Shades of the prison house

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Yee Haw (spelling?!) – after 6 months, my final treatment today. Still some nasty tests at end of September, but I hope no one will mention the bone marrow in the meantime – three weeks with no medical procedures, first weeks since February, and I intend to enjoy it. With all due respect to the lovely nurses, treatment is not dissimilar (I’m guessing) to being in prison.

Didn’t manage to post today (I am not a left-handed poster sadly) but did do some tweeting.

However I was thinking about David Hicks (one of only 2 Australians held in Guantanamo Bay). There were Ruddock and Downer, again, sneering at Hicks, and defending, again, the Australian govt helping the Americans keep him there, and happy with the military tribunal system where Hicks in desperation after 7 years pleaded guilty to a nonsense retrospective charge, to get released.

But why, I wondered, yet again, were our conservatives so determined to severely punish Hicks, why did they hate him so much?

Think for a moment about their treatment of refugees. The most fundamental principle was that these people must remain anonymous, unseen, unheard, not individuals. The media and the public were kept away, in order for the government to keep treating them inhumanely they had to be perceived as non-human, an anonymous faceless mass of threats to the country.

Conversely when they were hot to trot on following cowboy George into Afghanistan and Iraq, and hype up the terrorist threat to keep people scared and voting conservative they needed not just a faceless enemy (though also useful) but an identified one. Who was the enemy in “1984″, Emmanuel something? Same idea, here was David Hicks, ordinary Aussie from Adelaide, a TERRORIST (he wasn’t), must be, in Guantanamo Bay, therefore must be. So anyone could be, we were all under threat, doubt it, there was picture of Hicks with rocket launcher, still in a terrorist prison, be afraid, very afraid.

And it worked, kept re-electing Howard, silly young Hicks, without even knowing it. If he hadn’t existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Which they did.

Makes me ashamed to be Australian. And sad.

Things we don’t know we don’t know

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Oh I have been slack. Do I need an alibi? I do. Well, a sense of unreality as I approach final treatment (after 6 months) on Wednesday. Time has seemed suspended. But I have, in alibi number two, been getting minor, but unpleasant side effects which are just easing now. Hope there is no repeat after this week. And, alibi number three, I planted two fruit trees.

That phrase doesn’t quite conjure up reality. These events are nothing like the occasions when royalty, or celebrity (and no, thank you, but I have not quite achieved Charlie Sheen’s importance), “plants ” a tree by putting a spadeful of dirt on a silver spade into a hole dug by an underling in which a tree already resides. Nor does it resemble those gardening shows where someone photogenic in clean overalls puts hands into soft rich soil and “digs” a hole deep enough for a tree with a few hand movements, quickly returning soil to cover the tree roots in the same way.

No, planting trees (indeed anything down to the smallest seedling) here involves furiously attacking, with frequent rests in my prematurely (well, not that premature but you know what I mean) aged condition, solid rocky ground with mattock and spade. Chipping out small slivers of rock in the way a woodpecker chips out wood. Eventually I achieve, just, a hole big enough (carefully measured, not a chip more, not a chip less) to take the root bundle. Gasping for air, and being careful with my now tender back muscles, I plonk tree into hole fill up, water, protect from rabbits and parrots, and then collapse in heap while contemplating the second tree.

Strange thing that gap between imagination, what you pictured when I said “planting a tree”, and reality, on this rocky hill top

That gap seems to be getting wider all round the world. Last week there were photos of Steve Jobs looking, as my grandmother used to say, like death warmed over. People were already sympathetic, given his sudden retirement, and here was proof of our worst fears of what a terrible state he was in. Except the photos had been photoshopped to make him look much worse than he actually is. Why? A good question.

Over the weekend New York waited to be pounded or lashed (depending on the preference of the reporter) by cyclone Irene, and the world waited with her. How bad was it going to be? And suddenly there were the pictures we had all been dreading, flood waters rising on the streets of New York. Oh no. Well, that’s right, oh no they were faked images.

Then came the images of the “rebels” flooding into Green Square in Tripoli, the war, it seemed, as good as over. But hang on a moment, says Hugo Chavez (managing to lose any remaining admiration I had for him, which he has frittered away in the last few years), those images are faked, must be, propaganda, my good friend Ghadaffi is still in control, defeating this rag bag bunch of terrorists supported by the oil hungry countries of Europe.

Well, it wasn’t that silly a guess. A few weeks ago we had faked video (from the Lebanese civil war) being used for propaganda in Syria. We all remember the faked images (no doubt what Chavez was remembering) created by America in pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue, the fake story of the kidnapped female American soldier, the contradictory stories about the killing of bin Laden.

Except in the case of Tripoli it wasn’t a fake, indeed given the number of western reporters around (not always insurance, I know), it would have been impossible to fake this particular event. But who is to know? Obama is dead. No he isn’t. In that case he can appear in person to misquote Mark Twain, but the more insidious cases of photoshopping, fake videos, facebook rumours, are impossible to get to the bottom, take on a life of their own among the conspiracy theorists.

In fact the belief that nothing is real, things ain’t necessarily so, is so pervasive now that we can have fake fakeries, as it were. The classic case being the hacking of emails from the climate research unit of the University of East Anglia, and the pretence that these demonstrated a conspiracy to deceive the world about climate change. The people who believe this fake conspiracy continue to do so, in spite of a number of enquiries, and the application of a modicum of common sense.

Now I know you are waiting for me to wrap this up with a dollop of good advice hard-earned from my years of education in the school of hard knocks. But I remain as baffled as you. How do you tell a photoshopped model from a non-photoshopped model on the cover of Vogue? All I can suggest is to take what you are told, especially but not only by politicians and business interests, with a grain of salt. But not a spoonful of salt. Even conspiracy theorists occasionally find a real conspiracy, but on the other hand Elvis remains dead. So tread warily these days, seeing isn’t always believing, nor is hearing or reading – remember my trees. And Hey!

Be careful out there.

But now we want our money back

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by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , ,

In 1975 anthropologist Hannah Middleton published a book on Aboriginal land rights called “But now we want our land back”. The title was a quote from one of the Aboriginal people she worked with. It’s many decades since I read it, and I can’t remember what interpretation she placed on the phrase, which was often quoted in the years that followed. But I reckon the meaning was along these lines. When white fellas arrived in Australia they laid claim to individual ownership of pieces of land – owned them, used them, excluded others from them, grew rich from them. This attitude to land was completely alien to the Aboriginal people watching this process with some bemusement (while trying to avoid being killed as they tried to keep using their ancestral lands to sustain themselves). “Silly white fellas, how could you own land? Land owned you.” Land was owned by everyone and no one in an Aboriginal group – no individual could alienate a piece of land from the rest of the group, the concept made no sense. Still, if the white fellas wanted to pretend that it did make sense, behave in this silly way, let them get on with it, they would come to their senses one day.

But they never did, and the consequences of their behaviour impacted every Aboriginal person on the continent. By the 1970s they had had enough – OK, you’ve had your fun, we went along with the joke for 200 years, but now we want our land back.

I feel the same way about the rise and rise in the number of billionaires, the result, all around the world, of policies (including very low tax policies) designed specifically to cause a rise and rise in the number of billionaires. We all know, don’t we, that you can’t really have such disparities of wealth in society. Oh we can pretend for a while that it is real, laugh along at the antics of the nouveau rich and the oldeau rich as they flaunt their Lamborghinis and diamonds and influence on politicians, but we all know it is as silly a concept as owning land in an Aboriginal society.

Quite apart from the damage to society that such grotesque differences in wealth cause (just as damage to Aboriginal society would be caused by individual land ownership), their origin lies, ultimately, in grotesquely unequal exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Directly or indirectly a billionaire can only be created by using millions of times the resources, destroying millions of times the ecology, spewing out millions of times the amount of greenhouse gas, as your ordinary everyday existing-on-a-few-hundred-dollars-a-year member of the rest of the 7 billion non-billionaire citizens of the planet.

So it was fun for a while, going along with this fairytale of how good billionaires were for the Earth, but now the party is over, now it is getting serious, and now we want our money back. Now is the time for every country in the world to tax billionaires at a 99% rate (still leave them with at least ten million dollars each, but I’m a generous man, and a Lamborghini is not cheap to run given its petrol consumption). The resulting billions, trillions of dollars, to be poured into replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, protecting and repairing damaged ecosystems; and providing decent health care, and sustainable housing and employment and agricultural enterprises for the rest of the population of the world.

They’ll be happy enough, the billionaires, I reckon, had a good run, knew it couldn’t last forever. Can hear them now, singing along, CD in the Lamborghini sound system, with a former radical rock star (now minister in a socialist wealth-redistributing Labor government of course) “The time has come, to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share”. To the world.

Ship of fools

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by Climate Change, politics •

The exchange of refugees between Australia & Malaysia has stalled. But I have a much more attractive and less controversial suggestion. How about we offer Malaysia 100 assorted radio and print shock jocks, climate change denialists, fundamentalist religious leaders, nuclear promoters, populist conservative politicians, in exchange for 10,000 refugees?

Look I know that’s a much higher rate of exchange than the original, but obviously Malaysia isn’t going to want Tony Abbott, Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Barnaby Joyce, Ziggy Switkowski, Ian Plimer, Fred Nile, Jo Codling, Bob Carter, Sophie Mirabella, Alan Jones etc, so we really will need to come up with a good offer. Also, clearly, none of that crew would be able to demonstrate that they had the qualifications and qualities to be accepted for migration elsewhere, so Malaysia would be stuck with them a long time.

Douglas Adams had a scheme in which he shipped off, in a space ship, all the useless members of society like the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, management consultants, and documentary film producers. But the ones he lists were enormously productive and useful compared to the ones I want to send off in a leaky refugee boat (oh, didn’t I mention that?).

So what do you think, make the offer? I reckon we are going to have to go much higher eventually, but let’s start with 100 to 10,000 and go higher as needed. Australia will be the winner whatever the rate of exchange.

[A little housekeeping note. Have been on Twitter a lot later. You can follow my idiosyncratic brief musings by clicking button at right. You could also promote this blog with the follow friday button at right. And if you look at posts individually (by clicking on title) at the end of each is a sharing option to let other people know, via Twitter etc, when you have particularly liked something I have written. Numbers of visitors have settled on a new plateau, and it would be good to see some new explorers, not in leaky boats, visit Watermelonland with your help].

Rare Earth

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the report about “rare earths” a group of, obviously, rare minerals now apparently essential for all sorts of electronic goods and military purposes. China has pretty much cornered the market on them and other countries are trying to find other sources so as to have a competitive market. Trouble is they are hard to find, and are in low concentrations so you need to dig out huge volumes of soil/rock and process it, and there are waste products notably radioactive ones which need to be somehow disposed of. Now given all that you would think our government would get scientists on to finding alternatives to rare earths, but no, some Australian mining companies are gearing up to find and mine the stuff and to hell with the damage they cause. Money to be made.

This approach of getting stuff you can’t eat from underground, while wrecking the land above that can produce food, is already in operation with the fight over coal seam gas extraction. Tony Abbott got himself into trouble the other day, wavering between appeasing his own party’s supporters the miners, or the National’s supporters in the farmers. He finished up satisfying neither. But given the lack of really good deep rich soils in Australia, the proposition that we should wreck some of the best in southern Qld and northern NSW, extracting gas in a process that pollutes soil and water supplies and will add to greenhouse gas production when burnt, seems, politely, insane.

On the other hand we can actually improve our farming land. Starting in the 1930s when Louis Bromfield discovered the benefits of minimum tillage and retaining humus in the damaged farming soils of America, the benefits of such an approach are rediscovered every few years. But in recent years an added incentive, if one was needed, for retaining and building organic content, is the idea that such practices can help in removing CO2 from the air and “fixing it”. The government and Greens have just passed a bill (opposed by the Coalition) in which farmers will be paid a price per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. At the time of writing I don’t have the details of the bill and while it is a win-win situation for farmers and the environment, the price will need to be high enough to not only encourage farmers to build carbon levels in soil, but to maintain those practices over decades. In addition, for it to have any significant impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the areas needed will be huge (say a million hectares or more). So it isn’t any kind of “answer” to climate change but every little helps, and being paid to build soil organic matter seems like a good deal to me.

Anyway, it’s certainly better than digging huge open cut mines and spreading thorium, or injecting stuff into coal seams and polluting the water table.

Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore” or, more importantly, I say, “take care of your farming land, they certainly aren’t making any more of that.”

Steeped in religion

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , ,

As regular readers will know I got an iPad to give me something to do during treatment sessions and recovery periods. As a result I have done quite a lot of browsing on Amazon for ebooks. Something seemed odd about the range of non-fiction titles available, but for a while I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then it came to me – religion. This American site with its emphasis on American books and American customers has a non-fiction list saturated with religion. Of 479,000 non-fiction titles 71,000 (15%) are “religion & spirituality” far more than any other category except history (73,000). This strikes me as a hugely disproportionate number – almost one book in every six. In an Australian bookshop the equivalent section would be tiny, and I guess the same would be true of Europe.

The other notable characteristic is indicated by the inclusion of this out-pouring of religion in the non-fiction section. These are titles (and don’t tell me I can’t judge a book by its title) that don’t treat religion in the way a civilised country does, a somewhat embarrassed tentative offering on a topic potential readers know is nutty and esoteric, but as if this is a fully fledged alternative universe where the bible is literally true, people live their lives by its rules, prayer works, and little boys (in a current best-selling title) visit a real heaven and come back to report. When Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann talk about teaching both creationism and evolution in schools they are really reflecting a more general view that there is a religious world alongside a real world and that both are almost equally valid (the religious one being preferred) and that children need to learn both.

This is the scum floating on the surface, the bubbles emerging from the unhealthy depths, of a society in trouble. A society in which all except one of the contenders for Republican nomination for President are vying to see who can be the most fervent about teaching creationism in schools. A country where the ten commandments are appearing on walls, crosses in yards. A country where not only could an atheist never be president, but where increasingly only a rabid evangelical could be. A country whose armed forces, frighteningly, are increasingly subjected to fundamentalist religious indoctrination relating to “holy wars”.

In a fully-fledged theocracy (Afghanistan, say, under Taliban rule) I doubt that any non-religious books are available at all. In an effective theocracy (Spain at the time of the Inquisition) there will be a list of forbidden books which can not be read and must be destroyed. In a fully secular and civilised society few religious books would be wanted or available (I imagine, deliciously, religious books being sold, like cigarettes are about to be, in plain wrappers from under the counter).

We could then compile an index of the proportion of religious books for sale in a society ranging from effectively zero in a secular country to 100% in a theocracy. What proportion was sold in a country would be an indicator have how far along the road it had gone towards theocratic rule. On the evidence of America the danger point is somewhere around 16%. I wonder where Australia is up to, and which way the index is moving?

Do or die

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by Economics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Yet another dumb, uneducated, religious fundamentalist, anti-science, neoconservative, gun-toting Texan has emerged from that backward state to eye off the White House where he could apply his talents on a wider stage. Rick Perry – shudder.

Not much point in dissecting this good old boy who is aiming to outdo Bachmann in the craziness stakes, the few remaining Americans capable of rational thought are doing that, but I want to pick up on one aspect of his political beliefs out of the many he shares with our own wild-eyed cowboy Tony Abbott. Perry wants to get rid of all regulation.

This of course is the fundamentalist faith of neocon libertarian true market believers, and Rick would be right at home, Right at home, with our very own bunch of market, market and nothing but the market true believers in the IPA. Perhaps they could offer him a visiting fellowship if that running for president thing doesn’t work out.

But the whole thing is as puzzling as the beliefs of Catholics or the southern evangelicals of Texas (evolution? Nah). I have as much difficulty with it as I do with the appearance of virgin mary on toasted cheese, or christ on a creeper (you don’t want to know). But I’ll give it a go.

Normal people believe that it is best to regulate airlines to stop planes crashing, pharmaceuticals to stop side effects, food preparation to stop food poisoning, factories to prevent rivers being poisoned, and guns to stop people being shot.

The Rick Perrys of this world (?) believe nothing of the sort. They start from the premise that regulation costs a business money, either directly or through opportunity cost, and that as a result really rich people will get richer a bit more slowly. Because they are either very rich themselves or best buddies with those who are, they think this is a BAD THING.

But because you can’t admit this is all just about greed they erect a philosophy around it. The idea seems to be that if there are two airlines and one takes advantage of lack of regulation to skimp on maintenance and training and the other doesn’t then the planes of the first one will crash, people won’t want to fly with them and they will go broke. Triumph of the market, no need for that silly old regulation, so twentieth century.

Except, and I think you will have spotted this for yourselves, for one tiny little flaw, nothing at all really. The theory relies on quite a few people who used airline A, well, dying, suffering in fact an opportunity cost of the potential life they could have had if strict regulation had stopped any crashes.

Oh, yes, that’s an extreme test of market force theory, but not an unfair one. Don’t regulate food preparation standards and wait for enough people to get sick, the word to get around, and a restaurant loses business, goes out of business if it doesn’t mend its ways, wash its hands. Don’t regulate speed limits on roads and, after a certain number of crashes the speeds will average out at a safe level (yes indeed suggested by an Australian libertarian).

Poorly built houses collapsing in storm, children’s toys with lead paint, untested drugs in pharmacies, sweat shops in every suburb, all media owned by Rupert Murdoch? Not to worry, when the public knows about these things the market will swing into action. Oh, sure, casualties along the way – injury, disease, death – price you pay for perfect freedom. What’s that? Well, yes, the freedom of the corporations, obviously, what are you a socialist?

But as if the idea that testing the market involves, if it must, injury and death, to maintain the purity of vision of the Libertarian gurus like Hayek and Paul (his son, almost unbelievably, named after Ayn Rand), was not bad enough, it also depends on another contradiction. If an unregulated media becomes owned by just one or two powerful owners, each with their own corporate interests in other segments of the economy, and each depending on advertising from the airlines, builders, drug companies, children’s toy makers and such like, then the chances of those media outlets exposing shonky or dangerous goods to the public so the “market” can decide is, oh, let me guess, approximately 0%. And just in case a rogue reporter does manage to survive somewhere in the bowels of a giant media conglomerate, the corporations, as we have seen recently, have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves in the form of astroturf organisations and legal injunctions and donations to political parties to prevent truth ever getting out.

Have I missed something? Yes indeed. The consequences of deregulation on individuals and their inability, in a real world outside the pages of Randian fantasy novels, to do anything about it, is obvious enough. Still, I suppose you could argue that an individual may, eventually, become informed about stuff by word of mouth and observation. But there is a whole other category of failure, bad enough even in a semi-regulated world, that has no remedy. Damage to the environment is always an externality – the tragedy of the commons is that everybody dumps rubbish in it and someone else has to pay to clean it up. At least where there are attempts at regulation, however feeble, companies might decide it is less costly, if penalties are high enough, to clean up their act than to poison water and air and soil. With no regulation there is no “consumer” to discourage environmentally damaging behaviour, and a company that did, altruistically, decide to put filters on chimneys or outlet pipes would incur costs not incurred by its competitors. Only a massive public campaign which managed to effectively aim at boycotting a company’s products might be effective, and it would be met by astroturf crazies, union thugs, legal jackals, and media disinformation campaigns.

But the faith of the true believers like Perry and Abbott is unshaken by any analysis – just as in religion the less evidence the more faith, and no evidence at all requires the greatest faith and the surest path to paradise. Those calling for theocracies in what were once western democracies are doing so from the safety of hard-won secular societies. In the same way those calling for an end to all regulation are doing so from an economy and society which still, in spite of the best efforts of the neocons, is based at least nominally on the idea that some regulation is needed to save capitalism from itself. In both cases I have the feeling that the religious and economic fundamentalists should be careful what they wish for – they wouldn’t, in the real world, like what they got.

Speaking metaphorically

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by Uncategorized •

Hey oop, I can see the valley clearly now the rain has gone (almost a song lyric there but needs work), and a kangaroo just hopped along the bottom fence line, presumably wanting to queue early for the best grass restaurant.

Looking out the other window I see some new Spring rabbits, enjoying the new Spring grass I thoughtfully planted for them in Autumn.

Yes, this is a lazy afternoon post. Was going to, indeed started to, write about the insane anger of the anti-gay marriage and anti-pay-us-compensation-for-a-price-on-carbon and anti-having-a-female-prime-minister demonstrations of this week, but I was too angry. Incidentally you know the old media equation that one death in your own town equals five in someone else’s equals fifty in an English speaking country equals 5000 in a third world country? Something like that applies to protests in reverse – one person at a protest by a right wing/religious group is more significant than 500 at a union protest is more significant than 5000 at an environmental protest. So it’s like the old joke about a woman having to be ten times as good as a man to be paid half the salary (or something like that) fortunately this isn’t hard? Same with demos – a left wing protest has to have 100 times the number of a right wing protest to get half the media attention. Again, not hard.

Another similar equation in business one job lost because of an environmental measure will be met with 100 times the outrage of 1000 lost to profit increasing measures. The latter being just good business, the former, like gay marriage, signalling the end of civilisation as we know and love it.

So that was the week in Australian politics. And my week? Thank you for asking, not too bad. Now my second last treatment is gone I can see clearly the end in sight (should be clear of last of testing by early October). Trouble is it’s like the feeling you get after flying from London to Sydney and feel the wheels touch the tarmac. You are there, but not really there, still to endure the taxiing to the terminal, being sprayed with insecticide, disembarking, customs, lost luggage. So that’s me, looking out the window at the bright lights of home, but having them still just out of reach.

Unless my sense of metaphor has been unhinged by the signs at the “kill the prime minister” rally. I mean those people are using metaphors, aren’t they?

I can see clearly now

by Uncategorized • Tags: , , , , ,

Sad to see the last shuttle flight recently. Seems to have been around forever, though it was only 30 years. But over those years it had begun to look increasingly dated, more like a Model T Ford than a Prius, and the time had obviously come to retire it. Space exploration will continue, and indeed the shuttle was increasingly irrelevant to that. The Hubble telescope (which the shuttle did launch and repair) continues its amazing work in mapping the universe, and is soon to be replaced (hopefully) by the even more astonishing James Webb telescope. Small unmanned space ships continue their work of exploring the inner parts of the solar system (Mercury currently) and the outer (Pluto next) and even way beyond to the beginnings of far outer space. More exploring vehicles will land on Mars and continue mapping and analysing that planet, others may soon reach the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

What’s it all about? Is it of any interest at all as we struggle to pay the rent, raise children, care for parents? Once upon a time, and not that long ago really, people in the small farming and mining villages of England and Australia rarely strayed outside the village boundaries. May never have seen the next town. Married others they had grown up with, their children likewise. No awareness of what was going on in other parts of the country. No sense of a larger society of which they were also a part. No sense of the wider environment. Still something we see even today in Australia, where people will say “Oh, plenty of trees around here” and assume that means plenty everywhere, or “plenty of water here” and assume this means that people downstream can look after themselves. We need a wider perspective. Aborigines in the past, by the way, got this from the big ceremonial meetings where many tribes would gather to compare notes on climate and animal numbers (oh and have a good time and find a wife) across whole regions.

Once upon a time people thought Earth was the centre of the universe, and the sky at night was a roof with holes through which lights shone. That distorted view of the universe and our place in it has gradually given way, through hundreds of years of observation, and decades of space exploration, to a realistic one of where we are and how it all came about and evolved. Knowing the reality of what is out there may well have some direct benefits, as we better understand how the Sun behaves, how the Earth is constructed, what dangers we may face from asteroids; but more important is just a sense of the reality of the size and structure of the universe as we stare up into the clear night skies of the Yass Valley and see the billions of stars and galaxies spread out before us.

So, goodbye Shuttle, well done.Thank you to the brave people who flew on it and the 14 poor astronauts who lost their lives to let us see the world more clearly.

But the journey to knowledge will continue – down here and up there.

Photograph shows the Necklace Nebula, located 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta (the Arrow). In this composite image, taken on July 2, 2011, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured the glow of hydrogen (blue), oxygen (green), and nitrogen (red). (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

I believe

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by Climate Change, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some news items make me feel sceptical that the human race is ever going to be smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. Last week it was a serious interview with John Edwards, “world’s greatest psychic” in which he was asked how his “psychic powers” worked; and the news that London rioters would be thrown out of public housing and made homeless. This weekend it was the news that Michelle Bachmann had won the Ames Straw Poll. Well, not that she had won the bizarre (even by American political standards) ASP, but that she had won anything.

On the home front Tony Abbott was ridiculing the Prime Minister for persisting with the “carbon tax” – “What planet is she living on?” he wanted to know. Well, um, Tony, same planet as you, the one that is rapidly warming towards a future that is going to doom us all, with Australia among the countries being damaged first. That planet. Of course Mr Abbott, along with all except one of his colleagues, is a climate change denier, sorry sceptic.

He is also, famously, fundamentally religious, a once future priest turned future king’s first minister (also famously a fundamentalist monarchist, saying that there was something mystical about the monarchy that republicans couldn’t understand). Which once again illustrates a curious thing about self-described sceptics on climate change – they are sceptical about nothing else.

Not a hint of scepticism about any aspect of Catholicism as expounded by one cardinal seems to have ruffled Tony’s brow while he simultaneously denied the work of tens of thousands of scientists. The people who unaccountably tell pollsters that Mr Abbott would be a good prime minister (shades of the Iowans who can seriously propose Bachmann for president) have no scepticism about any of his publicity stunts. Have no scepticism about what the shock jocks, who they listen to religiously every day, tell them (can believe any number of impossible things before breakfast), nor about the headlines in the Murdoch Press.

No sceptical thought about WMDs troubled them as Iraq was shocked and awed. Scepticism isn’t a respectable intellectual position as they listen to the claims of the mining industry about a mining tax, clubs about poker machines, tobacco companies about packaging, the alcohol industry about closing hours, media companies about media enquiries, cattlemen about live exports.

There is no room, it seems, for scepticism about claims that there are plenty of fish in the sea, plenty of water in the rivers, plenty of trees in the forests. Nor about claims that reducing taxes on the rich benefits the poor. Ghosts, UFOs, toasted virgin Marys, virgin Virgin Marys, psychic powers, alternative medicines, Barnaby Joyce – all things that need the white hot heat of true scepticism, and all things that receive unquestioning belief from the people who attend anti carbon tax rallies.

No, the one thing, the only thing, that these modern day Galileos (revolving in his grave faster and faster each time his name is misused) point their telescopes of scepticism at is a single phenomenon known scientifically for 150 years and supported by hundreds of thousands of research results from tens of thousands of scientists.

No wonder I’m sceptical about their scepticism – and about the future of the human race.