle" in the real world (there's either one too many or one too few sets of scare quotes in that sentence). Today the proposal is dead in the water.

One possible loser from the Government's decision not to go ahead with this proposal is the current Member for Wentworth, Peter King. Mr King would have qualified for a payout of $7,880 (47,585.69 El Salvador Colones) if he gets rolled by loses his Liberal Party pre-selection to Malcolm Turnbull. As it is, he may have to settle for taking an unfair dismissal action against the Liberal Party.

Forex Update

The Australian dollar today continued its downward slide against the Dong, now trading at 10,648.52 Dongs to the Dollar. It held its own against the Angolan Kwanza, trading at 54.4666 to the dollar and rose to 4.80087 Lesotho Maloti.

Signage of the Times

I caught a tram into the city today; it was done up with a large advertisement down both sides, the kind that runs up onto the windows, on perforated sheets of plastic. I didn't pay the advertisement any attention till I got off; on a completely white background, in bold-face Helvetica, it said, "You'd notice if we weren't there."

How true. For a start I'd be able to see out the tram windows.

Later, in Swanston Street, I saw a shop that sold freshly squeezed fruit juice; the hoarding touted for business with the words "Fat Free Love Life". I hope they're still around in twenty years or so, when I expect to be looking for some consolation for a fat free old age.

Forex Update

The Australian Dollar has slipped slightly against the Vietnamese Dong, now trading at 10,785.49 Dongs to the dollar. It's worth 26.8380 Hiatian Gourdes and 4.77952 Lesothan Maloti.

Well, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time

An embarassing number of weeks ago, and a little over-enthusiastically, I called for bloggers to nominate their Top Ten Bungles of Australian History. Rob Schaap came up with an impressive list in seven categories, which shows how silly the idea probably was. Australia appears to have a lot fewer influential people to choose from than it has bunglers, so I am not surprised if people found it too daunting to sift through our two and a bit centuries of official history for ten truly great stuff-ups. The whole thing has been getting me down too, which is why it's taken longer than the week I originally planned for it.

So here's my final list of ten real corkers, which cannot really claim to be definitive.

1. The Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre

First by popular acclaim, is the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre. Prime Minister Harold Holt was lost at sea in late 1967 while snorkelling at Cheviot beach. A popular conspiracy theory of the time held that he was, in fact, a Chinese spy and had been whisked away aboard a miniature submarine. The general consensus is that he drowned and, given his love of swimming, the construction of a swimming pool in his honour seemed only fitting.

Incidentally, Holt's disappearance wasn't the only maritime disaster to affect his Government in 1967; 1967 also saw the second Voyager Royal Commission which re-opened the scandal of the collision between HMAS Voyager and HMAS Melbourne in 1963.

2. The Fine Cotton Ring In

On Saturday August 18, 1984, thousands of mug punters Australia wide did their dough on Bold Personality, racing at Brisbane's Eagle Farm as Fine Cotton. Both horses were geldings; however Fine Cotton was brown with white socks on its rear legs while Bold Personality was a bay with no socks to its name. John Gillespie, organiser of the ring-in attempted to correct the colour discrepancy with large quantities of Clairol, but to no effect. Before the race, when the time came to put the finishing touches to Bold Personality's colour and highlights, he discovered that he had forgotten the peroxide and resorted to spraying the socks on with white paint. When that didn't work, the horse's hind legs were bandaged to conceal the mess.

By the time of the race there probably wasn't a punter on the course who didn't know that "Fine Cotton" was a ring-in. To this day it isn't known why Andy Tindall, Chairman of Stewards allowed the horse to run. It was disqualified immediately after winning the race and all of the smart money that had been laid on Fine Cotton went to the bookies. Including all the money laid by the horse's "connections".

3. John Kerr

Is there anyone who disagrees with including Gough Whitlam's appointment of Kerr as Governor-General in this list? Tough luck if you do; I think the reasons for its inclusion ought to be pretty obvious.

4. The Introduction of the Queensland Cane Toad

In the 1930s, Queensland's sugar industry was plagued by two species of beetle; French's Cane Beetle and the Greyback Cane Beetle. Thanks perhaps to the success of the cactoblastis moth in dealing with widespread infestations of the prickly pear cactus, the industry looked to biological control to provide a solution and in July 1935 the Australian Bureau of Sugar Experimental Stations released around 3000 toads (species Bufo marinus were released into the canefields. At last those damn beetles were going to get theirs.

It didn't work out that way; the Cane Toad was a complete failure when it came to dealing with the beetle problem. The Cane Toad's main contribution to Australia's ecology has been to poison a lot of native predators (such as the goannas, freshwater crocodiles, various snakes, dingoes and western quolls) who were unlucky enough to mistake it for a much more comestible native frog.

5. The Australian Constitution

Constitutional lawyers and Secretaries of the Senate often talk a lot of guff when it comes to the intentions of our "founding fathers", the men who gave us the Australian Constitution. What the founding fathers most wanted to do was to broker an acceptable compromise which would persuade the governments and electors of six fractious colonies to agree to the creation of a single nation governing the whole continent of Australia (the phrase "one nation" has to be avoided in this context, for obvious reasons).

Given the years of vigorous argument that accompanied the drafting of the Constitution it's perhaps understandable that our founding fathers wearied a little as they got further down the agenda. I've been on committees, I know how they work. By the time everyone's finished nitpicking the secretary and treasurer's reports, half the allotted meeting time is gone and, to make matters worse, the mob who were caucusing before the meeting in the front bar of the John Curtin are all desperate for a piss and such debate as there is, is governed mainly by their desire to get to the urinal sooner, rather than later.

The "leak factor" appears to have played a large part in the framing of the Australian Constitution. It goes a long way to explaining the wording of Section 61 which vests all executive power in the Queen (section 61) to be exercised by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative; Section 62 which provides for a Federal Executive Council which "shall hold office during [the Governor-General's] pleasure"; Section 72 which gives the Governor-General the power to appoint High Court Judges and so on. As far as the black letter law is concerned, Australia is still a monarchy and, when push comes to shove, the Constitution provides (rather paradoxically) that it doesn't have to be a constitutional one.

6. The Leichhardt Expedition - 1848

No listing of the greatest stuff-ups of Australian history would be complete if it did not mention at least one of our doughty explorers, who set out to chart the Australian wilderness to discover its natural riches and open it to European settlement, only to die after they ran out of bully beef and canteen water. The tales of these brave souls are generally counted among Australia's tragedies, which is fair enough; anyone who has read any of the great tragedies of Shakespeare or the ancient Greeks is well aware that while tragedy is a complex thing, it is at least 9 parts pure stupidity. Without it, there would be no opportunity for the tragic hero, and his adherents, to demonstrate the nobility of character and courage in adversity which mark them out from the common ruck.

Ludwig Leichhardt's 1848 attempt to cross Australia from Darling Downs the the Swan River had all the makings of just such a great saga of exploration. Leichhardt's bushcraft was superbly demonstrated on a previous expedition from the Darling Downs to Port Essington near Darwin. This took 15 months, much of which the party spent wandering around lost. Leichhardt had organising and provisioning skills to match his knowledge of the bush.

So, in 1848, seven men and 300 animals left the Condamine River heading west and quite simply vanished. No traces of the party have ever been identified so there is no public record of the manly stoicism they undoubtedly showed in the face of the hardships which preceded their untimely ends. It wasn't until the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860 to 1861 that Australia produced its first adequately documented instance of heroically failed exploration.

7. The Leyland P76

In the mid 1970s, Leyland Australia set out to create its first totally Australian car - designed and built in Australia, for Australian conditions. It's difficult to believe that the P76 came from the same company that manufactured the original Mini Minor.

8. The Queensland Gerrymander

Originally created to favour the electoral dominance of the ALP in Queensland state politics, the Queensland gerrymander became a liability for Labor after the Labor Party split of 1954. It was maintained by the Country Party (later the National Party) which, with the help of the same gerrymander, governed Queensland from 1957 to 1989.


9. The Last Ball of the Last Over of the Third Final of the 1980/81 Benson & Hedges World Series Cup (February 1, 1981)

It was a very sorry day for cricket, and an even sorrier one for lawn bowls.

10. The Boer War

Incited by reports of abominations perpetrated by the Boers on British subjects, Australians were eager to join the defence of the British Empire in South Africa in 1899. After 1900 enthusiasm for the war waned, and opposition to it grew, thanks to reports of British abominations perpetrated on Boer women and children in Kitchener's concentration camps. The Boer War did, of course, give Australia one of its great folk-heroes, Breaker Morant, who like many of our folk-heroes was a bit of a turd.

Exchange Rates

According to xe.com, the Australian dollar is currently trading at 54 Angolan Kwanzas, 3,385 Azerbaijani Manats and 10,786 Vietnamese Dongs.

Etymology Wars Redux

Following the example of historian Gregory Melleuish, Janet Albrechtsen goes the nitpick in an otherwise sensible article in today's Oz:

Twice, Sane Australia wrote to inform me that I used the word "schizophrenic" inappropriately to mean dual nature. This perpetuates the myth of split personality, they said, which has nothing whatsoever to do with schizophrenia. The only problem is the Concise Oxford Dictionary says that "schizophrenic" derives from the Greek skhizt, to split, and phren, the word for mind.

She then goes on to defend her own use of the word schizophrenic (in describing the union movement):

Sane Australia's letter pointed me to Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness: A Resource for Media Professionals, to guide me in my errant way with words. The problem is I was not writing about suicide or mental illness. I wrote about the union movement and used the word "schizophrenic" in its well-understood colloquial sense.

The logic here seems to me a little unhinged; if Janet was using the word in its "well-understood colloquial sense", the etymology, interesting as it might be, is hardly relevant. That "well understood colloquial sense" incidentally is a good example of a "popularised technical term"; HN Fowler covered the subject in Modern English Usage years before anyone invented "political correctness".

US Scrapbook

Walker draws an invidious comparison between our bill and Hubert Humphrey's affirmative action legislation, which he swore would not lead to racial preferences but did. This analogy is inapt. There is absolutely nothing in the Academic Bill of Rights about affirmative action for conservatives or any other group or set of ideas.

David Horowitz in response to Jesse Walker at Reason On Line

One group of students at UNC-Chapel Hill has already made great progress by tackling their administration head-on in their quest to achieve academic diversity and the inclusion of conservative ideas on their campus. The students, led by senior Michael McKnight, and organized under the sponsorship of the Committee for a Better California attracted national attention this summer when they launched a protest in response to UNC’s assignment of Barbara Ehrenreich’s left-wing screed, Nickel and Dimed, as mandatory reading for the incoming freshman class. But their demands did not stop at less biased reading assignments.

In a meeting with school Chancellor James Moeser, the students demanded that the chancellor address the lack of conservative viewpoints presented on their campus. Specifically, they asked that the university devote more money to bringing in speakers representing a wider range of political viewpoints and that they make an effort to recruit more conservative faculty members, who are an underrepresented minority at the school. [my emphasis]

Sara Russo, National Campus Director, Students for Academic Freedom at Front Page

Industrial Disease

The big industrial relations news in Victoria this morning seems to be the closure of the Geelong Wool Combing (GWC) plant, with the loss of 93 jobs. There's been a lot of finger pointing on ABC radio this morning, with GWC's chief executive Leigh Schmitt blaming the intransigence of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA), while TCFUA secretary Michele O'Neil has pointed the finger right back.

Mr Schmidt's position was endorsed by our trusty, tolerant Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello. He also took the opportunity to reject allegations that the closure might be a result of the Government's industrial relations reform:

... Responding to claims that Government laws on industrial lockouts were to blame for the factory's closure, Mr Costello said it was a 'long shot'.

"I would have thought if a union calls an industrial dispute, the union leaders can take responsibilities for their industrial disputes," Mr Costello told reporters in Melbourne.

So there you go; it's yet another local company brought down by irresponsible and bloody-minded industrial action. Except in this case, the industrial action wasn't taken by the union. A quick Google for "Geelong Wool Combing" reveals the industrial action at GWC is an employer initiated lock-out not a strike. At ferret.com.au, you'll find this little nugget:

An initial lockout at Geelong Wool Combing on April 28 was stopped by the Federal Court, which ruled it breached the Workplace Relations Act because employees were not given the legally required three days' notice before industrial action was taken.

The current lockout started in early May.

In other words, the industrial action which has kept the GWC plant closed for the past 5 months was started by GWC on April 28. After the Federal Court ruled it illegal, no doubt the proper 3 days' notice was given before the lockout resumed in early May to ensure that it could continue on a legal footing.

It would be wrong to call Mr Costello's remarks misleading; they are perfectly in keeping with the new convention which allows a government minister to make any statement, on any issue, regardless of matters of fact, as long as he (or she) has been diligent in avoiding knowledge of the facts. Mr Costello has always been a diligent Treasurer.

Update (2 October): I just found this at the Australian Industrial Relations Commission site. It's the decision of Commissioner Whelan on GWC's application to "terminate a series of certified agreements between that company and the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia ". It's an interesting (but tedious) read.

Greens Are Good for Sexual Degenerates Too

According to WebMD Medical News:

A compound found in broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprouts may hold the key to thwarting the herpes virus, according to preliminary research presented Sunday at the 43rd annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICACC) in Chicago. The new findings may be one more reason to make broccoli one of your five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables each day.

Think I might just nip down to the greengrocer before the panic buying starts in earnest.

Interesting Reading Elsewhere

Michael Walzer on Iraq, Afghanistan and other issues.

Jesse Walker kicks seven shades of shit out of David Horowitz at Reason on-line.

Ticket to Write

I didn’t know I was a “conservative” until my columns began appearing on Townhall. I just thought I was smart, amusing, clever, witty, endowed with a vast reservoir of common sense and right about most things. Just like all the other people whose columns appear on Townhall and whose company I treasure, if only virtually. Then I started getting hundreds of emails from regular visitors to Townhall extolling my conservative virtues. And I was glad.

Kathleen Parker at Townhall

Another Cute Poem

This time it's a nursery rhyme, which I first found while browsing through a Coles Funny Picture Book. Although it was written mainy for kiddies, there's a message in it for adults too.

I love little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don't hurt her,
She'll do me no harm.
So I'll not pull her tail,
Nor drive her away,
But pussy and I,
Very gently will play.

Afterthought: must be bloody spring again.

Cute Poem - Pity About the Spelling

Here's a pome I found on-line:

The Baite

Come live with mee, and bee my love,
And wee will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and christall brookes,
With silken lines, and silver hookes.

There will the river whispering runne
Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the Sunne.
And there the'inamor'd fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channell hath,
Will amorously to thee swimme,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seene, beest loath,
By Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,
And if my selfe have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legges, with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poore fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowie net:

Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest,
Or curious traitors, sleavesilke flies
Bewitch poore fishes wandring eyes.

For thee, thou needst no such deceit,
For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait;
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas, is wiser farre than I.

Pleasant little ditty isn't it? Of course it would have been so much better if the author had checked his spelling with the help of a good dictionary or even the MS Word spell-checker. There's really no excuse for this sort of thing you know.

Smutty Bits

Zeppo Bakunin dropped round last Thursday, with a credit note from one of our local second hand book-shops. It was the proceeds from a box of books I passed on to him a few months ago, after I did a fairly radical purge of my bookshelves. A lot of stuff went, especially all those old science fiction books that I'd been keeping around because they might provide an interesting re-read one day. Experience shows that when that one day does eventually arrives you find yourself bored shitless by the wooden characterisation. Especially if it's one of those "hard" SF novels with an edifying science lesson in every chapter.

I cashed part of the voucher in on Friday, and came away with a copy of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which I'm reading at the moment. I also found a copy of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength, the third of his "Dr Ransom trilogy".I read the first two - Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus - a long time ago, and decided that it was time to finish the series.

The Ransom trilogy is a good deal racier than Lewis' Narnia chronicles; in Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus Lewis' hero, Dr Ransom, spends a lot of time wandering around in the nude. Of course it's good clean Anglican nudity, with nothing salacious about it.

That Hideous Strength promises to be a lot racier, if this passage from the first page of chapter 1 is anything to go by:

... He was an excellent sleeper. Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.

The proprietor of the bookshop is a friendly bloke, if a little bookish, and said he would give me first chance at any of the works of Sax Rohmer that come into his shop. He's also promised to keep an eye open for W E Johns' little known Biggles in Bondage which I've wanted to get a hold of for quite some time.

Filthy Bosche at It Again?

Here's an interesting item from the Deutsche Welle that I found via John Ray's on-line clearing house for batty ideas:

Want to design a baby or take a peek into your genetic future? Customers at a store in Bremen were more than willing to do so, and hardly anyone questioned the company's ethics, much to the dismay of the organizers.

Nestled inconspicuously between boutiques and snackbars in downtown Bremen is a new store called "chromosoma." The shop with its ultra-cool interior opened just recently and promises to offer its customers something they won't get at a run-of-the-mill department store, namely, the possibility for a complete genetic make-over.

Curious passers-by who venture inside the shop can explore a range of six products and services such as "book-a-baby," which allows women to choose precisely when they wish to start a pregnancy, as well as selecting their baby's genetic traits, and "re-set," which offers customers the opportunity to store their genetic information with a view to human cloning. The store also provides a service it calls "gen-ex," which destroys human genetic footprints - the skin particles, hair and saliva that contain someone's entire genetic code. The product is designed to prevent involuntary assessment and storage of genetic material - information which could conceivably be misused by employers and insurance companies, for example.

Sound a little dubious or ethically questionable to offer genetic designing to the paying public? Well, that's the point of the world's first DNA store.

Chromosoma is in fact not a shop at all, but rather a "field-study" project organized by the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, or Federal Center for Political Education, in the run-up to its congress on genetic research from 15 - 17 September in Bremen.

The article goes on to note that:

So far the reality is a far cry from the type of products outlined in the chromosoma catalogue. For now, many of the products displayed in the Bremen store clash with current legislation, such as stringent embryo protection laws.

Read the rest of the report and you get some indication of why the organisers of "chromosoma" were a little dismayed by its public reception. Still that hasn't stopped Byron Scott at Slings and Arrows from concluding that the whole thing is, in its own sinister way, typically German:

... they couldn't do it by killing off the un-wanted elements of their society, so those perfectionist Germans are now well on their way to marketing designer genetics - and the people are eating it up

It's possible that some of the good burghers of Bremen who visited "chromosoma" might feel a little disgruntled at having been taken in by yet another bunch of ratbag leftie social researchers. Especially any of the women who might have been interested in designer babies. Perhaps Bremen will be the city where the US' Repository for Germinal Choice sets up its first overseas franchise; it looks like there's at least one corner of Germany where they'll find a ready market for their services.

Update (Cheap Shot Draws Return Fire): Thanks to John Ray (and Heinz in the comments thread) for bring the mispelling of "boche" to my attention. Obviously I should have been a little more attentive when I was reading W E Johns as a boy. No comment from either on the substantive issue in this post: that Bremen's chromosoma was a hoax (however well-intentioned), while the Repository for Germinal Choice is all too real.

Another Self-Indulgent Post About Statistics

The ever fascinating David Horowitz of Front Page appears to have spawned another interesting political project. It's a grass roots campaign for the adoption of an Academic Bill of Rights. Like any effective grass-roots campaign, it's being fought on two fronts; through lobbying of legislators and on-the-ground activism and research by conservative students under the banner of Students for Academic Freedom (SAF). SAF has already put in the hard yards at 32 Elite US Universities and Colleges, producing this damning report on the dominance of lefty-liberalism at these institutions. US students who suspect that their own college or university is similarly tainted with academic bias can find handy tips on how to confirm their suspicions here.

The research protocol is an eminently simple, practical one. First, you make a list of the names of all the faculty and administrative staff of your institution. If possible, you should get a full list of names and home addresses, as this will make it easier to accurately identify individual staff members when you get to the second stage of the process, which is to trot down to wherever your State or county keeps its voter registration records and check the political affiliations of the people on your list. It's possible of course, that your identifying data may be inadequate when you cross-check against the official records; here's how you deal with that problem:

The person being investigated is “Andrew Jones,” and there is no address available.
If your result is one “Andrew Jones,” this is conclusive. Record the party.
If your result is two people named “Andrew Jones” this is not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.
If your result is “Andrew L. Jones”: this is conclusive. Record the party.
If your results are “Andrew L. Jones” and “Andrew N. Jones”: not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.
If your results are “Andrew Jones” and “Andrew L. Jones”: still not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that there is a simpler solution to this problem, which is to approach "Andrew Jones" (or "Andrew L. Jones") and ask him to his face what his political party affiliations are. After all, he might just ask why you want to know and, if you were foolish enough to tell him what you were about, might form an unfairly low opinion of your character based on the ridiculous prejudice that checking the political affiliations of college and university professors in this way is a bit of a sneaking, underhanded business. Better by far to accept the possibility of a few false positives and get on with the research.

Another interesting omission, which bears on the reported results of the 32 campus survey, is a simple test you really need to perform before you can say, with any authority at all, that the political affilaitions of the staff at your college or university are out of whack with those of the general community. That, of course, is to tally up all the political affiliations recorded in the county or state records, to find out how many registered Democrats (i.e. leftists) and Republicans (i.e. sensible conservatives) there are in the general population.

If this is too tedious, you could at least take a sample, by checking several random pages from the listings. It seems to me that anyone who is prepared to take the trouble to do all the other tedious data gathering reccommended in the SAF protocol ought to have the motivation to take this extra step as well. Its omission is troubling, although it may explain why the summary report on the 32 elite campuses makes no mention of any statistical test which may have been applied to determine whether the academic bias identified at these institutions was genuine, or consistent with random variations in the population. But this is mere nitpicking; the parlous state of the US academic community is well known to people of sense, so it would be unreasonable to insist on too high a standard of proof.

Irregular Verbs

I was just about ready to chuck blogging in this week; I spent too much time over the weekend writing witty first paragraphs of pieces that didn't go anywhere. One piece, on dinner party etiquette, got a whole six paragraphs before I decided the whole thing was pointless, at least forthe time being. And the only great Australian Bungle to win more than one vote from the readership was the building of the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre. So I guess that makes it our greatest Australian bungle ever; we're the world leaders in memorialising dead Prime Ministers in slightly tacky ways. In time perhaps we can expect the William Snedden Memorial Massage Parlour and the Malcolm Fraser Memorial Dry Cleaners.

If my own powers of comic invention have flagged a little this week, the world of politics and the press have taken up the slack admirably and I was pleased to learn today (two or three days after the event), that a little jobby whose flight path I started tracking in June has finally hit the fan. In the time it has taken to hit the Mistral, NASA could have had another Voyager probe half-way to Jupiter.

Under the headline Hailed a hero for blowing our trust in Sydney's Daily Telly, Piers Akerman puts the current furore over Bolt's reporting of Wilkie's work in the proper perspective, with the help of one of those Yes Minister irregular verbs:

Carlton and others who have placed the garrulous former analyst on a pedestal and awarded him the whistle-blower appellation like to ignore the reality that Wilkie became a media tart in early April when he contacted The Bulletin's Laurie Oakes and began briefing him for a television program.

...

If, however, Andrew Bolt did obtain a leaked classified document, it surely puts him in the junior Bernstein and Woodward category.

Repeat after Piers: we are respected journalists and commentators, you are a trusted source, he is a media tart and a threat to national security.

Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd doesn't share Piers awe at Bolt's scoop; in Parliament he was after Alexander Downer, looking for an explanation. You can find the rest of the news on this that's fit to Google here.

Postscript: in the interests of historical accuracy, I suppose I should mention that William Snedden wasn't ever a Prime Minister. But he did go out like Flynn.