Grace and Sour Grapes

Now we know. Contrary to reports published in Sydney's Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, the flag that was (briefly) wrapped around the face of Saddam Hussein's statue came from the US Senate gift shop. In response KnobBlog makes this graceful admission:

I WAS WRONG. The flag that was draped over the statue of Saddam did not come from the Pentagon. Media Watch last night presented two impressive sources who contradict widespread international reports - and my own repeated and, as it turns out, incorrect claims - that the flag was sourced from the Pentagon on September 11.

But what Media Watch won't admit is that they didn't know they were right when they aired their initial report. It took Media Watch three weeks of research - prompted by this site and various comments at the Media Watch website - to prove their case. Their situation is analogous to someone who assumes OJ Simpson is guilty because of his race, and who is subsequently proved correct by DNA evidence.

On the other hand, Tim was wrong when he criticised the original report, he's been wrong for the past three weeks and now he's man enough to admit that he was wrong all the time - he just didn't know it yet. Sounds logical enough to me.

Meanwhile ...

I'm feeling lazy today, so I'm going to take a book out of James Russell's leaf and post a brief round-up on what other bloggers have been saying.

While Ken Parish has been on a short hiatus, various commenters have been lowering the tone at Troppo Armadildlo.

John Quiggin has been collecting suggestions on how to restock his library. He also complains the The Bill has jumped the shark. Obviously he never saw The Noble Conflict, the celebrated Taiwanese chop-socky soap opera which jumped the shark in the very first episode and never looked back.

Pedantry has some interesting thoughts on the American education system.

Rob Schaap found some worthwhile ideas in this article.

meika has been traumatised by discovering the US' foremost gutter intellectual.

And in the mainstream media Chris Puplick has resigned from his position as president of the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board. I think it's even money that Ozblogistan's favourite conservative harridan will have something to say about this on Wednesday. In fact I'm prepared to bet my blog on it.

If your blog is listed on BlogShares you can take up the bet by posting a comment. Just tell me how many shares of your blog you're willing to put up for a chance to win an equal number of Tug Boat Potemkin shares. The house limit is 100 shares.

Strange Bedfellows

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Stanley of the Billabong but he makes a very good point here:

The Victorian government is about to waive its own discrimination laws in order to indulge Commissioner Nixon's desire to attract more female recruits. "It will also bring a greater diversity of approach to policing, particularly in areas such as negotiation and communication, where women are acknowledged to have different approaches to men," Nixon was quoted as saying. She's peddling trendy tosh from the syllabus of some womyn's studies collective at one of Australia's institutes of higher learning. But let that go - and overlook, too, the sad spectacle of those paid to enforce and uphold the law blithely circumventing those parts of it they find inconvenient.

As a reasonable citizen, what really troubles the professor is that this priority to achieve gender equity in the ranks is an example of grossly misplaced priorities. Since the police force's primary brief now appears to be raising public revenue via speeding fines (and private funds via cooperation with drug runners), does it really matter if it is a male copper or a female one who chooses not to enforce the laws that matter the most - the ones intended to safeguard property and safety? If Victoria had a parliamentary Opposition worthy of the name, some honourable member would point out as much on the floor of the chamber. Sadly, like Mrs. Bunyip, the very people who should be raising a stink prefer to peddle fibs. In this case, the lie of silence. [Stanley's emphasis]

Back in my early days as a bureaucrat, working for the now defunct Department with a Continuing Identity Crisis, I learned the difference between affirmative action, which is what they have in the US, and equal employment opportunity, which is what we're supposed to have in Australia. It's worth spelling out the difference, because a lot of people confuse the two. Affirmative action aims to overcome discrimination in favour of incompetent white heterosexual males by promoting discrimination in favour incompetents who are otherly genitalled or of other sexual orientations and colours. Equal employment opportunity is based on the principle that the best person for the job is the most competent, regardless of these factors, although it's unlikely to be much help if, despite your obviously superior vocational competence, you keep missing out on jobs because you can't resist picking your nose during the selection interview.

As Stanley points out, it's unlikely that Victoria's decimated opposition will have much of an effect here. It's also probably too much to hope that anyone on the Left of the ALP might get up on her hind legs and point out that this action flies in the face of Leftie principles too.

Curiouser and Curiouser

I took a look at the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 today. I wanted to find out whether the Therapeutic Goods Administration might have dealt with Pan's quality control failures without suspending the company's licence for 6 months. Section 40, Subsection 2 looked promising:

(2) The Secretary may, by notice in writing given to the holder of a licence, impose new conditions on the licence or vary or remove existing conditions.

I'm not sure whether this means that the TGA could have made it a condition of Pan's licence that they replace their entire senior management or submit to a period of outside administration but either of those possibilities strikes me as being preferable to the licence suspension.

I vaguely intended a longish, "well-considered" blog on the topic, but I got derailed by the latest revelation about Pan's bizarre corporate culture:

The theft of a million cold tablets from Pan Pharmaceuticals two years ago led to a security upgrade at the embattled pharmaceutical company, a NSW Health spokeswoman said today.

The theft of the cold and flu tablets, which can be manufactured into amphetamines valued at tens of millions of dollars, from the Pan factory at Moorebank at the end of March 2001 is currently the subject of a police inquiry, NSW Health said.

...

The spokesman [sic] confirmed the tablets, contained in eight packing pallets, were left on an external loading dock on the night of the robbery.

She also confirmed a large external floodlight was not working on the night of the theft and a security camera had been disabled.

Doing the Numbers

Rob Corr has found reason to be outraged in this Boston Globe report on further shootings in the Iraqi town of Falluja and this report from The Age of a US Marine who mistakenly adopted Tom Highway, Clint Eastwood's character in Heartbreak Ridge as a role model.

It's obvious that Rob hasn't got the hang of our new style of moral clarity. As Gareth Parker has pointed out, apropos the Iraq Body Count, what really matters in assessing the morality of US actions in Iraq is not the body count from isolated, and regrettable, incidents where "excess" force has been used by the US military, but how the casualty rate compares with that Saddam might have inflicted if he were still in power. John Quiggin has obviously got the hang of this, and provides a reasoned discussion of recent events, based on a more rigorous quantitative approach to the problem.

Gareth estimates that Saddam Hussein's regime would have killed 4,420 people since March 20 if the war had not gone ahead. If we throw in the death toll since the first Gulf War (when Saddam was very firmly repudiated by the administration of George Bush I) it's obvious that the US has a lot of catching up to do before the Left are entitled to claim that the actions of the US have any moral equivalence with Saddam's. The fact that the US' actions are taken in the interests of promoting democracy and ridding the world of the threat of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and various other forms of unpleasantness extends the ethical leeway a good deal further. As does the fact that the "innocent civilians" involved in the Falluja incidents were anything but innocent: they were anti-American demonstrators.

Perhaps it's time to move on to more important things, like the scandalous increase in car registration fees that Victorian drivers will face from July 1st this year. Now there's an issue worth getting outraged about - unless you're a West Australian of course.

Lentilgrad

The German port of Hamburg has been offered 10,000 euros ($US10,500) to change its name to "Veggieburg" by animal rights activists, who are unhappy about the city's association with hamburgers.

Qu(ot)e?

Instead, history has degenerated into mere emotion. The black armband is fastened so tightly, it has cut circulation to rational thinking. Historical facts that make us feel proud have been expunged. [My emphasis]

The anatomically correct Janet Albrechtsen in today's Oz.

Mouldy Oldie

I don't know why I got two referrals from Ken Parish's oldest site looking for Slavery and Double Effect but it's a good excuse to revive a personal favourite.

Placebomol

Thanks to James Russell for this report on the interesting business background of Pan Pharmaceuticals founder Jim Selim:

... In 1976 Mr Selim appeared before the Pharmacy Board of NSW charged with professional misconduct.

The charge - failing to include a substance in a manufactured item - related to his making of paracetamol tablets. Some batches contained no paracetamol.

Not exactly what you'd call a fair cop - it's well known that in about 40% of cases the tablets would have cured headaches anyway.

Woomerenstein

Phil Ruddock is very cross:

It's a dose of virtual reality that the Immigration Minister could probably do without: a computer game in which players try to escape from Australian detention centres has received $25,000 in federal funding.

The game, Escape from Woomera, will be modelled on four of the country's most contentious detention centres. It received the money from the Australia Council, the federal arts funding body, last month.

...

"The decision reflects poorly upon the Australia Council and its judgement, that the organisation should lend its name to the promotion of unlawful behaviour," Mr Ruddock said yesterday.

He's going to hit the roof when he hears about the boss monster on level 9.

An Unfortunate Contrast

According to ABC News, there have been two gunfights today in that dangerous WMD-owning rogue state which recently got democratised. First, there's this report of a gunfight involving Australian troops:

In a statement, Defence Force spokesman Brigadier Mike Hannan says the soldiers came across three men carrying guns during a patrol of the city on Sunday.

Brigadier Hannan says rather than engage in a street battle, the patrol broke off the contact after a few shots were fired.

And then there's this report of a gunfight involving somebody else's troops:

Lieutenant Christopher Hart, of the 82nd Airborne Division, says his unit, which is occupying the school, used smoke to try and disperse a crowd of 100 to 200 people who came down the street towards them chanting.

But US troops opened fire after two men carrying AK-47s suddenly came from behind the crowd on a motorcycle and started shooting at the school.

"They had AK-47s and, as they drove by, they opened up on the near side of this building here," he said.

"What happened was we engaged personnel on the motorcycle."

He says some people in the crowd also fired at the US troops.

He says he is not sure how many people were killed but estimates the death toll at between seven and 10.

[Local people, including the head of the main hospital in the town, say at least 13 people were killed and about 75 wounded.]

Looting the Looter State

I got an E-mail from dj the other day about Strawman's post Treasure the Memories at the Australian Libertarian Society Blog. Strawman questions whether the looting of Iraq's museums is such a bad thing:

The fact is that some individual (or individuals) made a decision in Iraq to deprive the collective of these relics of the past. Perhaps this was the act of a thoughtless hooligan, or perhaps it was someone who thought that it was time for Iraq to move forward.

Thinking about it, there's some merit to the idea of depriving the collective (an organisation which imposes the wishes of the group at the expense of the freedom of the individual) of treasures that they really don't appreciate anyway. Especially in my current circumstances: as well as feeding the cats and fishes (but not, I hope, acting as feline undertaker) it would be pleasing to repay my absent hosts with some small gift to show my appreciation for the way they have more or less given me the run of their house for the next couple of weeks. There's a couple of Arthur Streetons and Frederick McCubbins at the National Gallery of Victoria which would really enhance the decor. However much the curators might miss them, I doubt that the hoi-polloi who drag their icy-pole sucking toddlers through the place would notice much more than a few blank spaces on the walls. While I'm at it, I might as well pick up a Norman Lindsay for myself. After all, it was my taxes that paid for the damn things.

Back In the Saddle

I'm house-sitting for the next couple of weeks: in return for feeding three cats, six siamese fighting fish and nine goldfish, I get access to Foxtel. As usual when people go away and leave you in charge of their house, there's been a swag of last minute written and verbal instructions: how to set the video recorder to record Due South each time it's on, when to put out the garbage, where to find the spade if the oldest cat dies and you have to bury it.

Now I have the place to myself, I figure it's time to get back to blogging, although there's a lot to catch up on since I last posted 11 days ago. Just to ease back into things, here's a little gem from AM's Finance Reporter and master of purple prose, Stephen Long, reporting on the OECD's latest economic forecast:

The OECD's forecast was glum enough six months ago. And since then, war and pestilence have further undermined the outlook for economic growth.

Still, with only two of the Four Horsemen of Global Economic Recession abroad, the news isn't too grim: at worst we're in for a period of slow growth ,that is "growth below potential" or "growth below trends". Thank heaven for minor mercies.

Maybe, Maybe Not

When I was 14 years old, my father would sometimes drive me home from school. He drove an EH station wagon. He always had the radio on: there was Mitch Miller and Doris Day and Connie Francis. And I would sit there wishing it was The Beatles and The Stones and The Who. Then one day, I heard a woman speaking softly against a low accompaniment say:

I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up
in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement ...

As she spoke, I was drawn into her story, although I thought it was a little strange: this couldn't be a song. Then she reached the chorus and I realised that, yes, it was a song. And though I resisted - this was not the sort of music that I was supposed to like - I came to like it. After a few weeks, it wasn't getting played and I forgot about it. I never made the mistake of mentioning it to my friends, in case they thought me daggy.

Years later I fell in love, head over heels in love, with the most wonderful girl in the world. While there were no long walks by the river, there were times when we would sit for hours gazing into each other's eyes. It ended just as it did in the song - she went away and I thought I would die, but I didn't. I did go out and buy an album of Peggy Lee's greatest hits; not intentionally, it was there in the record store when I went in to buy something else. I picked it up anyway. That night I played that one song over and over for hours, until the guy in the flat below started banging on his ceiling, to let me know that it was now his turn to piss me off by playing Help Me Rhonda ad nauseam.

I know what you must be saying to yourselves: this piece isn't going anywhere, why doesn't he just end it now?

In the Red Purple

I'm starting to go off waking up to AM in the morning. Especially after this report on the HIH Royal Comission by finance reporter Stephen Long. Here's a potted version:

At times the hearings into HIH's collapse became an unseemly squabble between the culprits to apportion blame. Some claim the purchase of FAI from Rodney Adler was the straw that broke the camel's back. Rodney Adler said: "It's got nothing to do with me."

...

Justice Neville Owen's report tells a story of a company killed slowly by ineptitude as it shambled towards oblivion. ...

But the latest sale of FAI's profitable insurance lines to the German company Allianz was the "harbinger of doom".

The report says Ray Williams ran the company like a personal fiefdom, unchallenged by an incompetent board.

...

Justice Owen says HIH was not a place where wholesale fraud and embezzlement abounded but as it slowly disintegrated, key executives stand accused of lying to paper over the cracks.

...

Still others looted the ship as it sank.

...

Like Julius Caesar, HIH toppled on the Ides of March, March 15th, 2001, and also like Caesar, the regulator APRA failed to heed the warning signs.

...

But the victims could still be left wondering why so few criminal charges? Their careers may be over but it seems few, if any, of the culprits will go to jail.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Finance Correspondent Stephen Long.

Am I reading too much into John Ray's post WHY REDS ARE PREFERRED TO NAZIS, or did someone lose a bet recently?

Corrigendum: in the post below, please read "debris" for "rubble" throughout.

Where's My Rubble? There's Supposed to Be Rubble!

It looks like the ABC's Media Watch got it wrong, yet again. And Tim Blair has the evidence. Makes you wonder why they bother:

ON MONDAY night, Media Watch host David Marr casually dismissed the whole "Pentagon flag on Saddam's statue" story as bogus ...

Tim has found a lot of other media which lend credence to the Daily Telly's claim that:

The Stars and Stripes used by US Marine Corporal Ed Chin to cover the statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square was under the debris at the Pentagon following the September 11 al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

Or do they? Here's the Associated Press version of how Lt. Tim McLaughlin got that flag:

"Tim actually went back into the Pentagon and assisted after the attack occurred. He was given a flag that day and has kept it with him ever since," [Lt. McLaughlin's father Phil McLaughlin] "In fact, I saw him pack it when I was out to see him in 29 Palms Marine Base in January." [my emphasis].

No mention of the rubble there. The same wording appears in Lt McLaughlin's home-town newspaper: again, without the rubble. No rubble in Tim's corroborating detail from The Irish Times either:

"That flag came from the Pentagon on 9/11," Sgt Lambert said with something like awe in his voice. "Lt Tim McGloughlan [a colleague] was there on the day. We brought it all the way from 29 Palms. We drove our tanks all the way from Kuwait City with the flag in a plastic bag."

The BBC's report comes close to corroborating the Daily Telly's version, if you're prepared to accept hearsay:

Marines say that the US flag draped over Saddam Hussein's statue was the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

Oops - what was it doing at the top of the flagpole? Wasn't it supposed to be in the rubble? Never mind there's always this report from the UK Daily Telegraph:

The US flag used to cover Saddam's head was recovered from the Pentagon after the September 11 attack and carried to Baghdad by Marines.

There's that missing rubble again. Not looking good is it?

More Second Thoughts

I think I may have been a little harsh on Uncle Hugh : he may have been onto something in his article in the Saturday Age after all. It looks like the Federal Government's head union kicker Tony Abbott has adopted the approach to life Hugh says a lot of ordinary Australians are taking; forget the world situation and concentrate on the things you can control. In Tony's case that means the building unions:

The Federal Government has stepped up its campaign against the powerful Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, declaring unacceptable deals between the union and two big construction companies.

Australia Post will call for fresh tenders for a new mail screening facility at Melbourne Airport because the two preferred tenderers have breached federal industrial relations standards.

The $20 million facility, which will be part of the anti-terrorism fight as well as protecting against exotic diseases and illegal drugs coming into the country, was to be completed by the end of this year. It is now likely to be delayed at least several months. [My emphasis]

I don't intend to spend a lot of time on criticising Abbott's actions. Not today, anyway. And I'm certainly not going to criticise it on the grounds that it shows that the Government is more serious about fighting the building unions than terrorism, exotic diseases or illegal drugs. Abbott is setting an admirable example of how to be alert, but not alarmed. Of course it's going to be interesting to hear what he has to say when the Parliamentary debate on the ASIO Bill is resumed. Assuming that he does have anything to say of course.

Just Who Did Discover the Cook Strait?

I keep coming across the name of David Stove in various places especially here but he's also scored a mention in book reviews where the author is described as being an admirer of the "obscure Sydney philosopher" David Stove. Since reading some of Stove's work, such as Helps to Young Authors, I've decided that this admiration comes from the same sort of intellectual curiosity seeking which, if left unchecked, could easily develop into a morbid fascination with the life and works of Aleister Crowley.

Helps to Young Authors is my favourite piece of Stove's writings, for several reasons. It's freely available on-line and, as the cost of hard-drive capacity is likely to keep falling, it will probably remain so. It's mercifully short. Finally, I like to think that it represents Stove's intellect and wit at their sharpest because, if my assessment is correct, I can spare myself the tedium of wading through the rest of his writing.

In Helps to Young Authors, Stove attempts to take the piss out of the way Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Emmanuel Lakatos neutralise success-words. What Stove is referring to (part of what he dislikes in the work of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos) is that they put "scare quotes" around words like "discover". I'm not quite sure how it's possible to wet your own trousers while trying to take the piss out of others but Stove manages to do it. Take for example, Stove's parody of Kuhn:

It would of course be a gross anachronism to call the flat-earth paradigm in geography mistaken. It is simply incommensurable with later paradigms: as is evident from the fact that, for example, problems of antipodean geography could not even be posed under it. Under the Magellanic paradigm, however, one of the problems posed, and solved in the negative, was that of whether New Zealand is a single land mass. That this problem was solved by Cook is, however, a vulgar error of whig historians, utterly discredited by recent historiography. Discovery of the Strait would have been impossible, or at least would not have been science, but for the presence of the Royal Society on board, in the person of Sir Joseph Banks. Much more research by my graduate students into the current sociology of the geographical profession will be needed, however, before it will be known whether, under present paradigms, the problem of the existence of Cook Strait remains solved, or has become unsolved again, or an un-problem.

...

...

Although it's a passable parody of Kuhn's style there's a small problem. Stove has chosen a poor example: there are a couple of very good reasons for thinking that the claim that Cook discovered Cook Strait is inflated.

The first ought to be familiar from the controversy over whether we can really claim that Columbus discovered America when America already had a native population when the Nino, the Pinta and the Santa Maria fetched up on the shores of one of the Carribean islands (which island is still in dispute). This same argument applies to Cook's discovery of the Cook Strait unless you accept that the Maoris snuck int oNew Zealand quietly while Cook's back was turned. Assuming that they were already there, it's hard to imagine how they could remain unaware that they were living on two islands separated by a mere 20 kilometers or so at their closest points. If they were laboring under the delusion that New Zealand was a single land mass, they would have learnt otherwise as soon as they tried to walk from the North Island to the South or vice versa. Or lacking the frigates and brigantines of the Royal Navy, they didn't appreciate the significance of Cook Strait to the European science of navigation.

One way out of this difficulty and restore Cook's legitimate claim to the discovery of Cook Strait isn't too far from the post-modernist "one history, many truths" approach. We might say that, while it is true from the Maori point of view that Cook didn't discover Cook Strait, Cook can lay claim to the discovery as the first European to navigate and chart the strait. It's important that we be precise about the nature of Cook's cognitive achievement here: if his claim to discovery rested in having been the first European to sail through the strait, we'd have to call it Cook and the Crew of the Endeavour Strait unless, perhaps, he ran out to the end of the bowsprit when the crow's nest look-out cried out "Strait on the starboard bow!" It's the sort of thing I can imagine as part of the Royal Navy tradition: a friendly foot-race from the quarterdeck to the very front of the boat every time a strait was up for discovery. Just the sort of thing to win the love of the crew, tempering the austerity of Navy discipline by showing them that their officers had a playful side too. Finally, it's obvious that we can't claim that Cook discovered Cook Strait (at least from a European perspective) on the basis that he was the first European to see the strait: that honour would rightfully belong to the crow's nest look-out which would make it Able Seaman Smith Strait or something similar. But only a Marxist historian would say anything like that.

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