Trusty, Rusty Teddy Bear

It's pretty clear, with the release of the new ALP policy on police counter-terrorism powers, just how Kim Beazley plans to contest the next election; he plans to go to the polls as the warm and cuddly alternative to John Howard. On The Insiders on Sunday, and with the release of his proposals for new police powers to deal with either the threat or the actuality of a terrorist attack on Australian soil, Big Kim has set out to show that he might have a warm and fuzzy teddy bear exterior, but it's stuffed chock full of steel wool and iron filings.

The substance of the proposal is that we ought to feed the current NSW laws on police powers to deal with terrorism a dose of steroids, thereby producing model legislation that can be enacted in all States and territories. For up to a week before a threatened terrorist attack and forty-eight hours after an actual attack, police would have the power to cordon off designated "target areas" - i.e. neighbourhoods - and search all people, vehicles and premises within the area. Without any hint of irony, Kim introduces his proposal thus:

The Prime Minister talks about the need for new 'offences' in law - but terrorists are lawless people. I believe we need more emphasis on ensuring we have practical 'police powers' in law.

These tough but sensible and practical powers give police the tools they need to prevent attacks but also deal with ongoing threats in emergency situations.

In his interview with Barry Cassidy on The Insiders, the bomber made it pretty clear where he stood on the issue of balancing the competing demands of preserving civil liberties and fighting terrorism:

... One of the problems with this government is it seeks to have a debate on terrorism that gets to an argument about civil liberties ...

In other words, Kim's not going anywhere near that issue, lest he give the Prime Minister yet another chance to hoist the waistband of his undies, once again cramming the fabric into his bum-crack. On the issue of civil liberties, Labor will take the same principled stand it took in 1950 when Bob Menzies tried to outlaw the Communist Party. This time, though, you can be pretty sure that the ALP won't put up with any of the lawyers in its ranks going feral and challenging national security legislation in the High Court. This is one lesson of history that the 21st Century ALP has well and truly learnt and we're all the worse off for it.

Finally, the Beazley proposals are a nonsense from a pragmatic, political point of view. Whatever John Howard proposes by way of an extension of police powers, there are going to be people within his own party who will be less than enthusiastic in their support; people like Petro Georgiou perhaps. The easiest way fo Howard to deal with these objections now is to reply that the measures he proposes are nowhere as intrusive upon the lives of ordinary Australians as Beazley's alternative. Trusty, rusty teddy bear stuffed it up.

Snob of the Week

I'll bet a tin of Beluga caviar that most Australians don't fully grasp the essence of Pushkin - "sorry, who?" - never mind the full sense of what was happening on that pavement.

But I'll bet a crate of vodka that most Russians wouldn't begin to comprehend our national gallery's recent decision to pass up a Kandinsky ...

Media and policy consultant, Natash Cica in today's Age. Ms Cica is currently travelling through Russia; no doubt the experience is broadening her mind.

ProAntePenultimate Words on the Coelacanth

In that article, Andrew Fraser, following Kevin McDonald in Occidental Quarterly argues that

... Australians, like other ethnic groups tracing their ancestry to North-western Europe, are predisposed to individualism, exogamy and small nuclear families and, as a consequence, display a relative lack of ethnocentrism.

... [This] may actually be a defining characteristic of a distinctive European racial identity not shared by other peoples. Kevin McDonald explains Western "cultural" traits as an evolutionary adaptation to the rigours of life in cold, ecologically adverse climates. Natural selection worked there to favour the reproductive success of those individuals capable of sustaining "non-kinship based forms of reciprocity."

In the way of such things, that qualifying "may" soon gets forgotten as Fraser's argument proceeds - very soon he's taking it for granted that individualism, a disinclination to shag your sister and lack of ethnocentricism (which I'll refer to from hereon as racial tolerance - it's a much simpler expression) are the result of evolutionary adaptation to living in a cold climate.

Which raises an interesting question; how are we to explain Fraser's own, somewhat more ethnocentric views of the relative merits of different races? The answer occurred to me this afternoon: they're as much an expression of Fraser's genotype as "the deeply-ingrained ethnocentrism and xenophobia characterizing most non-European peoples". Assuming, for the nonce, that McDonald's thesis is correct, we can easily account for the occasional emergence of thinkers (I use the term loosely) like Fraser with the help of Mendelian genetics.

Imagine, if you will, our primitive forebears, happily wandering the Serengeti Plains and various other pars Africensis, organised into clannish tribes whose principal recreations were beating in the heads of strangers and shagging each other with complete disregard for the issue of consanguinity. As the tribes were essentially extended families, getting fussed about consanguinity would have been maladaptive, given that all the tribe's members would be blood relatives and attempts to mate outside the tribe would be greeted with a blow on the head.

Somehow, a group of these frankly sordid proto-humans made their way to Europe where a few interesting genetic events happened, among them, the mutation of one or more of the genes in the gene complex which predisposed our ancestors to deck non-shaggable strangers. The racial tolerance gene (T) emerged. Furthermore, it was dominant over the xenophobia gene (t) which hitherto had determined human responses to strangers.

In the relatively isolated environment of Europe, the racial tolerance gene rapidly prolifierated through successive generations of the population. Europeans actually come in three varieties: those who are homozygously racially tolerant (TT), those who are heterozygously racially tolerant (Tt) and those who, unfortunately, are homozygously xenophobic (tt). Of course, the more evolved racially tolerant phenotype (Tt and Tt) is the most widespread, but occasionally you will get throwbacks to the less evolved tt genotype. They're sort of living fossils, like the coelacanth.

This raises some interesting issues, which might be worth considering now that the whole kerfuffle over Andrew Fraser's rights to academic freedom has died down. For example, Fraser regards the racial tolerance of the European to be a mark of genetic superiority and has argued for racially realistic policies that recognise that some races are better than others. Perhaps we should also be looking at policies that would spread the T gene more widely into other racial populations and - somewhat controversially perhaps - programs aimed at reducing its occurrence among the European races. And perhaps not; perhaps instead we should be looking for ways to protect and conserve this sub-variety of Homo sapiens sapiens (europa).

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

Margaret Thatcher, 1987

Almost Plain English

This hasn't been an easy post to write; I started with the working title Very Plain English, but on reading it over I decided to drop all of the dysphemisms. I still find the result pretty repugnant. I don't think that can be blamed entirely on the subject matter either; my treatment of it may well be at fault.

Andrew Fraser turned up on page three of the Age this morning, bitching about the way his article Rethinking the White Australia Policy got pulled from the Deakin University Law Review. He's been getting a fair bit of press today.

The Deakin decision hasn't prevented the article from getting out into the public domain; as a service to free speech, Jon Ray has published Andrew Fraser's article on his web site. Of course that lacks the imprimatur of publication in a refereed journal, but it's publication nonetheless, leaving little substance to any complaint that Fraser's freedom of speech has been seriously infringed.

I'm a bit of a free speech buff myself so I've decided to take a shot at matching Jon Ray's altruistic gesture. However, at around 7000 words, Fraser's article is something of a long read. And there's a fair bit of academic jargon in it, which at times obscures Fraser's central argument. So I've decided to present a plain English summary of the article instead. I think I've done a reasonable job of capturing the spirit of the thing - whether this is of any value in the debate over this kerfuffle you can decide for yourselves.

Introduction

Over the past thirty years, the very foundations of the Australian nation have been dismantled by an insidious cabal of Communists, Christian churches, ethnic lobbies and other pressure groups. Using the power of corporations and government, they have worked at cementing their political dominance by replacing the white population with more tractable asians and blacks.

This cabal 's campaign to remake the Australian population to suit its political agenda has been based on two lies; the lie of equality and the lie of universal human rights. Australia's founding fathers were too realistic to believe in these lies; they had the good sense to regard racial differences as a fact of life. They realised that the best way to preserve the Australian nation was to keep it white; a white nation is a strong nation.

After forty years of stuffing around by various Governments, advances in various sciences have revealed that the founding fathers got it right: whites really are different to asians and blacks. Faced with these facts, the ruling cabal responds by making outcasts of people like me, using the law to repress us and sometimes resorting to physical coercion. But the truth about race will not be silenced forever and it's sad that two other recent writers on the White Australia Policy - Keith Windschuttle, author of The White Australia Policy and Gwenda Tavan, author of The Long, Slow Death of White Australia don't recognise this.

Was the White Australia Policy "Racist"?

Not according to Keith Windschuttle in The White Australia Policy. But he gets it wrong because he's bought into the ruling cabal's lie of human equality.

Racial Egalitarianism: Revolution from Above?

In The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Gwenda Tavan mounts an unconvincing argument that, when the ruling cabal dismantled the White Australia Policy, it was with the tacit support of the Australian people. In fact, the Policy was dismantled by stealth - in the 1990s there was a brief, shining moment when the patriotic instincts of white Australians found their voice through the One Nation Party but the ruling cabal was quick to silence this voice of populist protest.

Racial Realism Redux?

You might argue about how much of it is due to genetics, but there's no doubt that whites, asians and blacks are different when it comes to intelligence, temperament, criminality and athletic ability. Science has proved this. Genetic tests can give you a very precise idea of how much a human individual has been touched with the old tar-brush. But when it comes to dogs, well, geneticists have trouble distinguishing a cocker spaniel from a wolf.

Race exists and it matters to public policy - especially immigration policy. Even culture and cultural values - like Australian individualism and racial tolerance - might be determined by biological differences between races. Western "cultural traits" can be explained as an evolutionary adaptation to life in cold climates where natural selection favoured individuals who preferred to shag outside their immediate family.

In the long run, this innate individualism led to the development of English common law and the emergence of business corporations. This is an example of what Richard Dawkins calls an "extended phenotype" like a beaver dam or a spiders web. Being English, or descended from the English is very special - we have the best "extended phenotype" in the world.

Peoples descended from the English - Americans, English Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders are the best people in the world at doing civic nationhood. That's because they're genetically predisposed to be individualistic and racially tolerant so English style "civic nationhood" is really "ethnic nationhood". That's something that lesser thinkers than me don't recognise. And over the past couple of centuries, the ideal of the nation has lost its purity - it's been corrupted into the global corporate welfare state where the ruling cabal can reshape national identities to suit its own sinister purposes.

The Downside of Diversity

Other races have produced different "extended phenotypes"; these don't always work well with the racial interests of Anglo-American societies. Black africans got into America 400 years ago and the buggers still haven't integrated into the white culture. You have to worry about whether other races can be absorbed into the white English speaking nations any better. Look at the Chinese - they don't integrate well in Australia because they've evolved to be most comfortable in conformist, authoritarian political regimes.

Many Australians remain blissfully unaware of the threat the Chinese and other immigrants pose to the big extended family that is the Australian nation. These people breed; for every immigrant child born, there's one less place for a white child. In the long run, massive immigration of asians and blacks means that the white population of this country will be outbred and replaced.

And that's not the end of it. A lot of these asians are too bloody clever by half and they're going to end up taking all the plum jobs in the economy. Give them twenty years or so and they'll be running the country, like the Jews in Russia, the Chinese in South-East Asia or the Indians in Africa.

As for the blacks, you'd have to be a fool to think that they'll fit in with the white population. They're too stupid and too randy. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're natural criminals - that would be blatantly racist. It's just that they're more likely to do things that are regarded as crimes in most societies.

Seriously, this is all very dangerous. As for Keith bloody Windschuttle, he's no better than the race traitors who dismantled the White Australia Policy in the first place.

Managerial Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is basically a plot by the ruling cabal of the globalised welfare state to keep national populations divided, the better to conquer and rule over them. Its purpose is to undermine the white, Christian, masculine and bourgeois values and institutions "that remain the principal constraints on managerial reach and power".

Conclusion

It's time for white Australians to wake up to the threat to their homeland. Don't be fooled by Keith Windschuttle. This country needs a new, responsible ruling class, that respects the wisdom of Die Volk. And one day, when the entire rotting edifice of the global economy has collapsed, it will be possible for
this new ruling class to take its rightful place in steering the nation's destiny. All together now:

The sun on the meadow is summery warm.
The stag in the forest runs free.
But gather together to greet the storm.
Tomorrow belongs to me.

- *** -

As I said in the introduction, it's pretty repugnant. It's easy to see why the editor of the Deakin Law Review had a bit of trouble finding referees who considered it fit for publication.

Bluggered Again?

Testing check, too, too, too ...

Cake Theory 101

At least a year ago, I played around with the idea of writing a few pieces on the theory and practice of making cakes. I decided to have a shot at developing a cake recipe from first principles. I had no idea what the first principles were, but I did have a collection of cook books and a basic knowledge of physics and chemistry to work from. I was inspired, for want of a better word, by a television foodie segment where someone presented an "Angel Food Cake" This confection was basically a meringue with some flour tossed into the mix and a raspberry puree stirred through once the batter was in the tin. The alleged cake used about twelve egg whites but no yolks, which struck me as rather wasteful. The segment should really have been followed by one on zabaglione or some other dish which would use up the twelve left-over egg yolks.

My irritation at the thought of all those wasted egg yolks was minor. What really got me going was the emphasis the presenter laid on the importance of aeration. I pretty much went through the ceiling when she was explaining how sifting your flour helped to add air to the batter. It's precisely this kind of superstitious nonsense that puts people off cookery, I thought, and set out to debunk as many cake superstitions as I could, at least to my own satisfaction.

I began with the recipe books, reading up on the preparation of various sponge cakes, to get an idea of what they all had in common. All of them begin with a foam consisting of very small air bubbles suspended in a mixture of egg-white and sugar or, in the case of the genois which I eventually chose as the basis for my very own original recipe, air bubbles suspended in a mixture of whole eggs and sugar. To this foam you add flour, flavourings and butter. All very simple when you think about it.

For debunking purposes, I decided that the cake was to be flourless. I settled on almond meal as its replacement. In most other respects, the cake would be a standard genois. To add a little moistness, I decided to incorporate a couple of layers of cooked fruit in the cake at cooking time; in the first version of the cake I used apples, lightly sauteed in butter with brown sugar and a little cardamom.

The result was interesting; it rose quite well in the oven, and promptly collapsed once cooking was complete. Unfortunately, the substitution of almond meal for flour wasn't as straightforward as I thought; 100 grams of almond meal didn't do the work of 100 grams of flour. The end result, while edible, was not a cake. It was more like a very thick pancake. It might make an acceptable clafouti, once cherries were in season, but they weren't and that was the end of it.

I did a little thinking about the problem and, in particular, what the flour in a cake is supposed to do. What is flour after all? It's ground up wheat, and mostly it consists of starch. In the process of cooking, the flour absorbs moisture and bulks up. Ah-ha! If I was going to substitute nut meal for flour, I needed to use enough of it to match the bulk of the cooked flour. Or something like that. One thing was clear; almond meal is impossible to sift, so sifting wasn't going to contribute anything to raising the cake. All the lift was going to come from that foamy mixture of air, eggs and sugar.

So, on to version two; I worked out the conversion of 100 grams of flour into cup measure, and had a bit of a think about how many cups of almond meal would equal one cup of flour. I figured I needed at least as many ground up bits of almond in my mix as there would be flour particles in a cup of flour. I settled on doubling the volume measure for starters. Plus, when I came to mix the almond meal into the frothed up eggs, I would have to keep an eye on the consistency of the batter and adjust quantities as I went on. Nonetheless, it was all very simple when you think about it.

Like version one, version two rose quite well in the oven. This time, to prevent the catastrophic collapse, I left it in the oven, with the oven turned off, once cooking was complete. It collapsed anyway, but nowhere near as much as version one had. The collapse didn't bother me - well, not much. On examination, there's not much reason to expect a cake where all the rise comes from the air incorporated into the original batter to stay puffed up once it cools. The cake rises because all those air bubbles expand as they are heated; once they cool down to ambient temperature again, they're bound to contract. It's got something to do with the Ideal Gas Law; as the temperature inside the cake goes down, so does its internal gas pressure. As a result the external atmospheric pressure pushes the cake back to more or less the volume your original batter had. There is no way to avoid this. As long as the cake comes through the process without getting too deformed, you're doing fine.

And version two was fine; quite good enough to cut up into large chunks and fob off on various friends. And good enough to trot out at a recent gathering chez Gummo. And, what the hell I'm going to publish the recipe here, because you never know, there might be somebody out there who might want to give it a try.

Equipment & Materials:

A large mixing bowl (and I do mean large - I use a stainless steel bowl about 30 cm in diameter);
An electric hand mixer
A rubber spatula
A large saucepan
A smaller saucepan
A 13 cm springform cake tin.
Kitchen paper
Oven pre-heated to 180 C

Ingredients:

6 medium - large size eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (no I don't mean vanilla essence - it's not the same at all)
2 - 2 & 1/2 cups of almond meal
6 ounces of butter
Punnet of fresh berries (blueberries or raspberries, but definitely not strawberries, OK, suit yourself, see if I care).

Butter and flour the springform tin and line the bottom with a circle of kitchen paper.
(To cut a circle of kitchen paper: fold a square of kitchen paper in half diagonally, and in half again (i.e. into triangular quarters). Fold again into eighths, and once more into sixteenths. Place the point of the paper triangle at roughly the centre of the spring form and cut across the paper where it touched the rim. That's as near as damn it to a circle, and quite good enough for present purposes).

Melt the butter in the smaller of the two saucepans and set aside to cool.

Fill the large saucepan with water and bring it to the boil.

Break the six eggs into the large bowl, add the sugar and vanilla extract. Beat gently until they are all combined.

Warm the egg mixture over the pot of boiling water until it is lukewarm*. Remove from the heat.

With the electric beater, beat the eggs until they form "the ribbon". This is going to take some time; expect to spend at least 10 minutes beating the eggs. They're ready when:

• They have at least trebled in volume;
• The colour looks suitable for painting a wall or a picket fence;
• A little of the mixture dripped off the beaters sits on top of the rest of the mixture without immediately dissolving back into it.

As I said, this takes at least 10 minutes, usually longer. If you're using a hand whisk of any description expect it to take a hell of a lot longer. In fact, you should probably plan on dying from exhaustion well before you're finished.

Once the eggs are thoroughly beaten, fold in the almond meal in stages, using the rubber spatula. Then fold in the melted butter. Do this as quickly as possible.

Pour half of the batter into the cake tin and sprinkle the berries on top. Now pour in the rest of the batter. Smooth the surface with the spatula till it is more or less level. If possible, it should be a little higher in the centre than at the sides. Get the tin into the oven.

Bake for about 45 minutes, then test with a skewer. The cake is cooked once the skewer comes out completely clean. When the cake passes this test, turn off the oven and allow the cake to sit in it for at least another half an hour before taking it out.

Once it's out of the oven, put it on a plate (paper circle and all). Tart it up however you like - apricot glaze would probably work well but I'd lay off the decor mexicain.

* - since writing up the recipe, I've started to entertain doubts about this business of heating the egg mixture until it's lukewarm. One day I'll have to try it with eggs straight out of the refrigerator, to see if this is another inessential step I can dispense with.

Qu(ot)e?

I did a spot of Googling this afternoon, researching a carefully considered, nuanced piece on "PM's Blitz on Terror", as yesterday's Hun called it. I got a bit thrown by the editorial Melbourne's most respected tabloid produced on the same subject today:

... The most effective way of legislating [the proposals] is to include a sunset clause. Mr Howard has not put forward a sunset clause, but some sort of time limit is supported by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty.

Whatever is decided upon is likely to be divisive, particularly when some civil libertarians have compared such an Australia to the police state of Nazi Germany.

Such a comparison is as offensive as a statement by a Muslim leader that Australians should be free to voice support for insurgents in Iraq. Could this be said to endanger the lives of Australian troops in Iraq or is that in itself a dangerous attack on freedom of speech?

The question is how far we should go, and part of the answer is, not into a future where such laws are no longer necessary.

Personally, I'd rather not have the PM's proposals at all; but if they are necessary, I'd rather look forward to a future where they are no longer necessary than to one where they are not no longer necessary. Maybe that's just me.

Just when You Thought that Idiotic Concept was Finally Played Out ...

... some fool comes up with another "meme". This one's inspired by a post at Troppo Armadillo, which reminded me of a story about Voltaire, which I found somewhere in my copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Devils Dictionary.

It seems that Voltaire and a few friends were staying overnight at a country inn one night, during a long coach trip. To while away the time they decided to tell each other stories; it was agreed that each of them would tell a story about a robber.

When Voltaire's turn came, he said "Once, there was a fermier-generale of the taxes."

His audience pressed him to continue.

"That, my friends," he said, "is the story."

Which leads to the simple idea that I'm hoping to send running like wildfire through the blogosphere. Take a word like "robber", "murderer" and produce a Voltairean short story on the topic. No need to tell anyone what the word is; let your readers figure it out for themselves. They enjoy being treated as intelligent people from time to time; it makes them feel respected.

I think I've told you enough to convey the general idea. Here's my story:

Once, there was a Defence Minister with a defective mobile phone.

To save time, I think I'll just tag everybody and have done with it.

Bullshit Theory Update

Thanks to Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo, for alerting me to the existence of The James McConvill Blog:

This blog is not for the faint-hearted or narrow-minded. It is about fostering the transcendence of social and academic thought rather than settling for what is safe and secure. Some people will be offended. I'm fine with that. The trade-off is that many more people will be enlightened, reinvigorated... and hopefully even inspired. I hope you enjoy the ride.

James' views on the state of academia are at least interesting and entertaining. Here, he lets us know where we can find real legal academics, as distinct from the jaded tarts hanging around Law Faculties waiting for a philosophical sugar-daddy to come along and whisk them away to a life of fame and fortune, or the outright bullshitters who infest all part of the academy. Real legal academics are people like James, oddly enough; they've had op-eds published in the major dailies.

That last one particularly got my attention, because it seemed a good test case for the application of my own researches into Bullshit Theory, which, as James says:

... has emerged as part of mainstream philosophy and should be taken seriously. Just recently, Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt released a small book titled, On Bullshit (2005, Princeton University Press), which has sold truckloads of copies worldwide.

My own work in this area, as you know, focuses on developing a reliable statistical metric of bullshit. It's still very much a work in progress. After reading James' post on academics, I've found myself torn between two alternatives. The first is to put in some more work on the basic model of an ideal piece of bullshit which is needed to establish a sound footing for statistical Bullshit Theory. The other is to continue work on the three days and several weeks novel I began writing around 12:05 Saturday. Decisions, decisions.

And a little disappointment too; because with the BS-95 scrapped, thanks to Zeppo Bakunin's precise and very correct formulation of the null hypothesis, I don't have the means to do the statistical testing which would show which of the following statements fits James piece on academic bullshitters:

H₀: the amount of bullshit in this article is consistent with its having been assembled completely at random;

H₁: there is not enough bullshit in this article to be consistent with random chance (and it might therefore be a worthwhile read);

H₂: there is too much bullshit in this article to be consistent with random chance (which, incidentally, doesn't make it any less a worthwhile read);

My guess is that it's H₀, based purely on this little purler where, as commenter Steve notes, McConvill neatly hoists himself on the Cretan paradox:

Due to the way in which many universities have traditionally operated, bullshit is rife. A number of academics do not operate in the “reality-based community” ...

Reinvigorated, hopefully even inspired? Actually, I think I might be.

A Portrait of the Artist with Egg on his Dial

72, Episode 1 (an incomplete post from Saturday, September 3)

The events in this post took place between twelve midnight, Friday September the second and twelve midnight Saturday the third.

12:05:01 (ka-chunk) ... 12:05:02 (ka-chunk) ... 12:05:03 (ka-chunk) ... 12:05:04 (ka-chunk)

I've been partying for the past five hours; a last chance to enjoy some pleasant company before I embark on three days of concentrated neurotic anxiety. I'm in the middle of something resembling a conversation, when I'm rudely interrupted by Zeppo Bakunin. "Oy," he says, "You're supposed to be at work writing now."

Well, that was the plan and he's going to be a complete bastard about it and make me stick to it. "Don't come back until you've written at least three hundred words, he orders." I head off to clock in on the shop floor of my soul and start fabricating the conscience of my race. (Apologies to anyone who might have seen the previous sentence in an e-mail or something).

2:15:01 (ka-chunk) ... 2:15:02 (ka-chunk) ... 2:15:03 (ka-chunk) ... 2:15:04 (ka-chunk)

Save the first three pages of the work in progress to disk, shut down the computer, go to bed. Sleep immediately.

11:35:01 (ka-chunk) ... 11:35:02 (ka-chunk) ... 11:35:03 (ka-chunk) ... 11:35:04 (ka-chunk)

Wake. Go immediately to the kitchen, put the kettle on and coffee makings into a cup. Turn on the PC. Go outside for the first cigarette of the day, the first walk up and down the back yard of the day. Follow that with the second cigarette of the day and the second walk up and down the back yard. Wonder where all the brilliant ideas I had last week flew off to and whether I'll be able to track them down again. Or find replacements for them. Make the coffee, say good morning to Zeppo Bakunin who is also now awake.

Open the document file with last night's work in it. Decide that alcohol is not a creativity enhancing drug. Rewrite time. Did we really listen to Dark Side of the Moon last night? And without getting stoned first? God help me, we did. At least it wasn't Thick as a Brick.

3:31:01 (ka-chunk) ... 3:31:02 (ka-chunk) ... 3:31:03 (ka-chunk) ... 3:31:04 (ka-chunk)

Check the stats on the growing document; it really is possible to write 500 words an hour. So, if we assume that rate is sustained for sixteen hours a day over three days there should be 24,000 words at the end of it. Decide to hell with it; get the scenes written, worry about tying them into the plot later. It works well enough for certain other writers, I can make it work for me. Ignore the minor quibble that those guys are TV writers.

4:47:01 (ka-chunk) ... 4:47:02 (ka-chunk) ... 4:47:03 (ka-chunk) ... 4:47:04 (ka-chunk)

Check the survival guide, to see where I'm at; it's almost reassuring:

1st Day: For most, the first day is the toughest. Veterans are almost unanimous in their belief that if one even gets out of the starting gate on the first day they’re doing well. There may be a lot of “window staring”, pacing, wishing to be anywhere else. It may bebest to just keep in mind no one knows anything the first day.

I'm doing OK then; I'm out of the starting gate with a whole five pages written. Get on with it. Pacing the back yard is OK; I'm expected to be doing that. Think about whether or not to follow last night's friendly suggestion from Catherine that I blog the experience.

Go on-line long enough to collect e-mail, find one cryptic comment on the blog re the current enterprise. What the hell, I'll blog it. A bit. But first I've got more pages to write.

8:15:01 (ka-chunk) ... 8:15:02 (ka-chunk) ... 8:15:03 (ka-chunk) ... 8:15:04 (ka-chunk)

Eleven pages. Not good enough, when you consider that one of those is the title page. Too many little square bracketed pointers to missing plot and outright ellipses. I really was mad to get myself into this. Madder still to take time out for that shower, write this post. Time for another coffee.

***

And that's as far as I got with the "live blogging of the event as it happened". Sometime around midnight Saturday, I went to bed and didn't sleep for a couple of hours. I'm pretty sure I got up and went back to the PC and cranked out some more, um, prose.

2nd Day: By sunrise on the second day, one should be well on their way, the real world is far off, one is immersed wholly in the concept that is unfolding before them. This is also the day that the outline may be discarded, not consciously, but by some other malevolent unleashed force that, in effect, takes over the driving. It is generally agreed one should be halfway by 6 o’clock this evening.

I have a vague memory that it was Sunday morning when I was wandering around the back yard at 4:00 am, listening to a blackbird, perched on the highest part of the house, proclaiming to the world that this was his TV antenna. In the distance another bird warbled back to let him know that he didn't want the TV antenna, he had a perfectly good one of his own and if you come over here mate, I'll give you a good kicking. I considered a spot of self-plagiarism, decided against it. Just as I had earlier decided, a little reluctantly, against making one of my minor characters a publishing company executive whose last job was quality assurance manager in a major department store.

I definitely remember Sunday breakfast; I decided to take Zeppo Bakunin's advice and cook myself a nice high protein breakfast, using the two eggs left over from Friday. I cracked them into a bowl, mixed them with a fork, added some grated cheese and some left-over marinated mushrooms from Friday's antipasto selection. The whole lot went into the microwave for two minutes; I stirred it and returned it to the microwave for another two minutes.

While it was cooking, I made the mistake of watching it; the egg mixture formed a large bubble that swelled out of the bowl like some malevolent protoplasmic blob from the planet Zangara in some 1950's science fiction B-Movie. When I took it out of the microwave it didn't look like anything fit for human consumption. It looked more like it should be slithering over someone's face, ravenously devouring flesh and bone to get to its favourite sweetmeat - the human brain. I looked in the cupboard for some HP Sauce, the only substance in the known universe capable of killing malevolent protoplasmic blobs from the planet Zangara, but all we had left was that last centimeter that sulks in the bottom of the bottle and refuses to come out because its been completely abandoned and nobody loves it any more. Somehow, I managed to eat the eggs before they ate me.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't anywhere near halfway there by six o'clock; it didn't help that the various plot lines were writhing around like noodly appendages. But I did have that really seedy, smutty scene in the run-down hotel written and the manuscript was growing. I'd given up on characterisation; if Dumas could get along without it, so could I.

Zeppo Bakunin was pleased to learn that as yet there were no daleks in the novel. However, when I started to think about it, the idea of including a couple of gay daleks had certain possibilities. Of course gay cybermen would probably flounce a lot better. But the smutty bit I already had was looking good enough and I could also wring a running gag out of it with a little more work.

Sometime Sunday night, I printed out the House of Representatives passage for Zeppo Bakunin to take a look at; in his opinion it read well (that was reassuring) and was frighteningly realistic (that wasn't; it was intended to be satirical. If Question Time really is as ridiculous as I represented it, the country is in deep shit). Encouraged by this qualified praise, I went on, confident that the conscience of the race
was shaping up nicely. (Once again, apologies to e-mail correspondents). Some time between 10:30 and midnight, I decided that sleep was definitely a necessity. I turned off the PC, went to bed and didn't sleep for a couple of hours. With a notebook beside the bed, just in case.

At two, I was at the PC again, sketching out connecting passages in the present tense, pulling the plot highlights together. I went back to bed, left the alarm set for six o'clock.

Somewhere between five thirty and six o'clock I found myself wandering around a dingy room, fascinated by the three panel mirror on one wall. The mirror's frame was ornamented with carved grotesques; demon's heads and such. I was particularly taken with the figure of the hooded assassin at the bottom right hand corner of the right hand frame. He was clad all in grey, his face completely hidden by a grey hood and a curved dagger hung, hilt down, in a scabbard at his left shoulder. Then he reached for the dagger with his right hand, and started moving toward me. The other figures ornamenting the mirror frame were starting to move too.

I backed away, a little nervous, but aware that I was in no serious danger; this was merely an animation in a computer game. As I backed away, the monitor screen appeared in front of me; that would keep them back. They marched confidently up to screen and pressed themselves against it; their plasticine bodies merged with the screen and they forced their way through it. No problem; all I needed was another screen. I backed away again; now I was in trouble - my way was blocked by the giant rubber band behind me. I conjured up another screen; once again, they pressed their bodies against it and oozed through the glass. Three screens later, things were looking grim and I was relieved when the game show host came to congratulate me on getting through the first round and qualifying for round two, Honest Piano. That's when things started to get really weird.

I woke up, just as I was telling one of my rivals in the game show what I thought of him (this was after I'd told him what he could do with the pencil I'd just broken in half and handed back to him) and realised I was talking in my sleep. Back to the PC, for the serious part of the third day's work.

The 3rd Day Attack of Doubts (Feelings of Pitiable Failure)

It is important to know these feelings will come. The deadline approaches. You’re well behind your intended schedule. Of course, you did screw up. Those “couple a’ drinks” last night with friends. And there didn’t seem to be any harm in taking a break to watch Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, on the 9:00 movie (here you may achieve at least a sense of irony, aneffective literary device you may want to incorporate into your present 3-Day opus). And then, there’s the walk in the park, the phone call to a lover, and the list goes on and on ... the hill of sand proved too much. Well, despair is for artists and poets—you’re a writer.

Take three deep breaths. Don’t punish yourself. You can do that on Tuesday. Get back to work. Take phone off hook. Pull drapes. If you feel lonely—an outcast—you are. It’s OK, you’re trying. That manuscript is now your only friend, the only thing that matters. Come to think of it, the only thing that has ever mattered. Finish it. Let it, at least, have a life.

I sat down in front of the PC at about 6 am and then it happened; somehow, the word processor, destroyed the files with those key passages. The seedy, smutty scene in the run-down hotel - gone. The resident's tale (a fine passage, written in the pre-traditionalist style often misdescribed as post-modern) - gone. And much else besides. The conscience of the race was still missing a lot of necessary components and the injection moulder had just blown a gasket (final apology to e-mail correspondents).

Sometime between this despairing moment and eight o'clock, I had the good sense to shut down the PC and call it quits. I wrote a note to Zeppo Bakunin, telling him that there was absolutely no need for him to wake me up, went to bed and didn't sleep. Which brings us up to date with my last post.

Since Monday, I've had an interesting time downloading various programs off the web, looking for a tool that would allow me to retrieve the lost files. The best of them is Linux Disk Editor (lde). Last night, I gave up on the idea, and decided I would just have to rewrite from scratch.

This morning, I got up at six (must reset the alarm clock to a time more befitting a burden on society) and, finally more or less calm, I sat down at the computer. Looking in my home directory on the reserve drive (/home/gummo) I found a directory "gummo" that I'd never seen before. I took a look inside, and found that /home/gummo/gummo is a copy of /home/gummo. And in the directory /home/gummo/gummo/3daynovel were the files missing from /home/gummo/3daynovel that I'd thought lost for ever. All the evidence is that they were copied there on Sunday. So the dog didn't eat my homework after all; it just buried it in the back yard.

So I've assembled what's written, printed up a declaration that the writing was done in three days (as required under the rules of the competition) and it's going in the mail this afternoon. At least I'll get the certificate or whatever it is that the organisers send you saying that you did actually do it. As for actually winning, well there's more chance that Mad Bugger Kev will finally get a winning tip on race five at the Dapto Dogs from the radio inside his head.

Afterword: heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along on Friday night; particularly for the food that I somehow forgot to put out on the table. It provided most of my sustenance over the following three days.

The Desperate Hours

Here's a consoling thought; at least I got the basic concept right when I decided to run a second hard drive on the PC as an internal back-up. Making the backup drive bootable? Pure bloody genius. The only flaw in this little piece of DIY brilliancy is when it came to the crunch, at six o'clock this morning, was this; that script I'd written to copy files from one hard drive to another each time the machine shut down wasn't working anywhere as well as I thought it was. Small, but rather devastating mistake involving a couple of missing asterisks. It's the old nail, horseshoe ... kingdom story. I've fixed the script, and now I do have back up, but that's very much a case of stable door, horse, bolted.

Here's another consoling thought; the data in the three files that had simply vanished from the hard drive when I tried to open them this morning is still on the other hard drive. That's why it's sitting idle right now; one way or another I'm getting that data off there, even if it means going over the entire partition sector by bloody sector. I'll lift it off in chunks of hexadecimal if that's what it takes. It's safe, as long as the drive isn't being written to, which is why I've switched to working from the reserve drive, with the other mounted strictly read only.

But that's pretty much the lot when it comes to consoling thoughts, right now. There's no way I'll finish the three day writing binge with anything like a completed work, not when most of the good stuff has, for all intents and purposes, simply vanished. That became pretty clear at around eight this morning. So did a pressing need for sleep; I'd taken on yesterday's portion of the writing frenzy with the motto, "Make friends with your insomnia" but this morning insomnia was no longer my friend; just a bloody unwelcome house guest who wouldn't take my repeated hits to bloody well clear off.

I futzed around with fsck a little, and decided I had two options; reconstruct most of what was aready written and then grind on to the finish - all in sixteen hours, or get some sleep and a clear head to deal with the technical issues. I took the sleep and the clear head. And the half a temazepam that Zeppo Bakunin kindly provided so that I could calm down enough to sleep; I was on the verge of one of those messy "blokes don't cry, they just get on with life" fits.

Realistically, What are my chances of getting the data back and getting a more or less finished work of 90 to 100 pages by midnight tonight? About as good as a three-legged greyhound's chances of winning at the Sandown dogs. So that's that.

Tonight, I'm going to take myself out into the back yard, turn to the South Celestial Pole and have a quiet word with the ex-God; we parted ways several years ago, after a barney over which of us actually existed. I've more or less put up with the little episodes of peevish attention seeking beehavour over the past few years but this time it's gone over the line. Time to get an intervention order.

Bugger Off, I'm Busy

According to Nicholas Gruen at Troppo this is not an easy read for philosophical amateurs, but it's a good one. A pox on him; the last thing I want right now is to find interesting on-line articles that give me new ideas to write about. Not that I consider Gödel's incompleteness theorems new, exactly; they have been around for quite a while and I'll have you know that I'm not entirely unacquainted with them. But I've never done a blog post on them.

But right now, I've got other things to do for a while. Perhaps not better things, or more important things or even necessary things but things nonetheless. So I'm just going to slap up this edited extract from Chapter 5 of Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg (London, 1958) and leave it at that:

... in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory we can indeed proceed without mentioning ourselves as individuals, but we cannot disregard the fact that natural science is formed by men. Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it describes nature as exposed t o our method of questioning ...

If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein had in understanding and accepting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, one can trace the roots of this difficulty to the Cartesian partition [of reality into three parts - God, World, I]. this partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take along time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.

... We "objectivate" a statement if we claim that its content does not depend on the conditions under which it can be verified. Practical Realism assumes that there are statements that can be objectivated and that in fact the largest part of our experience in daily life consists of such statements. Dogmatic realism claims that there are no statements concerning the material world that cannot be objectivated. Practical realism has always been and will always be an essential part of natural science. Dogmatic realism, however, is, as we see it now, not a necessary condition for natural science ... When Einstein has criticized quantum theory he has done so from the basis of dogmatic realism. This is a very natural attitude. Every scientist who does research work feels that he is looking for something that is objectively true. His statements are not meant to depend upon the conditions under which they can be verified. Especially in physics the fact that we can explain nature by simple mathematical laws tells us that here we have met some genuine feature of reality, not something that we have - in any meaning of the word - invented ourselves. This is the situation Einstein had in mind when he took dogmatic realism as the basis for natural science. But quantum theory is in itself an example for the possibility of explaining nature by means of simple mathematical laws without this basis ...

And that's it from me for the rest of this week, all of the next and possibly most of the week after. Go and find somewhere else to amuse yourselves. I was going to suggest that you might lay off the interesting links until I get back but there's Buckley's chance of that happening. Oh, and spare me the smart-arsed comments about how the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory opens the possibility of an alternative universe where nothing interesting will actually get written, anywhere, over the next two weeks. Call me dated, but round here the Copenhagen interpretation rules, OK?

BS-95 Hunt

... When one person speaks and is encouraged to develop his or her ideas, then it is we, the audience, who provide the challenge. We provide the democracy. In each of our hearts and minds, we absorb, judge and come to our own conclusions. The dialectic is, thankfully, not between a group of equally ignorant people thrashing out a series of arbitrary subjects about which they know little and care less. It is between an informed individual who, we hope, has thought long and hard about their own area of specialisation, and an audience which is ready honestly to assess what the speaker has to say. Democracy, like everything else, thrives on preparation. (David Hare, in a Saturday Age syndication of an article originally published in The Grauniad (link via Nicholas Gruen at Troppo Armadillo).

I didn't sleep Sunday night. As a result, I took an inordinate amount of interest in this article in Monday's Age. It's an extract from Peter Costello's speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue Forum (whatever that is) on Saturday. Looking it over, I thought it might be worth running a more or less complete BS-95 check over it, to see how the Treasurer rates as a bullshit artist.

This is what happens if you're the sort of person who wanders the streets picking out house numbers at random and then testing whether they're prime numbers. That's a lot easier than it sounds, incidentally - all you do is take an approximate square root and then look for a prime factor below that. As an example, my street number has no prime factors below 17 so it passes the test. If you're looking to narrow it down a little more, you might get a result with the help of this additional bit of information: if you knock off 100 the result isn't prime, having two factors below 10. Actually, that might just nail it. There's one extra hint I could give you, but that would hand you the result on a plate.

So I spent all of Monday in a crazy, insomniac headspace where it was absolutely the most important thing ever to check Costello's speech in detail and see how it rated on my home-grown bullshit quantifier. When I got down to it, the start wasn't all that promising:

Last Monday was the 60th anniversary of the victory in the Pacific. Australia and the United States went into World War II separately but came out of it together: as allies, as friends.

By February 1942 the continental mainland of Australia was under direct air attack. Australia faced its gravest security threat. But beginning with the naval battles in the Coral Sea, with the Australian land defence of Port Moresby and the island campaign under Douglas MacArthur, the war began to turn. It ended in circumstances that are well known. [my emphasis]

All up, there are seven assertions in those two paragraphs: dedicated nitpicking only produced one bullshit point. That was for the sentence in bold. According to this source, which I'm inclined to consider reliable, February 1942 is when Japanese air attacks on the Australian mainland actually started (with the bombing of Darwin on the 19th). In the light of Costello's later remarks on the subject of historical education, I considered it fair that the Treasurer should score a bullshit point for this pointless bit of lily-gilding. That little gloss over the exact circumstances which ended the campaign in the Pacific almost scored a bullshit point too, but on balance, I decided against it. It's a notable omission, but that's all.

The score really started to climb in this section of the speech:

It is common in this country, like so many others, to come across anti-American sentiment.

It is always there, but it rises at times of Australia's military engagement in coalition with the US. Most recently Australia's engagement in Iraq has raised these sentiments.

Critics commonly allege that Australia is only engaged in these theatres at the urging of, or in some supine gesture towards, the US. "After all," one senior school student aggressively asked me at a local school, "what have the Americans ever done for us?"

... I began my answer with the events of 1941. There was no flicker of recognition. It was clear to me that whatever the educational achievements of this school, the teaching of history was not among them. [emphasis added, one rhetorical question deleted]

By the end of this passage, the figures were up to 17 assertions with 9 of them bullshit of one kind or another. The anecdote about the senior school student at the local school scored as follows: accepting that the event described occurred, we have two facts, stated in the first two sentences. Next we have an opinion, passed off as fact and, finally, a daring leap to a conclusion about the school's educational performance - four assertions, two of them bullshit.

When I reached the end of the article I had the following figures. The Treasurer had made a total of 51 assertions of one kind or another and I was satisfied that 31 of those were bullshit. I'd also reached an assessment of the speech that's completely at odds with Tony Parkinson's in today's Age, but at the moment I'm nowhere near tempted to run a BS-95 check on Parkinson. With him, I prefer to use the less rigorous approach of reading the last paragraph first; if the conclusion strikes me as egregious, I immediately lose interest in how Parkinson got there.

Given the figures, how does the Treasurer stack up as a bullshit artist? On checking my revised BS-95 scoring table, I found that in an article with 50 substantive assertions, 32 of them had to be shown to be bullshit before the article could be written off (with 95% confidence) as total bullshit. The Treasurer's speech doesn't meet this criterion so in this case we'll have to retain the null hypothesis, a the statisticians say, and conclude that there's no more bullshit in the speech than you'd find if it were put together completely at random.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Comrade Zeppo Bakunin for his very precise formulation of the null hyothesis.

Not Quite Supported

I finally got the new PC upgrunted and working on Friday the 12th; I suppose that ought to make it Trotsky 1, St Anselm and the Single Mothers 0. But here I am, a little over a week later and it's still not good enough. Sure the machine has more RAM then I've ever seen crammed onto the same motherboard (a mere 256 MB), a bootable reserve hard-drive and a much faster internet connection. So, it's finally hooked up to a working printer and I can print my attempts at literature in the double spaced format beloved of publishers and editors. And yeah, that little bit of code I added to the system halt script, to copy changed files in my home directory to the reserve hard drive whenever I shut down the PC, is working a treat. But the thing still doesn't have a working sound card. How utterly bloody useless.

Come to think of it, the video card - a Riva TNT - isn't working up to capacity either. It's fine for stuff like word-processing and web-browsing but it craps out a soon as you try to run Tux Racer. I've got an old PCI video card (FCC ID LUT-DSP3332P) over in the drawer with all the other old cards - two dud ISA internal modems, one working PCI modem, two serial port cards, and a SoundBlaster (Model CT4170, © Creative Technology Ltd 1997). It has occurred to me that if I shift the stacks of books off the coffee table next to the desk and move the printer (Hewlett Packard OfficeJet LX) onto the coffee table, that would make room for the spare monitor (Viewsonic E653). Then I could slot the older video card into the PC and see if it runs Tux Racer any better. I might even be able, eventually, to split my KDE desktop over two monitors. This wouldn't get the sound card working but I'd be impressed enough with myself enough to believe that I can still do technical stuff, at a pinch.

Except when it comes to sound cards based on the ESS Technology ES1868F AudioDrive chip, FCC ID KWX-SND21-W, manufactured by Formosa Industrial Computing Inc. When it comes to getting this little bugger to work with the Fedora Core 2 distribution of Linux, I'm stuffed, no matter how vigorously I wave around my Phillips head screwdriver (Stanley Australia, Model No 65-522). Slightly more intelligent approaches, involving reading the documentation, using the system tools and a lot of Googling, haven't worked either.

Once or twice a day, I hit the Soundcard Detection option on the "System Settings" menu, type in the root password in the dialog box and wait. What happens? Nothing - unless you count the disappearance of the password dialogue box, followed by a little chuntering from the hard drive. There's a fine little program (system-config-sound card) at work there somewhere; the programmer obviously put a lot of thought into the question of how best to make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible.

Frustrated by the way the sound card detector would simply slink away in disgrace each time it failed, I tried hacking modules.conf. No luck there either - probably because I was working from some seriously out of date documentation, the example given was for a SoundBlaster card and most of the hacking was on the basis of inspired guesswork.

Next, via some frantic Googling, I located a downloadable copy of sndconfig, the command line tool for setting up recalcitrant soundcards. It worked a little better than system-config-sound card had. sndconfig at least had the gumption to tell me that it couldn't detect a sound card. Then, as I more or less expected from what I had read about the program, it came up with a screen which asked me to select a driver from a list of possible alternatives. The only problem now was that there didn't seem to be a suitable driver for the ES1868F AudioDrive in the list. Nor was there a driver for the SoundBlaster, should I choose to slip that into the PC case. So it wasn't a particularly helpful list. Well, there wasn't really a list at all, just a blank blue rectangle where the list should have been.

No matter what I do, Linux just refuses to recognise the KWX-SND-21, or whatever it calls itself, as a sound card. This might have something to do with the fact that ESS don't actually list an "ES1868F AudioDrive" in their product range - they have an ES1868. This might point to the root of the problem; maybe expecting the card to work is like expecting a Bolex watch to give the correct time more than twice a day or Charnel No. 5 to smell better that a blend of patchouli and cat's piss.

TV Confessions

I got sucked into the new season of 24; I hope I'm not the only one. Even if you haven't been following 24, you might have come across the associated advertisement that Channel 7 has been running: the one where Kiefer Sutherland, on behalf of the show's producers, reminds the great TV audience that American muslims are right behind the war on terrorism.

I haven't seen too much comment on the ads, apart from some fairly predictable comments in the Age Green Guide along the usual lines - "it's all too silly for words." That's not an opinion I share; I think the ad is inadequate and there are quite a few more announcements I'd like to see the put to air. Here's one that ought to have preceded most of the episodes I've seen so far:

"Tonight's episode of 24 features scenes depicting the successful use of torture to extract information from unco-operative subjects. The producers of 24 would like to remind viewers that no reputable authorities regard the use of torture as an effective means of obtaining truthful information. Our writers were just too lazy to come up with anything better."

Things to Come

If you're looking for indications of how liberal democracy, Australian style, is going to shape up once the coalition has whipped the dissidents, sorry political terrorists, within its ranks into line, you could do worse than to take a look at this report from Monday's Age and SMH:

Companies and individuals should be able to secretly donate up to $10,000 to political parties, says a Liberal Party federal director.

The Liberal Party wants the threshold at which political donations must be publicly disclosed lifted from $1,500 to $10,000 - and for more donations to be made tax deductible.

... Brian Loughnane says it's time the threshold was lifted to a level similar to the STG5,000 ($A11,600) allowed in Britain and $NZ10,000 ($A9,000) in New Zealand.

"It's been over 20 years since the threshold for disclosure of political donations was first introduced at $1,000. It's 13 years since this was lifted to $1,500," Mr Loughnane told a parliamentary inquiry into the 2004 election.

"Obviously the current $1,500 has been eroded by inflation and in our view that was way too low anyway."

...

Mr Loughnane said it was ridiculous to assume that someone donating $10,000 or less was trying to buy influence, when most were simply paying to attend party functions.

Their privacy should be protected, he said.

"The fact that somebody attends a political function of itself I don't believe requires public disclosure," Mr Loughnane said.

"I think people are entitled to participate in the activities of political parties but have an element of privacy."

...

... Mr Loughnane said the current disclosure provisions worked well, with the exception of the actual limit.

"If the threshold level was raised to $10,000, based on last year, 88 per cent of donations would still be publicly declared," he said.

"At a point where 88 per cent of all donations are disclosed, we believe there is still a very very transparent funding system in Australia."

I can't remember ever paying much more than about twenty bucks to attend a political party function - usually a local ALP Branch fund-raising barbie (salads provided, BYO everything else unless you want to find yourself eating standard industrial BBQ Snags washed down with cask red) or the ever popular quiz-night. On top of the admission you might find yourself shelling out an extra couple of bucks to be in the draw for an autographed copy of the recently-remaindered memoirs of a former local mayor, usually described as "a valuable contribution to Labor history which provides a fascinating, insiders' view of the machinations of local politics." All up, I'd be pushed to shell out even $100 a year on political party donations. To get to $10,000, I'd have to attend 500, if you ignore buying the occasional token ticket in a raffle you have no desire to win. Somebody's running some pretty swank party fundraisers out there, aren't they?

I'm no big fan of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument but I remain a little bemused by Loughnane's concern for the privacy of closet supporters of political parties. Not his own party, I'm sure - in the current political climate I can't see any reason for people to feel that attending a Liberal Party function has to be done as furtively as paying a visit to the Daily Planet. It's obviously ALP, Democrat and Greens supporters he has in mind; people who might find themselves embarassed socially or have their careers jeopardised if it became widely known that they didn't have the nous to get on the side of the conservative ascendancy. Perish the thought that Mr Loughnane's position has anything to do with the inconvenience of collecting a lot of untraceable used bills, finding a brown paper bag big enough to hold them all and then organising a discreet rendezvous where the whole parcel can be passed over.

The Science of Nitpicking (2)

(Introducing BS-95 and BS-99)

Last Wednesday, in the first post in this series, I introduced a simple test of whether an op-ed article was a complete piece of bullshit. Basically, if , starting at the beginning of the article, you come across five bullshit statements or arguments in a row you can write the article off as complete bullshit with the statistician's much beloved 95% confidence. Seven in a row takes you to 99% confidence.

Over the past few days I've been looking to try this test out on a promising candidate and, via EP in a comment at Larvatus Prodeo, I got onto Pamela Bone's impassioned piece in Monday's Age. The opening paragraph looked promising:

Feminist debate here - what little of it there is - seems to be mainly about whether Big Brother is empowering to or patronising of young women. Many of the same young women would rather die (metaphorically speaking) than own the title of feminist.

What are the claims made in this paragraph?

• There's not a lot of feminist debate here;


• The debate that there is seems to be mainly about Big Brother


• Many young women don't want to be identified as feminists.

That's three candidates for the status of bullshit claim packed into two sentences. If you want to go to the implied subtext - that feminism in Australia has vanished up its own bum and hence, become irrelevant to the next generation of should-be-feminists, you have five claims which might all possibly be bullshit, plus the questionable argumentative technique of letting the sub-text do all the work.

So, you could be 95% confident that this article is complete bullshit if you could demonstrate that:

• There's a lot more feminist debate around than Pamela Bone has noticed;


• Very little of it is in fact about Big Brother


• At least as many young women are willing to identify as feminists as those who don't;


• Feminism hasn't vanished up its own bum;


• Feminism is still relevant, here and now.

Unfortunately, that demands a little more knowledge of the current state of feminism in Australia than I can claim. So, although I'm inclined to count the three explicit claims of the first paragraph as bullshit, it's necessary to read on a little before I can claim the five in a row I need before I'm entitled to dismiss it out of hand and move on to more informative reading.

In other places women are dying, literally, for the feminist cause. Did Western feminists in the 1970s - so silent these days! - think they had it hard? They had to put up with scorn and ridicule from the media and hostility from conservatives who said they were out to destroy the family. But no one, so far as I can remember, was murdered.

A few examples, of many, of what women in some countries are up against: in northern Afghanistan in May, three women workers at a microcredit organisation (which gives loans to women to start up small businesses) were stoned to death by warlords; in India, a woman social worker in Madhya Pradesh state had her hands chopped off by a man furious because she was counselling villagers against child marriage.

Well, that pretty much buggered things up; after a neat little segue in the second paragraph, we get some reported fact, and the simple "five specious claims in a row" test is out the window.

It's for situations such as this that I've devised the BS-95/BS-99 scoring system. It works like this:

• Count all the questionable assertions of fact, possible errors of argument etc in the article;


• Nitpick away at them and count all the errors;


• Consult the BS-95/BS-99 scoring table (Table 1) to determine how confident you can be that the article is complete bullshit.

Table 1: BS-95 and BS-99

No. of Questionable Assertions/Inferences	BS-95	BS-99
5	5	-
6	5	6
7	6	7
8	7	8
9	7	8
10	8	9
11	8	9
12	9	10
13	9	11
14	10	11
15	11	12
16	11	13
17	12	13
18	12	14
19	13	14
20	14	15
25	17	18
30	19	21
35	22	25
40	25	27
45	28	30
50	31	33

It's probably appropriate to slip in a few words here on the BS-95/BS-99 table. It's the product of a couple of hours of futzing around with a spreadsheet of cumulative binomial probabilities. Assuming that any claim I question has at most a 50% probability of being true (the nominally unbiased position), I calculated the probabilities that, in an article with five substantive claims I could refute at least one of them, at least two and so on. BS-95 represents the number of claims you need to refute to be 95% certain that you're reading (or have just read) a piece of complete bullshit. BS-99 represents the number of refuted claims which entitles you to claim 99% certainty. It's in the nature of the test that you can't claim 100% certainty and that's the way it should be. So there.

As you can see from the table, there's no point trying for a BS-95 if you have fewer than 5 questionable claims to deal with and BS-99 doesn't work below 6. Now let's see if we can apply BS-95 to Pamela Bone's article. A promising place to start is here:

A YouGov poll published in London's Daily Telegraph last month found that 32 per cent of British Muslims believed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". But men were far more likely than women to say this.

Here's the question that was actually put to the poll respondents:

Which of these views comes closest to your own?

• Western society is decadent and immoral,and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, if necessary by violence 1%


• Western society is decadent and immoral,and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, but only by NON-VIOLENT means 31%


• Western society may not be perfect,but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end 56%


• Don't know 11%

So, Bone's claim that 32% of British Muslims want to bring decadent, immoral Western society to an end appears to be supported by the poll results: as long as you're prepared to lump the 31% who believe that this should happen by non-violent means in with the much smaller number (1% or roughly five and a quarter respondents out of a total of 526 (unweighted) or 527 (weighted). It's possible that this little detail got lost at the subbies' desk but the end result is patently inaccurate and misleading in a rather alarmist way. Are men "far more likely than women" to hold this view? On that score, the YouGov report (PDF) of the poll results is silent. All we have to go on is the Daily Telegraph report:

Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims should only seek to bring about change by non-violent means but one per cent, about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence.

Yet again, far more men than women and far more young people than their elders evince this kind of hostility towards the world around them.

You might wonder how 1% of a 527 respondent polling sample can have 16,000 members. The answer is simple; in his report of the poll results the Telegraph's Anthony King is freely projecting the percentages to the Muslim population as a whole. It's a pretty sloppy article, and worthy of a BS-95 check in its own right. Back to Bone, in The Age:

As well, the proportion of Muslim men who said they felt no loyalty to Britain (18 per cent) was more than three times higher than the proportion of women who said the same.

Once again, here are the poll questions:

Turning now to wider issues,how loyal do you think most Muslims living in Britain feel towards Britain?

• Very loyal 28%


• Fairly loyal 48%


• Not very loyal 10%


• Not at all loyal 8%


• Don't know 6%

How loyal would you say you personally feel towards Britain?

• Very loyal 46%


• Fairly loyal 33%


• Not very loyal 6%


• Not at all loyal 10%


• Don't know 4%

[emphasis added]

Here's the Telegraph report:

... YouGov asked respondents how loyal they feel towards Britain. As the figures ... show, the great majority say they feel "very loyal" (46 per cent) or "fairly loyal" (33 per cent) but nearly one British Muslim in five, 18 per cent, feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all.

If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country.

The proportion of men who say they feel no loyalty to Britain is more than three times the proportion of women saying the same.

Whoa, Hold on there! Where did that 18% total of people who feel little or no loyalty come from? In the second question, where respondents are asked about their own loyalties, as distinct from assessing the loyalty of others there are 6% of respondents who are not very loyal and 10% who are not loyal at all; that's a total of 16% over the two categories, not 18%. The 18% figure appears to come from adding up the not very loyal/not at all loyal percentages for the previous question where respondents weren't asked about their own feelings of loyalty, but how loyal they reckoned everyone else was. It's like conducting a poll on stupidity and inferring that most people think they are stupid, based on their responses to a question something like this:

Which of these views comes closet to your own:

• Most people are stupid;


• A lot of people are stupid;


• Some people are stupid;


• Few people are stupid;


• Don't know.

Note too, that in the Telegraph report, there's no mention of how many Muslim men say that they feel no loyalty to Britain. But somehow, when it gets to Bone's turn in this little game of Chinese whispers, we have a definite figure: it's that wandering 18% again.

Now, the results so far:

Claim: 32% of British Muslims want to bring decadent, immoral Western society

Misrepresentation. Firstly, it's 32 percent of the poll respondents and extrapolation to the general population of British Muslims has to be approached with caution. It ignores the distinction between respondents who want it done peacefully and the much smaller number who are prepared to contemplate violent means. Verdict: bullshit. Count it towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: men were far more likely than women to want this.

Questionable, but not refuted on the available information. So it can't be counted towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: 18% of Muslim men said they felt no loyalty to Britain.
On the available information, this is bullshit, so we count it towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: That 18% of men was more than 3 times as high as the percentage of women who felt no loyalty to Britain.

Questionable, but not refuted on the available information. So it can't be counted towards the BS-95 score.

Blimey, this is getting to be a long piece isn't it? And we haven't even got the count of all questionable assertions and arguments in yet. So much for the idea of coming up with a quick, simple way to rate the bullshit content of an op-ed piece. On the other hand, I may have inadvertently stumbled on a scrupulously thorough and fair way to do it. It's bloody tedious, though. Right now, I think I'll take a break and come back to this after I've had time for some sleep.

Update (Thursday, 11 August): Anthony King, referred to above as "the Telegraph's Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University.

After reviewing the spreadsheet of binomial probabilities from which I derived the BS-95 and BS-99 scores, I've decided that Table 1 needs to be revised. A lot.

I'm getting well and truly sick and tired of putting in so much bloody time on what started out as not much more than a half-arsed throwaway idea.

Blaming St Anselm

I started out last Thursday morning the proud owner of two second-hand, out-of-warranty and out-of-date PCs, thinking that, with a little work, I could I could up-grunt the less obsolete of the two so that it would remain more or less serviceable until the next time I'm offered an out-of-warranty PC with bugger all resale value which I might as well have. 24 hours later I was down to one half-working PC and the realisation that it probably hadn't been a good idea to begin the job thinking "Well, this might not be a good day for making major life decisions or writing thoughful, analytical posts for the blog, but I'm probably up to a few hours of tinkering around with a Phillips' Head screwdriver."

Things started out promisingly enough. Thursday afternoon I opened up the more clapped out of the two PCs, unplugged the hard-drive and slid it into the drive bay of the new box. I then put the bay back in the box, did a bit of work with the Phillips head to secure it and transferred the cables from the existing hard drive to the newly installed one. This is pretty much the same procedure I used when I got the older machine to replace a completely dead one.

I plugged in the monitor, keyboard and mouse and turned on the power. Boot, boot, boot: up came the award BIOS, found the hard-drive and there was the GRUB boot loader telling me I had a choice of booting up Fedora Core 2 and bugger all else and if I didn't make up my mind which one within ten seconds it was going to be Fedora, like it or not. I hit the enter key, and there was some more boot, boot, boot right up to the "Checking for new hardware" message. A couple of bits of hardware had gone missing - a modem and the video card - so I discarded those and let Fedora pick up on the new stuff, like the new video card it had to deal with. All very smooth and cool, just like last time. Then it was back to the last of the boot, boot, boot.

Which all went fine, right up to the point where the PC tried to load the X-Windows GUI, couldn't find the monitor and reverted to text mode, which it was handling without any problems at all. No big drama, thinks I. Had this happen before, got it sorted in a lot less time than it took Zeppo Bakunin when he gave it a try with a Windows hard-drive because the hard-drive on his newly bought second-hand desparation clunker was completely useless. Now where are those mental notes I made on how to sort this? Uh-oh, looks like they found their way into the old cerebral round file. Oops.

No big problem; I had a command line, I could use "man" to find the answer, couldn't I? "man X" I typed and paged quickly through the output to the "See Also" section; "XProjectTeam(7x), XStandards(7x) ..." Nup, nothing promising there. Dimly, I was starting to remember that last time I'd used some program called "xsetup" or "xconfig" or something like that to set up the GUI from the command line. "locate xsetup", I commanded. Nothing. "locate xconfig", I tried. Nothing there either. How about "locate xcfg". Again nothing, except the first stirrings of an ugly, slightly panicked realisation that things weren't going all that well. For the sake of my sanity, I needed to find someone to blame, and I needed to do it quickly.

And so to bed, where I lay in the half-dark running through a list of likely suspects in my head. Single mothers perhaps? Had their malign influence somehow bollixed my new PC? Could the evil spirit of single-motherhood have somehow crept out of its usual haunts in the stews of underclass land to lay its blight on my life, just as it lays its blight on the national economy and our entire social fabric? However appealing, that notion seemed a bit of a stretch. The root of the problem was probably to be found elsewhere.

Eventually, I wrenched my mind away from this profitless train of thought to something else; Mark Bahnisch's off-hand comment at Larvatus Prodeo that St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God

... [is] useful mainly for giving you an enormous headache in first year philosophy before you suddenly see how easy it is to refute.

There might be a post in this, I thought, once I have a working PC again and, by hook or by crook, I'd have one Friday. Even if it meant putting the Fedora hard-drive back in its old box, while I sorted the new one. Personally, I've never been convinced that refuting the ontological argument for the existence of God is quite the philosophical walkover that Mark's comment suggests. In addition, if someone trots it out in a discussion, they're unlikely to consider themselves refuted if all you have to say is something like "That's pretty much St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and any first year philosophy student could tell you what's wrong with it." It invites the question "Can you tell me what's wrong with it?" And there you are, in deep discourse doo-doo because of course you could, back in the days when you were a first year student cutting your philosophical teeth on St Anselm, but you've forgotten precisely how that easy refutation went.

St Anselm's argument went something like this:

• God is the only perfect being we can imagine.


• If God did not exist then it would be possible to imagine a being who is more perfect than God: one who is in every respect like God except that she exists and God doesn't.


• That's pretty much a contradiction - we can't assert that God is the only perfect being imaginable and then go off imagining something more perfect so:


• God must exist.

It's pretty clear that something has gone wrong here but it's a bugger to put your finger on what it is. So much so that the ontological argument has been repeated a few times in the history of philosophy; Descartes trotted one out and Berkeley produced an entire metaphysics which purported to show that we needed God to keep an eye on the forests so that the trees could be confident that when they fell over, they really fell over. The ontological argument is an obstinate little bugger. You think you've got it refuted and it just picks itself up and crawls away to hide in the dark for a couple of centuries. It's a philosophical cockroach.

It doesn't help that explaining what's gone wrong usually requires a discussion of the principles of logic. You can refute St Anselm's argument, to the satisfaction of logicians at least, by trying to frame it in the languge of formal logic with all those upside down As and backward Es. But that's really only a preliminary step towards explaining the error in ordinary language. And if the argument is being advanced by someone who is logic-blind - the usual case - it's a complete waste of time. They'll invoke something like "higher rationality" or run the old "Well logicians only set up the rules that way for their own convenience" line.

Soothed by the contemplation of my own brilliance, I finally slept. Friday morning I was ready to resume work, thinking "Let's get this done so that I can get the St Anselm piece written. But if things aren't working by 11:30, I'll have to stop because there's that too long neglected little bit of unpleasant personal business to take care of this afternoon."

Half an hour later, the new PC was refusing to boot completely. Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger! No point cursing the situation; it was time to swallow the little pride I had left and go to the fallback position: put the hard-drive back in the old box.

Once that was done, in went the connections for the monitor, keyboard and mouse and I hit the power switch, confident that within a few minutes I would have a working PC again. OK, so it was the one I wanted to replace but half a loaf is better than no bread or something. Boot, boot, boot, here's GRUB so hit the enter key to bring up Fedora Core 2. Beautiful. And here's the Award BIOS again because the Linux kernel just crashed. Boot, boot, boot and let's go round again a couple more times just to confirm that things are utterly and irredeemably stuffed.

So, things looked irredeemably stuffed, eh? Why not try booting from the installation CDs, I thought. We'll get that St Anselm piece written yet. I changed the BIOS settings, fed the installation CD into the machine and away we went; whatever was wrong, it was on the hard-drive. As soon as I figured out what it was, I could fix it. But right now I'd reached the time limit of 11:30 am, so figuring it out and fixing it would have to wait until later.

It's looking a lot like cut-to-the-chase time; obviously I now have a working PC again, or you wouldn't be reading this. The too long neglected bit of personal business got done and I actually got a couple of amusing moments out of it. And sometime in the next couple of days I may feel up to taking a look at the new PC to see whether it's true that, with a little help from St Anselm and the single mothers, it's been turned into a box o' junk.

Thanks, but No Thanks

Zeppo Bakunin just brought this little item to my attention. It's from the employment pages of The Age:

Are you a team player who enjoys working within a down to earth yet highly professional team? An opportunity now exists for a passionate customer service professional to join an Australian organisation infamous for their cutting edge designs & superior service ... With your highly developed communication skills you take pride in going that extra mile and being recognised for your commitment and hard work ...

It's easy to see that an organisation whose designs and service standards have made it infamous would be crying out for good customer service people, but I find it hard to imagine that they're going to attract anyone who's actually passionate about the job. Unless perhaps, there's a passionate customer service professional out there who's thinking that maybe it's time for a sea-change and reckons a good dose of complete disillusionment might be just the thing to push them along a bit.