'Age of Bastardry Over' - Bastard

HERE is the latest, shocking fashion news: nasty is out and nice is in.

Bastardry is suddenly so last season - just like Big Brother - that all the best stars must now switch their sneers to smiles.

The sooner this trend spreads from TV and radio to those newspapers, the better.

Word of the Day: Thingo

With nothing significant to report from Canberra, the front page of today's Hun is devoted to the dastardly 'West Gate Bomb Plot' of recently convicted terrorist wannabe Abdul Benbrika. According to The Hun's Keith Moor:

One of the most chilling conversations taped by police was between Benbrika terror network member Fadi Sayadi and an associate as they discussed destroying the West Gate Bridge...

Sayadi suggested it would be possible to snorkel or scuba dive under the bridge and plant "thingos underneath".

Obviously Sayadi wasn't talking about water-lilies; nonetheless he sounds completely clueless. Anyone wanting to plant thingos under the Westgate Bridge need only take a walk through Westgate Park in South Melbourne. Once you had your thingos in place at the base of the Eastern pier you could hop on the ferry to Science Works, where a short walk will take you to the Western pier with its memorial to the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction.

If Sayadi had ever made that little trip he might have seen how difficult it would be to bring down the West Gate Bridge with thingos, however well placed. Still, it's a good excuse for THe Hun to milk the story for another day while they wait for the man who would be Prime Minister eventually to make his move on Malcolm Turnbull. Since that's going to take at least six years we can all look forward to a lot more well beaten-up crap on The Hun's front page.

Gutless Bolt Has a Bob Each Way on Freedom of Expression...

... and he's not the only one.

Emily Mapfuwa, a devout Christian, has launched a private prosecution against an art gallery for displaying a statue of Jesus Christ with a beef bugle. According to the good Emily's lawyers, the Baltic Centre for Conteporary Art committed an ‘act of a lewd and a disgusting nature and outraged public decency contrary to Common Law’ by displaying the statue.

The private prosecution is funded and supported by the Christian Legal Centre, an organisation whose aims include:

To promote and protect the freedoms of Bible believing Christians in the United Kingdom; to promote religious freedom as a fundamental right by means of legal action and public promotion.

The Centre's support for freedom of speech is evidently highly qualified and selective in its application, as this private prosecution shows; the Centre will obviously defend the right of Christians to 'freedom to speak and live in accordance with truth'; they take a very dim view of the right of unbelievers to depict their personal saviour with a boner:

The Christian Legal Centre believes in freedom of expression but this statue served no other purpose than to offend Christians and to denigrate Christ.

In plain English, the Christian Legal Centre believes in freedom of expression for Christians only. A private prosecution on criminal charges remains an option for those who offend Christians and, in doing so, infringe on their 'biblical freedoms'.

Andy Bolt isn't too keen on the court action, but with all those adoring Christian readers and fans to pander to, he'd much rather 'despise the cheap shot cowardice' than defend freedom of expression. Once again, it's 'Where are all the blasphemous pictures of Mohammed' time.

Of (Hairless) Mice, Men & Moisturisers

Sometimes it's what the reporters and editors leave out of news stories that makes them interesting - and alarming.

Yesterday's Age included this story by Nick Miller:

Mice moisturiser link to skin cancer criticised

COMMON moisturiser creams including one sold in Australia have been shown to double the risk of skin cancer, in new US research. (original punctuation)

The Age wasn't the only news outlet to carry the story. Here's The Daily Mail:

Moisturisers used by millions of women every day could increase risk of skin cancer

Moisturisers used by millions of women every day may raise the risk of skin cancer, scientists have warned. (original punctuation)

Here's The Daily Telegraph (UK):

Common moisturiser 'could cause skin cancer'

Moisturisers used by millions of people each day could be responsible for causing a variety of skin cancers, according to a study. (original punctuation)

Here's The National Rupert:

Study: Moisturisers cause skin cancer

From correspondents in Paris

MOISTURISERS used by millions of people have induced skin cancer in experiments on mice, a new study says. (original punctuation)

Here's ABC Online:

Skin moisturisers may increase cancer risk: research

Australians have long been told by cosmetic companies that the best way to reduce skin damage from the sun is to apply moisturising cream, but some US biologists say some common moisturisers may promote skin cancer.

I'll finish the roundup with a shot of sanity from The New Scientist:

Moisturisers cause cancer in mice - but don't panic

Research on mice suggests that moisturising creams increase the risk of common skin cancers – but there's no need to throw away your moisturiser just yet.

Predictably, this is the least garbled of the reports I've read. It continues:

"We don't know whether or not there's an effect in people," says Allan Conney of Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, who carried out the study.

Elsewhere - in the tabloids, the larger tabloids and at Aunty on-line - the story was reported with the same two-part narrative:

1. Play up the findings of the study.
   
2. Obtain a local expert (or experts) to pooh-pooh the study.

First alarm the readers then find a local expert to tell them not be alarmed. The huffier your local expert gets about the issue the stronger the air of controversy:

Gavin Greenoak, director of the Australian Photobiology Testing Facility at the University of Sydney, said the potential for alarmism was high and the paper should not have been published.

"The acknowledged need for more research is an understatement bordering on irresponsibility," he said. There were technical reasons why parallels could not be drawn with moisturiser on human skin. (Nick Miller in The Age)

If Greenoak was quoted accurately, he goes a little too far in suggesting that the paper should not have been published - unless his objection was to the experimental design of the study, rather than its potential to create alarmism. If alarm has been created, the responsibility for it belongs with the journalists and editors who chose to play the alleged risk.

One thing that makes hairless mice very different from normal humans is that hair isn't the only thing that normal mice have that's lacking hairless (or nude) mice. Hairless mice also lack a thymus, the organ that turns ordinary lymphocytes into t-lymphocytes or 't-cells'. Lacking t-cells, hairless mice are a pushover for cancers of all kinds. Unfortunately, you won't find this information by Googling 'hairless mice' - the first page you'll find is this one, a pet-owner's guide apparently written by someone ignorant of this fact.

To learn why hairless mice are so different from normal humans you'd have to take the time to ask the right expert the right questions. But then you might discover something truly alarming to a journalist - that your story had no real news value at all.

Who Needs State Controlled News Media?

When your morning newspaper devotes the top half of every front page to the latest "Gold! Gold, gold, gold for Austraya!" moment and every television news broadcast begins the same?

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

In today's Age, Bridie Smith reports:

VICTORIA'S curriculum is left-wing and is pressuring students to conform to the politically correct views held in school texts and by teachers to enhance their chance of academic success, a Melbourne tutor has warned...

Why isn't the main clause of this sentence up the front where it belongs? Because that would make it too obvious that Smith is passing on an opinion, not news.

In a submission to a federal inquiry into academic freedom, Mark Lopez argues that — in year 12 English in particular — students with non-left views face "additional challenges" and are often disadvantaged if they "cross the teacher's bias".

Dr Lopez, a humanities tutor of 18 years, told the Senate inquiry that, in part, he set up his tutoring business to tackle issues of ideological bias, teacher quality and the "subjective" assessment of students' work.

In fact, Lopez doesn't argue anything - he merely asserts it. Here's what his submission actually says:

5th August 2008

To: Mr John Carter Committee
Secretary
Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee Department of the Senate
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3521 Fax: +61 2 6277 5706

Dear Mr Carter & Committee members,
I welcome the opportunity to provide a submission to your Inquiry. I have long been concerned about this issue and I have been doing something about it, helping students deal with the problem of bias through my private tutoring business. To some degree, you could say that I set up my business to address the issues of ideological bias and teacher quality.

Recently, I have published two articles that address precisely the concerns of this Inquiry. I am presenting them to you as a submission: 'This bias: the left-wing domination of Year 12 English' (December 2006), and 'Surviving ideological bias in the classroom' (October 2007).

The first article (This bias) analyses the bias in the curriculum and reflects upon its implications. I focused on the Year 12 English but I could have spoken about any of the humanities subjects since the problems outlined for this compulsory subject are replicated in the others. This article first appeared in the IPA Review with an extract published in The Australian. The second article, written as a sequel, looks at the practice of bias by teachers in the classroom. This article originally appeared in News Weekly with a shorter version published in The Australian.

The problem of bias is much worse than many assume. Through my business I have a superb opportunity to observe and scrutinise, though the experiences of my students, the curricula and what really goes on in school classrooms and university tutorial rooms. I have extensive experience dealing with this, 18 years, covering dozens of school and university subjects in the English and humanities areas, where assessment is, as you know, subjective. I am about to bring a book out on this subject, The Little Black School Book, which analyses the problem in depth and shows students how to deal with it.

I am willing to be contacted for more information and I would be more than happy to be a witness at the public hearings.

Sincerely,
Dr Mark Lopez (my emphasis)

The headline to Smith's reoprt (which goes on to canvass the opinions of seasoned culture warrior Kevin Donnelly) is Conservative students suffer from 'left bias'. The actual events of the story warrant something more like Political Hack Uses Senate Inquiry to Plug His New Book.

Whitewash of the Week

The Extraordinary Rendition of Mamdouh Habib

Today, Chris Hammer of The Age reports:

THE United States sent Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib to be interrogated in Egypt in defiance of repeated pleas from Canberra not to do so, Australia's top spy has revealed.

ASIO director-general Paul O'Sullivan said the US was told several times that Australia opposed sending Mr Habib to another country for interrogation — a process known as rendition — after his arrest in Pakistan in 2001.

Mr O'Sullivan told a Senate hearing he believed Australia's concern at the time was that Mr Habib would be tortured, a fear later backed up by Mr Habib, who says he was brutally treated in Egypt.

Mr O'Sullivan made that revelation at the estimates hearing of the Senate Standing Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs. You can access the Hansard record of the committee proceedings here (PDF format) and here (Parlinfo web page).

According to Hammer's report:

Mr O'Sullivan said Australian officials in Pakistan formed the view on October 22, 2001, that Mr Habib might be "rendered" — transferred to a third country for interrogation — and conveyed concerns to Canberra.

A meeting in Canberra the next day — attended by then ASIO director-general Denis Richardson and senior representatives of the Federal Police and three government departments — decided that Australia would oppose his rendition.

This is a bit of a distortion of O'Sullivan's actual account of events, given in answers to questions from NSW Greens Senator, Kerry Nettle:

Senator NETTLE — I want to ask questions in relation to the rendition of Mamdouh Habib. I want to start with an answer that this committee received last week from the Attorney-General’s Department, which refers to a meeting that, we found out this morning, was on 23 October in 2001. In the answer from the Attorney-General’s Department it states that senior officials from ASIO, AFP, Foreign Affairs, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Attorney-General’s Department agreed that the Australian government could not agree to the transfer of Mr Habib. I want to start by asking you who represented ASIO at that meeting.

Mr O’Sullivan — Of course, I was not involved at that stage but, if I understand correctly, there was a meeting on another matter in Canberra. I do not know what that other matter was but at the end of it there was a pull-aside, to use an American expression, and Mr Richardson, my predecessor was the ASIO person at that meeting.

In plain terms, and contrary to the impression conveyed by The Age's report, there was no formally convened meeting between ASIO, the AFP and other departments about Mamdouh Habib's detention in Pakistan. It was discussed informally after 'a meeting on another matter'.

O'Sullivan's answers to further questions from Senator Nettle seem a little confused:

Senator NETTLE — The answer from the Attorney-General’s Department says that the senior officials from those various departments that I mentioned agreed that the Australian government could not agree to a transfer of Mr Habib to Egypt. Was there a request to transfer Mr Habib to Egypt?

Mr O’Sullivan — I believe no is the answer.

...

Senator NETTLE — The reason that I was asking Mr Keelty about this this morning was that he previously provided information to this committee that the AFP liaison officer in Islamabad was present at a meeting in Pakistan on 22 October, the day before, at which the transfer of Mr Habib to Egypt was discussed. So, I thought that when we were here this morning with the AFP, perhaps that pull-aside or discussion had been initiated by the AFP. At that point I was told that it was not the Australian Federal Police but ASIO. Can you tell me if that is correct?

Mr O’Sullivan — I am not sure exactly what the dynamics of the arrangement were, but I think you might be overformalising it when you talk about who convened or chaired it? It is clear that a meeting took place and it is clear that Mr Richardson was a central figure in that discussion. Whether he convened it in the sense that you are using that word, I am not sure, but there was a pull-aside at the end of a meeting on another matter and he was centrally involved with it for sure.

Once again, O'Sullivan reminds us that there was no formal, minuted discussion of Habib's possible transfer to Egypt - merely a 'pull-aside' involving interested parties from various departments.

Senator NETTLE — Was it information from ASIO that led to that discussion occurring?

Mr O’Sullivan — I do not think it was information from ASIO exclusively. I think there had been a meeting the previous day — if I have got the dates correct — in Pakistan, that you are referring to, and one of the things that happened at that meeting in Pakistan was a discussion of hypothetical possibilities. One of those possibilities was that Mr Habib could be transferred from Pakistan to Egypt. What happened then at the meeting of 23 October in Canberra was that the officials, including Mr Richardson, considered that issue and came to the conclusion that you have described — that is to say that the Australian government would not give assent to such a process of rendition, if that is what you want to describe it as.

Senator NETTLE — What did ASIO do after that meeting to ensure that the decision of that discussion was conveyed and to whom?

Mr O’Sullivan — Mr Richardson conveyed that information to the United States.

And there's the only basis for the assertion that the US defied Australia's wishes when they transferred Mamdouh Habib to Egypt. The current head of ASIO has told a Senate Estimates hearing that the former head of ASIO conveyed the decision of an informal discussion of Canberra bureaucrats to the United States - somehow.

An interesting question arises here: was then Prime Minister John Howard told about this decision? That depends:

Senator NETTLE — Did ASIO brief the Prime Minister about that discussion?

Mr O’Sullivan — I do not know what conversations Mr Richardson may have had privately, but the essence of the meeting was conveyed to senior people in Canberra, including all those who had a need to know. I do not have the list of people in front of me, but it was a piece of intelligence reporting that was distributed appropriately in Canberra.

Unfortunately, because the information was highly classified, O'Sullivan refused to discuss who was on the 'need to know' list. There's also the small matter of the difference between 'need to know' and 'want to know' and John Howard's preference for governing on the latter basis.

Senator NETTLE — Can I ask you what ASIO did, beyond conveying to the United States the decision of that meeting, to ensure that an Australian citizen was not transferred to Egypt?

Mr O’Sullivan — Essentially, the issue of the transfer and treatment of an Australian overseas is a matter for the department of foreign affairs. ASIO’s job is to make sure that that department has that information, and that is what happened in this case.

...

Senator NETTLE — This morning — again, it is other people’s descriptions of ASIO’s role — I asked the AFP and I asked Attorney-General’s Department what action they took to ensure that the decision of that pull-aside was implemented. Their indication was that they did not take action and it was ASIO’s responsibility. I want to make clear what ASIO did, apart from telling the Americans.

Mr O’Sullivan — As I said, the Director-General of ASIO informed the United States authorities that it was not the Australian government’s policy and position to engage in practices of rendition. (emphasis added)

Later, under further questioning from Senator Nettle, O'Sullivan identifies those 'United States authorities' as people at a senior level in the US State Department and the intelligence community. If what they were told was as wishy-washy as O'Sullivan says then no-one in any level of the US government was told, clearly and unambiguously, that Australia didn't want Mamdouh Habib sent to Egypt.

What a cock-up.

Echo & Narcissus Redux - Time to Get Serious (Part I)

Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology , it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
(Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan 1964)

Everyone more or less knows the story of Narcissus - he was that legendary Greek nancy boy who fell in love with his own reflection. The infatuation was inflicted on him by the gods as a punishment for his egotistical ways.

Echo was a nymph who had the misfortune to fall in love with Narcissus, after she too had been visited with a spot of divine punishment. Infuriated either by Echo's insistence on always having the last word, or by her habit of completing other's sentences for them (the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive) Hera removed her voice, with the exception that she could only speak the last words of someone who had spoken before her.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan declares:

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

Implicit in that "until now" is the belief, or hope, that in 1962 things might be arranged differently - that it might be possible to resist, or forestall the automatic interiorisation of the new media technologies that created McLuhan's "global village". Though the phrase has acquired warm fuzzy tree-hugging hippy connotations thanks to chronic misuse and misunderstanding, McLuhan didn't necessarily endorse its emergence. He merely described it. It's unlikely that he would have written either of the two passages I quoted if he wholeheartedly approved of the global village or the way consciousness would develop if we remained numbed and distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset us when we encounter ourselves extended in our own gimmickry. That form of progress leads ultimately to tribalism.

Here's take it or leave it proposition from me: the village, as we think of it, occupies an uneasy middle position between tribal society and, let us say, the civitas. Athens, in the time of Socrates was a civitas; in Homeric times it was something else. At its peak, the nation state is a civitas; in decline it relapses into feudal thuggery or something worse. Along both the upward path, and the downward path, you'll find the village - neither fully tribal nor fully civil (assuming either of these two extremes are attainable).

Over the past couple of weeks, while I've been reading McLuhan, I've found myself a little detached from this interwebs thing, much less of a participant in the ideological fun and much more of an observer. What I've often seen, and occasionally illustrated, is the playing out of global village scandals, such as the recent furore over Josef Fritzl and his long term imprisonment and repeated rape of his daughter Elisabeth.

I'm sure that there are plenty of people outside the wholly wired world - where the Fritzl scandal is playing out - who have never heard of Josef and Elisabeth Fritzl, and are neither the better nor the worse for it. Their personal welfare and their stature within their communities is left unaffected by it. Inside the wholly wired world - in the dream world of them Telstra Big Pond homes - things are different. The story of Josef and Elisabeth Fritzl is news and news demands a response. In fact, it demands several responses.

The first response, dictated by the sensational nature of the story, is a public emotional one. The ambit of that response is limited by common decency which prescribes empathic sorrow and pity for Elisabeth Fritzl, outrage on her behalf and disgust at the monstrosity of Josef Fritzl's actions. As a global villager you may be as extroverted as you wish in expressing these emotions - indeed you must be as extroverted as you can since common decency is all that the village retains of extroverted, empathic tribal life. While your material welfare is clearly unaffected by the events in Austria, you might lose standing within your community (at home, at the office, in your personal sector of the WWW) if your emotional responses are found deficient - indecent.

It's worth noting, at this point, that you're not under any social obligation to respond to this story, a brief item that appeared on page 13 of The Age on Wednesday April 30th, next to half a page on the "Solid Austrian burgher [who] led a double life", including photos and graphics depiciting the inside of "the house of horror":

Jersey
Child Abuse Arrest

LONDON. Police have arrested a 68-year-old man as part of an investigation of allegations of abuse at a former children's home on the English Channel island of Jersey.

The man was answering questions about a number of rapes and indecent assaults, according to Jersey police investigating alleged abuse over decades at the Haut la Gaurenne site.

About 100 former residents have alleged physical and sexual abuse over three decades from the 1960s. (hat tip to Zeppo Bakunin)

Below the Fritzl article, and the "In Brief" column beside it - where the Jersey report appears - there's a half-page advertisement for the Commonwealth Bank, which declares "Our Personal Relationship Banking Specialists in Melbourne are here to help" - a reminder that the real business of The Age, like any newspaper, is attention broking; that what gives the Fritzl story value as news is, in part, it's capacity to draw your attention to a half-page advertisement promoting the services of a bank. Should more details of the Jersey case become available, it might be promoted from filler and supplant the Fritzl story in the role of attention grabber for paid advertising space. (The ad's placement, by the way, is by no means bizarre - the bottom of the page is the first place your eyes would turn if your repugnance for the Fritzl story turned you off reading the latest instalment.)

Part 2 later this week, or early next week. Right now I'm feeling a bit shagged out with this topic.

Wonderful, Cosy, Feel-Good, NATURAL Chemicals

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Louise Hall is a "Health Reporter". According to The Age, she's just Louise Hall. I guess "Lazy Hack from Sydney" doesn't look too good as a by-line when you're syndicating crap written by an interstate colleague. But let's not turn this into a Melbourne vs Sydney, Age vs SMH thing - The Age has one or two notably lazy hacks of its own, like this humourless humourist.

With the help of promotional material from Galen Naturopathic, Hall reports a surprising discovery:

FEELING blue? Mung beans, lobster, turkey, asparagus, sunflower seeds, cottage cheese, pineapple, tofu, spinach and bananas could lift your spirits.

It's easy to see how tucking into a lobster bisque or a turkey sandwich might make you feel better if you're feeling a bit glum - eating tasty food is a pleasant activity. The mung beans and tofu are a bit of an odd inclusion but there are people out there who like both - sometimes on the perverse basis that there's something virtuous about eating bland food to preserve the buff temple of your personal narcissism - so once again, the intrinsic pleasure of eating stuff you like might be the reason you'd experience a lift in spirits. According to Galen Naturopathic, via Hall, you'd be wrong to take such a naive view:

A diet high in tryptophan — an amino acid converted by the body into the feel-good chemical serotonin — can improve mood and wellbeing, a pediatrician and natural health expert, Caroline Longmore, said.

When and where did Longmore say this? Probably in a press release, such as this, where Longmore is described as "a French ex-paediatrician who has run Galen Naturopathic Centre in Richmond upon Thames for the past five years". Or in a spam e-mail to the world's Health Reporters.

The body cannot produce tryptophan so unless we get enough through diet, we may suffer a deficiency, leading to low serotonin levels, which is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, cravings and irritable bowel syndrome.

"Following a diet which contains foods rich in naturally occurring serotonin will improve your mood, leaving you energised and in a state of harmony and wellbeing," Dr Longmore said...

So Dr Longmore - a former paediatrician turned naturopath, proprietor of a naturopathy clinic named after the ancient Greek physician who is credited with holding back western medicine for more than a millenium - is spruiking a fad diet with Hall's eager assistance.

Right up to that last paragraph, neither Longmore nor Hall had put a foot too far wrong on the basic science too. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid which we have to get through diet - it's one of several such amino acids. And it is the biochemical precursor to the "feel-good chemical serotonin". It's just the spin that Longmore - through Hall - puts on those scientific facts that's a bit off.

The claim that "following a diet which contains foods rich in naturally occurring serotonin will improve your mood, leaving you energised and in a state of harmony and wellbeing," cranks the spin up by quite a few revs. Longmore's implied argument is that eating more tryptophan will lead to more serotonin synthesis and since we know that low levels of serotonin in certain parts of the human brain are associated with major (or clinical) depression it follows that eating lots of lobsters is going to be just as good for you as those nasty, big Pharma produced SSRIs. Not too long after the spin comes the outright bullshit:

In her e-book, The Serotonin Secret, Dr Longmore claims the best way to get optimum tryptophan levels is through a carefully devised eating plan.

She rates dozens of foods for their levels of tryptophan. Written with an Australian-trained medical scientist and naturopath, Katrin Hempel, the book has 50 recipes designed to solve serotonin imbalance without drugs. The concept works on the same principle as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, such as the popular antidepressant Prozac.

No it bloody well doesn't. The concept works - to gull people into buying copies of Longmore and Hempel's book - by misrepresenting science. To explain this, I'll have to take a short detour into some basic concepts of modern pharmacology.

First up, pharmacology doesn't interest itself in the origin of drugs. Morphine is a narcotic analgesic derived from opium poppies. Pethidine is a synthetic narcotic analgesic introduced into use in 1939. The two drugs are classed as narcotic analgesics because they produce the same effects - narcosis and pain relief. They've also been found to work on the same receptors in the nervous system.

A basic assumption of pharmacology - one which I doubt has been discarded in the few decades since I studied the subject at university - is that drugs (however defined) achieve their effects by either imitating the action of chemicals that naturally occur in the body (such as hormones and neurotransmitters) or by interfering with natural responses - at the cellular level - to those naturally occuring chemicals. This occurs because the drug binds to one of those receptor things, and either triggers a response, or hangs around doing nothing, like those boofheads who always plant themselves in doorways at parties.

SSRIs - Serotonin Specific Reuptake Inhibitors - are like the aforesaid boofheads. They block molecular "doorways" that take serotonin back into nerve cells after its release. The result is that the serotonin hangs around the synapse (the microscopic gap between one brain cell and another), long enough to have its "feel good" effect. But let's remember that it's only in the brain, and very specific sites within the brain where we want this happening. SSRIs are used in the treatment of clinical depression because they're very good at hitting that site. And because they've been tested and shown to work in clinical trials.

Raising your tryptophan intake because a former paediatrician tells you that it will lead to an increase in "feel-good" serotonin is a very different proposition. There's no evidence that it will work and quite a few reasons to think that it won't.

Making serotonin isn't the only use your body has for tryptophan. As an essential amino acid, tryptophan is also used in protein synthesis. So there's no guarantee that the extra tryptophan will get converted into "feel-good" serotonin. Neither is there any guarantee that extra serotonin production will happen in the brain - serotonin plays other roles in the body. It's present in blood platelets - when platelets bind to wounds to stop bleading, serotonin is released into blood vessels and constricts them.

At most, it might work, and if your tryptophan enriched diet includes a lot of those lobsters, turkeys, pineapples and bananas, you'll definitely have reason to feel good. You might even feel clever about boosting your serotonin levels, but you'd be fooling yourself; harmlessly, if your problem is merely "the blues" and you need a bit of a pick-me-up, not so harmlessly if the problem is more severe.

Hall finishes with a bit of token balance (there's more token balance earlier in the piece):

Britain's Food and Mood Project recommends eating chicken, sardines, turkey, salmon, fresh tuna, nuts and seeds to boost serotonin levels. But Associate Professor Michael Baigent, clinical adviser to the BeyondBlue anti-depression organisation, said there was only low-level evidence to suggest tryptophans had a medical effect.

Statistics show that in any 12 months, almost 17% of adult Australians have a mental disorder, with anxiety, depression and bipolar the most common.

In February, a major international review of clinical trials of new generation drugs, including Prozac and Aropax, found they were no more effective than a placebo, or sugar tablet, for most people with depression. (My emphasis there, to ensure you didn't miss the token balance)

That last paragraph isn't included in the SMH's version of the article - it most likely refers to the paper by Irving Kirsch et al where the conclusions were consciously spun by the paper's author to suggest a conclusion that was in fact refuted by the study's own data and data analysis.

Hall's article is a gift to Galen Naturopathic and to Australia's cray fishers, turkey farmers and growers of pineapples and bananas. But those 17% of Adult Australians with "mental disorders" have nothing to thank her for. Especially those who'll be hearing from friends and family that they need tostop wasting their time with the pills and get a bit more crayfish in their diet.

Qu(ot)e?

At the risk of stooping to the level of culture warrior by broad-brushing an entire subgroup of the community, it must be said that the chest-beaters on the Left and Right of our national discourse are surprisingly naive in the ways of politics. They think governments run nations when, in fact, they manage them as best they can. They mistake the limits of power for cowardice and think the exercise of policy reform is an exact science.

This isn't a comment against individuals, but against a style of writing that assumes only one version of Australia, be it Left or Right, is the true expression of national identity. Australia is open and closed. It has three established mainstreams: the traditional white male, the tertiary-educated woman and the Australia-born children of immigrants. Each brings a slightly different perspective to national identity, depending on the topic.

This level of complexity escapes the cultural warriors because they need caricatures of good and evil.

George Megalogenis in the Australian Literary Review.

Got that everyone? To understand Australian society in all its complexity, one stereotype is not enough. You need three.

The Law - not a Complete Ass After All?

The case of Thomas Towle, recently convicted of six counts of dangerous driving causing death and four of dangerous driving causing injury is back in the news, with today's Age carrying reports on the sentencing and reactions to it. The Age also provides a link to this transcript of Justice Philip Cummins' sentencing remarks.

True to previous form - when the Towle jury found him not guilty of the more serious charge of culpable driving - The Age has focussed its coverage on the grief of the families of Towles' victims, pitching the story as human interest. It's not alone - a Google News search turns up plenty of reports on the Towle case, from both our major newsprint suppliers.

I don't intend to discuss any of these reports in this post - I'll be sticking to the transcript of the sentencing. The media spin on the story is familiar - it's an obvious outrage, a scandal to society and so on and so forth. And to help convince us of that, once again, the grief of the families of Towle's victims is to be made a public spectacle. None dare call this exploitation because it's being done by the most reputable of journalists, with the consent and participation of the families themselves. It's all in the public interest, too. That's why the case is getting so much coverage; it's got nothing to do with advancing careers or boosting circulation, or audience share, and hence advertising revenue at all.

Cummins J begins his sentencing with this simple statement:

1 This is a most tragic case.

That's where you would stop if you were looking to verbal Cummins J to depict him as an unfit judge, out of touch with community standards like all too many of our judiciary, because in his next remarks he makes it very clear where he believes the responsibility - the blame if you insist - for this tragedy lies:

2 Six loving and loved children, on the threshold of adulthood and with their lives before them, have had their lives taken from them. Their grieving families have been left distraught and devastated. Four more children have been seriously injured and will always bear the trauma inflicted upon them, as will their families also. A whole cohort of good young persons have been traumatised and afflicted. All because of your criminal and dangerous driving, Mr Towle. (emphasis added)

After reviewing the facts of the case, the judge delivers a few remarks that might indicate a slight difference of opinion between judge and jury on the culpable driving charge:

12 A most serious element of your criminal driving was not physical but psychological: you knew that there were, or were likely to be, numerous children in the area of the party house. You knew that they were, or were likely to be, a couple of kilometres (1.8 kilometres in fact) along Myall Street going east from your brother’s house, because you had just traversed it going west. You knew they were, or were likely to be, not far from the two curves in Myall Street, because you had just been there. You had just been reminded of it by your younger brother. Your knowledge that there were, or were likely to be, numerous persons in the relevant area is an especially egregious element of your dangerous driving, Mr Towle.

13 This is not a case of unexpected circumstances. This is not a case of a momentary lapse of attention. This is a case of multi-faceted lack of attention at high speed at night and with knowledge of risk. And with terrible consequences.

14 The jury found you not guilty on all counts of culpable driving causing death (counts 1–6)[2] and of negligent driving causing serious injury (counts 7-10)[3], as well as the other counts, and found you guilty on the alternative counts to counts 1-10, namely dangerous driving causing death or serious injury.[4] It is for those dangerous driving offences that you are to be sentenced, Mr Towle. It is essential that the sentences, and the facts found in sentencing, are consistent with and faithful to the jury’s verdicts. The proper construction of the jury’s verdicts, in my view, is not that the jury were not satisfied of the constituent driving elements alleged of speed, inattention and knowledge, but that the jury characterised that driving – not the consequences, but the driving – not as gross criminal negligence[5], but as dangerous. I proceed on that basis. (emphasis added)

When Justice Cummins turns to the principles of sentencing that he will apply to the case (starting at section 20), he gives the impression that he's scraping around for enough bricks to make up at least a decent fraction of a ton:

23 By operation of law, those sentences are to be served concurrently unless I order otherwise. Therefore I turn to the question of cumulation of these sentences.

...

25 ...There is no principle of law or of logic which requires that in the case of multiple offences arising from the one course of conduct, the total sentence must be no more than the maximum legislative penalty for one of them. To require that the total be no more than the maximum for one would indeed reduce human victims to mere numbers; or, in the words of the illustrious President in DPP v Solomon, to a “meaningless statistic”. Neither parliament nor the courts so reduce people...

The rest of the judgement consists largely of Justice Cummins' reasons for arriving at a final sentence (with cumulation for some of the offences) of 10 years imprisonment with a minimum of 7 years before parole. The question of whether this might be overturned on appeal I leave to the law bloggers.

Troll? Moi?

I try to avoid visiting Andrew Bolt's blog, but sometimes it has the same morbid fascination as a pool of red wine vomit on the pavement. You don't really want to look at it to check if Billy Connolly was right about the diced carrot, but you just can't help taking that sidelong glance - and then you wish you hadn't.

Today I made the mistake of not only taking the sidelong glance, but dipping my finger in to push the bits around a little, with a comment on one of Andy's posts - this post. That got me named "Mr Troll" by the man himself - and it didn't affect the loyal acolytes and disciples who prostrate themselves before Mr Bolt's callipygian features, waiting for oracle to trumpet forth another revealed truth.

Tha "Mr Troll" bit is a bit rich, since I rarely do comment on Bolt's blog and in one comment I made last year (on a post about the Trevorrow case) I inadvertently ghost wrote a whole column for him:

Before you make a scapegoat of the hapless Mrs Angas, Andrew, perhaps you should have a careful read of sections 90 and 91 of the judgement:

90 It is relevant to observe that a departmental officer with the Aborigines Department, Mrs Angas, who had been appointed as a welfare officer in the Department for less than nine months, apparently took on responsibilities with regard to the removal of the plaintiff. At that time, as earlier observed, it was the practice of the APB and the Aborigines Department to act to remove children thought to be neglected, and to do so with the state of mind that they lacked the legal authority or power to so act. Mrs Angas’ conduct would appear to be consistent with this practice.

91 Although precise findings cannot be made, it would appear that this practice of deliberately and knowingly acting beyond legal authority and power – as it was understood – ceased by the end of the 1950s when the Aborigines Department openly and publicly acknowledged that it had no power to remove neglected Aboriginal children from their parents, and the departmental approach had been altered to an attempt to persuade rather than to remove without approval.

It might be wise to check that she’s actually deceased too, before you hang all the blame for this on her.

It's all a bit galling really. Where's the gratitude?

Will Someone Please Sit on This Man's Head?

Preferably while he's prone, but supine will do - as long as it stops Laurie Ferguson getting pronouncements like this out of his mouth:

"People fear there is a monoculture in some suburbs. They believe there is an over-dominance of some cultures in schools, which is denigrating the quality of education," Mr Ferguson told The Age [through its earpiece, reporter Jewel Topsfield].

"So they are withdrawing their kids from government schools and sending them to religious or selective high schools. This leads to further concentration of marginalised communities in government schools and the further stigmatisation of these schools."

Through the rest of the report Laurie is given ample opportunity to demonstrate seven shades of stupidity. Calling for refugees to be housed across a wider spread of suburbs sounds reasonable - until you ask the question, and where are these people going to find the community supports they need to get themselves settled, even integrated to a degree, in their new environment. And in the following statement, Laurie takes off into cloud-cuckoo land with his finger pointed in the general direction of a possible scapegoat:

Mr Ferguson told The Age [through its earpiece, reporter Jewel Topsfield] more needed to be done to avoid children from places such as Africa, who had grown up in refugee camps and had limited education, being so heavily concentrated in some areas and schools. "Deliberate policy decisions" needed to be made about diversifying the location of housing for refugees and humanitarian entrants.

He said settlement workers should also try harder to find private rental properties for their clients in a broader range of areas, rather than simply dealing with the same real estate agents. (emphasis added)

What makes him think that settlement workers aren't trying hard enough to find private rental properties for their clients? Hasn't he heard of the current housing shortage housing affordability crisis, or did that simply slip his mind?

When it comes to stupidity, The Age (through its earpiece, reporter Jewel Topsfield), shows it's no slouch itself, with this cursory investigation of the problem of "white flight" from the public education system:

The president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals, Brian Burgess, said the exodus from state schools in Victoria was "more like a middle-class flight" than a white flight.

"It has more to do with middle-class people living in lower socio-economic areas moving into private education or what they would view to be a more upmarket secondary school in the next suburb," he said.

But teachers at racially diverse schools, who asked not to be named [by The Age (through its earpiece, reporter Jewel Topsfield or her offsider, Bridie Smith)], told The Age [through its earpiece, reporter Jewel Topsfield or her offsider, Bridie Smith] white flight was occurring in Melbourne.

There's nothing like investigating the facts and checking the evidence for yourself, is there? Nothing like it there at all.

Elsewhere, Andrew Bolt suggests that the term "white flight" is a misnomer. Excuse me, while I go off somewhere quiet to grind my teeth for a couple of minutes.

Maybe 50%

How reliable are the Snopes Urban Legend Reference Pages? Judging from Andrew Bolt's recent behaviour, his answer would be no more than 50%. It all depends on the topic.

If the topic is a little cockle-warmer about a young girl receiving a reply from a "special angel" after sending a letter to God about the death of her beloved dog, and Snopes confirms the truth of the story, then you take Snopes' word for it. If the topic is global warming, and a photograph of deep snow from "near New York right now" (emphasis added) which (according to Snopes) is actually a photograph of Canadian snow taken in 2004, then maybe you don't put so much trust in the Snopes version of the truth - you just put up a snarky update:

UPDATE

Readers say the above image sent by Janek was from Japan, or Canada, or somewhere else not enjoying Adelaide’s bit of heat.

But for those wanting a newer picture, here’s one of the Ottawa garages crushed by Canada’s huge snows...

Well, maybe. The official story on the Ottawa garage that collapsed takes up just one paragraph of this Canada.com report:

Ottawa fire Platoon Chief Paul Whitney said the cause of the collapse had not been determined, but noted that the garage was covered by snow.

As far as I can tell from my quick Google news search, there was only the one Ottawa garage that collapsed. A number of neighbouring buildings were evacuated - a sensible precaution, no doubt. Interesting how that one garage became one of several in Bolt's description of the photograph.

So what's the truth here. Well, maybe it doesn't matter - there might be higher considerations involved.

(Hat tip to Nexus 6).

Prozac vs the Placebo Redux

I'm no expert on clinical trials of drugs but I do have an old copy of Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (Fifth Edition, 1975). It includes a quick overview of the development and testing of new drugs as it was done then:

What constitutes an adequate controlled clinical trial necessarily varies, depending on the drug effect being evaluated. The more important general requirements for all trials are an appropriate and sensitive method of evaluation, an adequate number of subjects, lack of bias, concurrent comparison of the new drug with a reference drug over a range of doses and appropriate statistical validation. Many clinical trials must be conducted under so-called blind conditions. In a blind experiment, the nature of the medication is concealed from the patient (single blind) or from both the patient and all persons associated with conduct and evaluation of the trial (double blind). Blind conditions are essential for trials in which subjective effects of medication are being studied; they may also be necessary in evaluation of objective drug effects if these are under voluntary control or otherwise easily biased. In addition to a ... reference drug, a new compound is often compared with inert dummy medication, to serve as a control for placebo effects and coincident effects, such as spontaneous remission of symptoms.(Original emphasis)

Over the past 24 hours the newspapers, the broadcast media and the blogosphere have run wild with reports of a new study, led by Professor Irving Kirsch, showing that in most patients, the "most popular" anti-depressants are no more effective than a placebo. A lot of opinion pieces have also spewed forth, much of that equally predictable, give or take the odd moralising rant. People are being wrong on the internet again. In Malcom Farr's case, bizarrely so.

Evidently my shrink, the estimable Doctor Ziggy Stellenstaub, was right a few weeks ago when he suggested that it was unreasonable to think that I could give up this blogging business. I'd rather not have been angered by reading the report of the study in yesterday's Age, angered more by reading the misinformed (or just plain ignorant) posturing that quickly followed on MSM blogs and then totally pissed off after I used Google, and various other techniques to do some background checking that seems to have been omitted by every journalist who has reported on this "new" study. For example, Laura Blue, published at TIME

There are plenty of studies about antidepressants. What makes this one so important — the results were front-page news across the U.K. on Tuesday — is that the researchers were able to track down comprehensive unpublished trial results from the drug makers themselves before the drugs were authorized for sale in the U.S., and include them in their review of the literature. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must receive records of all relevant pharmaceutical-company trials, both published and unpublished, before it will approve a drug. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers writing in PLoS Medicine were recently able to obtain those FDA records of industry-sponsored clinical trials. They yield data, they believe, that lets them avoid a bias that often plagues reviews of previous research: the tendency for conclusive positive results to be published, sometimes more than once, and thus over-represented, while mediocre results can be ignored or even swept under the rug.

Important? Unlikely. Although Blue's article suggests the exciting possibility that the lid has finally been blown off a scandalous cover-up by Big Pharma, Professor Kirsch's new study is not the first of its kind. The University of Connecticut web-site has this 1998 report:

The effectiveness of antidepressants is mainly in the placebo effect of treatment, not in the medication itself, according to a new study by Irving Kirsch.

Seventy-five percent of the response to medication for depression was a result of the patient being in treatment, while at the most 25 percent of the response was a true drug effect, asserts the study by Kirsch, a professor of psychology, and former UConn graduate student Guy Sapirstein.

"This means that for a typical patient, 75 percent of the benefit obtained from the active drug would also have been obtained from an inactive placebo," Kirsch says. "Whether the remaining 25 percent of the drug response is a true effect of the drug or a psychologically triggered response to side effects alone cannot yet be determined."

...

The study analyzed the possibility that antidepressants serve as active placebos, which produce side effects but do not cause any actual drug effect on the problem.

"Data from other studies indicate that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition or the placebo condition," according to the study.

"This study suggests that antidepressants might function as active placebos, in which the side effects amplify the placebo effect by convincing patients that they are receiving a potent drug," Kirsch says. "So if a patient takes a pill that causes side effects, he or she feels better because they believe they have been given an actual antidepressant and that the pill must be working."

In 2002, USA Today reported:

Antidepressants work only slightly better than dummy pills, and the Food and Drug Administration has not informed physicians of how little benefit most of these drugs offer, suggests a study to be released next week.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, two psychologists obtained 47 studies used by the FDA for approval of the six antidepressants prescribed most widely between 1987-99.

Overall, antidepressant pills worked 18% better than placebos, a statistically significant difference, "but not meaningful for people in clinical settings," says University of Connecticut psychologist Irving Kirsch. He and co-author Thomas Moore will release their findings July 15 in Prevention and Treatment, an e-journal of the American Psychological Association.

"Whether the remaining 25 percent of the drug response is a true effect of the drug or a psychologically triggered response to side effects alone cannot yet be determined." This statement, from Kirsch, suggests that in 1998, he preferred to believe that Prozac had no therapeutic benefits whatever - you might also infer at least a hint of bias from the 1998 article's title "Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication". The title of the 2002 study was "The emperor's new drugs: An analysis of antidepressant medication data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration."

As I noted yesterday, the language of this "new" study indicates again that Kirsch and his collaborators would prefer to explain away what other researchers would take as an indication of therapeutic benefit in at least some patients. It's worth noting that the emphasis in these alternative explanations is always on the benefits of the placebo effect, rather than the other possibilities that my old Goodman and Gilman points to, such as spontaneous remission - that is patients just getting better on their own. So where the new study says:

Thus, the increased benefit for extremely depressed patients seems attributable to a decrease in responsiveness to placebo, rather than an increase in responsiveness to medication.

It might be more precise to say:

Thus, the increased benefit for extremely depressed patients seems attributable to a decrease in responsiveness to placebo and spontaneous remission rates, rather than an increase in responsiveness to medication.

But I could be wrong about that - my copy of Goodman and Gilman is over 30 years old and it's possible that since publication, medical researchers have discovered that there's no such thing as spontaneous remission - sick people just don't get better on their own. Ever.

So far, all we've got from the publication of this news is a replay - hopefully a brief one - of a standard public brou-ha-ha over whether depression is really a medical problem, with the usual know-nothings - the people who have never experienced the delights of suicidal ideation - getting on their high horses about how depressives would be so much better off if they'd just exercise, accept Jesus as their personal saviours or do something to release the ancient trauma of being imprisoned inside a volcano by an evil inter-galactic warlord.

The sooner it's over the better as far as I'm concerned - especially when people are writing and publishing guff like this:

What will the impact of this new research be? Is it a case of recognising that the Prozac emperor never had any clothes? Or, on the contrary, of acknowledging the power of placebo and finding new ways of working with it?

Disclosure: Gummo Trotsky takes 225mg of Effexor - a "popular anti-depressant" - daily. Some days he forgets to. Today wasn't one of them.

Update (1 Mar): More from Slate. Thanks to The Unknown Commenter.

Prozac vs the Placebo or teh Spin vs Science?

Thus, the increased benefit for extremely depressed patients seems attributable to a decrease in responsiveness to placebo, rather than an increase in responsiveness to medication.

Today's Age reports (link via Blogocracy) that a recent study has found that most patients diagnosed with depression would get as much benefit from a daily sugar pill as they would from a dose of Prozac, Aropax or Effexor. You can access the original report here.

The report is helpfully provided in three versions - an abstract, an editor's summary, and the full report. In all three, the authors make their opinion that the reason anti-depressants appear to be clinically effective in cases of severe depression is because severe depressives are less responsive to placebos clear, in case anyone reading only one of the first two misses this very important point.

The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication. (abstract)

The findings also show that the effect for these [severely depressed] patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. (editor's summary)

These statements are not particularly scientific - they're pure spin. What the authors are telling us, in plain English, is that anti-depressants do work better than placebos on severely depressed patients, but they would prefer to explain it away. It's not particularly rational - let's see what happens when we make a few substitutions:

Thus, the increased benefit of analgesics for patients with chronic severe pain seems attributable to a decrease in responsiveness to placebo, rather than an increase in responsiveness to medication.

The relationship between initial severity and analgesic efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

The findings also show that the effect for these patients [with chronic severe pain] seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication.

Starts to look a little woolly-headed, doesn't it? More like the sort of thing that you would write if you had some deep-seated conviction that the use of analgesics to relieve pain was just plain wrong than an objective assessment of the evidence.

Then ... Now

THIS may be my last column. If you don’t see me again, you’ll know the Pinata Left has whacked me, too.

You see, Kevin Rudd’s victory has unleashed a horde of haters with sticks who are trying to sack conservative commentators and close down debate.

Their demands are simple. They won. So shut up. No more of these “culture wars”. No dissent.

Andrew Bolt, yesterday, toeing the "if I do get sacked it will be because Rupert Murdoch is a tool of the left" line first enunciated by Tom Switzer.

And The Age gives this woman [Tracee Hutchison] a platform. Has it no shame, or even a sense of self-preservation?
Andrew Bolt, today.

I suppose by The Hun's standards, calling on the management of your major commercial rival to show some shame or even a sense of self-preservation and sack one of its columnists is a responsible and proper exercise of free speech.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Song for Andrew

Australia should be like America!
With gun owners free like America!
Try shooting spree in America!
Get shot by me in America!

Definitely an Own Goal - but Whose?

A week's supposed to be a long time in politics but it seems that it's nowhere near long enough for those insightful people over at the Rupertian to get over their peevishness at the way the voters let them down by electing a bunch of trade union leaders and other assorted riff-raff to replace what's his name and his annointed successor, Chinese submariners willing. However this morning's opinion section brings one promising sign that the engorged spleens and gall bladders of the editors and commentators at our rag of record are now merely distended - the task of paying out on the people for electing Kev, Julia and the ARRP (Australian Riff-Raff Party) has been contracted out to an overseas supplier for the day.

The supplier is Mark Steyn. His article "A loss for civilisation" is a good follow on from Paul Kelly's last piece, where he argued that what Australia had on November 24th wasn't any ordinary election: it was a great national enema, a purging of the bowels of the body politic with the warm soapy waters of democracy.

Steyn begins:

ACCORDING to my Oz-watching pals in Britain and the US, John Howard is not a failure but a victim of his own success. He made Australia safe for the Labor Party: or, at any rate, safe enough that a sufficient number of bored electors were willing to take a flier on a house-trained Labor on the short leash of a quasi-Blairite leader.

That, at any rate, is the spin. Even if it's correct, and accepting that in parliamentary democracies even the greatest generals go a bridge too far, I regret Howard's end. True, I object in principle to Australia's gun laws, and I regard much of the Aussie economy as embarrassingly overregulated after a decade of supposedly conservative rule. But, as the former prime minister put it in one of his most famous soundbites, this is no time to be an 80 per cent ally.

I am a 100 per cent ally of Howard.

It strikes me that there's really only one sensible place for Mark to go from there - and that's a final paragraph announcing his voluntary retirement from the columnising game in favour of a job as humble library technician which will allow him to mentor new up and coming columnists. That after all, is where all the 100 per cent allies of John Howard in the Liberal Party are headed - with the possible exception of Tony Abbott. In fact, Steyn goes on for several boring paragraphs to belabour us - the people who voted Rudd in and the Rat of Straw out. By his own admission Mark isn't arguing from an informed, knowledgeable position (you'd no doubt have guessed that from his objection "in principle" to Australia's gun laws - which are none of his damn business because he doesn't bloody live here):

From my perch several thousand kilometres away, I won't pretend to be an informed analyst of the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party. During my last visit, en route to yet another meeting, there'd usually be someone in the car explaining why the fellow I was on the way to see was on the outs with whichever prime-minister-in-waiting I'd met the day before...

Mark doesn't let his admitted ignorance stand in the way of giving us a good telling off for letting down Western civilisation - and hence the whole world:

What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard's ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you'll forgive the expression) Western civilisation.

There's more absurd bollocks after that declaration, and a lot of name-dropping to let the reader know Mark's actually met some Aussie politicians. We natives might find them laughable, but Mark's willing to wise us up on a few points, such as this:

Costello's exhortation to Aussie couples - have one for mum, one for dad, and one for Australia - gets the stakes exactly right...

The Coalition was all but unique in understanding the three great challenges of the age - Islamism, demography, civilisational will - that in other parts of the West are combining to form the perfect storm... I liked to call Alexander Downer my favorite foreign minister, which, in hindsight, was damning with the faintest of praise.

Yes, we had our chance to re-elect the Rodent, and we blew it. Nonetheless, there's still a way that something might be salvaged from this - not for Australia specifically, but for the Western Civilisation of which we're a small corner:

As a distant observer of Australian affairs, I had some small personal contact with Howard and co. over the years. Merry, feisty, blunt and fair, they were exactly what we need at this moment: happy warriors. I'm saddened Australians feel differently. But if it's too late to get the US constitution amended in time for them to run for president next November, the savvier candidates ought to snap 'em up as speech writers.

There's no way I can beat that for a punch line.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo in Exile)

Alarmism 101

I've been reading another bad book over the past week - a really bad book. It's a long spray at consumerism and urban sprawl. It follows a fairly familiar formula - after the introduction (where you tell the reader what you plan to say), the author moves onto a quick survey of the human condition, cramming in as many references as possible, then launches into several chapters of condemnation and denunciation.

Writing that first chapter is a complex job. To show readers you're not an intellectual snob, you have to mention popular culture, so references to pop music and movies (but not cinema) are a must, the earlier the better. Of course you naow have to convince them that you're not a bogan either, so you bung in the literary references. Reference one or two web-sites to show that you're not a complete Luddite (very necessary in this writer's case). Top that off with some guff about human evolution, neurology and psychology, add a dash of philosophy and religion and there's your first chapter written.

Pull it off, and your readers will be convinced that you're a very knowledgeable person, whose facts are reliable and opinion trustworthy. Well, some of them - enough, you hope to preserve you from the ingnominy of the remainer bin. As long as no-one notices the non-sequiturs and the fact that you're relying completely on emotive argument - including the odd dose of alarmism - you're home and hosed.

Here's an entertainingly alarmist passage from that first chapter, with some explanatory notes from me.

The fantasy [of a world without pain or mental suffering] approaches. A recent Scientific American article by Stefanie Reinberger showed how unpleasant tastes could be eliminated with a new type of food-additive called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).

A very good start - scare the reader by dropping in a frighteningly polysyllabic chemical name lifted from one article in Scientific American. On no account should you do any background reading - you might learn a couple of facts that might get in the way of your very enjoyable self-inflicted panic:

• Adenosine is one of the four nucleosides that make up RNA - a vital part of the biochemical mechanism that transcribes DNA sequences into proteins. Without adenosine, there would be no life as we know it.
  


• Adenosine monophosphate is a precursor to two other compounds - adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). All three compounds are used within living cells to transfer energy obtained from breaking down sugars and lipids (fats) to processes that build other cell constituents - like proteins. Without AMP, ADP and ATP there would be no life as we know it.

Moving on:

AMP is a 'bitter blocker' that overrides our ancient sensitivity to bitterness, acquired to protect us from eating toxic substances like strychnine, by preventing communication of the recognintion of bitterness from tastebud to brain.

A good, strong continuation: OMFG! They could use this "new" food additive to poison us all with strychnine and we wouldn't even know it!

The additive has already (2004) been approved by the US Food and Drug Admininistration; the application of similar principles could mean we never have to taste anything unpleasant.

A bit of a slip there - noting the US FDA's approval of the drug was a plus, but the second clause of the sentence is a bit of a let-down. Most of us prefer to avoid unpleasant tasting stuff, most of the time, which is why some cook, others eat out, and others buy take-away. But this is bad for us:

Brussels sprouts could taste like gruyere, or ice cream, or chocolate and still be as good for us as the bitter cruciform original.

It's important, in alarmist writing, to strike the right note of hysteria and the prospect of chocolate flavoured brussel sprouts is certainly hysterical. Also, while a malapropism (cruciform for cruciferous) assists in convincing the reader that you're hysterical, it reinforces the reader's tendency to respond with the kind of hysteria you don't want to engender.

But is this really what we want? Do we, even at the relatively trivial level of taste, want a world where our only sensations are pleasurable ones? Will pleasure have meaning when that's all there is?

Poor execution, but the author of this passage has the right idea - miss the major issues completely so you can pose a set of rhetorical questions whose answers will strike guilt and fear in the hearts of all but the most decadent of hedonists. The reason that adenosine monophosphate poses such a threat to civilsation and culture as we know it is because it's us that have gone soft - it has nothing to do with anything the food processing industries might do. Nothing at all.

The book, by the way is Blubberland by Elizabeth Farrelly, of the Sydney Morning Herald. This post is a by-blow from a more extended review that the anonymous one appropriated for another shot at temporary notoriety and a bit of ready money, fame and fortune being completely beyond his capabilities. No doubt that review will turn up here, later in the week.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo in exile)