Movie Classics

A still from the long forgotten Australian silent film The Cabinet of John Winston Howard.

Serving Suggestion

What about me?

... It isn't fair
I've had enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

Haneef admits it: "I was arrested"

Q38. Do you recall me saying that. That you were under arrest.

A. Yes you arrested me um, but I didn't know that, ah then you, you said that I have been ah involved in terrorist activities. But I deny that I have been involved in any...

Q39. Okay. Do you agree that I told you at that time that you were under arrest for providing material support to terrorist organisation.

A. Well I haven't, I, I haven't provided...

Q40. Okay. I understand that but I'm saying to you, do you agree that that's what I said to you.

A. Well I, I've submitted to you for whatever reasons, you have ah taken um top clear myself from whatever charges I am being put on.

Q41. Okay. I'm just asking you whether, do you recall me saying that you were under arrest.

A. Yes.

More here (PDF).

Phil Ruddock is spitting chips that this damning admission was leaked to The Oz.

Egging Brendan

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, might find himself with a few things to explain about his handling of the Education portfolio, back in the day:

THE long-held secret of which nine Australian Research Council grants were vetoed by former education minister Brendan Nelson may soon be out, with the affected researchers to be asked whether they want the details made public.

...

Dr Nelson vetoed three projects in 2004 and seven in 2005 (one of which had been rejected in 2004, suggesting there were nine academics involved). These Discovery projects - believed to be in the social sciences and humanities - had been approved by ARC peer review.
(National Rupert Daily)

Any embarassment that might cause our Brendan, will come on top of being made a liar by Kevin Andrews' decision that Doctor Muhammed Haneef - reckless supplier of mobile phone facilities to family members who later turned out to be terrorists - will go into immigration detention if he ever takes advantage of his grant of bail. Last Thursday, The Times of India reported:

Refusing to go into merits or otherwise of the case of Haneef, who has been detained for the last nine days, or divulge details of the investigation, Nelson said there was "no intention to detain him (Haneef) beyond a period that is considered by the judge as appropriate."

The report, ironically, is headlined "Haneef case: India promises Australia all help". Pity it looks as if the promise was obtained under false pretences, making it completely void. But what do integrity and good diplomatic relations matter when you've got an election to win.

(Cross Posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Go Ahead, Be Stupid - It's Your Democratic Right!

CHRIS UHLMANN: On a personal level, were you expecting to see some signs of a turnaround in the polls by now?

TONY ABBOTT: I think it would be fair to say that you always tend to expect that good government will get a political pay-off, and so far that isn't happening. But I remain reasonably optimistic.

I mean obviously Chris, the public have a right to vote for whomsoever they wish, and they have a right - if they wish - to replace a good government with an inept Opposition. I mean, they have that right.

But nevertheless I guess I have always been pretty confident in the basic good sense of the Australian people. So we'll just keep going forward up to the election and hopefully beyond and see what happens.

(AM, 16 July 2007. My emphasis.)

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo

Guns Don't Kill People - Doctors Kill People!

According to a comment at Club Troppo, doctors are a bigger threat to community safety than guns. And this, being the internet, the commenter, Phil, had the links to prove it.

First there was this report in The National Rupert Daily, "Hospital Bungles are Killing Scores":

AUSTRALIA'S first national report into serious mistakes in public hospitals has found at least 130 avoidable instances in which patients died or were put at serious risk.

Operations or investigations on the wrong patient, or the wrong body part, accounted for the biggest share of the mistakes, at 41 per cent of the 130 "sentinel events" recorded in 2004-05.

...

Stephen Bolsin, associate professor of patient safety at Victoria's Geelong Hospital, said there was no evidence hospital safety had improved since a landmark 1995 report showed that up to 8per cent of hospital patients would be the victim of a preventable mistake - and 10 per cent of these would cause permanent disability or death.

"Safety breaches in Australian healthcare are killing more people than breast cancer or road accidents," Associate Professor Bolsin said.

"But it doesn't get anything like the attention ... there's no evidence things have changed over the past 10 years."

I don't know the death rate from breast cancer, but it seems to me that Professor Bolkin is indulging in hyperbole when he says that the Australian healthcare system kills more people than road accidents. A quick check of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's Road Deaths Australia: 2006 Statistical Summary reveals this fact:

In 2006, there were 1,601 persons killed in 1,456 road crashes. Comparing the number killed with the previous year, this was a 1.6% decrease (1,627 persons killed in 1,472 crashes).

So the comparative scores are: road traffic deaths - 1,601, patients killed or put at serious risk by the health system - 130. If Associate Professor Bolsin's claim is correct we still have around 1,500 iatrogenic deaths to account for.

Phil's other link is to this page at the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia web-site, titled "Doctors: A Health Issue". Here you'll find plenty of reports and links on the health risks of health care.

There are plenty of adjectives to describe this sort of reporting. "Honest" and "truthful" aren't among them.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

More Discredited Documentary Links than You Can Possibly Stomach

Via the Oz Politics Blog Feed, and other sources, here's a quick round up of the responses from bloggers who're having a bit of trouble with getting their heads around the idea that Martin Durkin's mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle was just that - a swindle:

At The Daily Telegraph, Tim Blair reminds us that it's not just cold today in Wagga-Wagga, it's been a cold month across the whole of Australia:

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin' continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ's sake.

No such foolishness will be indulged in here.

Sadly, those who believe in global warming - and who would compel us also to believe - aren't similarly constrained...

The rest of the column, predictably, is exactly the sort of foolishness Tim says he'll avoid.

Pommygranate is incensed that the ABC put so much effort into subverting Durkin's documentary and goes the out-of-context quote to suggest that his displeasure is shared by Carl Wunsch, the scientist who accused Durkin of misrepresenting his opinion:

He was furious with the ABC's decision to run the program, saying

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist. The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

Well, err, quite, Carl. But isn't this the precise point the program was making?

Here's what Wunsch actually said, according to the ABC:

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist," he said.

"The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

"They are possibilities that we think society should take very seriously and try and decide how it is going to deal with them if they come out."

Mr Wunsch has also criticised media organisations including the ABC for broadcasting the documentary.

"TV companies around the world are treating it as though it were a science documentary. It's not," he said.

"It's a contentious political propaganda piece, it's not a science film at all, it's a political statement." (emphasis added)

Finally, Steven Lloyd is angry that Tony Jones dared to challenge Durkin's claim that it's the sun stupid:

Tony Jones spent a lot of time hammering the filmmaker over leaving out the last 20 years on what was otherwise a compelling graph correlating global temperatures with solar activity. The 20 years left off of the graph, diverged completely, making it look bad for the filmmaker that he left it off.

The thing is, even with the last 20 years added in, the graph was still compelling. You don’t disregard the first 80% of a graph which correlates to a high percentage, just because the last 20% didn’t. Tony Jones would have us think exactly that.

No, Kevin - in science, when you find new data that doesn't fit your theory (or in this case Dorkin's belief) you don't ignore the new data - you look for a better theory. At least that's the kind of science they were teaching when I went through secondary school and university - if there's another kind of science where you throw away awkward data, I haven't heard of it. Unless it's economics, maybe.

The solar activity theory doesn't fit the new data - it's a dead theory. It is no more. It has ceased to be.

Well, that's enough of that - I've wasted enough time on irrelevancies for today. And in the long run, the opinions of Tim Blair, PommyGranate and Steven Lloyd aren't going to have any influence. The way things are looking they'll all be voting "1 - Loser" at the coming election.

It's about time John Howard read the writing on the wall and made that visit to the Governor-General, don't you think? Sure, he'd go down in history as the Prime Minister who led the Liberal Party into oblivion but, as a Burkean Conservative, you'd expect him to look to the interests of the nation and exercise his sovereign conscience accordingly.

Update: in the most ineffectual response to date, Diogenes Lamp fisks today's Age Letters and reminds us that global warming is also currently occuring on Mars and other planets. This also gives him the opportunity for a completely gratuitous demonstration that he's not afraid to be politically incorrect.

The Picture from Newspoll

There's a lot of controversy in the blogosphere this morning over the latest Newspoll results, and what they mean and alleged attempts by The National Rupert to monster one or two bloggers.

We can expect that part of the debate to get rather heated over the rest of the day, and well into the weekend and this will inevitably distract a lot of people from the poll results themselves and what they actually mean. Still it's possible that there are a few readers out there who are level-headed enough to be interested in taking a look at the actual poll results and the data analysis, before they weigh into the debate.

Figure 1: Newspoll data as presented to Newspoll's haruspicers (source: six-month old goat).

Figure 2: Data analysis. Key:

1. Kevin Rudd's approval rating. Consistent with past Newspoll findings - and the findings of other polling organisations - this appears to be above that of John Howard.


2. John Howard's approval rating. Note that a large portion of John Howard's approval rating is in fact obscured by Kevin Rudd's approval rating.


3. Bob Brown's approval rating. This is clearly much smaller than either John Howard's or Kevin Rudd's.


4. The ALP's current primary vote.


5. The coalition's primary vote. Once again, the ALP's primary vote appears to be above the coalition's primary vote, obscuring the actual size of the latter.


6. Stuff that will have to be dissected away when the next Newspoll is conducted to get a clearer picture of the real situation.

I don't think there's really any more that needs to be said on the subject - now that you've seen the pictures for yourself, the situation ought to be very clear to everyone.

Good News, Bad News

This might be good news:

$3975.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth
But with the big global zombie apocalypse scare due before the next federal election, this is seriously bad:

50%

Ands a zombie apocalypse would pretty much wipe out the value of my one significant (but seriously illiquid) asset too. Complete bummer.

Exclusive: Government Reveals New Weapon in War on Bad Things

The Government's intervention in Northern Territory indigenous communities took a dramatic new turn today, when the previously secret Special Dominatrix Service (picture) arrived at Mutitjulu.

SDS commander Major Ilsa Vixen explained the Service's role in the intervention to a media conference: "There are some very bad, naughty boys and girls in this community and they deserve to be punished. Mainstream Australia wants to see them punished. We're here to make that happen."

Each member of the SDS will operate in a special, Australian developed, portable dungeon, equipped with an extensive range of whips, chains, paddles, clamps and stuff you really don't want to know about. The dungeons also have several strategically placed web-cams and broadband internet capabilities, via satellite.

For Major Vixen and the other members of the SDS, this is only the start of a long mission. "There are plenty of other people in this country who deserve to feel more pain," she remarked "Well now we're around to inflict that pain."

Decoupage

Societies which seem to us ferocious may turn out, when examined from another point of view, to have their humane and benevolent sides. Take the Plains Insdians of North America: they are doubly significant - first because some of them practised a moderated form of cannibalism, and second because they are one of the few primitive peoples who were endowed with an organized police force. This force, which also had to mete out justice, would never have imagined that the punishments accorded to the guilty could take the form of severing all social links. An Indian who broke the laws of his tribe would be sentenced to the destruction of all his belongings - his tent and his horses. But at the same time the police became indebted to him for the harm he had been made to suffer. This restitution put the criminal, once again, in debt to the group ... Not only are such customs more humane than our own, they are more coherent, even if we are to formulate the problem in terms of modern psychology. It would seem logical that in return for the 'infantilization' of the guilty man that is implied in the notion of punishment, we should acknowledge that he is entitled to gratification of some sort. If this is not done, the initial step loses its effectiveness and may even bring about results directly contrary to those hoped for in the first palce. The summit of absurdity in this context is to do as we do and treat the guilty simultaneously as children, in that they are meet for punishment, and as grown-ups, in that we refuse them all subsequent consolation. It is grotesque to believe that we have made a 'great spiritual advance' simply because, instead of eating our fellow human beings, we prefer to mutilate them, both physically and morally.

Claude Levi-Strauss, "A Little Glass of Rum" (Triste Tropiques, translated as A World on the Wane, 1961).

Now and again, things happen that remind me of that particular passage and I get to thinking about the way individuals and entire sections of the community are treated as children, yet expected to behave as adults. The obvious motivation for this post is the Howard government's current exercise in conspicuous punishment of aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Now go read this post by David Coles at Club Troppo.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Proctalgia, and Sundry other Pains

aerodontalgia - toothache caused by atmospheric decompression (for example in high altitude flying).
arthralgia - pain in one or more joints.
cardialgia - (1) heartburn; (2) pain in the heart.
causalgia - constant burning pain due to peripheral nerve damage.
cephalalgia - headache.
cephalgia - headache.
coxalgia - pain in the hip.
cranialgia - pain occurring within the skull; headache.
enteralgia - pain in the intestines.
erythromelalgia - hot skin rash with burning pain. Usually in the feet.
fibromyalgia - chronic widespread pain with tenderness and muscle stiffness.
gastralgia - pain in the stomach.
hypalgia - hypalgesia, i.e. diminished sensitivity to pain.
ischalgia - pain in the hip.
mastalgia - mastodynia, i.e. pain in the breast. Not often observed in men.
meralgia - pain in the thigh.
metatarsalgia - burning pain below and between the metatarsals where they join the toe bones.
myalgia - pain in one or more muscles.
nephralgia - pain in a kidney.
neuralgia - acute, paroxysmal pain along one or more undamaged nerves.
nostalgia - homesickness; sentimental yearning for the past.
odontalgia - toothache.
otalgia - earache.
polyarthralgia - pain in two or more joints.
polymyalgia - myalgia affecting several muscle groups.
proctalgia - sharp pain of the kind caused by blog posts like this.
psychalgia - mental distress.
veisalgia - sober medical term for a hangover.

Sources: Merriam-Webster OnLine, MedicineNet.com

Mr Burke's Unpleasant Surprise

Edmund Burke - the senior patron saint of Australian Liberalism (but not liberalism) - was first elected to Parliament as the Member for Wendover in 1765. By modern Australian standards he wouldn't be regarded as a democratically elected Member of Parliament - they did things very differently in 18th Century England. Wendover was the next best thing to a rotten borough - a pocket burrough, in the pocket of one Lord Verney, who condescended to accept Burke as his representative in Parliament.

In 1774 Lord Verney informed Burke that he couldn't stump up the readies to get Burke re-elected (in fact, Verney was so strapped for money that he sold the seat out from under Burke) so Burke quickly took himself off to Bristol where he contested a poll for the very first - and last - time in his parliamentary career. It was after winning this poll that he delivered his highly esteemed Speech to the Electors of Bristol where he thanked the electors for the favour that they had bestowed upon him, then went on to set them straight on the matter of "instructions" from electors to their Parliamentary representative:

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

That settled - to Mr Burke's satisfaction, if not the satisfaction of the electors - he took himself off to London as one of the two elected representatives of the freemen of Bristol. While there, he added several dilatory works to the Burke canon:

• Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775


• Letter to the Sheriffs Of Bristol, on the Affairs of America, April 3, 1777


• Two Letters To Gentlemen Of Bristol, On The Bills Depending In Parliament Relative To The Trade Of Ireland, April 23 and May 2, 1778


• Speech on Presenting to the House Of Commons a Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil And other Establishments, February 11, 1780

In September 1780 he returned to Bristol to stand for re-election and delivered two more speeches to the electors. In the first, the Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election, (September 6, 1780) he addressed sundry criticisms, from some of the electors, of his performance as their Representative. In the opening of his speech, Burke made his attitude to these criticisms plain:

If you call upon me, I shall solicit the favor of the city upon manly ground. I come before you with the plain confidence of an honest servant in the equity of a candid and discerning master. I come to claim your approbation, not to amuse you with vain apologies, or with professions still more vain and senseless. I have lived too long to be served by apologies, or to stand in need of them.

Having taken a firm stand on his dignity, Burke then answered his critics, starting with "my neglect of a due attention to my constituents, the not paying more frequent visits here". This charge, he considered quite unreasonable:

... I admit, there is a decorum and propriety in a member of Parliament's paying a respectful court to his constituents. If I were conscious to myself that pleasure, or dissipation, or low, unworthy occupations had detained me from personal attendance on you, I would readily admit my fault, and quietly submit to the penalty. But, Gentlemen, I live at an hundred miles' distance from Bristol; and at the end of a session I come to my own house, fatigued in body and in mind, to a little repose, and to a very little attention to my family and my private concerns. A visit to Bristol is always a sort of canvass, else it will do more harm than good. To pass from the toils of a session to the toils of a canvass is the furthest thing in the world from repose. I could hardly serve you as I have done, and court you too ...

Three days later, Burke delivered the second of his 1780 speeches to the Electors of Bristol - and presumably his last speech to those august gentlement - the Speech at Bristol on Declining the Poll, (September 9, 1780). By then it had become clear to Burke - from his own polling - that he had no chance of winning. Nonetheless he managed to put a brave face on it:

...I have not canvassed the whole of this city in form, but I have taken such a view of it as satisfies my own mind that your choice will not ultimately fall upon me. Your city, Gentlemen, is in a state of miserable distraction, and I am resolved to withdraw whatever share my pretensions may have had in its unhappy divisions...

Burke clearly learnt a little about the role of a Parliamentarian as a representative of his constituents from his Bristol experience - when he returned to Parliamentary life, it was as Member for Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord Fitzwilliam's. Presumably their lordships' demands upon Mr Burke's sovereign conscience and his precious leisure time were less onerous than those of the Electors of Bristol.

Toe in the Water

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

O. Henry "The Gift of the Magi"

Like a tired actor who plays the same role over and over again, hamming it up each time, the leitmotif of the Left lacks a certain sparkle.

J. Albrechtsen "The Left Needs to get Real"

Forget the hashed simile. She was ransacking her brains for something clever to say.

Hiatus Time

A Short Post on Waking with a Hangover and the Sure and Certain Knowledge that You Made a Complete Ass of Yourself Last Night in Divers Ways

It's unpleasant.

"Swindle" - too Little, too Late?

David Tiley at Barista raises an interesting question in a post on The Great Global Warming Swindle:

I’ve been told by loyal ABC staff that “the debate is over” about Holocaust denial and no-one seriously supports it. So how do we decide when the climate debate is over? When I began to suggest that there is no trained consensus against Global Warming any more, I was told the Prime Minister didn’t believe in it.

Hmmm … that reflects his bob-each-way duplicity, in which he is dragged reluctantly to accept it but his government has actively funded anti GW programs for at least five years. He supports a Greenhouse Office, for crying out loud. (my emphasis)

One obvious thought that has a brief moment to cross your mind in the short pause between the two paragraphs is that John Howard is no climate scientist. It's unlikely that he believes that the Earth is flat, but if he did, his opinion wouldn't count for much if you were looking for a trained consensus on the shape of the Earth, its place in the solar system and all that jazz. So why should it matter to the ABC that the Prime Minister doesn't believe in global warming if his opinion is flat-out wrong?

From all the reading I've done on the subject, it appears that the debate over global warming in the scientific community is over - there's just too much evidence that global warming is happening and that the major cause is all the carbon dioxide we've put back into the atmosphere through a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels while, at the same time, removing large parts of the ecosystem that take the stuff back out of the atmosphere. The existence of an Australian Greenhouse Office, the fact that John Howard finally shifted from "it ain't happening", via "we aren't going to stuff up the economy for a theory" to "clean coal and nuclear energy is the answer" are indications that the debate is over in politics.

The only place the debate does survive is in Newstralia, the parallel world inhabited by the punditariat of News Limited, News Limited bloggers and their fans in the blogosphere What are we hearing from that quarter?

Tim Blair is so burnt out on the subject global warming that he's writing complete nonsense, like this article in the Daily Terror (hat tip to John Surname at Grodscorp and this post, where Tim declares that he prefers the theory that global warming is caused by extra-terrestrials microwaving the Earth to anything Al Gore has to say on American politics. Does Tim actually believe that global warming is caused by a giant space alien who can balance a microwave oven on one hand and the Earth on another? Well, the theory gets us off the hook, so it must be worth taking a look at.

The prolific Andrew Bolt got a column and a later post out of the ABC's decision to screen The Great Global Warming Swindle before he got swept up by the deluge of bile that News pumped out on Therese Rein. His last post on Global Warming for the weekend was this weak effort - no new facts, no argument, just a quick snark at Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US Congress for flying to Europe to discuss, among other things, global warming.

Some debate, eh? Seems to me that it really is over and science won. It's not exactly a victory for the Left though - there are still a few Leftists around who think global warming is a vast, global conspiracy against the working class. Even Tim and Andrew will recognise that for a delusion - how can an anti-capitalist conspiracy be a conspiracy atgainst the working class at the same time.

Whoops - maybe I shouldn't have said that. The buggers might get together and come to some bi-partisan agreement on the subject. That could be a real bugger to deal with.

Qu(ot)e?

Feminist women sometimes take the attitude that men just can't take being intellectually inferior to themselves.

Mark at OzConservative.

I know exactly what he means - I've been feeling intellectually inferior to myself all morning and it's not much fun at all. The only good part is that once in a while I get to feel intellectually superior to myself.

There is no evidence that Hicks committed an act of terrorism, though he received more terrorist training than almost any other white man.

Paul Kelly in The Oz.

Well, obviously he didn't mean it that way.

BALCAP!

Bullshit and Lies Create Awesome Possibilities

Here's a story you're not seeing at News Limited for some reason, although it's getting a big run at The Age, The SMH and The Brisbane Times. Plus The ABC.

The Industrial Relations Commission in Canberra is currently hearing a claim of unfair dismissal against the Federal Government. The claimant is Trent Smith - I first learnt of the case through the Hansard for the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade (parlinfo web permalink). I've been waiting since for the proverbial brown stuff to hit the proverbial rotating thing.

And now it has. You can find all the news that's fit to Google here. Enjoy.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo).