Making your brown eyes blue

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by Education, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

When my mother, aged 85, had a fall and was taken to hospital, it quickly became clear that she would not be able, any longer, to manage living by herself, but would need to go into a nursing home and receive, for quite some time, if not indefinitely, extensive nursing care. So I had to try to arrange that, and it meant finding a Home with a room available, and one in which she could receive nursing care. Not easy, but I eventually found one with a vacant appropriate room in the total care area. The next step was to quickly (before the room was taken by someone else) get approval from the government Department of Aged Care, or Health, or Community Services or something, I forget. That is I had to fill in a form setting out her medical condition and so on to request that she get a total care package, and this had to be witnessed. Witnessed, easy. Her regular doctor (visiting her regularly in hospital as her GP) was required as one signatory, and there had to be a second witness of my signature. Second one? Well, let’s make sure there will be no question, get the Senior Nurse Manager, responsible for her care in the ward she was in to add her signature. Had to wait to catch both of them while visiting/on duty, but eventually, done and dusted. Off I set in my car for the some 2 hour drive to the head office of the Department concerned with nursing homes. Found it, walked confidently up to counter, stood in queue, anxious to get back before end of business hours in order to register at the Nursing Home. And reached the counter to find … well, let’s call him Mr B. B for …. let’s say Bureaucrat.

There were several reasons why Mr B was the boss of me now. First he was behind the counter in his familiar space with his gang, and I was outside. Rather like storming a castle really. Second, I had already had a couple of weeks of desperately trying to sort out my mother’s affairs, while staying on the other side of the continent from my own family. I was tired, anxious, and had driven two hours to get to these battlements, sorry, counter, desperate to get the nursing home arranged. He was warm, rested, well fed, at home, and had absolutely no emotional capital invested in my form or mother at all. And, finally, and most importantly, he had absolute power over me. I had to get his approval in order to move my mother into the nursing home. There was no other pathway, no other bridge over the ravine, and he was guarding the bridge. The power balance was really unbalance – he was all-powerful, I was vulnerable and totally dependent on him.

So he took my pitiful little form almost as if he was handling it with tongs and cast a gloomy eye over it. Page 1 ok, it seemed, his face gloomier, page 2 yeees, probably, page 3 and we were on the home straight, nothing could go wrong now, only page 4 with our signatures to go. And that was where he got me. ‘Ah, doctor, yes, but who is this other one?” Then he picked up his guide book, found the page, and began going through the list. All sorts of people were on there, all kinds of occupations, and if I had found, for example, a real estate agent who didn’t know my mother or anything about her but did have a pen I would have been home free. “No, he said, no ‘Senior Nurse Manager’”. “You are kidding” I said, “what do you mean?” “That isn’t one of the approved occupations for signing this form to witness your signature and your mother’s condition”. I went into the routine, told him the situation, begged him to reconsider. Big mistake, I was even more vulnerable now, and showing it. He went through his list again, his finger pausing at each one, saying the title, like a person who is not able to read very well. “No, ‘Senior Nurse Manager’ not there, can’t accept this form”, he said triumphantly, handing it back to me, “Next”.

And that was that. I drove back the two hours arriving too late to do anything else. Next morning got another copy of form, filled it in again, got the doctor to sign it again, and managed to find someone else on the approved list (a Pharmacist, if I remember correctly, who had no idea who any of us were). Headed back on the two hour drive, stood in queue, reached the counter, handed form to the same fellow, now triumphant and showing it. Thought of saying something but could see no point, and feared that he might find another t uncrossed, an i undotted. Back in car, his signature on the approval form, back two hours to the nursing home that had the vacancy the previous day. Rushed through door, waving form to the chap in charge. “Oh”, he said, “sorry, that vacancy has been filled, what a pity you didn’t come in yesterday.”

A couple of days later there was an unexpected vacancy at another, much less appealing home, and I got her in. She was very unhappy to be in this less attractive place with a not very good room, but I was helpless. It was what it was, we were where we were. Six months later she had died, suddenly, of pneumonia. Cause and effect? Who knows.

I tell this story at some length because it seems to me, in a microcosm, symptomatic of a much larger problem. Everywhere we look around the world, and throughout recorded history, we have tens of thousands of events which seem, at first sight, unconnected. Trials proceed in the Hague of people responsible for cruel massacres in Bosnia and Ruanda; in Australia the child victims, stolen from their parents, of terrible treatment in children’s homes (both government and religious based) demand and get apologies from governments and church groups; Abu Ghraib prison, a place once used for torture by Saddam Hussein, is used for torture by Americans; in South America, military coups see men and boys shot, or flung alive from helicopters into the ocean, babies stolen from women; in Africa hands and arms are chopped off innocent civilians of the wrong tribal group; the Gestapo torture and kill Resistance prisoners; the Catholic church (and some other churches) try to cover up pedophile priests who have been raping altar boys for decades; private security firms guarding asylum seekers in mandatory detention in Australia inflict all sorts of major and minor cruelties; in various countries police are captured on CCTV tasering or pepper-spraying restrained prisoners over and over, or beating them to death in prison cells; and so it goes – the Stasi, the Khmer Rouge, the Romans, the British (in India, Northern Ireland, Kenya etc), Aztecs, Indonesians, South Africans, Soviet Union, America (native Americans, Vietnamese, Filipinos and so on), China (harvesting organs from executed prisoners, Tiananmen Square), Japanese, Spanish Inquisition, Israel (Palestinians), Burmese, they, and many others, have been at it in various ways for thousands of years. In Africa, South America, Asia, the Middle East, supposedly civilised European countries like France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, have all treated native populations with unspeakable cruelty in hearts of darkness.

Usually each incident is treated as quite separate, explained by particular circumstances, or particular national characteristics, or explained by some particularly vicious leader. But whether they are the small scale cruel treatment of girls in a children’s home, or large scale atrocities of thousands of men working the Burmese railway, or shot in Bosnian fields, or sent off to die in Gulag Archipelagos, the cause it seems to me is the same, and all comes back to my Mr B. For some reason, buried evolutionarily deep, I suspect, within our psyche (if the behaviour of say rams towards a wounded ram, or birds towards a sickly member of a flock are an indication that its origins lie well back in evolutionary time), is a psychological switch that turns on when another human being is within our power to some degree.

We actually have psychological experiments on this human flaw. The two famous (and so devastating in their effects that they were and are still controversial) experiments were the Brown eyes/Blue eyes in the classroom one, and the press button to inflict pain one. Jane Elliott was the teacher who, to give children some idea of what racism was about, following the Martin Luther King assassination, divided her class into blue eyed and brown eyed groups and gave the latter absolute power over the former, then later reversed the power status of the two groups. The effects on the subordinate group were devastating, as was the astonishing willingness of the group arbitrarily given superior status to treat their classmates very badly. The related Milgram experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram, had students giving what they thought were greater and greater electric shocks, to the sound of screams, to another person who they were told had to be punished in order to learn some words. When told to go ahead by the instructor, students were willing generally to inflict more and more “pain” on the other person. You can read the details of both experiments on Wikipedia, but essentially both demonstrate that people are willing to treat people in their power with great cruelty, and are willing to be more and more cruel if told to be so by someone in authority over them.

It is not really, as Elliott and Milgram have shown us, really very far from my nasty little Mr B, to the bully in the school playground, to the Matron in the girl’s “reform school”, to the policeman with the taser, to the fellow who opens fire with an automatic rifle on a crowded cinema, to the Serbian general, to the commandant of Belsen. That is not to say we should just shrug our shoulders and say “human nature eh, what can you do?” It is to say that in establishing procedures, structures, hierarchies of power, we must do so with as many checks and balances as we can find, and then a few more (perhaps you lot could suggest some). No one should have absolute power, for it does indeed corrupt absolutely.

Short and stout

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Bertrand Russell famously said that if he stated that there was a teapot circling the Sun, nobody could prove him wrong, and that this was exactly the same as saying, without proof, that a god existed:

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time”

Or as Carl Sagan put it more succinctly “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

Note that Russell was writing exactly 60 years ago, and so could happily include in his argument that the teapot was “too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes”. Sixty years on and we have massively stronger telescopes. Well, ok, he could certainly still say that the telescopes wouldn’t see a small teapot wandering through space between Earth and Mars, but a medium-sized teapot?

Telescopes can see almost back to the Big Bang, see the earliest stars and galaxies that formed. Can see the tiniest perturbations in the rings of Saturn, tiny colour differences on Mercury, changing seasons on Titan. Billions of galaxies can be seen, black holes in abundance, nebulae, distant planets circling different stars, every phenomenon of the universe. Can see every small rock and sandstorm on the surface of Mars, can see where the ice melts in Summer. Can look at details of the surface of asteroids, of comets, of lumps of rock that whizz past Earth. Can do experiments on our own Moon and see the results. Can analyse in detail the surface of the Sun, describe the history of other stars.

Telescopes can view the universe not just in the visible light spectrum, but in infrared, UV, XRay, radio waves. Can see where the “dark matter” is, can “weigh” galaxies, estimate the size of black holes. Can see the echoes of the big bang in the cosmic background radiation. Can see the arrangement of the universe in local groups of galaxies and in the super groupings.

The detail in our description of the universe is now quite astonishing. And nowhere in all that is there a sign of a teapot. Not a big one or a little one. Oh, and no sign of a fellow with a white beard and flowing robes either. Nor tall skinny gods or short stout ones. Nor any of the other imaginary elephants or buddhas or rainbow serpents. No imaginary figures, unless of course they are hiding in a sunken cave on Mars, or under the frozen surface of Titan, or shyly peeping from behind the dust clouds in a nebula, or popping in and out of a black hole in the middle of a galaxy, or, well, you get the idea. No one out there.

For the religious, like homeopaths, the less you can see the greater the proof, until the point where absolute zero evidence equals absolute certainty. So I guess they have it now – whatever the size of the telescope, or all the other devices with which we see the universe, the evidence for teapots, sorry, gods, is zero, zip, zilch, nada, nothing. Them gods ain’t nowhere man.

Nor is the teapot.

Upon this rock

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

Saw first part of a terrific tv documentary (How to grow a planet) on the history of plant life on Earth the other night. Struck me that the first episode should be compulsory viewing for every one of the seven billion people I share this planet with. It showed how this ball of sterile, and extremely inhospitable rock we call home was actually turned into a habitable place by plants. Habitable not just for us but for all the other animals we are related to. The first primitive one-celled plants began to generate oxygen, later ones helped to break down rocks, generate more oxygen, began to create an atmosphere protecting us from UV rays. First marine animals were able to eat plants as food. Plants coming on to land paved the way for first land animals. First advanced trees with roots began to break down rocks even further and create soil (there had been no soil). Their shading of the ground helped other plants to establish, shelter formed for animals. Their recycling of water formed clouds and resulted in rain. The deeper roots of trees brought up nutrients from far underground. And so on.

In short then, what we take for granted as a planet on which the living is easy is totally dependent for its benign environment on the plants that cover its surface, from the simple algae in the water to the complex giant trees, and all the plants in between. If a plague of some virus that killed all organisms with chlorophyll erupted, and plants disappeared, animals, including human animals, would be gone a very short time afterwards as the planet went back to being an inhospitable hot rock.

If a plague sounds a bit unlikely, what if one of the organisms, evolved quite recently on this benign planet, decided, inexplicably (the idea is crazy of course), to start large-scale clearing of plants? What if people were logging and clearing forests or sending in hunters and trail bikes? What if grasslands were overgrazed, over fertilised, monocultures, being damaged by fracking? What if “National Park” was merely a synonym for “Exploit Later”? What if marine vegetation was being damaged by run-off full of chemicals, and by rising sea temperatures? What if increasing CO2 levels and temperatures were beginning to damage all plant life?

All of the animals that were evolving in the last 5 million years or so alongside Humans did so in a world whose characteristics had been established by the plants that they lived on and among. Those characteristics of soil, water, temperature range, indeed the very air itself, essential to human and other animals, are not the result of some fixed aspect of this planet Earth, but have been developed over billions of years by plants. Damage extensively, remove completely, the ecosystems containing those plants, and we are sending the Earth back towards its natural status as a barren rock incapable of maintaining life.

Probably not the wisest choice, eh?

Around the world in 80 tweets

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by Environment, Media, politics • Tags: ,

There was a fashion some years ago in Australia, and I presume elsewhere, for what was called “Neighbourhood Watch”. Various elements to it, but essentially the idea was that people in a community kept a lookout for each other. Might note for example if there were strangers entering a house of people known to be on holidays. Might hear suspicious noises and notify police. Might check on why the old lady down the road hadn’t collected her milk from the front step that morning. Might report strange cars with unknown occupants parked in a back street late at night. And so on.

Not a bad idea eh, aiming to change a suburb or city block from a collection of individual fortress dwellings where old people can die in their homes unnoticed, houses can be robbed with impunity when owners away, police investigating crime met with a complete lack of eyewitnesses, to a community where people watch out for each other. Oh, sure, some room for stickybeaking, nosy neighbours, troublemakers, police timewasters, privacy intrusion, but on the whole a really positive thing. Back to the way things would have been say 100 years ago and previously.

Seems to me that, on a much larger, indeed planetary scale, and on a much more ambitious idea of content, Twitter is the new universal neighbourhood Watch, where the Neighbourhood is the Earth itself, and the community is all 7 billion of us.

On a direct level twitter is providing very rapid notice of events like earthquakes or severe storms or fires or shooting rampages, tweets flashing out within seconds, far quicker than any traditional news. And it provides a billboard for community events, plays, charity shows, lost dogs, sports results, and so on.

But it is also providing a superb venue for passing information around quickly, linking to newspaper articles, political speeches, noting media mistakes. It provides opportunity for eyewitness accounts of revolutions, wars, invasions, massacres to flash around the world, beyond the scope of a dictator to prevent them. And you can find notices about climate change, damage to ecosystems, threatened species.

There is really no limit to the information exchange that is now happening. Each of us can act as an observer, a good citizen (though, just as in neighbourhood watch, there are some bad twittercitzens), picking up pieces of information here and there and adding them to all the other pieces collected by others, in other towns, in other countries.

The neighbourhood is the planet, and we all need to watch out for each other in these dangerous times.

Think globally, tweet locally.

One hit wonders

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

Bill Clinton, presidential candidate, famously had pinned to his wall by his campaign manager (the glib James Carville) a sign saying “It’s the economy, stupid”. It was shorthand for “all the voters are interested in is their hip pocket so give them what they want, not any high falutin’ stuff about environment, or arts, or foreign affairs, or infrastructure, or health, or education, Dumbo”. It was instantly adopted as the kind of ageless political advice on stone tablets brought down from the Acropolis by Machiavelli after everybody said “gosh darn why didn’t I think of that?”

And away they went. And because it was the preferred political fighting ground of the Right it suited them down to the balance sheet to have progressives always focused on “the economy” and not the hundreds, thousands of other aspects of daily life that the Right don’t have a clue about. While the strengths of progressive politicians were left undiscussed. As time went by this became a self-fulfilling bon mot because progressives were expected to focus on the economy, so only those who were happy to do so, looked the part, and talked the talk, could become political candidates. Game set and match to the corporations and banks. Bravo Mr Carville.

But the ramifications of this ratty little bit of paper with its fortune cookie sentiment went even further. The public began to believe that you only had to utter the phrase “the economy”, and, like a Hogwarts’ spell, demons would be defeated, all put to rights, happy ever after. An answer to a perceived problem which is “the economy” ignores all the other aspects of society and culture that combine to keep the wheels of history turning. Ignores environmental issues, education, health, infrastructure, culture, technology, communication, ethnic relations, population parameters, geography, history itself indeed. To pretend that there is some magic economic lever you can pull and everything comes good is fooling both yourself and the people.

But it has got worse since that golden age when the Clinton-Carville political renaissance was in full bloom, like a hundred flowers. At least then the post-it note’s wisdom for the ages encompassed the whole economy. In more recent times politicians have come to reduce the language of a campaign to three word slogans, and the “policies” to glib single issues. Modern Carvilles I guess pin-up notes saying “It’s the Dummies, Stupid”. Can’t confuse the dumbed-down voters, so politicians wander around, repeating the same mantra endlessly – all will be well if you elect me and I just do this one thing. The one thing might be the removal of a tax, the change in a law, the building of a railroad, the bulldozing of a forest, the cutting of “red tape” (or these days “green tape” or “black tape”), the stopping of immigration, the reduction of minimum wages, fighting terrorism, and so on.

Our very own Tony Abbott, who three word slogans suit just fine because he can’t remember sequences longer than three words (Romney in America the same) has been telling the public, daily for two years that the “Big New Tax” (ie what is actually a price on carbon applicable only to a few hundred big companies) will be removed and the Golden Years of Howard will be restored. Nothing else needed, just keep telling people (ranging from fishermen to antique dealers to coal miners), over and over that the removal of this ‘tax’ will solve all their problems, for ever and ever amen.

Tony Abbott, Opposition Leader and prime minister manque, doesn’t bother explaining to the businesses that, if they do have “problems”, those problems have nothing whatsoever to do with a carbon price. Their businesses are the way they are (for better or worse) because of the exchange rate of the dollar, free trade agreements, global financial crises, lack of funding for education, inadequate infrastructure, the labour market distortion caused by the mining boom, the adequacy of workplace safety regulations, health care for workers, business tax concessions, the wages that potential customers get, the presence of sufficient housing for a workforce, adequate transport and communications, and so on. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a society to support a business.

Similarly the general public, offered, say, a tax cut by a wannabe leader, might want to consider what that wannabe might to do public transport, public schools and hospitals, road maintenance, whether they will ensure the air and water are clean (whether indeed they will help to stop the climate itself changing), whether they will be tempted to take the country to war for some less than adequate reason, whether they will encourage development of the arts, and so on.

It is no good making promises about what you will do about one tiny element of people’s lives. What counts is the entirety of the society in which we all live. And the entirety of the people who ask to lead us.

Drink like a fish (water only)

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

“Prohibition” seems to have had a strong effect on the American and world psyche as a kind of ultimate argument against regulation and in favour of libertarianism. See, say the conservatives, try to ban something and “pouf!”, gangsters. Curiously they fail to see that exactly the same argument applies to drugs – completely banning them with “zero tolerance”, and pouring ever more money into law enforcement and prisons while criminal organisations become rich.

Conversely, in relation to alcohol itself, prohibition having “failed” so spectacularly, Australia is now suffering the effect of what amounts to almost totally open slather on alcohol. Available 24 hours a day, licensed premises in huge numbers, liquor sales in and around even supermarkets, “mixer” drinks specially designed for addicting teenagers, massive promotion of alcohol via sporting events and teams, constant jocular remarks in media about binge drinking.

But US Prohibition failure isn’t an argument against regulation, it’s an argument against not regulating well. The problem in America before 1920 (and now here and elsewhere) was not ANY alcohol consumption but EXCESSIVE alcohol consumption, both at an individual and a society level. Closing off all alcohol consumption at the stroke of midnight, without support from business, and a large part of the population including police forces, and the failure to involve Canada and other neighbouring countries, was a recipe for the huge flouting of the law, and corruption, and violence, and health problems from bootleg liquor, which quickly became the norm.

If America had, instead, said that the aim was to reduce excessive alcohol consumption, then the approach would have been very different. A reduction in the number of licensed premises, and a reduction in the hours alcohol could be sold. A reduction in the number of places of retail sale. A reduction in advertising and promotion. Education for children about alcohol. Increased support for rehabilitating alcoholics and helping their families. Better training and support for police dealing with domestic violence. And so on.

Many such approaches of course could equally be applied to non-alcoholic drugs, instead of prohibition. Or to gambling, obesity, and perhaps other social problems. In fact “Prohibition” is an object lesson not against regulation, but in favour of doing it properly. Ninety years on we should be a lot more sophisticated in our approaches to more civilised societies.

[Note the title comes from the inscription on a jug that my grandmother, a very vocal teetotaller opposed to alcohol in all its forms, bought around 100 years ago. A period, as in America, which also saw moves to try to prohibit alcohol in England].

The C Word

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by Climate Change, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

An odd discussion on one of the Australian tv networks yesterday morning. They had run, to their credit, a segment looking at extreme weather events in different parts of world and tentatively suggested that these might be due to climate change. Well done (more than our public broadcaster has been permitted to do).

At some point during the editing of the segment (and obviously I am guessing this) someone seems to have said “hey, guys, balance, remember, we must have balance”. So they had created “balance” by saying something like “of course all major disasters can’t be ascribed to climate change”. Curiously though, they clearly hadn’t understood their own attempt at balance because they gave an example about flooding. I forget which major flood it was, Thailand perhaps, and the comment was that the damage there was the result of people building in the wrong places, and drainage being impeded (there may have been other factors I forget). So, “not climate change in that case”.

So the discussion by the bright young things began. One was delighted that the presenter of the segment had been “moderate” by pointing out that one even couldn’t be “blamed” on climate change. In her view in general in fact there was far too much talk about catastrophes associated with climate change, and what we wanted was a much more moderate view. The others agreed that, yes indeedy, moderation every time was their preferred option, and that it was really bad to scare people by warning about calamities. The first speaker, who makes much of her origins in the country, said farmers were getting the idea of climate change, but resisted it because of the lack of a “moderate” approach.

Now a number of things occurred to me while listening to this. First, while the media determination to prevent any serious information about climate change reaching the public, and hence prevent any action on greenhouse gases, is as strong as ever, the changes we are seeing in the Earth’s climate are becoming so obvious that they can’t continue totally ignoring the matter. Hence the segment.

Second was the total misunderstanding of what the issue is with extreme weather events and climate change. Events can’t be ascribed or not to climate change based on whether they were made worse by human activity on the ground or not. It isn’t the effects (in loss of life, crops, infrastructure) that is the measure, but the origin of those events. Were they caused by record high rainfall or temperatures, or record numbers or extent of storms, is the question to ask, not what happens afterwards (though of course one of the responses to the now inevitable serious climate change must be improvement of infrastructure to try to make effects less severe on the ground).

My final thought was what a confusion of thinking (not unique to this bunch of tv identities) about what is actually happening to our planet was represented. They were again unable to separate two different issues. Partly they were saying – mustn’t tell people bad stuff that’s going to happen because then they will get scared and react badly and not do anything. Fear not a good motivator. A rare Republican with the nous to understand climate change is saying similar things in the US currently. This sounds kinda logical until you think about it. There are two major aspects to climate change. The first is the gradual rise in CO2 levels, gradual rise in average world temperature, gradual seal level rise and increasing acidity, gradual melting ice caps and glaciers, gradual changes in plant and animal distributions. The second is the manifestations of these changes in weather patterns – record hot days, extreme rainfall events, storm intensity and frequency, droughts, Now the first kind of change is impossible for the average human being to perceive. We rely on scientists to measure such things over time, and report, but we can’t experience the changes for ourselves from one day to the next or even one decade to the next. The extreme weather events however are what we can experience. They are not only a major way in which humans are being directly affected, but the only way we can sense that change is happening and what the implications are. So what these tv personalities (and the Republican, and others) were saying was don’t emphasise to the public what is going on by pointing out to them that what they are sensing is happening is indeed relevant. Instead concentrate on the slow changes that they can’t perceive. This is a recipe that has been in operation for 20 years now and it has resulted in precisely no public awareness or alarm. It is the classic frog in boiling water syndrome.

But partly what these tv icons were also saying is that the “moderate” view was by definition the correct one. That, three bears-like, climate change would be not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Not too wet, not too dry. And so on. It is the kind of mentality that sees a driver whose petrol gauge shows empty driving faster to get to the petrol pump before he runs out. That sees people believing that after a run of “bad luck” they are due some good. That a lump somewhere in the body must be benign, because, well, it just must be. That people who behave well get rewarded. And so on. The climate cannot be changing in a major and disastrous way because, well, it just can’t be. So people who tell us we are in big trouble must be wrong. And while people who tell us we don’t have any problem might just, possibly, also be wrong, it is those who tell us things will change a bit, moderately, but won’t be too bad, who must be right. If change wasn’t going to be moderate, these tv clowns would have to say something, do something, but they aren’t so it must be.

Reality check, guys. The planet, indeed the universe, has absolutely no concern about human beings at all. Knows nothing and cares less about our existence. Doesn’t in fact have the wherewithal to care. Is not sentient. Things happen as a result of physical laws. That’s it. If you pour CO2 into the atmosphere of a planet that planet will warm up, whether or not it contains naked apes. If it warms up enough the consequences for ice, water, soil, oceans, are also inevitable, Homo sapiens or no Homo sapiens. There is no moderator, there is no “moderate”. There are no bargains. There is no good behaviour that keeps you safe, there is just what there is.

And what there is represents calamity ahead, coming ready or not. And if tv clowns think everything will be fine as long as we don’t mention the C word, then we are in really big trouble.

Elementary my dear Particle

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by Media • Tags: , , , , ,

In the great scheme of things it’s no big deal. Hardly worth getting all hot and god-bothered about, really. Of all the targets I can aim my keyboard mightier than the sword (yeah, as if) at, this one should be down the list at number 1000 (yes, it’s a big list, you got a problem with that?), I mean, Higgs Boson, come on, you can find weightier topics than that can’t you?

Look, I’m not a physicist (something the physicists are probably grateful for), but I am probably even angrier than they are about the constant, ubiquitous, use of “the god particle” for “Higgs Boson”.

It apparently began with a book written 20 years ago in America. Titled originally, it seems, “The Goddamn Particle”(at that time the search to prove the existence of the Higgs had already been going on for 20 years with no hint of success), the publishers, scared of upsetting the notoriously sensitive religious Americans, changed the name to “The God Particle”. I also assume that they thought this was a pretty cool title that would get buyers running into stores, in a way that “The physics of the search for the Higgs Boson” wouldn’t.

Anyway, the god particle dice were loaded and rolled, and away went the media, who loved it. Every time the search was mentioned in some form (for example in the building of the Large Hadron Collider) the heading, and the text would be full of more god particles than a Baptist Sunday School, and if poor old Higgs, let alone Bose, got a mention, it was only enclosed in brackets. Physicists could complain all they liked, the media had a meme, a Higgs Memeson, and by god they were going to keep calling it a god particle until the Swiss cows came home.

Which they did a week or so ago. Proved the existence of the Higgs with a certainty greater than Samuel Johnson kicking a rock (although more recently it looks as if the rock might have been a rock cake, the finding certainly a Boson but not quite yet definitively Higgs). And away went the journalists again, with more mentions of “god particle” than there are Hindu gods, one Australian newspaper excelling itself in its quest (presumably) for differentiation by saying scientists had found “a fragment of god”. It is possible I swore a little when I saw that.

There are two reasons why this nonsense matters. It is part of what seems a deliberate policy to maintain religiosity in secular discourse to an extent that wouldn’t have seemed extreme in the Dark Ages. Sportsmen don’t merely try to win they “seek redemption”. Places are not merely the sites where military battles took place they are “sacred sites” and so on. So even as science is decoding the last remaining elements explaining the origins and structure of the universe, the media seems to be hell bent on reassuring people that “don’t you worry there are still plenty of gaps for god to be hiding in”. Mustn’t ever admit that there is a significant number of the people of the world who literally believe in imaginary beings. And it is effective – there were frequent comments I saw on twitter, of the religious saying that at last science had proved existence of god (see, told you so), or telling people to read some bible verse that, was the fevered mind of the believer, predicted the finding of a nuclear particle 2000 years or more ago.

And second it represents the kind of sloppy populist know-nothing journalism that has become the norm in 2012. Dumb journalists reporting to a dumbed-down audience. Little different to a credulous uneducated monk in, say 800AD, mumbling half-learned and totally not understood bible verses to credulous uneducated peasants. The old saying that any subject or event you personally know something about which appears in the Press will be wrongly reported has become more and more universal. I’m not saying that reporters need to be expert in nuclear physics (in this case) to report on the Higgs Boson, but they do need to talk to those who are, read some background, get what they write checked, respect the concerns of those doing the work. The constant, mindless use of “god particle” is like a collective thumbing of the nose at scientists (as is the coverage of climate science and evolutionary biology in most cases). We have no interest in the facts of a case, say the journalists, we are just here to entertain you.

The real story of the Higgs Boson is that it shows, counter-intuitively, that “mass” is not an inherent property of matter, but is a quality that has to be added, like velocity. The media treatment of it shows yet again that, counter-intuitively, truth is not something inherent to journalism, but must be added. I will call the particle by which truth is added to journalism the Horton. Hopefully someone will prove its existence a bit quicker than was the case with the Higgs Boson.

Living on a thin line

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

All of the “debate” about asylum seekers seeking Australia takes part in an historic, geographic, social vacuum. It is as if, until they appear on a leaky boat near Christmas Island, these people don’t exist, and, having appeared, that they exist only to help Tony Abbott become Prime Minister.

Did you see recently a beautiful animated map online showing changes in Europe 1000AD to present. A shifting kaleidoscope of colours ebbed and flowed before your eyes as countries emerged or failed, conquered or were conquered, combined or split. Nothing was firm, all was fluid, a mockery, if you thought about it, of all the nationalism associated with being born in a “country”. But these shifting political boundaries hid a more important shift. As boundaries moved so did people, displaced in their thousands, tens of thousands, millions, as ethnic and religious and nationalistic and economic based conflicts took place.

There isn’t a part of the world where the same kind of map couldn’t be drawn. That’s the salutary lesson. We look around now and see what appear to be fixed and stable countries, but some arose very recently, and few country boundaries are older than one hundred years. Since history began there have been records of people moving, escaping, fleeing, first this way, then that. And they are still moving, either on land in Africa, Europe, Asia, Central America, or on sea (Mediterranean, Caribbean, the sea between Indonesia and Australia), in huge numbers at times, depending on which places have hot wars, or civil wars, or religious conflicts, and which ones temporarily don’t. Most of the conflicts have little directly to do with Australia, but we did help the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both now sources of asylum seekers heading in all directions out of the hell holes the wars created.

And we are already starting to see a whole new ball game – climate change. Not just rising seas, but loss of drinking water sources, and lack of rain for crops and animals, and the failure of marine resources. People are starting to move for these reasons, and we are going to see a gathering flood of such refugees. In addition the battle for shrinking resources will itself cause more warfare. At the same time Europe, America and Australia are going to have their own problems with climate change reducing their own ability to feed people.

Clearly we need to find a process that doesn’t involve people risking their lives on leaky boats. In the absence of refugee processing centres in the main places people are fleeing, there needs to be something in Malaysia or Indonesia that would allow processing there.

And stop pretending growing refugee numbers is the Australian government’s fault.