JPB

Pictures of Singapore

2012-01-15T23:34:00.004+11:00

Amidst a sojourn in Hong Kong, I spent almost a month with my brother in the sauna-like heat and humidity of Singapore and briefly Kuala Lumpur, where my brother was. It was very enjoyable, though, because I enjoy the companionship of my brother even though he calls me “zuiington” after the Chinese word 嘴 or zuǐ, which means mouth and refers to my habit of talking about funny and silly topics from my youth such as the Famous Five Adventure Games. I bsolutely hate being called “zuiington”, though i am not as nasty towards my brother as I have been in the past when my motehr likened us to “Saint Bernards puppies”.

One feature of the trip is that with Chinese a prominent language in Singapore and dominant in Hong Kong, I relearned quite a number of characters from my high school Chinese studies. My brother still says I struggled with the tones, which I never tried to master and instead tried to use head movements to remember the tones because I do not have very good understanding of pitch as is needed for Chinese.

Hong Kong holiday: Third and Last Day (5 January 2012)

2012-01-07T13:00:00.007+11:00

Thursday was our last day in Hong Kong before returning for another week in Singapore. Although Hong Kong usually has warm but not horrible winters, a strong Siberian High was driving very cold air into the East Asian outer tropics. I had prepared for weather slightly hotter or similar to the delightful winters of southern Australia, but in fact the weather in Hong Kong this Thursday was not only very cool, but also (as is typical for southern China) extremely gloomy with low-level fog. The low-level pollution problems of the region are exacerbated by the fact that the superabundant labour supply has encouraged extremely intensive industrialisation.

The chilly weather - I was really surprised to find it was only 11˚C which is about the average maximum of a Tasmanian winter - meant that my brother decided that we would not go on the long trips of the previous day. Instead, we went to the Hong Kong Museum, which was a fascinating trip through the history of this small, mountainous city-state. There were some details new to me, especially regarding the Yue people who lived in Hong Kong before the Qín Dynasty unified China for the first time, and of groups of Chinese who were almost completely based in small water craft around Hong Kong and only set foot on land to trade for essential supplies.

There was also some fascinating information on how Hong Kong came to look the way it does from the high mountain views I had seen on Tuesday and Wednesday; revealing how the terrain and rocks of Hong Kong were formed by Paleozoic orogeny and Mesozoic volcanism. It even went into details of how Hong Kong’s climate has changed over time; though with a brief exception during an arid period of the Mesozoic it has generally been remarkably stable over long geological periods, and showed the subtropical rainforest that would cover Hong Kong in the absence of the disturbances that has degraded or removed the whole territory’s natural vegetation.

The last and most interesting part of our museum trip looked at colonial Hong Kong, and it revealed how a deadly trade in opium and China’s extremely xenophobic cultural attitudes allowed the British to take over Hong Kong and use it as a trading port. Under British rule, Hong Kong developed rapidly, and one of the best aspects of our museum trip was that we were able to actually look at how life in Hong Kong changed during the 1960s and 1970s as new conveniences were developed as a result of vast private sector investment in the city-state, which has mistakenly led to Hong Kong being seen by the Politically Incorrect Guides as a model for development in very poor nations with no natural inorganic resources. There was also some very good information on how Hong Kong actually evolved politically during its period under British rule, and how it has continued to evolve since being handed back to China. It was surprising to note that modern income taxes developed so early in Hong Kong.

After leaving the museum, I had a look at an interesting travel book about major destinations for travel, and about the history of Hong Kong - which seemed interesting but which I never read more than a few pages of. Next, I had a minor accident whereby I hurt my head trying to sit down, but after that we went to look at Hong Kong’s vast, super-dense business centres and in the process I had an excellent Italian meal that did not even remind myself of what I often eat at home. After this, we had a look through Hong Kong’s shopping stalls for a USB port for myself (the one I have only allowing 500 MB of memory) and for clothes for my mother. The clothes in Hong Kong are generally much too small for Australians, so it is not surprising that we did not buy anything.

To finish our last full day in Hong Kong, we returned to the hotel and had a relatively relaxing evening in our hotel room. The stay, which we completed with a brief look around the city on Friday 6 January, was one of the best travelling memories I have had since Kyōto and Mount Fuji at the end of 2009. The highlight of Friday was viewing towards China, which I love to call following Tony Cliff the SCDC for “State Capitalist Dictatorship of China”, as shown below:

Hong Kong holiday: Day 2

2012-01-06T00:48:00.002+11:00

For my second day in Hong Kong, my mobile phone (which I was trying to charge) woke us up at 6:00 and I had to sleep in for another hour before having a hot shower. Given that the weather in Hong Kong was even cooler than on Tuesday and much cooler than the average 18˚C January weather, my mother ordered me to wear two T-shirts to compensate for the lack of jumpers or proper shoes. I had as a result to wear my “pyjama” T-shirt over a white one which acted like the flanelette singlets I wear during winter at home, but Mummy said that I looked better and less fat because my outer T-shirt was not tucked in as I usually do to avoid my pants tickling.

Once we were all dressed, we headed down to the first floor for a breakfast that my experience in (otherwise disappointing) Kuala Lumpur twelve days ago had showed could serve as a full day’s meal. When we reached the dining room, I gorged myself on two bowls of Coco Pops, one of Sultana Bran, and later on bread and jam, with additional meals of fruit adding variety along with some sweet white coffee. After we left I was full, but my mother said I should have eaten more vegetables rather than carbohydrate to reduce my calorie intake and mass.

After going back up to plan the day’s excursions, we decided to travel up the mountains adjacent to Hong Kong’s famous cable car on the outlying island of Lantau, though at first my brother was confused and we went on the wrong train line and we saw areas that looked even more run-down than we had seen the previous day. Once we found the right train ride, however, the day became a memorable and exciting trip through very scenic mountains and endless shades of green.

Once on Lantau Island, we had no trouble reaching the number 23 bus which took us to Po Lin Monastery. Although my mother and brother hate religion, they did take a long time looking at the Big Buddha statue amidst the beautiful, often bare mountain scenery of Lantau Island. The bare patches of granite were surprising in such a hot, wet climate at elevations that do not exceed 957 metres anywhere in Hong Kong, but they made the landscape both more beautiful and more familiar for one who used to read pictures of protected areas in my Australian homeland. The Buddha statue was both familiar in form and surprising in size, but the views from Po Lin over even the village were quite amazing. There were some unusual flags to add to the view, and it was one of the most spectacular I have actually experienced, beaten only by my view of Mount Fuji in Japan.

After going back down to the village, we had a warm hot chocolate in Starbucks and then, despite an intense debate, we went on the cable car, and it was a terrific experience. Although I feared what would happen if the cord of the car broke - and imagined it as worse than falling on soft or slippery snow in a properly cold climate - we got through the whole trip remarkably smoothly and had no troubles at all. The scenery was superb and even wild; and in spite of the low-level fog from the Siberian High there were some very good sea views.

The cable car took us so far down that after a short sojourn in a souvenir shop we went up again on a different bus, this time seeing a quaint fishing village that reminded me of what Hong Kong was like before industrialisation. The specialised fish markets - though we did not buy anything - were particularly fascinating to look at with the old people drying fish for sale and salting them to keep for lean periods.

The last part of our journey, by which time I was really tired, saw me make an unfortunate mistake of not clicking on my “Octopus” card before going back to the ferry on the bus. Actually, I deceived the driver thinking the bus ticket bought before going on the number 23 bus was adequate, but the driver ignored this. We still saw some really wonderful forest scenery - even a wild bovine of a type similar to what I saw in the Night Safari in Singapore a week beforehand just by the very narrow road. By the time we reached the ferry back home, I was really, really tired and did not even feel like eating much.

Nonetheless, I rate this Wednesday as one of the best days I have had on any holiday. The contrast between the uninhabited mountain scenery and some of the densest populations in the world is nothing like anything I have ever seen, and even though the presence of plants like casuarinas obviously imported from Australia shows the land is not pristine its colours were still wonderful. Moreover, the cooler weather meant I was less tired than I have been walking around in Singapore’s horrible climate.

Hong Kong holiday: Day 1

2012-01-05T22:59:00.003+11:00

For the past three days, as a break from the awful year-round heat of Singapore, I have been travelling with my mother and brother to Hong Kong. I have always thought southern China has wonderful weather in the Australian summer and have viewed it as a great destination for travelling long before this trip, but visa costs precluded a trip to Xiàmén, which I had suggested in October before the trip was planned.

Hong Kong is often compared with Singapore as an example of free-market success in a resource-poor small city state, for instance by the Politically Incorrect Guides to American History and Socialism. Upon seeing Hong Kong, I was startled by the amazingly dense and seemingly run-down flats that characterise almost all the residential areas of the city and even exist on top of commercial buildings. (My mother said that Hong Kong’s desnity is nothing compared to what is found in Shànghǎi).

Our first day (Tuesday) in Hong Kong was short, and dominated by a trip on the tramway to the top of the Peak. It was extremely crowded at the entrance to the tramway and there was some very interesting information about its history in the aisle between the ticket office and the boarding platform. Although it was very hard to find a seat on the tram - seats had to be restricted for safety reasons on the steep route - we were able to get a tram about twenty minutes after paying for our tickets and the trip to the Peak was very quick and efficient.

On top of the Peak, in contrast to the year-round heat and humidity of Singapore, the weather was pleasantly cool - in fact too cool for someone only having clothes designed for 30˚C weather with very high humidity! Nonetheless, we did some easy walking down from the Peak and it was very enjoyable because of the views of Hong Kong’s mountains and a small residential village on the opposite side. After returning to the top of the Peak, we had a look at the sizeable shopping centre adjacent to the tram terminus; though there was quite a bit worth buying, we did not buy anything since it was quite a bit more expensive than on the lowlands. Thus, we travelled back down in weather that with wind chill and altitude added was probably colder than a typical southern Australian winter.

After going on the return tram journey, the always-foggy weather from the northeasterly winds off the Siberian High became cooler still as it became dark, and we turned to a big meal after I had not eaten for over a day. As it turned out, I had a delightful, if not remotely Chinese, meal of steak, chips and vegetables that cost HK$49, which is much cheaper than one can obtain such good meals for in Australia. The steak was well-cooked and very tender, even though a little thin, and the vegetables were an excellent accompaniment.

Lastly for Tuesday, I had become very tired and went to bed unusually early, though unfortunately I had forgot my pyjamas and had to sleep in the same T-shirt I had been walking in. Still, I slept better than I had in Singapore where the air conditioner‘s breeze made it difficult to obtain a pleasant temperature.

A really funny joke

2012-01-05T12:46:00.001+11:00

In an article about the hippopotamus and pygmy hippopotamus, Nick Thomas describes the fights of males of the common hippopotamus thus:

When two male hippos face off, they not only hurl dung at each other, but they may viciously attack one another. In fights between rival males, hippos can inflict serious injuries, often ripping off an opponent's ear with their long canine teeth. A similar technique was adapted to human combative rituals by Mike Tyson some years ago.

This is one of the funniest jokes I have heard on the web of late! Although my mother believes boxing should be banned because the purpose of the sport she says is to hit and injure one’s opponent, it is really impossible to compare Mike Tyson’s ear-biting antic against Evander Holyfield in 1997 to what male hippopotamuses do not only to their rivals for mates, but also to humans. Hippos kill more people than any animal except other humans, though they are easier to avoid than the African buffalo, which is so ruthless a killer it could be called the al-Qa‘ida of the animal kingdom since it kills anything threatening it. Mike Tyson’s bite was a reflection of his violent nature, but Tyson apparently only did it because of his feeling of superiority being threatened, unlike an African buffalo or hippopotamus.

Extremists may be fringe and crazy, but have genuine purpose

2012-01-02T22:19:00.010+11:00

Ever since I became interested in politics and culture in the 1990s at the time Jeff Kennett’s obscene “Linking Melbourne” project served to remake Australia’s climate, my mother and brother have consistently said I support “fringe groups”, “special pleaders”, “lobby groups” and other tags. Nonetheless, I have always felt, and still do whenever something like:

Marthe Robin’s claimed fifty-three year fast on only a weekly Eucharist
the relationship between radical rainfall changes in Western Australia and Australia’s pro-freeway transport policies
the fact that New Zealand ecologically can maintain a far larger population than Australia
the notion that religious conservatives are much less selfish than atheistic liberals

is criticised aggressively by my relatives, I feel that they have read less than I have.

Ross Douthat, in his recent article “Pariahs and Prophets”, looks at the case of veteran libertarian politician Ron Paul and argues that, whilst Ron Paul’s ideas are extreme at at times abhorrent - especially regarding what he is supposed to have said about Martin Luther King’s supposed sexual misbehaviour and his tendency to blame intellectual or business élites for the United States’ problems, people like him are extremely valuable for the criticism they offer of fixed, long-term government policies:

But consider a third possibility. There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.

I can agree one hundred percent with the notion that very frequently it is necessary to be far-out in order to tell the truth. Ever since I joined the Public Transport Users’ Association, though my absorbing the ideas of radical Trotskyists (Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialist Party), Tim Flannery and Tom McMahon, and finally the Politically Incorrect Guides, I have always seen immense value in radical criticism. When a country is on an ecologically or culturally destructive path, its population (and even those outside thereof with interests therein) is very often wedded tightly to values that simply do not allow anything to be done to deviate from such a path. This is for instance, the case with the enormous greenhouse emissions in suburban Australia and with the selfish, ultra-materialistic welfare cultures of Europe, Canada and New Zealand. People who see a need for changes tend to be dismissed as extreme, when in fact there could be many long-term benefits from adopting radical changes.

The classic example I give to my mother and brother concerns what Australia’s climate might be like if it had successfully sold its last new car in 1990 and invested every cent of transport money on a high-speed national rail network. In my view, such a policy could have cut Australia’s greenhouse emissions immensely more than all the small measures taken since then, and if the rail service was good enough it would have more than compensated for the loss of mobility from private cars.

The same thing could be said for many other examples which on my present sojourn in Singapore with my brother have become irritating to me as well as to him. Although I can admit that more people would lose out from the radical changes I can easily see as essential than their advocates admit, every reform beloved of the Left - from universal suffrage to welfare states to decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion - was won in Europe, Asia and most of the Americas by protest from below initiated by people with extremely radical ideas for their time. The same is true of reforms in America and former Stalinist nations beloved of the Right.

Fringe radicals almost always solved past social problems (whether real or not you can decide); there is no reason why the future will be different. We need to be careful before seeing people with radical ideas as madmen: they may have much more to offer than any mainstream politician.

A Stalinist-inspired surge?

2012-01-02T22:01:00.002+11:00

Although the explosion in rhino poaching in South Africa, which has ninety percent of the world’s total rhino population, is no longer the headline new it was when I first chronicled it in June 2010, it has become catastrophic, with as much as seven percent of rhinos living as of January 2008 having been poached in the past four years.

Whilst efforts to bring poachers to trial have been mixed, and some within rhino range states have independently suggested Robert P. Murphy’s idea of privatising rhinos so that they could be sold for profit or watched by the public for a fee, the new year has seen a fascinating revelation about where the demand for rhino horn was coming from.

It has long been known the Vietnam, which lost its last rhinos this year, has been the main source of the upsurge in rhinoceros poaching, has been the source of demand for the horn from South African rhinos. However, this article by Elizabeth Batt has made the sinister suggestion that it is the Vietnamese government of all people who is responsible for the decimation of rhinos.

Increased demand it appeared, was fueled by the rumor from a Vietnamese politician who claimed that his cancer had been cured by ingesting powdered rhino horn.

This is a terrible scene if it is true, and would mean that Stalinism, in one of its last holdouts, has been responsible for an environmental disaster that may rival in long-term effect, if not in scope, what was done to the Aral Sea by Stalinism in Central Asia.

Unless accusations against it can be proven false, the effects of the Vietnamese government on the world’s rhino population over the past four years really do demand a reaction. Although Vietnam has moved towards a globalised market economy, it has never been as high-profile about this as China, and since the death of Hồ Chí Minh and reunification it has never been in the headlines beyond debates over “boat people”. Today’s rhino poaching epidemic ought to change that, besides seeing a dark underside to Asian culture for both Left and Right.

A panic we do not need

2011-12-15T14:53:00.001+11:00

In this article, there is what I would call a rather unnecessary panic over Canada's failure to remain within the Durban Protocol - whose best thing is being located in one of the most fragile of ecosystems that can have something far, far more useful and telling about the issue of global warming. People are suggesting that Canada, one of the worst per capita emitters in the world, is a key issue in the context of global warming and that Peter Kent, a prominent minster in Canada's Harper government, does not want to extend the 1997 Kyoto targets.

As I have said many times, the 1997 Kyoto targets reflect no ecological knowledge that Tim Flannery and Tom McMahon showed even before they were signed, and the result is that on a global perspective free markets tend to encourage conservation in the very regions with least need - the very low-diversity, heavily glaciated polar, montane and boreal regions where growing seasons are too short and terrain too steep for economic farming, even though these regions have the advantage of reliable rainfall and that their soils are continuously forming today when those of Australia and most of sub-Saharan Africa have not been forming for 300,000,000 years. For this reason, how nations could panic at Canada's withdrawal when they have done nothing about the constantly rising emissions from Australia is quite ludicrous. If they should panic at Canada, they ought to be invading Australia until the last car and last coal-fired power station is gone from the continent, regardless of the immense bloodshed that would result.

Reduction in or elimination of government welfare services, industrial regular, farm and fishing subsidies and even environmental regulations in Canada may have the effect of actually reducing per capita and possibly total greenhouse gas emissions since with cheaper housing and more business opportunities families that are at present unaffordable may become more nearly so than anywhere in the Enriched World (though never so much as in land-rich Australia and Africa).

The realisation that Canada, despite its very poor per capita greenhouse emissions, is of peripheral importance, especially with its likely future population decline from a very low fertility rate of under 1.5 children per woman (about 80 percent that of Australia) would be a huge step forward. The only thing I can say about the present reaction is that Canada's presence, by virtue of its geographical nearness and ecological similarity, is felt much more than the more critical presence of Australia.

Sports market overload and the need for care in proposing relocations

2011-12-04T00:37:00.029+11:00

In this article, renowned sports writer David Berri looks at the problem teams in unviable markets have for both the cities that must support them and the leagues in which they work.

His particular focus in on the National Basketball Association, which in recent weeks has been stalled by a recently-resolved dispute between owners and players over revenue, and where one might relocate those teams whose present cities cannot afford to support them. Berri makes a look at those markets without a present NBA team which his data show as able to support one based on the average cost of an NBA team. He compares it with the requirements for the NFL and NHL (slightly higher), Major League Soccer (much lower) and Major League Baseball (extremely expensive presumably due to the epic season length). Whilst given the tiny talent pool of the NBA it is hard to see how an NFL franchise would not be cheaper even with the much larger roster size, it is still a valuable look at the costs involved.

Berri and Arturo Galletti look at:

the income provided by each city
the amount spent by each team on its existing teams in:

The National Football League
Major League Baseball
The National Basketball Association
The National Hockey League
Major League Soccer

they then deduct the cost of these teams from the income to see which cities are overburdened with teams.

The analysis is very revealing and sensible in most areas. The notion that more than one city could support a team is very sensible and more generally applicable than just the Green Bay Packers. The income data are very useful because I have never seen so concise a table with so much data on US city incomes.

There are problems, though. The first is that of relative income or cost of living. It remains revealing to realise that the poorest region of North America is in reality the heavily glaciated, mineral- and land-poor, and snowy New England region, due to the costs of living in a chilly climate. What that does suggest is that cities in that region really have much less money for sports teams than those in hotter regions with same or even lower income. By the same token, cities in the low-cost Sunbelt would on this basis be more able to support teams.

A second factor is that marianismo in outer suburban and exurban Sunbelt areas, as I noted earlier with Australian suburbs, tends to produce a noncombative, noncompatitive culture which tends to be very hostile to competitive professional sport on the grounds of its ethical influence which tends to value extreme hardness and aggression. This factor makes markets like Atlanta and New Orleans very poor despite their abundant population and low living costs, and probably makes other Deep South cities like Birmingham and Baton Rouge totally unviable markets since only the income of a small proportion of the city’s population might support sports teams.

The third is that interest in the various North American professional sports is not evenly distributed. Ice hockey, obviously, is of interest only in the colder regions of the country and has caused problems moving to hotter regions. Gridiron is likely to be of little interest in Hispanic regions where soccer is more popular, but of great interest where Polynesian Americans are concentrated. This factor would rule out many (if not most) possible relocation destinations that would look financially feasible.
In this table, I have isolated all the cities that could potentially support a relocated NBA, NHL or NFL team, since there are such teams as:

In the NHL:

Phoenix Coyotes
Nashville Predators

In the NFL:

Jacksonville Jaguars
Minnesota Vikings
Buffalo Bills

In the NBA:

Milwaukee Bucks
Minnesota Timberwolves
Cleveland Cavaliers
Indiana Pacers
New Orleans Hornets

that really have little choice but relocation for their survival. Two of these teams have been “re-possessed” by their league for an indefinite duration as the Sydney Swans were in the middle 1990s after three successive wooden spoons, whilst many of the others, like the Timberwolves, have never been profitable since formation.

The logical choice of the “Inland Empire” of southern California makes sense, but there is the huge problem that government regulations make it difficult for a private entrepreneur to build a stadium to attract an NBA team or even MLB’s struggling Pittsburgh Pirates.

Connecticut may seem easy but is terribly tough due to its high living costs which could easily cut the income in half, along with its cold winters that are certainly a factor in the problems of the Bucks and Timberwolves. Even with the NHL where its cold climate is an asset teams have not been successful in nearby Rhode Island, though a general Connecticut team may do well in ice hockey.

Las Vegas, were the major leagues to lose the fear of its gambling associations, would be a very good choice for relocating a struggling NBA team since it has a large income and a hot climate that because of the paranoid fear of winters that are not warm.

There are several choices that were not seriously discussed by Berri or so far by myself, which I will briefly assess:

Richmond and Virginia Beach, both in Virginia. Virginia, if we exclude Washington teams, has no major league franchise, but it has a big population and lacks the extreme marianismo that makes Atlanta a terrible market even with its huge population: that population abhors the competitiveness and aggression inherent in this level of sport.
Louisville, Kentucky is also a possibility on these grounds with similar qualities to the two Virginia markets, and has had success in the ABA before its merger with the NBA
Honolulu would be an extremely good choice for NFL relocation because gridiron’s short schedule would allow long-distance travel and Polynesia is a great centre for gridiron talent. It would be logistically impossible as an NBA market, however, with the long season and distances for teams from the contiguous States.
Austin, Texas would likewise be an extremely good NFL choice since Texas is very much a hotbed for gridiron
San Juan, Puerto Rico as San Antonio is with the Spurs, could be potential single-team NBA market: it has the size and culture to be effective. Tucson and Alberquerque, though more marginal, would also be possibilities in the NBA, though likely to have too little interest for the NFL.
Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington are really marginal and should, owing to their highly atheistic culture, really only attempt to attract one or two NHL teams since that is the most popular sport relative to other cities.
Omaha, Nebraska may be a viable market for gridiron or ice hockey, but that is doubtful since it has been a “failed” NBA market in the past.
Orlando and Sarasota in Florida are doubtful since the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tampa Bay Rays and heavily indebted Orlando Magic may be in part supported by these cities (though this would be tougher to calculate than for the Packers.
Allentown, Pennsylvania ; Worcester, Massachusetts and Albany, New York are very unlikely due to the rapid emigration and high living costs which would make a team impossible to support.
Tulsa, Oklahoma is more questionable than it looks because it is on the edge of the the sunbelt with its noncompetitive culture, and has a (very unsuccessful) WNBA team.

I think that sums up the potential of all listed cities. I intend to look at how efficiently teams might be organised in a later post.

A weakness for outside backs

2011-11-20T22:48:00.002+11:00

Having a look at a few rugby players on the web for the first time in a while, I foundthis 2008 list of the thirty best players of the past thirty years, excluding those not eligible to play for Australia:

Andrew Johns
Wally Lewis
Brad Fittler
Darren Lockyer
Allan Langer
Mal Meninga
Peter Sterling
Laurie Daley
Brett Kenny
Bradley Clyde
Mick Cronin
Steve Walters
Glenn Lazarus
Steve Rogers
Gorden Tallis
Shane Webcke
Steve Roach
Terry Lamb
Ricky Stuart
Ray Price
Andrew Ettingshausen
Danny Buderus
Jonathan Thurston
Cameron Smith
Graham Eadie
Steve Mortimer
Benny Elias
Wayne Pearce
Nathan Hindmarsh
Cliff Lyons

Although I have not access to enough rugby league footage to tell if this list really is accurate, what I do know about rugby league (the Super League war reduced my interest in the game I must confess) I can state that the main flaw with the list is positional. There is not a single winger in that list; though wingers never win player-of-the-year awards, that should hardly mean they should be omitted.

Eric Grothe senior would be the obvious choice to rectify this omission: for one thing he was one of only two players

Also, with fullbacks and centres, the list is not only weak but also places the few in those positions in odd places:

Darren Lockyer
Mal Meninga
Mick Cronin

are all very high given the lack of outside backs in the list as a whole. Then Graham Eadie, though from my limited experience watching the sport the bets player I have seriously seen, is a little too old (he first played in 1971) to be a part of a list covering the period from 1978 to 2007.

As for inside backs, it is hard to see apart from his bad injury record (his last injury-free season was in 1989) how Greg Alexander was not preferred over Steve Mortimer or Cliff Lyons.

The myth of a Catholic Spain that never dies

2011-10-30T22:17:00.003+11:00

In today’s Christian Science Monitor, there is a serious discussion of Spanish protests against the government funding the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. According to the Monitor, the protesters are not anti-Catholic per se, but are arguing that a government that is in terrible financial trouble should not spend up to 100 million euros (132 million Australian dollars) on this when it is making cuts in other areas to deal with a huge public debt.

What is troubling about the Monitor is how it calls Spain “one of the world's most Catholic countries” and says:

“While Spain has been a Catholic bastion for centuries, in recent years the Vatican has clashed with governmental leaders here over the country's turn toward secularism as they have legalized gay marriage, banned mandatory religious education in public schools, and eased abortion restrictions.”

What it does not realise is that for at least eighty years and probably more nearly one hundred and twenty, Spain’s politicians and wealthy classes (especially landowners) have consistently sided with the Catholic Church against the urban working masses over political issues such as religious education and sexual morals. When the Catholic Church was openly campaigning against eugenics in the 1930s, working classes in eastern Spain (Aragon) were strongly campaigning for it and the legalisation of extramarital sex - a legalisation that would have taken place decades earlier than the 1970s if mass opinion in urban Spain had been reflected in the ruling classes. Even when Francisco Franco’s dictatorship tried to use education to promote the teachings of the Catholic Church, it had no long-term, inward effect on a Spanish psyche that was firmly secular, even anti-religion.

“Tourist” architecture?

2011-10-29T22:11:00.005+11:00

By reading a recent post from a rather slyly named website called “adamsmith.org - Europe’s favourite think tank website”, Rod Dreher has argued that one of the reasons for the rebellions that have been taking place in London over the past few months is that modern architecture in the Enriched World has been designed by socialist planners rather than people. The result is that the Enriched World’s population lives almost exclusively in inhuman environments which are exclusively focused on the short-term material wants and give no room for emotional or spiritual development.

Dreher says that people like Jonathan Hale in The Old Way of Seeing say that architects formerly understood “natural” patterns of community that governments pressurised to provide for a working class that would otherwise have voted in outright Marxists. These governments provided what Stephen Masty describes as:

“populated by large groups of unsupervised children and teenagers, where peer socialisation can occur between them without the influence of adults.”

I can see how such housing systems, typified even in Unenriched Australia by the old housing estates - which look older than they are - leads to people wanting to socialise without any supervision from older people. This is a problem I had as a child: my peers bullied me for bad behaviour which I with hindsight realise I could do little or nothing to correct. The influence of adults would have helped schoolboys realise that they had to work together to

However, my experience of housing in the Enriched World from living in Germany in the Australian summer of 2006/2007 gives an interesting impression: that in fact the growth of mass tourism may be what creates the kind of architecture that people like Dreher are so deploring. For one thing, far more than even Hans Hoppe admits in a brief e-mail I had with him some time ago, tourism in the Enriched World is more often than not a source of extremely selfish and present-oriented attitudes. This is epitomised by the ultra-macho adventure sports that dominate the economies of what before industrialisation were cultures of marianismo where land was used seasonally to provide food and not inhabited during the very cold mountain winters. The tourist apartments I lived in whilst in Germany remind me a lot more of these Italian apartments (from Naples) that any residential architecture I have seen in the Enriched World or the densely populated tropical city of Singapore. Tourism grew extremely rapidly in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s as a response, perhaps, to the demands of their working classes for more wealth.

Tourist houses will inevitably have a “temporary”, extremely “trendy” feel about them because they serve to house one or a few people for very short periods - and as I said what they seek is a very short thrill of less long-term value that the kind of cultural study I have taken of the evolution of the Enriched World, which looks more deeply at the psyche of these people today as traditional cultural studies biased towards either the past or the desires of conservative ruling classes. The short-term nature of the interaction between tourists and locals who over time have in many places become almost totally dependent upon tourist income undoubtedly shapes the culture of tourism-based Enriched World cities. It is hard to see how this can lead to anything other than an ultra-materialistic culture totally focused upon wealth and money.

As Human Events says:

No. 270 of 365
Ask how come, if liberals are so keen on equality and fairness, they're so much more money-grubbing than conservatives.

According to both the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, left wingers are more likely to rate "high income" as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say "after good health, money is the most important thing," and agree with the statement "there are no right or wrong ways to make money." This was confirmed by Doug Urbanski, former business manager of libtard documentary-maker Michael Moore, who said: “He is more money obsessed than anyone I have known—and that’s saying a lot.”

If liberalism can lead to an obsession with money, it is likely to have worked the other way round in Enriched World cities ever since the Industrial Revolution. Seeing money, as much as mere poverty, has led the working classes of the Enriched World to advocate bigger and bigger government without looking at what motivates them.

Javan rhino extinct on Asian mainland

2011-10-26T19:22:00.003+11:00

This year has been a very bad one for rhinos. Poaching, which increased in 2010, has multiplied by about the same amount this year.

Most tragically, following the extinction of the northern white rhinoceros in 2006, the last Javan rhinoceros has disappeared from Vietnam. The species was known before 1988 only from its remaining stronghold in the extreme west of Java, but the a small population was discovered in Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park. There were even before the current rhino poaching epidemic began grave concerns that the rhinos in Cat Tien were not breeding, but still this news was very surprising since almost all the news about today’s epidemic of rhino poaching comes from Africa or Nepal. In fact, it is popularly thought that the reason for the Critically Endangered status of the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses is purely and simply the immense destruction for timber and agriculture of Southeast Asia’s forests. However, in reality the Sumatran species at all events is actually much more able than is popularly thought to cope with disturbances in primary rainforest - and a huge proportion of its original range was and is much too steep to farm.

Thus, we are left with poaching for horn as the culprit for these two most critically endangered rhinoceros species - this in spite of the fact that the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses yield a very small amount of horn and prices for them are not nearly so well-documented as those of Indian and African horn. It is interesting to imagine if rhino horn dealers actually hold stockpiles of Javan and/or Sumatran horn that they do not offer for sale to rhino horn customers even at much more than the typical asking price of $100 per gram for Indian rhino horn??

Are Rolling Stone’s readers copying Blender?

2011-10-09T01:46:00.004+11:00

A few years ago, the now-defunct magazine Blender made a list of the fifty worst songs of all time. The number 1 choice was Starship’s “We Built This City”, a song that was the 66th top single of the 1980s in Melbourne and a staple of my travels in an old XC Ford Falcon to Currajong Special School on the modern 624 bus route.

Now, Rolling Stone, which has probably absorbed a lot of Blender’s readership since the latter magazine ceased publication, has asked its readers to vote for the worst songs of the 1980s. Although as a child I listened consistently to the commercial music of the eighties, since reading Joe S. Harrington I have been completely turned away from it. The list voted for was:

Starship - “We Built This City” (On Rock and Roll)
Europe - “The Final Countdown”
Chris de Burgh - “The Lady in Red”
Wham! — “Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)”
Men Without Hats — “The Safety Dance”
Falco — “Rock Me Amadeus”
Bobby McFerrin — “Don’t Worry Be Happy”
Toni Basil — “Mickey”
Taco — “Putting On the Ritz”
Rick Astley — “Never Gonna Give You Up”

The strange thing is that according to those who reported on the list, “We Built This City” was nominated as the worst song by a huge margin, and that the reason it was so hated was not the song itself, but the fact that so many fans of Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick’s former band of the 1960s, did not want her singing stadium rock which was designed only for commercial success.

in fact, I have never found “We Built This City” anything like so bad as Jefferson Starship’s other songs of the 1980s like “Jane” or “No Way Out” which were less successful but far worse examples of “We Built This City”. All the other songs on the list, however, really are very bad, and most are staples of these lists with at least three being repeats from the 2005 Blender list. The similarity with “We Built This City” and the more-deserving “Mickey”, “Don}t Worry Be Happy” and “The Final Countdown” is so striking I really wonder if the readers took their cues from it.

Greenhouse sceptics as a carryover from Stalinism in China?

2011-10-08T13:25:00.000+11:00

Today in the Sydney Morning Herald, there is some strange news that it is not only Australia where greenhouse sceptics have tremendous political influence. I outline in the link the fact that greenhouse sceptics are more often than not ordinary working people who would suffer a great deal from serious moves to reduce greenhouse emissions and believe adaptation is cheaper and more efficient than mitigation. The trouble with this view is that adaptation is very likely to make the problem worse, especially in a nation like Australia possessing a surfeit of fossil fuel resources.

What the Sydney Morning Herald is surprisingly showing is that in formerly Stalinist China, despite privatisation and extremely rapid economic growth, greenhouse sceptics may have more influence in academia than they do in Australia:

"Global warming is a bogus proposition," says Zhang Musheng, one of China's most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to a powerful and hawkish general in the People's Liberation Army, Liu Yuan.

Mr Zhang told the Herald that global warming was an American ruse to sell green energy technology and thereby claw its way out of its deep structural economic problems.

According to another Australian source, Zhang is a "left leaning" intellectual. If this is remotely true, it suggests that for all its rapid economic growth, China remains in many ways a fundamentally Stalinist nation whereby the interests of a dictatorial ruling class dominate despite growth of a type Mao Zedong could never have wanted or even imagined. What the ruling class of China will do in the future is an interesting question given the country's demographic decline as outlined by The Economist in Graysia a month ago. It may make it hard for China to adapt new technology, especially with such an old population and extreme scarcity of flat land. China is also turning to the much-discredited policy of farm subsidies to stabilise its economy: Beijing now pays more in farm subsidies than even France or Germany. As I outlined with Japan here, this may be a key cause of its low birth rate since removing farm subsidies would permit construction of affordable housing.

Still, once China's population falls into free-fall, one cannot say even a China that lags behind Europe in efficiency is a threat to the planet's ecosystems as an Australia with a pacified working class and a surfeit of fossil fuels.

Name changes that are silly beyond belief?

2011-10-04T16:17:00.005+11:00

Time magazine this week has made a list of the top ten most absurd name changes.

Whilst I have loved to note name changes and even love to use the phrase g.k.a. (generally known as) for a pseudonym and to refer to a person by their real name, I have rarely laughed at the use of pseudonyms, even though I know that in some spheres of sport and religion changing names is mandatory for those of high rank.

Time's list was:

Lisa Bonet to Lilakoi Moon
Ol' Dirty Bastard to Big Baby Jesus
Caryn Johnson to Whoopi Goldberg
Mark Duper to Mark Super Duper
Mark Sinclair Vincent to Vin Diesel
Ron Artest to Metta World Peace
Prince to a Symbol
Steven Demetre Georgiou to Cat Stevens to Yusuf Islam
Puff Daddy to P. Diddy to Diddy
Chad Johnson to Chad Ochocinco

Of these, I can easily see a great deal of merit and reasoning in all Time's inclusions with the exception of Cat Stevens, for the simple reason that if Stevens was converting to Islam then there is every reason why he should want to change his name as the Islamic faith in its strictest forms requires him to do so.

A traditional home night

2011-09-27T13:24:00.001+10:00

Last night, despite the absence of my brother in Singapore, was a traditional party night for our family when the Brownlow Medal was counted. Although for the past couple of month I have been under an awful daily rhythm whereby I get to bed at 2:00 and do not get up until 12:00, am often not washed and dressed before 13:00, am frequently not out to do basic jobs like checking my post office box or buying essential meal supplies until 16:00, and typically back home for dinner at 21:00 or three hours after my mother has cooked and eaten it.

The Brownlow count, like few other events, motivated me to do something to change this habit, so that after a stint in the State Library, I hurried quickly home with traditional party chips, pies and sausage rolls. An excellent Bolognese sauce was cooked for me - though I cooked the spaghetti myself since my mother prefers to have it on toast when I am not home at 17:00. After that, I rested for an hour and when I came down to cook the pies and sausage rolls the Brownlow count had already began.

When I sat down - rather awkwardly I will admit because of the angle I had to view the television at - I was disappointed at the early rounds because the long-familiar method of reading had been changed and the votes were being read at generally too fast a speed. There was also a somewhat erratic manner in showing this early footage and, as is so often the case with sports broadcasting these days, too much emphasis on overblown, noisy music to try to add drama to the skills of the players. With a clear eye I can see how this drama makes footy more appealing and exciting to casual fans, but it does the game discredit in my eyes since it tries to make the game more aggressive and violent when footy should be a game of skill above all else.

A result of this was that when people like myself became eager to see whether a player near the top had won votes after his team was announced, there was less suspense than in previous Brownlow counts. A lot of ridiculous and irrelevant time wasting about developing footy overseas - environmentally ludicrous given footy requires a surfeit of land only the southern and western states of Australia can provide - would have been better replaced by slow and more relaxed reading of the votes. An alternative was to provide more and better footage of the games where Brownlow votes were taken - the would have been enough space for nine games as we will have from next year with good footage if all irrelevant program material were deleted - even perhaps for slow motion highlights.

At first, I told my mother I was not enjoying the Brownlow count, but later, even as she politely declined more than one pie or any sausage roll as part of the party, I found it fascinating. As a number of rank outsiders like Andrew Swallow and Matthew Boyd obtained considerable numbers of votes, I noticed for the first time in watching Brownlow counts that North Melbourne have had the second-longest Brownlow drought in the VFL/AFL, not having won for twenty-eight years. Though Boyd and especially Swallow faded out, Hawthorn's Sam Mitchell attracted constant attention as he led the count for most of the night despite being ineligible due to a one-match suspension. there was no precedent apart from Chris Grant of the Western Bulldogs in 1997 for an ineligible player obtaining nearly so many votes as Mitchell did. Moreover, the highlights became better-broadcast and I came to enjoy watching it even if I was generally lolling about the fragile couch to get a good view.

Another twist that made the night fascinating was Gary Ablett junior reaching twenty votes for newcomers Gold Coast even though they received the wooden spoon. No player for a wooden spoon team had received twenty votes since Gary Hardeman of Melbourne in 1974, when votes for teams losing a game were much more frequent due to the lack of scrutiny during the count.

Then, when Mitchell finally faded there was the surprise of Nick Dal Santo winning 3-vote after 3-vote during St. Kilda's form recovery. My mother being a strong Saint fan, she was really excited at a Dal Santo Brownlow making up for a disappointing year for the Saints, but by Round Twenty, when I was really enjoying the count, it seemed clear that he had little chance as the familiar and expected name of Collingwood's Dane Swan received votes in most of the games he was predicted to. Moreover, the suspense returned as Collingwood's and swan's unbeatable form his a peak from the early August matches, and he received votes even when the Magpies got an expected scare from Brisbane.

As a finale to a day that delivered more than it promised, Swan received in the end more votes than any other player, and I, utterly tired, managed still to watch him receive the award. It was really exciting, though, to hear the discussion of Swan's record.

What the list says about Australia

2011-09-09T12:17:00.003+10:00

It is unfortunate that I forget the site from which this 2011 list of the best Australian albums of all time was taken. However, I still feel I should have some sort of look at it as I had planned to do a long time ago.

Odyssey Number Five – Powderfinger 
Frogstomp – silverchair 
Back in Black – AC/DC 
The Living End – The Living End 
Kick – INXS 
Internationalist – Powderfinger 
Apocalypso – Presets 
Wolfmother – Wolfmother 
Since I Left You – The Avalanches 
UNIT – Regurgitator 
Like Drawing Blood – Gotye 
Guide To Better Living – Grinspoon 
Crowded House – Crowded House 
Vulture Street – Powderfinger 
Slightly Odway – Jebediah 
The Hard Road – Hilltop Hoods 
Eternal Nightcap – The Whitlams 
Woodface – Crowded House 
Innerspeaker – Tame Impala 
Conditions – The Temper Trap 
10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1– Midnight Oil 
Diorama – silverchair 
The Calling – Hilltop Hoods 
Sunrise Over Sea – The John Butler Trio 
Get Born – Jet 
Hourly, Daily – You Am I
Neon Ballroom – silverchair 
The Cat Empire – The Cat Empire 
The Sound of White – Missy Higgins 
Themata – Karnivool 
Down the Way – Angus & Julia Stone 
Universes – Birds of Tokyo
Diesel and Dust – Midnight Oil 
Memories & Dust – Josh Pyke 
Hi Fi Way – You Am I 
In Ghost Colours – Cut Copy 
Highly Evolved – The Vines
A Book Like This – Angus & Julia Stone 
Birds of Tokyo – Birds of Tokyo 
Echolalia – Something for Kate 
Double Allergic – Powderfinger
East – Cold Chisel 
Freak Show – silverchair 
Tu-Plang – Regurgitator 
Sound Awake – Karnivool 
Walking on a Dream – Empire of the Sun 
Black Fingernails, Red Wine – Eskimo Joe
Ivy and the Big Apples – Spiderbait 
Whispering Jack – John Farnham 
The New Normal – Cog 
I Believe You Liar – Washington
Murder Ballads – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 
Three – The John Butler Trio
Tea & Sympathy – Bernard Fanning 
Blue Sky Mining – Midnight Oil 
Bliss Release – Cloud Control
The Honeymoon Is Over – The Cruel Sea 
New Detention – Grinspoon 
As Day Follows Night – Sarah Blasko 
We Are Born – Sia 
Hold Your Colour – Pendulum
Cruel Guards – The Panics 
Grand National – The John Butler Trio 
Polyserena – george 
Cold Chisel – Cold Chisel 
Running on Air – Bliss N Eso 
Flying Colours – Bliss N Eso 
The Experiment – Art vs. Science 
Gossip – Paul Kelly and The Coloured Girls 
Young Modern – silverchair 
Beams – The Presets 
Beautiful Sharks – Something For Kate 
Highway To Hell – AC/DC 
The Overture and The Underscore – Sarah Blasko 
Living in the 70s – Skyhooks 
Human Frailty – Hunters & Collectors 
Immersion – Pendulum 
Lovers – The Sleepy Jackson 
Gravity Won’t Get You High – The Grates 
(I’m) Stranded – The Saints 
Feeler – Pete Murray 
Up All Night – The Waifs 
Wonder – Lisa Mitchell 
16 Lovers Lane – The Go-Betweens 
State of the Art – Hilltop Hoods 
This Is the Warning – Dead Letter Circus 
A Song Is a City – Eskimo Joe 
Imago – The Butterfly Effect 
Pnau – Pnau 
The Long Now – Children Collide 
Gilgamesh – Gypsy & The Cat 
A Man’s Not a Camel – Frenzal Rhomb 
Moo, You Bloody Choir – Augie March 
Everything Is True – Paul Dempsey 
Stoneage Romeos – Hoodoo Gurus 
Paging Mr. Strike – Machine Gun Fellatio 
Begins Here – The Butterfly Effect
The Boatman’s Call – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 
Thrills, Kills & Sunday Pills – Grinspoon 
Two Shoes – The Cat Empire

On the whole, it is very hard to say much abut this list for the very simple reason that I know so little about most of the albums in that list. Powderfinger, who top the list, are a band I have always disliked since first hearing them on Triple M as a young Melbourne University student, and Silverchair are a band I have hated ever since hearing many times awful songs like “Pure Massacre” (which I heard as “New Mexico”) and “Israel’s Son” - though they have actually disowned Frogstomp today.

When one looks at Australia’s comfortable, conservative culture, it is hard to with hindsight see ultra-macho AC/DC as being part of it. They really were a part of the European rock scene that lived in Australia, though some aspects of their music - its very basic rock and roll character - are Australian. INXS have not held up that well with age since Hutchence’ suicide in 1997, and the Presets are totally retro even in the middle 2000s. Those artists lower down on the list are mostly “alternative” rockers whom I have come to realise really are not properly an “alternative” to the mainstream of the post-grunge era. Critics outside of Australia have never remotely been attracted to these groups even though they are generally not without experience of Australian music.

When one looks through the rest of that list, one sees more than anything that Australia’s extremely high “connectedness” or natural unity leads to a stifling conformity even with the incentives of perhaps the freest market in the world. Newspapers have long notices Australia’s lack of distinctive music - I recall such being noted by The Age in 1996 - but the cause is never considered.

Culture mod and pop music linked? I am not sure at all.

2011-09-08T21:21:00.001+10:00

My brother - firmly established in singapore and just as well since recent rainless weather is almost certainly where Melbourne will be forever headed - sent me today an article by "Elliott Wave" that aims to show how popular culture is related closely to swinging economic fortunes, based on a 2009 study by USA Today.

The argument is that the angry mood of the late 1970s "punk revolution" reflected the way in which markets were collapsing due to stagflation, and the same with the Bush Senior Era's rap revolution.

On the other side, the "Oh, wow, I feel great and I love everybody" sentiment of the 1960s is seen as reflecting the long boom since World War II. Author Susan C. Walker even extends her idea before rock even existed, arguing that the atonal music of Bartok reflected the downturn from World War I and the Great Depression. To me, that is unlikely; rather atonal music - which is wrongly seen as rebellious I think - may reflect the highly sensual culture found in developed sectors of the Enriched World during the 1920s. "The Waste Land", with hindsight, was a reaction against the materialistic excesses that some saw as philosophically responsible for the colonial struggles crucial for producing World War I. (The same is basically true of, say Patti Smith's decadent mysticism in the late 1970s which combines almost-religious tones with extremely sensual poetry). Another big problem is when they say:

Some darker rock bands even get back together when the mood sours. AC/DC hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 2008, and The Sex Pistols returned to the concert circuit after the Dow peaked in 2007.

they fail like so many to recognise how AC/DC and the Sex Pistols were anything but dark. Rather, they were about trying to eliminate all rationale for restrictions on hedonistic pleasure as hand existed in Western culture since Christianity. Their music was celebratory like no other bands before: to the point of celebrating violence. It is more likely that the period between punk and the Bush Senior Era reflects the rise of the Baby Boom Generation and its frequently hedonistic and extremely selfish attitudes. If these have been repressed by commercial radio since the Bush Senior radicals faded, they could come back if later generations are equally selfish and not because of economic factors.

Are people in agreement with me about music?

2011-09-08T20:50:00.002+10:00

As a whole, I have always found it tough to agree with what the public says about music, even though I have been a music listener for a long time.

When in 1995 I heard of Triple J being a major source fo new Australian music, I was suspicious because I hated the aggressive noises which formed a wrongly and badly stereotyped vision of "alternative rock" for me for almost a decade.

10. 4 Non-Blondes, "What's Up?"
I have never liked this one: its drearily annoying lyrics and syrupy hard rock sound really stands as terrible

9. Right Said Fred, "I'm Too Sexy"
Have no definite recollections of this song at all, but cannot imagine it beging great after the techno/dance style music of the 1990s I did hear

8. Baha Men, "Who Let The Dogs Out?"
If I recall correctly, I would have to agree with this one even more than the previous two

7. Celine Dion, "My Heart Will Go On"
Not as offensive, perhaps, as the others, but even more syrupy.

6. Hanson, "MMMBop"
Not as bad as the previous four, to be frank, and not as bad as songs by Corona or The Real McCoy I did hear, but still has no substance at all

5. Chumbawamba, "Tubthumping"
This is one I never recognised from its title in the day but now do see as an utterly awful song, distinctly worse than any of the previous five. Despite having an interest in anarchism myself, I do not see any message exept partying here.

4. Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
Though it became awfully unfashionable soon after ceasing to be a hit and I have not a single memory of it on the readio thereafter, I do not find this one as bad as the previous two - which does not mean it's remotely good or has redeeming qualities!

3. Billy Ray Cyrus, "Achy Breaky Heart"
If anything, I would say this huge it is worse than what Vanilla Ice did the previous year. Though in the cloistered suburbs I saw nothing of the Bush Senior era cultural revolution, I never liked "Achy Breaky Heart".

2. Los Del Rio, "Macarena"
Now we have an utterly awful song! Probably the line "return of the Mac" was the single song that had the most decisive effect in turning me awya from contemporary hits even before I was seriously exposed to songs that I though went "I kill you"/"What's that gonna change" which in an environment where people nearly murdered me with a heavy rock naturally made me think of as awfully dangerous to young kids who at times confessed to watching Double Dragon, saying "Double Dragon is rated R"!

1. Aqua, 'Barbie Girl'
It's hard for me to say this is nearly the worst song I have ever heard, but it really is rather childish and, as my mother once said when she thought Triple J played songs saying "you must have big (expletive)" and that Triple J was designed for 11- or 12-year-olds, I cannot sympathise with the message.

However, I feel as if Rolling Stone's readers have not recalled a few songs at least that were worse than most of those here:

TISM "Shut Up, The Footy's One The Radio" - one of the most awfully noisy songs trying to commercialise a sport that had no need for it
Corona, "Rhythm of the Night" and The Real McCoy "Love and Devotion" - the most utterly tuneless noise for a spoiled generation (of course I'm much worse so maybe it makes no difference)

The odd thing is how I hate every song listed by music listeners whose experience since I first read Joe S. Harrington a decade ago a so vastly different! It's as if, even if I had no understanding of music history and saw no seriousness in listening as I hope I do now, I still could see something even in the 1990s!

How costly will climate change in the Enriched World be?

2011-09-08T19:42:00.001+10:00

Although for years I have emphasised the cost of man-made global warming in the fragile environment of Australia and the appalling failure for the past thirty years of Australia's ruling classes to act as if they were interested in maintian the value of Australia's environment by preventing greenhouse emissions with a rigid zero-car, 100 percent renewable policy, I have always thought the impacts on the Enriched World (and even the Tropical World) would not be of any importance.

However, Time this year has shown that the effects of climate change even in the robust environments of North America have the potential to be serious. Last month, when there was still hope for good rains that have been quashed by a bone-dry spell in Victoria that I would rather believe will last forever, Time published an article about drought in the American South and Southwest that made me suspect climate change's effects could be felt in areas with greatly higher runoff ratios and essentially zero (as against 200-400mm in southern Australia) runoff thresholds. Evidence of extreme patterns of dryness and wetness in the US, as can be seen from last "year"'s rainfall data by state and district, is as with Australia in recent years proof that carbon emissions are chnging the climate immensely.

The way in which the eastern part of the affected region has been affected by a hurricane and flooding is perhaps a suggestion that in the future the American South may acquire the rainfall variability of a tropical region, which as those who understand Central Queensland (which does not even include people in southern Australia) will know, can have drastic effects. At the same time, as in Australia, it is the very regions, generally in the hotter parts of the temperate zone, which are gaining people through their more hospitable (less masculinised) cultures as regions further north lose people to high living costs, big government and lack of mineral resources resulting from glaciations. A potential problem in these regions is that as hotter regions become drier or harsher, market reforms in cooler regions (which invariably have little land and hence no economic agriculture) could force more production onto hot regions that have even less water than before anthropogenic global warming.

Such a change could make global warming even worse if hotter regions resort to coal-based desalination, since they will either lose soil nutrients from erratic tropical rainfall or become even drier and have to irrigate more with less - and there are limits to what can be done here because crops cannot wihtstand heat above a certain point. This gives a good reason to try to farm in cooler regions for the future and to try to get around the huge governments: it could mean a lot for the world if sustainable demographics return in cooler regions even without the extreme living standards.

Anti-elitism does not mean anti-competitiveness; Human Events wrong again

2011-08-26T23:50:00.000+10:00

No. 232 of 365

Pick a fight with a liberal on:
ELITISM.

Liberals believe in egalitarianism. They don't often get called on it, though, because no one bothers to defend elitism—but you should. Ask a liberal, “So you really disapprove of competition and hierarchy and achievement and want everything to be equal do you? Well, answer me this, if you were president and you needed a handful of troops to do a delicate, dangerous job, who would you turn to—a unit of racially and sexually and disability diverse troops or the elite: Special Forces, Navy Seals, Delta Force? When you watch football, assuming you're willing to watch something so violent and competitive, do you want to watch the elite, the best of the best, the professionals who made it to the NFL on the basis of their talent and training, or a United Nations coordinated rainbow coalition of teams drawn from men and women from around the world to make it a truly global unisex game? Or suppose you needed serious surgery, would you prefer the operation to be done by a surgeon with years of practice behind him, drawn from the elite of the medical profession, or by a deserving recent immigrant, selected for the task as a result of the new Obamafair™ social justice program designed to boost the self-esteem of low-skill workers while simultaneously combating society's sexist, racist, elitist hegemony?”

This is a familiar argument from the Right against the radical egalitarianism of the Left which they think so consistently undermines all incentive for achievement. The case study is problematic in an odd kind of way: whilst the Left really want equality of outcome, they equally love competition in the most aggressive manner possible.

The relationship between these goals is at first sight hard to see, since equality of outcome would rule out activities where one gender and some races (e.g. Asian-Americans and Native Americans, owing to their light bones) are at the most extreme disadvantage. However, even before the radical masculinisation of the Enriched World during the 1970s and 1980s, it is noteworthy how the most violent sports, like ice hockey and gridiron, were popular in the most socialistic and egalitarian regions like Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest. This does suggest that aggression, even hypermasculinity could be inherent in the whole idea of socialism - and if you believe Hans Hoppe, in democracy itself.

The whole idea of showing the world that America is the best or the biggest seems to attract the attention of liberal leftists. At least showing that America can equal Europe and East Asia in environmental sustainability and income equality seems to be a goal.

The problem with this whole idea is the very notion that most people are attracted by these things. In fact, the government spending and taxation required for these things, especially in a country which is fairly well-endowed with coal and other fossil fuels does not attract migrants or investment. Russia’s restrictive government in its resource-rich Far East is a good example. Trying to encourage noncompetitiveness and harmony, which require a limited government, actually is much more conservative than the reverse.

Understanding the British riots and the decay they symbolise

2011-08-15T19:30:00.003+10:00

Ross Douthat, a commentator I have had links to for some time but have not seriously read until now, has recently provided a devastating critique of the welfare state culture that has swamped almost all of the Enriched World over the past ninety-five years.

He argues quite strangely but not unrealistically that even those who see the riots as a logical response to government austerity programmes à la Green Left Weekly or Socialist Worker: they are not defending government programmes, but are arguing instead by rioting that they fear that the specialty goods they seem desire greatly to symbolise their individualism may not be available if the government cuts welfare spending.

The quote:

“A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life”

tells exactly the same story as Richard Nisbett does about culture of honour in the inner city. As I have emphasised before, an industrial Britain has the key pre-requisites for a culture of honour if government is absent:

glaciation of most of Britain has deprived it of the essential mineral resources

fossil laterites in glaciated areas suggest strongly that before the ice sheets came northern Europe had essential industrial minerals but soils akin to the infertile soils of Australia and Southern Africa today

mineral resources (or at least their products like cars and so many technological gadgets) tend to be portable so that theft is not difficult. This is especially true of the electronics and boutique clothing that angry masses tend to target as Victor Davis Hanson shows.
without government or with the police ineffective the masses would have to regulate law themselves, and with scarcity of resources prevalent the prevailing means of doing so is by force

Both these viewpoints suggest that they key issue is that the masses of Britons really care about little more than having the most fashionable goods - a tale on instant gratification gone beserk that explains why long-term stability has been confined to the isolated suburbs of Australia and to a decreasing extent Red America where the influences of the radical individualism preached by businessmen is least.

More than materialism: envy

2011-08-13T12:26:00.000+10:00

In a telling post - actually from 2002 but revealed to me only today and still resonating with me - Rod Dreher has shown the troubles the demographically crippled Netherlands faces with a culture dominated by hedonistic atheism.

Dreher argues in essence that the culture of the Netherlands is living on capital from a time when Christianity was the dominant force and encouraged people to work for a living. He argues that the libertine, militantly atheistic hedonism that has overwhelmingly characterised the Boom Generation has led to the country importing migrants and weakened the work ethic that allowed the Netherlands to become a wealthy country.

Whilst I cannot deny these claims - indeed I feel that the response of the secular left should be not to deny them but to twist them to their own advantage as I have often demonstrated with environmental policy elsewhere in this blog - there is certainly more to it than just libertine hedonism. It is materialistic envy of the knowledge that so many companions are moving to a country that in the short to medium term offers them a much more comfortable and cozy existence at apparently no cost whatsoever. The result is that people in Europe - even more today as the inefficiency of using any of their land for a purpose for which it was more nearly designed than any other land in Earth's four and a half billion year history (intensive production of food) - want to have everything people in land-glutted Australia and Red America receive naturally for little effort.

For this reason most of Europe's working masses have for a century and a half campaigned constantly to be given whatever wealth they can by government, whilst at the same time they have bought inventions of dubious long-term value as far as maintaining a demographically sustainable culture.

Meanwhile, Europeans have never become as comfortable as Australia, Red America, or in some ways even the extremely poor people of sub-Saharan Africa which has the same glutted land supply. The lesson that Europeans really have to learn is that they should not desire this because they live in a land endowed with a gift immesurably rarer (in geological terms) than a glut of land or minerals.

An urban dead sea?

2011-07-27T10:59:00.001+10:00

In today’s issue of Time, there is a story of how the excessive use of the Jordan River has reduced the level of the Dead Sea by as much as twenty-seven metres since 1980. It also says that the extraction of potash for the making of fertilisers has contributed significantly to this reduction, which almost rivals that of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Whilst the rains of 2010 and 2011 have eased the problems with the Coorong at least for the moment, in southwestern Australia the situation has got creepily bad to say the least. So altered is Australia’s climate by global warming that in the year from April 2010 to March 2011 the lowest rainfalls were as far south as Corrigin in the heart of the Western Australian wheatbelt.

The map presented here from the Bureau of Meteorology shows that if we make our judgments based on the location of the area of lowest rainfall, then Australia’s rain belts have shifted about eight degrees poleward from their pre-anthropogenic-global-warming location (represented by the year from April 1955 to March 1956 with similar positive SOI values for realistic comparison). Most of the rainfalls observed in the super-monsoon belt today have no parallels even during the wettest years before man-made global warming took over. However, this is not likely to create new species very quickly: it is simply likely to expand monsoonal vineforests at the expense of tropical grasslands. Monsoon forests occur when there are wet and dry seasons and the wet season is longer than the dry season, a situation observed definitely in Darwin today when the wet season of 2010/2011 broke the pre-anthropogenic-global-warming record by a whopping 780 millimetres, or thirty-one inches - more than the average annual rainfall in most of Australia.

The result has been that Perth’s water storages, and indeed all rivers in the southwest of Western Australia, have become the same thing as the Dead Sea. Moreover, because in the pre-anthropogenic-global warming age southwestern Australia’s rivers - even if clearing for grain production made those in drier areas saline - were able to support life, the loss stands much, much larger. The western swamp tortoise has already survived artificially for thirty-five years - its existence depends on levels of runoff not seen in southwestern Australian rivers since 1974 when the CO₂ level was 100ppm lower and climatic belts about eight degrees closer to the equator.

Ian Smith, the main CSIRO climatologist, has said that the same trends have occurred in the Middle East, though I do not have rainfall data to say how they compare with what is observed in southwestern Australia. Still, if there is anything in common between them, then we really are faced with the need to restrict water use in hot climates. The trouble is that it is much more economic to farm in hotter climates than in cooler ones because:

more crops can be grown per year, so that even if yields per single crop are lower, total yields on the same amount of land can be higher
higher-value crops can be grown in hotter climates than in cooler ones since the most valuable crops - which of course do not grow naturally in large numbers - are in the more biodiverse hot regions

This creates serious economic problems since cool climates tend to be much less fragile and less greenhouse-intensive to live in than really hot ones. (Even though properly cold climates require large amounts of energy for heating, they always have reliable hydroelectric power to produce it, which hot climates rarely do). Nonetheless, the need to avoid the disasters that have already occurred within an expanding tropical belt is something that really should worry people in cool climates who are willing to realise that a major focus on global environmental concerns means growing local even if it means a less high living standard.

How the tsunami has revealed a crisis

2011-07-25T13:23:00.002+10:00

According to today’s Bangkok Post, the March tsunami has actually had the serious problem of exacerbating the demographic crisis that has been hitting Japan over the past thirty years.

Whilst the statistics are familiar, what is new is the fact that Japan, despite its exceptionally high population density from the richest fisheries in the Earth’s geological history, and its reputation for encouraging older people to continue working as long as they are physically able to do so, is suffering from an acute labour shortage that will only get worse as the proportion of its population of working age declines by fifteen percent over the next forty years.

The remedies offered, however, really do not look at the problems of Japan’s land scarcity or even the issue of whether government spending is the cause of Japan’s appallingly low fertility, especially with the extreme scarcity of usable land to complement its super-rich seas. Although Wendell Cox says:

“As for agricultural subsidies… they would not be the cause of higher housing prices, in my view, unless they block the construction of housing. The subsidies themselves are unlikely to raise the price of land sufficiently to make it too expensive to purchase for home building.”

firsthand experience in Japan certainly does suggest to me that agricultural subsidies, which encourage part-time farmers to remain working on very small plots with low-value crops like rice, are blocking the construction of housing that would alleviate Japan’s high prices and most likely increase its birth rate at least somewhat. I have not researched this question myself, but the extent of Japan’s farm subsidies is such that one can doubt Wendell Cox’s claim: rice prices are set orders of magnitude above the world level and imports are very severely restricted. Still, the long-term consequences for Japan of industrialisation are at the same time:

more severe than other Enriched World nations due to the country’s lack of flat land for its large population
very different because, like the rest of East Asia it has the paradox that:

like the polar regions, much of its economy was dependent on fishing rather than agriculture
but owing to the humid, hot summers it could grow at high yields crops designed for hot climates

This has profound effects on Japan’s post-industrial demographics, because the ability of fishing to support communities without demographic decline is in fact weaker even than farming. Even in the cold and rich North Pacific, fisheries cannot compete economically with extensive pastoralism as a protein source, no matter what Martin Taylor might say about government aid to Australia’s pastoralists. Thus, it would take a lot of thought to see how to make Japan’s main natural resource valuable enough to allow for family formation and encourage a less materialistic culture. This is especially true when one considers that the ethos of East Asian culture has been less hostile to materialism than Christianity.

The terrible dilemma for Australia

2011-07-25T09:39:00.002+10:00

Yesterday’s Age had the depressing note that the carbon tax - however inadequate and misguided it is - is going to be overthrown most likely at the next election, with Labor’s primary vote down to a record low 26 percent and Gillard’s preferred Prime Minister down to 39 percent. Most of this is clearly over the issue of a carbon tax - which like the far more efficacious mining tax that cost Rudd his job, is a too-late effort to deal with Australia’s dreadful greenhouse gas emissions.

It is rather pointless to think what Australia will be like under Abbott in the long-term future, but simple demographic shifts to growing outer suburbs do point to the potential long-term demise of the Labor and Green parties, whose support is very dependent upon low-fertility academic communities in the inner city. With the carbon tax eliminated and threats to mining company power gone, Australia’s still-unexplored mineral resources (on left-wing political websites one never hears of any new mineral finds or of campaigns to stop proposed exploration abroad) will be able to carry out such greenhouse-emitting steps as:

coal production in the Namoi Valley
oil exploration in Ningaloo Reef
underground coal gasification in the Flinders Ranges

Taken together, these will increase Australia’s advantage in terms of cheap and abundant energy, and raise further the discrepancy in fertility between the car-dependent suburbs and the less conservative inner city (representative of the rest of the OECD). What this will mean over the long term is:

that Australia’s carbon emissions continue to rise as its cities develop into some of the largest in the world by area and even population

it has been forecast that both Sydney and Melbourne will be among the five largest cities in the OECD by 2050 as larger European cities decline

that as countries elsewhere in the world shift under scarcity and political pressure to renewable energy Australia retains an abundant supply of fossil fuels to fund its population at energy efficiencies possibly even lower than today

especially since a hotter climate means higher household energy use from air conditioning

that the often-ridiculous laws being implemented (such as the recent fatty food tax in Hungary) in the Enriched World serve further to encourage migration to the very national that ecologically can least afford it.
that even if Abbott really is serious about his criticisms of excessive immigration, that his opposition to artificial birth control can be enforced to produce higher birth rates as it cannot in the Enriched World.

thus, Australia’s birth rate, which at present is higher than that of other OECD nations but not exceptional, could easily become the highest outside sub-Saharan Africa under Abbott
thus, Australia’s already excessive population could well grow even more rapidly than demographic models currently predict, even as the declines in Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand precede as expected

if this is the case, Australia would be able to maintain its present very high electricity and fuel consumption without having the problems of:

importing fuel or electricity
excessive housing prices from a lack of flat, unfrozen land

The problems for Australia’s already endangered soils and ecosystems this likely scenario poses are severe to say the least.

Even if the vastly increased rainfall over the arid interior, which the super-monsoon has already brought, does bring increased pastoral yields in the short term, there is no likelihood this can continue because once rainfall reaches 900 millimetres per flood season, soil fertility will necessarily decline from the intense leaching of the cracking clays upon which the pastoral industry originated.

In the former winter rainfall zones of southern Australia, the situation is even worse. Even if the super-monsoon brings significant October to April rainfall to the southeast, the likely loss of the peaty soils through this super-monsoon rain will mean much lower runoff to rainfall ratios in the alpine catchments like the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Goulburn, Snowy, LaTrobe/Thomson and Yarra, as I show here. In southwestern Australia, anthropogenic global warming has, if we use 2010 streamflows as a guide, reduced runoff by an astonishing ninety-six percent. Even rivers such as the Warren which before anthropogenic greenhouse emissions flowed year-round would become dry streambeds that would not flow even after rare heavy storms should this scenario eventuate. This illustrates a deadly effect of Australia’s old soils: vegetation of wetter climates can actually absorb enough water under anthropogenically reduced rainfall to cause runoff reductions that would not occur under an extraordinarily rare natural drought. Only when the vegetation of drier climates moves to southwestern Australia would occasional heavy cyclonic rains (like April 2008) produce significant runoff.

These threats are terrifying - as much as the pathetic response of ordinary Australians to the small long-term costs of the mining tax. Similarly terrifying is how Europe and China mingle over their own emissions without realising that in the long term there is a far more pressing threat even if they can achieve zero emissions.

My prediction for the 2011/2012 Rock Hall ballot

2011-07-13T23:40:00.003+10:00

For the past two years, I have during each winter predicted what artists will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the following summer and autumn. I will admit my predictions have been terribly wrong: for both 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 I got a mere two candidates right. Still, I feel as though I should continue making these predictions since I enjoy learning from the debates that result and from people with more experience dealing with the influence of important rock artists - which I never saw during my cloistered childhood in suburban Melbourne.

The 2011/2012 Rock Hall ballot is highly notable because of its critical quality for backlog artists who have been seriously considered for some time but have not been elected in or even reached the ballot. In 2012/2013, a number of critical artists of the radical Bush Senior era (the rap revolution) become eligible and for a number of years I have strongly felt 2012/2013 shall see more newly eligible artists than any year since the “punk revolution” class of 2002/2003, when the success of newer artists became rather constrained by the conflict between critical reputation and the stiflingly restrictive policies of major labels and commercial radio, which punk produced in the US.

There is at this stage not the slightest evidence that any artist newly eligible for 2010/2011 was ever discussed by the Nominating Committee. 2011/2012, however, I have always seen as having two artists certain to be considered very seriously in Guns‘n‘Roses and Soundgarden. Both of these groups were key artists in the late 1980s heavy rock scene: Guns‘n‘Roses recycled the scariest moments of rock, whilst Soundgarden made heavy rock more melodic than anyone before without losing emotion. There is also Salt‘n‘Pepa, whom Digital Dream Door said deserved it but of whom I have no belief they could be inducted before rappers on the current backlog, especially as they lack credibility in critical terms. Eric B and Rakim are a little better respected critically but are also unlikely to get in before backlog rap artists.

In looking at the 2011/2012 Rock hall ballot, I will assume the Nominating Committee is not going to allow any further artists on the ballot as it has been doing lately. The effect of key Bush Senior Era artists starting to become eligible will not really be seen until 2012/2013, and my predictions are for the following fifteen artists to make the 2011/2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot:

- Chuck Willis: A long-praised pioneer rhythm and blues artist with hits “C.C. Rider”, “Betty and Dupree”, “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes” and the number nine “What Am I Living For”, Willis may be undergoing a major revival that ought to see him on this year’s ballot. He influenced Buddy Holly and Otis Redding in later years.

- Joe Tex: Nominated for the fourth time in 2010/2011, Joe Tex’s vocal style has been seen by many as a precursor to the spoken-word vocals of rap. He was not commercially successful until a decade after he first recorded, but in the late 1960s Tex was a key performed in the soul arena and it is likely he will keep getting chances until induction.

- The Five Satins: In the shuffle of vocal groups, the Satins, chiefly known for “In The Still of the Night”, should have a strong chance of making the ballot for the first time. They defined the meaning of “doo wop” with their chief hits “In the Still of the Night” and “To the Aisle”, and influenced many later vocal groups.

- The Moody Blues: The first progressive rock group - later like so many to have overblown pop hits after the “punk revolution” tightened up record company and commercial radio playlists - the Moody Blues seem likely to have a chance this year after Genesis were inducted for 2009/2010. They have often been critically derided but writers like Mark Prindle suggest this is less general than I thought.

- Donovan: The second long-eligible artist to be nominated despite never having been seriously discussed by the Nominating Committee after Leonard Cohen in 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 (inducted), Donovan has long been seen by outsiders as deserving of the Rock Hall due to his success as part of the psychedelic Zeitgeist in the 1960s, although he has not retained a great critical reputation and has recorded only four albums since 1976.

- Captain Beefheart: His death, if we look at the history of reappraisals of dead rock musicians, could well help him to get onto the ballot after having been for a long time considered without a nomination. His disciple Tom Waits’ 2010/2011 induction would give Beefheart a much better chance of getting in the Hall if he is nominated than I thought beforehand, too.

- Laura Nyro: Being a big fan and a semi-regular at her sites, I need to be careful, but despite the reasonable and severe criticism of her nomination by Sampson, it does seem likely that her influence - which is I must admit concentrated outside the mainstream of commercial and critical success - seems to be seen as strong enough to keep her on the ballot whilst the Bush Senior era revolutionaries are ineligible. It may not be enough to get her in whilst she has her chance, but so original an artist would be most welcome in the Hall.

- The J. Geils Band: One which seems likely more because of the enormous support from Dave Marsh, Steve Van Zandt and Jon Landau than because of their critical or even commercial reputation, the J. Geils Band (actually fronted by Peter Wolf who later had a solo career and co-wrote “We Built This City” with Bernie Taupin) are widely rumoured to be a frontrunner for 2011/2012 induction so I cannot leave them off despite their lack of influence and not even a single Grammy for their popularity.

- KISS: One group on the Rock Hall backlog which has had a lot of pressure in its favour, KISS have often been seen as unlikely. However, their immense commercial success in the 1970s and their essential role in the development of pop metal makes KISS an important part of rock and roll history.

- Chic: More critically respected (and in my own experience more listenable) than most acts of the disco era, Chic have been, like Sabbath and the Stooges, consistently on the ballot but opposed by a sufficient number of voters to prevent them from getting in. It seems that in this circumstance it is almost impossible for an artist to be fully rejected, so Chic would have to be likely.

- The B‘52s: New Wave is one genre of substantial popular support which I have not otherwise catered for on this ballot, and the B‘52s, as the most commercially successful act form that genre not in the Hall of Fame, have a good chance this year. Although their true leader was keyboardist Fred Schneider, it would be interesting to see how the presence of two women affects their chances.

- Afrika Bambaataa: The most important hip hop pioneer with their song “Planet Rock”, Afrika Bambataa have long been the only artist first eligible in 2005/2006 to have had a chance. He may not be well-known to the general public beyond his signature song, but that signature song, which was number two hundred and thirty seven on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 songs, is sufficient to make his place in rock history and give him one nomination already. Another seems surely likely.

- The Beastie Boys: Essential as one of the first artists to popularise rap despite being the only significant white rappers until Eminem emerged in the 2000s, the Beasties are also of critical importance in the way in which their sampling of metal groups like AC/DC paved the way for the link between metal and rap that is an often overlooked part of the radical Bush Senior era culture. They were nominated in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011, so it would be predicted the Beasties will appear again this year.

- The Red Hot Chili Peppers: As one of the premier modern rock acts, the Chili Peppers were nominated in 2009/2010 but missed out in 2010/2011. However, it would be hard to see them not having another shot in the near future, despite the fact that the Nominating Committee membership, now better known than before, does not have anyone under forty who might have been exposed to more modern genres of music.

- Guns‘n‘Roses: Although extremely derivative in their musical style, Guns‘n‘Roses were critically and popularly praised during the late 1980s for recycling the scarier moments of the Rolling Stones and 1970s Aerosmith. They attracted a lot of controversy in what was to be a highly controversial age with the cover of their mega-selling album Appetite for Destruction, still acclaimed as one of the best heavy metal albums ever. Their reputation as recyclers of what the critics who make up the Nominating Committee see as the essence of rock give them a strong chance.

BUBBLING UNDER:

If the fifteen artists listed above fail to make the 2011/2012 ballot, it will likely by because one or more of the following artists gets on:

- The “5” Royales: On the ballot in 2001/2002 and 2003/2004, the “5” Royales are the most famous of the doo-wop groups so beloved of the Nominating Committee that have not actually made it. Another chance may well be coming.

- Dick Dale: A commercially unsuccessful guitar god, regarded as the prototype of the whole persona, I have tended to see Dale as a left-field choice for the Rock Hall backlog for some time. With no genuine guitar gods on my list, this may provide Dick Dale with a space of his own.

- The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Described as the inventor of jamming in a rock context with their eleven-minute “East West” and eight minute “Work Song”, Butterfield and his band have already reached the 2005/2006 ballot despite never reaching the Top 50 on Billboard, which shows the influence they had in the following few years. Another nomination for somebody so influential on hippie jam bands is not improbable.

- The MC5: After the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, the MC5 are the third in a trio of critically lauded underground bands who were the ancestors of the “punk revolution” in the late 1970s. Nominated in 2002/2003, the induction of the Stooges has not yet given their Detroit brethren another chance, but it may soon.

- Deep Purple: Often thought of as a very bad snub by the Hall, the problem with Purple is the small output of their classic Mark II lineup and the number of personnel changes they have had. If it could be decided to induct only the Mark II line-up they would have the most genuien chance.

- Jethro Tull: If as happened in 2010/2011 the Rock Hall in the absence of newly eligible candidates chooses to put one from deep in the backlog, Tull would have a strong chance. The presence of a small number of instantly recognised monuments from early in their career (“Living in the Past”, “Bungle in the Jungle”, Thick as a Brick, Aqualung) may help them over arguably better qualified candidates.

- The Last Poets: Will the movement towards the beginnings of the Bush Senior era and the rap revolution lead to a re-consideration of a key prototype of hip-hop, who reached number twenty-nine on Billboard with their first album but did not draw attention until rap’s influence became obvious? Maybe, I say, given the way Rolling Stone has focused on rap to much criticism in recent years.

- Donna Summer: The most successful act of the frequently derided disco era, Summer has already had many nominations without an induction. Such a situation has been observed ever since the Rock Hall was first created to ultimately give all but the oldest artists (who thus might not be known to younger voters) a certain pass into the Hall.

- The Cure: An artist who may be passing into favoritism if there is any turnover in the Nominating Committee, the Cure even as it is have a lot going for them as the first “alternative” (I can testify from record stores in the 1990s) group to reach genuine mainstream status.

- Janet Jackson: Although eligible for some time, the way in which Donovan was considered from obscurity last year makes one wonder whether, with her first acknowledged album Control reaching its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, the Nominating Committee might wish to re-consider the most commercially successful singles artist in the US over the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s?

- Soundgarden: The first prominent grunge group, with a unique sense of melody, lyrics that symbolise the Bush Senior era, and a rhythmic complexity that distinguished them from other bands in the genre, Soundgarden have long had critical and commercial respect but the question of whether they are too “metal” for those in the Nominating Committee looms large over their certain credentials.

A difficult mother’s birthday - and a wonderful cake!

2011-06-22T23:08:00.003+10:00

This past few weeks have been difficult for me owing to my mother having to have two operations for a breast tumour and my having to spend three hundred dollars to replace the whole frame of my bike. The problem was discovered in an unusual manner when I was travelling to visit Christian Ganaban in Richmond and the bike appeared to move out of alignment.

This has made me very nervous about my future, with concern I will have to work much harder than I have been doing lately. The last few months have been dominated by grazing and grazing on Sesame Wheats and Monte Carlos, so that my mass, which over the middle 2000s I had curbed the growth of and even achieved some loss, has risen to quite unprecedented levels.

In spite of this, today I have done a good deal to redeem an appallingly late night where I was not in bed until 3:00. After recovering from a prolonged sleep, I went quickly to get the 1999 Geelong v Melbourne game from Christian Ganaban and to re-deposit money in my saver’s account that had been used to pay for the bike frame. I did not - as I have been doing - hand around Name A Game, but after buying meat, mushrooms, cake and ice cream went straight to prepare for a dinner planned by my mother of steak, chips and mushroom sauce. After buying the steak and mushrooms, I came home to cut the potatoes and watch a surprisingly good game between The Cats and Demons in a year when both became awfully disappointing.

When Mummy came home at 18:00, I had already prepared the food for cooking, and we cooked it very well - indeed only one of the two steaks was required. I enjoyed the dinner even if I expected more varied flavour and Mummy said not to cook the onions and garlic I had prepared as she wanted a pure mushroom sauce for the steak.

The highlight of the day, however, was the way in which the cake shop (I am familiar with it but have never bought from it) gave my mother a piece of white chocolate with “Happy Birthday” on it! She was amazingly delighted, even though we had to remove the chocolate spirals to cut the cake into a piece small enough for eating, and in my view the cake and ice cream (of which there were two flavours, vanilla and banana, which I bought because bananas have been appallingly expensive ever since the major cyclones of last summer) were the real highlight of what I fear in my worst dreams will be my mother’s last birthday dinner, although she says that the cancer is not invasive and will not reach the lymphatic system.

It’s not de-funding, it’s equitably taxing

2011-06-15T12:11:00.003+10:00

In my email today, I had an advertisement for Credo Mobile Phones given to me by the American journal Mother Jones (MoJo). I had never expected it to be an advertisement, but the point of de-funding the greenhouse sceptics is one which really needs serious attention.

Greenhouse sceptics are very marginal in most of the world today. However, in the non-academic outer suburbs and rural areas of Australia they are essentially mainstream. I have already explained some of the reasons for this in the loss of living cost advantage necessarily part of serious steps to deal with Australia’s dreadful greenhouse emissions record.

However, one thing that needs to be realised is that greenhouse-sceptic opinions among Australia’s politicians do not result from this process. They come from the enormous wealth and political influence of greenhouse-emitting industries in Australia, which in turn comes from Australia’s surfeit of mineral and energy resources.

As I have explained many times before, most countries in Eurasia and the Americas do not have any significant deposits of major lithophile metals, and the less energy-intensive chalcophile metals are too scarce in the crust to be a long-term resource. This allows the overwhelming scientific view that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are the cause of observed global warming to be universal in parliaments.

The results are that governments of these countries, which actually have no need for environmental regulations. The social costs of a selfish and inhospitable culture and the potential for a demographic time bomb of extreme old age dependency ratios are very great. There is likewise no doubt that government regulation, as Johan Surkyn and Ron Lesthaeghe have shown in their relationship between government size and religion (which determines how gentle and hospitable a culture is), is the cause of the extremely selfish and inhospitable cultures dominant in Europe, East Asia, Canada and New Zealand today. (In fact, this character of these cultures may worsen the effect of Australia’s appalling carbon emissions by encouraging people who might consider migrating to these countries to settle in the gentler culture of suburban Australia).

In Australia, by contrast, mineral companies have ever since the first lithophile mining boom of the 1950s had virtually complete control over the country’s energy policies. Their complete control was seen in the dreadful Lonie Report of 1980 - written not by urban planners or economists but by the chiefs of Broken Hill Proprietaries and the Country Roads Board - and in Australia’s laggardly status with renewable energy and emissions reductions. Those within and outside Australia who wish for the country to improve its emissions from the highest per capita to the lowest (the only acceptable situation) need to realise that this vicelike grip on policy by corporations with an immense amount of wealth in their hands must be broken completely for anything to be achieved.

My opinion - strange and extreme as it might seem - is that corporate taxes really must be judged on the natural inorganic resources available. Whilst I do not deny that high taxes can lead to inefficiency, even Kevin Williamson admits that when they become wealthy enough corporations are able to control governments - and nowhere is this more possible or real than in Australia. This means that even if the taxes on corporations in the Enriched World are undoubtedly excessive, those in the Unenriched World may be quite inadequate. Indeed, Australia’s 30 percent company tax allows corporations more political influence than a tax haven would permit in the Enriched World, whereas similar rates in Europe stifle economic and family development completely. Capping mining income would, as I said in my last post, not affect Australia’s mineral output significantly and would give a genuine opportunity to give Australia a public transit system superior to any in the Enriched World. It would also mean that Australia could invest in solar power without having demands of the fossil fuel industry on its back.

The trouble is that Australia’s working class - the people whose duty it should be to do this - live comfortable lives that protesting would greatly disturb. More than that, those in Western Australia - the very state whose climate has become unrecognisable from pre-1969 climates purely via man-made global warming - is the state whose working masses rejected the mining tax most vehemently, even those in southwestern Australia whose rainfall has declined by fifty percent and judging by the last five years is declining at an exponential rate.

We don’t need either a carbon tax or emissions trading

2011-05-28T23:50:00.001+10:00

In the midst of Liberal governments refusing to do even the most basic things to improves Australia’s dreadful performance on greenhouse gas emissions, The Business Spectator is trying to suggest that emissions trading may be just as good a solution as the unpopular carbon tax flouted by Gillard. It argues that an emissions trading scheme may actually be effective in capping carbon emissions. However, the difficulties of measurement, as more radical commentators have noted, make this in my view an unlikely scenario.

More than that, I can easily sympathise with those who see problems in a carbon tax for its ability to reduce the living standards of the majority of Australians, who could lose quite a lot in living standards if the government is unable to do something to eliminate the causes of the problem, that is, coal-fired electricity and fuel-inefficient cars. A carbon tax is almost certainly an extremely regressive tax, because the poorest people in rural areas generally have the least ability to rely on public transit or higher cost renewable energy. For this reason, it is very hard to push a carbon tax on the populace of a spread-out, low-density country like Australia.

The real solution - one advocated by radical socialsts but to my mind amenable to more moderate views - is the mining tax which was so unpopular at recent elections.

People think that a windfall tax on wealthy mining companies will ruin Australia’s economy, but such articles as Quarry Vision really show that is not the case. People in Australia need to be informed that Australia’s mining industry is quite largely non-competitive. This is because the combination of a hot climate and extremely thick cratonic crust means that Australia has been entirely immune from the tectonic and glacial upheavals that have destroyed the lithophile mineral wealth of Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand. (“Lithophile” means the reactive metals that form strong bonds with silicon and oxygen like aluminum and titanium, as distinguished for the more easily extracted but greatly rarer “chalcophile” and “siderophile” metals like copper and gold.)

Paleopedological records show that most of the present-day soil types of Eurasia, the temperate Americas and New Zealand were non-existent or nearly so until the appearance of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the late Pliocene five million years ago. Combined with the growth of the Himalayas and Rockies/Cascade Ranges, the repeated growth of the Laurentide and Scandinavian Ice Sheets in Europe and North America, the Patagonian Ice Sheet in South America and the Himalayas and their glaciers in Asia has produced new soil on a scale probably never known before in the 4,500,000,000 years since the Earth formed. This formation of new soil has been accompanied by the decomposition of FePO₄ and AlPO₄ to soluble phosphorus to form soils of a chemical fertility not known for at least 280 million years.

In Australia, because most of its continental crust (overlain by high-density iron rich rocks) is as much as fifty five kilometres thick as against twenty for typical crust, none of these processes have occurred at all. The result is that all the lithophile metal ores that in almost all the rest of the world have been largely destroyed remain. Even today, after two hundred and twenty three years of European settlement, new deposits of lithophile metals are still being discovered. The result is that Australia’s established mining companies, as extensively documented by Guy Pearse, have since the 1950s been able to establish a super-tight control over the country’s energy and transport policy. Because of Australia’s very flat topography, there is no tendency for even those regions most remote from the main mineral deposits in the Pilbara to rebel against this power, especially as it gives Australians electricity prices one-sixth those of the Enriched World.

Another far more important and potentially significant result is that, unlike most other industries where high taxation simply leads to inefficiency, if Australia’s masses were to realise the potential use of a mining tax to fund the exceptionally high-quality public transport that such an old and fragile continent absolutely must have (as I have stressed many times before, acceptable standards of public transport in Australia would be greatly higher than in Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand) and the revegetation and conservation of at least the exceptionally biodiverse South West Botanical Province there could be many improvements in conservation without efficiency loss, simply because there is no alternative source for lithophile metals. This would mean that, rather the destroying the most critical and fragile environment, Australia’s metal ore resources are used to preserve it in a rigorous manner.

A real surprise from Huffington Post editors?

2011-05-20T11:00:00.000+10:00

This morning, after a very late night trying to upload extracts from a couple of 1997 AFL games (one of which is of immense statistical interest) I found a list from the Huffington Post of its writers’ recent reading experiences:

Katie Bindley, Style and Culture Reporter: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Amanda Terkel, Senior Political Reporter: O by Mark Salter
Amanda M. Fairbanks, Education Reporter: Middlemarch by George Eliot
David Wood, Senior Military Correspondent: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Andrea Stone, Senior National Correspondent: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
Shahien Nasiripour, Senior Business Reporter: Confidence Game by Christine S. Richard
Jon Ward, Senior Political Reporter: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
Jen Bendery, Staff Writer: Just Kids by Patti Smith
Laura Gottesdiener, General Assignment Reporter: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Joy Resmovits, Education Reporter: Macbeth by Shakespeare
Lila Shapiro, Business Reporter: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
William Alden, Business Writer: Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese
Catherine New, Reporter: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Caroline Dworin, Culture Reporter: Here is New York by E.B. White
Elise Foley, DC Reporter: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Michael Calderone, Senior Media Reporter: India: A Million Mutinies Now by V.S. Naipaul
Saki Knafo, Reporter: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

The list is very varied. Many of the books are heat-of-the-moment nonfiction that people will not be reading for anything - even biographical information - but the proportion that are not are very varied, which is the way I actually like it to be. There is, too, some historical works I could consider buying after a proper read, such as the one about Theodore Roosevelt and about the political problems facing India today.

The only two I really know much about - courtesy of Elizabeth Kantor and Wendy Mulford - are the two works of “classic” (by date) literature in Macbeth and Lolly Willowes. Lolly Willowes, of course, is the kind of work adherents of classic literature like Kantor will regard as a pre-PC godhead of feminism for its proto-Wiccan theme, whereas Macbeth is seen by such people as representing the real nature of men and women. it is, however, hard to see from the profiles of these two people why they would take an interest in such different works of literature: Shapiro is after all a business reporter!

Easton’s list revealed

2011-05-14T20:15:00.002+10:00

One list that I had seen in book form on eBay and perhaps some other places but never noticed in this high-tech age on the web is Easton’s list of the 100 best books of all time.

Unlike most book list form the Modern Library to Benjamin Wiker, this list caters for both fiction and nonfiction. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that with a few exceptions most of the material would be familiar from the variety of lists I have read. The major expectin in fact is the first book, which I had seen heavily criticised by most critics beforehand.

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift
Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
The Odyssey by Homer (5 stars!)
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
A Portrait of the Artist as s Young Man by James Joyce
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Candide by Voltaire
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Collected Poems by Robert Browning
The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Collected Poems by John Keats
On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Collected Poems by Robert Frost
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Iliad by Homer
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Politics and The Poetics by Aristotle
The Aeneid by Virgil
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion and Candida by George Bernard Shaw
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Cherry Orchard and the Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Beowulf
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The History of Early Rome by Livy
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickins
The Republic by Plato
Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Confessions by St. Augustine
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

A favourite joke

2011-05-12T13:10:00.002+10:00

One of my favourite jokes about Melbourne is about what the name of the next new Melbourne suburb should be.

I always say it should be called Wass, because one of the major outer suburban growth areas is called Hallam.

The names Hallam and Wass may not seem related to most people, but to old county cricket buffs like myself they are intimately related because of Nottinghamshire’s 1907 County Championship record of fifteen wins and four draws from nineteen games due to their amazingly effective bowling on sticky wicket after sticky wicket in England’s coolest summer of the twentieth century, taking 298 wickets for 12.66 runs apiece. Hallam’s flighty off-spin and Wass’ deadly fast leg cutter popped and spun in a manner even batsmen with better technique than today’s spoiled cricketers could not counter.

I know this is a joke because Albert Hallam, who did not play for England even in the Tests of 1907, cannot be the person for whom the Hallam in Victoria is named after, but it is just too funny and is a story probably few people even in England know!

Intelligence and atheism: watertight or an artefact?

2011-05-05T00:00:00.003+10:00

Richard Lynn, a controversial scholar known for his extensive studies of racial differences in intelligence, has recently published an interesting if familiar look at how religious belief correlates with phenotypic IQ for one hundred and thirty seven nations.

What is striking from the database is how average intelligence, it seems, is able to predict rates of atheism and nonbelief across nations. It is notable that virtually all nations with mean phenotypic IQs of less than ninety have almost no atheism, whilst those with phenotypic IQs above 90 have generally significant to very high levels of atheism. This relationship may be even stronger than Lynn actually shows because for political reasons many people in Catholic Europe who are actually very much nonpractising and politically radical will not claim to be atheistic.

Supporters of atheism, however, must not say “hey, hooray” that the more intelligent are necessarily more atheistic. The few exceptions outside of Catholic Europe are explained very easily and in a satisfactory manner, except that Lynn probably has not heard of the arguments of Lestaghe and Surkyn that the higher religiosity of the United States is due to its much smaller welfare state than that of European countries, which means people are more dependent on private religious charities if in need.

A much worse problem is that, whilst in the past Lynn has easily explained the increased intelligence of Europeans, East Asians and to a lesser extent other Enriched World races in terms of adaptation or past adaptation to the cold winters in and north of the Himalayas, his thesis about how increased atheism relates to increased phenotypic IQ is rather problematic in that context. If atheism were purely related to phenotypic IQ, then for the negligible levels of atheism in medieval European populations, we would require a “phenotypic depression” (in simple terms the difference between genotypic IQ and phenotypic IQ) of about fifteen IQ points. There are many writers - for instance Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts - who do suggest peasant living standards in Europe were poorer than those of the Tropical World before the colonial era - but that creates a further problem since the observed genotypic IQs of farming peoples in the Tropical World are between twenty and seven IQ points lower than those of Europeans. Unless most farming peoples in the Tropical World really had much more productive environmental conditions for farming than did Europeans, it would be unlikely that “phenotypic depression” in European peasant IQ could have reached to 15 IQ points.

If “phenotypic depression” did reach 15 IQ points for a substantial period, it contradicts Lynn’s whole thesis for why Europeans were able to surpass Southeast Asians and the more numerous South Asians in cultural achievements. The Openness of South Asians is virtually the same as that of Europeans; that of South East Asians unknown. However, since Southeast Asians have never lived in environments where conformity is valuable like the highly infertile Unenriched World or extremely cold climates, one could not expect their Openness to be much lower than that of Europeans. Thus, if these theories are at all correct, then it would be predicted that South Asians and South East Asians in the Tropical World would have overtaken Europeans in scientific achievement - which of course did not happen.

Thus, we are left with the probability that medieval Europeans cannot have had sufficient “phenotypic depression” to explain their high religiosity and that this fact undermines Lynn’s thesis quite severely. We are left with a very strong probability that big government remains a major cause of atheism, especially when one moves it beyond welfare to other aspects of government regulation which make countries like Hong Kong look much less like capitalist models.

How Australia dwarfs the US

2011-04-30T13:30:00.004+10:00

In a recent Care 2 Causes post, they are taking advantage of the fact that those states affected by the disaster are the ones that, among the Enriched World, have the poorest environment records.

What these people do not realise and absolutely must, is that Western Australia has been hit by massive greater and much longer term climate changes that have ever been known in the Enriched World. Rainfall in its southwest has declined by as much as fifty percent vis-à-vis averages from before enhanced levels of greenhouse gases began to have a dominant influence in 1967. Although the fires that began this summer have not been major headlines and died down from significant rain in January, but the extraordinary spell of hot and dry weather for the three subsequent months suggests very strongly that in fact the region - which possesses probably the most unique biological diversity of any region in the world - already has had its climate altered irretrievably by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The extremely conservative Australian government’s Department of Climate Change has admitted that it is ninety percent certain that the observed decline of forty percent in southwestern Australian rainfall is due to man-made global warming. They admit that a decline of thirteen percent in wheat yields is likely by 2050. In reality, it is far more likely that under likely carbon dioxide levels then there will be no winter rain at all and that any crop or even pasture production will be totally dependent on erratic and very limited summer falls.

Yet, I recall a good deal of evidence (which a detailed search could not track down) that many politicians in Western Australia are either so ignorant of their state’s historical climate data or - much more likely given the state’s limitless and not fully discovered mineral resources - too dependent on industries that would lose money if Australia was to achieve its long-required zero emissions target with no reductions abroad. Even if there is little outright scepticism, there is far too much ignorance of the radical climate changes that have swept Western Australia in the past forty-five years. What is galling still is that the southwest of WA is one of the most biologically diverse regions of the world and could lose its entire biodiversity at likely greenhouse gas levels by 2050, even if the Enriched World achieves zero emissions in entirety. Such a scenario of continuing increases even with major reductions in the Enriched World is, owing to the immense political power of the carbon industries in Australia outlined by Guy Pearse in Quarry Vision. It is exactly the reverse of a sane global greenhouse policy whereby Australia is required to achieve absolute zero emissions and no restrictions are placed on the mineral-poor Enriched World at all.

Such a policy, which the political leaders of the Enriched World should have known the necessity of in 1997, would actually have cost lower-class Australians very little, as Pearse says:

“Of course, in the event that carbon pirates did flee, the emissions picture for Australia would improve. If those sectors seeking compensation were put in a backpack and transported offshore tomorrow, Department of Climate Change figures suggest that around 94 per cent of GDP might survive, while Australia's emissions would drop by more than 40 per cent… In practice, they will not flee. We needn't wait for emissions trading to confirm this, either. As we've seen, companies predicting carbon leakage from Australia already produce the same commodities offshore with renewable energy and vastly lower emissions-intensity. The best-known aluminium producers (Rio Tinto Alcan, Alcoa, Hydro Aluminium and Rusal) all smelt the vast majority of their aluminium with renewable power. As for LNG, industry analysts believe Australian projects will not be rendered uncompetitive if producers are forced to pay for their emissions.

Not surprisingly, ABARE found in 2007 that even if Australia acted alone in cutting greenhouse emissions, for every tonne of greenhouse gas cut only around one-tenth of a tonne would leak offshore--and compensating polluters with free permits made little difference to that.”

Last day with my brother: wonderful meal in an obscure restaurant

2011-04-05T21:13:00.006+10:00

Tonight was the last night I would spend for a long time with my brother in Melbourne - for he is off tomorrow to Singapore to work in research with the National University of Singapore.

Although I thought it entirely befitting him that we three should have a special farewell meal in a restaurant, it was not until midday today that I learned he was going to do exactly this. I had to work around this schedule when planning for the meal since I was busy exchanging Mummy’s bag of gold $1 and $2 coins at the bank - and as usual I had slept in very late.

Still, I did manage to be with my mother and departing brother at the appointed time of 18:00 and we went straight to the car and towards the restaurant, which my brother said was in Holmes Road, East Brunswick. Although I knew the area extensively from tram travels, I had no idea what to expect, though my brother said it was a special pizza restaurant with exotic foods like goat’s cheese and pumpkin on pizza that did not exactly appeal to me.

When my brother showed Mummy and me the restaurant, we went in to a mostly empty but well-maintained house that had a charming old feel. I looked at the menu and was not sure what to order, considering a pizza that Mummy warned against because of its hot chili before settling on a salmon one with roe (salmon eggs) that I had never tasted before. Although my brother said it would be tasty, I was very surprised at what I tasted. The flavour of both the salmon and the roe was quite different from anything I had tasted before and extremely distinctive and impressive, and that of Mummy’s pizza with it’s goats‘ cheese equally good. There was also some mouthwatering mandarin-flavoured mineral water that had much more real taste than the drinks i often but for home use or for drinking when I go on longer cycles. I could taste the flavour so intensely that I wanted to drink it in tiny sips so that I would not have it drunk up before the main meal came. (Despite my efforts, I did meet with that fate as usual).

To finish off one of the best meals I have had was a banana “pizza” (more like a pie in reality) with some quite impressive vanilla ice cream. Although - with much later regret as well as dislike form my mother - I consistently buy commercial type ice creams, I have known for a long time that top quality ice creams which we still occasionally have for dessert are totally different from parlour ones.

Top 25 rap albums

2011-03-30T13:31:00.000+11:00

Although, ever since I read Peter Kreeft’s funny but revealing article “A Defence of Culture Wars”, I have been suspicious of rap because I have believed it to be really violent in a celebratory manner - as opposed to darkly depicting terrifying scenes of violence. However, with age I have realised - as indeed I suspected when I first read Peter Kreeft - that heavy metal and some forms of punk are actually even more violent than celebrated political rap groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. Heavy metal and punk rock also took to celebratory violence earlier. It all began with AC/DC’s “TNT” and, as I mentioned in one recent post, the Dead Kennedys. Both these groups clearly condone violent acts to get one’s own way at any cost, and one can easily imagine the consequence of a culture where people are “educated” by such works.

However, looking with trouble for lists of best music of all-time as we move towards a culture with seemingly little appreciation thereof, I have decided I should look at a recent list of the top twenty-five rap albums by Chris Rock:

#25: Dizzie Rascal - Boy in Da Corner (2004)
#24: DJ Quik - Way 2 Fonky (1992)
#23: Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
#22: Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
#21: Outkast - Aquemini (1998)
#20: Nas - Stillmatic (2001)
#19: Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt (1996)
#18: Scarface - Mr. Scarface Is Back (1991)
#17: Ice Cube - Amerikkka’s Most Wanted (1990)
#16: Wyclef Jean - The Carvinal (1997)
#15: Geto Boys - The Resurrection (1996)
#14: Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele (2000)
#13: Genius/GZA - Liquid Swords
#12: Eric B. and Rakim - Follow the Leader (1988)
#11: The D.O.C. - No One Can Do It Better (1989)
#10: De la Soul - Buhloon Mindstate (1993)
#9: A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (1991)
#8: Beastie Boys - Paul‘s Botique (1989)
#7: EPMD - Unfinished Business (1989)
#6: LL Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out (1990)
#5: Pharcyde - Bizarre Ride II: The Pharcyde (1992)
#4: Run-DMC - Raising Hell (1986)
#3: 2PAC - Rap Phenomenon II (mix tape, 2003)
#2: Snoop Doggy Dogg - Doggystyle (1993)
#1: N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton (1988)

The most surprising things from what I know about rap:

Public Enemy so low at #22
None of the wholly pre-Bush Senior rap groups are included
A few little-known albums at the lower end of the list

All in all, though, the list is familiar though it does not look at why Joe S. Harrington and David Keenan did not keep up interest in rap after Bush Senior lost power and the radicalism of the Boomers abated.

The problem with complex gadgets

2011-03-29T23:07:00.001+11:00

In this week’s Top 10 list from Time magazine, I found a surprise: that the magazine listed the complexity of Gmail as a problem, despite what Time describes as

“a reliability record, which remains sterling compared with most of the corporate e-mail systems it's been known to replace”

Time argues that today people are turning very rapidly from e-mail to such features as Twitter and Facebook.

To be honest, my experience of Twitter (rather brief) and Facebook suggests to me that what Nicholas Carr and Cory Doctorow said about the iPad and how its design was a model of consumerism because:

the iPad is designed almost completely by the entertainment industry and telecommunications companies (who I admit can be terribly superficial
even the most basic maintenance for the occasional rough child required professionals rather than ordinary people
technology comes and goes and today’s iPad is not going to be of long-term value
the way in which Apple have designed the applications makes it much more difficult to work with than an ordinary personal computer
for many critics, the iPad was analogous to the CD-ROM which, with hindsight, taught me very little compared to print biographies and which at times made me laugh (for instance over who “Charlie Parker” was - to me the definitive “disambiguation” comes from reading simultaneously biographies of Miles Davis and Wally Hammond)
“We don’t really care. It’s okay. We just wanted a book. We love you as you are” really sums up my attitudes towards library reading, something which Christian Ganaban says will not last much longer

Over the decade or so I have been a regular computer user, I have found that the Internet certainly has the power to control one without one gaining any understanding of how it works. I have been consistently baffled by how to operate a computer beyond that particular level of knowledge, yet always want to use it more and more, for more and more superficial purposes, at that very level.

The most unlikely note from James Dellingpole

2011-03-26T23:25:00.001+11:00

In James Dellingpole’s populist book 365 Ways to Drive A Liberal Crazy (one wonders why it could not be 366)

No. 74 of 365

Reclaim rock for conservatism:
Sing “California Über Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, especially the lines

“Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face.”

Then remark how spookily prescient it was that an obscure, left-ish, 1970s punk band managed to predict the eco-Nazi tyranny of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Although there have been numerous works of art and literature that most people without the experience I have gained over the past half decade would not recognise as “conservative”, what Dellingpole is trying to do here is - to put it logically - going a bit far.

Reading Robert Inchausti in Subversive Orthodoxy shows that many of the ideas promoted in the underground of the 1950s and 1960s were essentially conservative. A large proportion of this underground felt that government was intrusive on personal dignity and freedom (“philosophical anarchism”) because it did not allow people to pursue the life they most desired to as a result of intrusive regulations. These people viewed government as a threat to personal freedom to do things that were not harmful to others, seen especially in regulations of product standards that made it more difficult for the small businessman or craftsman.

In contrast, the worldview of the “punk” and the later rap revolution of the late 1980s was completely opposite. Although both were often scathingly critical of government, with the personalists it was because they felt government was taking money they had legitimately earned - in essence the whole basis of conservatism.

With punk, post-AC/DC metal and rap, criticism of government was in contrast because they felt that it restricted their absolute rights to do what they wanted and failed to provide them with the money and wealth that these ultra-materialistic urbanites wished for. Essentially and critically, these rights included the right to inflict any harm instantaneously desired on someone who they felt threatened or even restrained them in many cases.

The Dead Kennedys, who were hardly an obscure band, epitomised this value in songs like “Drug Me”, “Let’s Lynch the Landlord”, “Stealing People’s Mail” (which quite clearly condones theft), and especially “I Kill Children”, which anybody who sees a potential demographic time bomb in the Enriched World can analyse as a perfect anthem for the selfishness of the Boom Generation - beating even AC/DC. Then there is “Religious Vomit”, an anthem for selfish hypermasculinity like no other - easily beating Public Enemy and N.W.A. I have always thought that if Benjamin Wiker writes a Ten More Books that Screwed Up the World, he should include some of the major heavy metal and rap albums from the “punk revolution” and after. Although the Dead Kennedys never dented the Billboard Top 200, they were Top 40 in Europe, where radical secularisation has proceeded much further than Red America or Australia, so their cultural influence in the very things Human Events despises may be quite real. “California Über Alles” was an attack on Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and may have been noted by Dellingpole for being anti-Democrat - but as I have emphasised this in no way makes it pro-Republican or pro-small government. Brown in fact was quite fiscally careful, as Bill Kauffman has noted, and his hippie leanings were the antithesis of what hardcore and thrash stood for, but have roots which are related to the modern conservative “counterculture”.

Where technology goes in the wrong place

2011-03-19T22:51:00.002+11:00

This last week’s news has been dominated by a catastrophic disaster affecting the northeast of Japan, where a huge earthquake and resultant tsunami have:

destroyed many towns on the northeast coast of Honshū
destroyed numerous nuclear power stations

Although socialist radicals have consistently been against nuclear power, with age and reading I have become a little more mellow in opposition to it. In part, this mellowing has been related to the fact that I know fast reactors can be much more efficient with uranium use than conventional reactors, even though they require liquid sodium metal which is violently dangerous if leaked.

However, this last week’s earthquake has undoubtedly turned the global public away from nuclear power because, with a cold change expected to reach eastern Honshū in the coming days, radiation that is now being blown out into the Pacific Ocean will be blown back towards Asia and into very densely populated areas. My mother today said that this disaster is by no means so bad as the infamous Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

However, there is one question of vital importance: if nuclear power can do something to allow us to live comfortably on less energy (as it might indeed with the efficiency of fast reactors) should we not be careful to place nuclear power plants in areas known to be at no risk of damage from natural hazards like earthquakes, cyclones and other strong winds, volcanoes, or landslides. Even if Japan was in the 1950s and 1960s when it developed a nuclear programme a country desperately short of energy, it should have been known how dangerous nuclear explosions would be in this seismically ultra-active areas.

In contrast, it is the most seismically inert areas like Australia where the ecological costs of fossil fuels are disproportionately felt - and where nuclear power would be quite safe and economic of energy especially if a cycle is used to smelt salt into metallic sodium. Yet, owing to its limitless coal reserves and poor land conservation, Australia has never developed this kind of advanced technology and has, sort of, remained stuck in a type of society designed for the enriched continents.

What might be the best lesson from this disaster is that people need to be careful where they do dangerous jobs - at least ecologically.

Laughable game to attack Thérèse Neumann - could Ignatius refute it?

2011-02-28T14:20:00.004+11:00

Yesterday, whilst we were in a hotel in Newcastle so I could see an old friend who moved there during the 2009/2010 summer, my brother - always on the alert for me talking about anything he views as failing to fit essential scientific evidence - wrote a programme to simulate what he believes to have been the true life of German mystic and stigmatist Thérèse Neumann. In this programme, my brother assumes dogmatically that Thérèse Neumann ate in secret and did not enjoy the Eucharist so much that she could not live without it for more than a day.

In a later version, my brother changed the writing to German and added more detail, like saying “Ich bin durstig” if Thérèse was not given water (Wasser) but once he had the problem of it failing to say she was dead if she just had the Eucharist. What I said to him was that in reality, when she was given the Body of Jesus, Therése would say “Das schmeckt so gut, daß ich Darohne nicht leben kann” (“That tastes so good I cannot live without it”)!

In the words of Joan Carroll Cruz, Thérèse Neumann’s life is supposed to be ebbing away just before she received her daily Holy Communion, and she was revived as soon as she received the Bread of Life. However, as you can work out from the attached diagram which my brother sent me, there are some key assumptions that people who knew Thérèse Neumann had strong eyewitness evidence against.

The most basic is that Thérèse Neumann was capable of eating ordinary nourishment. The impression one received from reading Joan Carroll Cruz and Michael Freze is that she and other stigmatists would suffer illnesses such as vomiting and fevers as soon as they were given food or drink other than the Eucharist. Freze says quite definitely that such occurrences have been observed by eyewitnesses. If Thérèse Neumann really could not eat ordinary food, then she would have felt very bad if she ate donuts (Krapfen) or fried potatoes (Bratkartoffeln) at any time, which would make what my brother says absurd. Sophy Burnham says that people who were anything but mystical have had the problem of coughing up any solid food given to them, as with Xiong Zaidong who had a fever of 42˚C. If Thérèse Neumann had such problems, she would at the very least have had to take a very special diet to survive, which might not include typical food from the Germany of her time.

Another is that Thérèse Neumann actually was carrying out normal bodily processes. Eyewitnesses like those cited by Adalbert Albert Vogl say that as a result of her illness, Thérèse’s body no longer carried out normal functions like excretion. If she was not excreting as eyewitnesses say, Thérèse would have been able to retain minimal nourishment and might have struggled even more to add something like fried potatoes.

Some have also suggested that Thérèse’s stomach contracted because she was not eating, though I have no evidence for that claim being medically examined.

Still, if any of this is true for whatever reason, it means that we must be careful about assuming Thérèse Neumann could eat freely and/or could be fed as an ordinary person would be.

A mega-arid Perth is the key feature

2011-02-27T16:28:00.000+11:00

In yesterday’s Yahoo news, they are saying that under present CO₂ conditions the southwestern US state of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada would suffer from a much drier climate. This data is based on work from a dried lake bed in New Mexico called the Valles Caldera, which shows that in hotter periods this region of the United States had rainfall even less than those observed since instrumental records began about 125 years ago. it points out that settlements in this area depend greatly upon access to water, and that under projected climate conditions there would be much less water available.

What is problematically overlooked, however, is that the southwest of Western Australia, which has almost no paleoclimate data apart from very specialised research that does not go back even to the Medieval Warm Period (read Climates of the Southern Continents for the best available data) has suffered both from a larger population increase and a greater reduction in rainfall, and yet is not discussed. In fact, though the far southwest of Western Australia has been historically much more humid than any region of the southwest of North America, last year saw almost all this region have its driest year since records began. In fact, the very limited rainfall data going back to 1882 strongly suggest that the observed rainfall in 2010 would not be possible had greenhouse gas levels remained at what they were before the Industrial Revolution.

Even more critically, runoff in southwestern Australia (and Australia generally) shows much more sensitivity to precipitation changes that that in southwestern North America. For example, a decline of forty percent in rainfall (as observed in 2010) has caused runoff into Perth’s dams to decline from 338 gigalitres to just eleven gigalitres, which is a decline of 96.7 percent. In California, by contrast, a decline of 40 percent from normal annual rainfall is a regular occurrence, but never causes runoff to fall below 20 percent of the average. More than that, there is no evidence years so dry as 2010 ever occurred in southwestern Australia even during glacial conditions when most other parts of Australia lost up to ninety percent of their rainfall. This means that at likely future CO₂ levels Perth could have a runoff of a few gigalitres to serve a million people with its formerly renewable groundwater rapidly depleting.

The only solution is for basic necessities in this unique and fragile environment to be realistically priced. Realistically priced would necessarily mean a price that would be able to keep CO₂ levels low enough to maintain the region’s unique ecosystems, and total consumption low enough to keep aquatic systems in order. It is clear that with 2 million people southwestern Australia is quite grossly overpopulated. Based on current runoff levels, that is around 100 litres per person per year or one tenth the accepted minimum of 1000. That would mean prices for energy and water would have to be sufficient to exclude all but the most frugal people.

The battle over rhinos is heating up

2011-02-21T00:04:00.002+11:00

2010 saw poaching of rhinos reach levels never seen in the past, as the price of Asiatic rhino horn reached the unimaginable levels of $50 or higher per gram, whilst less expensive African horn reached much higher prices than it has historically been at. Three hundred and thirty-eight rhinos were killed in South Africa alone during 2010, or about one-thirtieth of that country’s rhino population (and South Africa holds 75 percent of the world’s rhinos).

As I have observed the increasing poaching of rhinos through a Google Alert throughout 2010, I have long wondered why the governments of the countries concerned have not been either doing something about rhino poaching or asking themselves whether, as Robert P. Murphy says, rhinos could be handled better by profit-oriented groups? Murphy argues that the political leaders would have to personally benefit from maintaining stocks of rhinos for there to be any possibility of their numbers stabilising. My brother, myself and other relatives doubt this very much because:

the conservation of rhinos would need to be more profitable than other land uses
those who hold rhino horn have an interest in extinction of rhinos to increase its price as it turns into a rigidly non-renewable resource.

For this reason, it is encouraging for me to see that governments in Southern Africa, often viewed as incompetent and tending towards lawlessness, have actually in recent weeks managed to prevent at least nine rhino poachers from killing this year even more than the three hundred and thirty eight rhinos killed in 2010. Since rhinos breed only once every two or three years, at the present rate of increase in poaching all five rhino species would be extinct by 2035.

One cannot question the need for park rangers in areas with such poaching-sensitive species as rhinos to be armed. Rhino poachers are naturally armed, and unarmed park rangers are not likely to be able to simply tell a would-be rhino poacher to move away. Rhino poachers, being generally members of well-structured and well-resourced criminal gangs, are not likely to back down against even someone from the government.

One much deeper ethical issue that these shootings produce is whether it is just to kill proven rhino poachers - or even those who would kill rhinos, which contravenes laws on the trade in endangered species (of course most rhino species are now Critically Endangered). In general, there is a very strong resistance within me to allowing killing of anybody, even the worst criminals. Nevertheless, with rhino poachers, killing may be the only way that can serve even as a deterrent to killing rhinos, so that one can make the most extremely exceptional case here. The killing of rhino poachers as far as I know has not been seen before, though Kenya, with the fourth largest rhino population after South Africa, India and Namibia, began arresting rhino poachers in 2009 and seems not to have been in the rhino poaching news so much (correct me if you can). Although it is not easy to tell how many innocent people could be shot if a really hard-line policy was adopted by those eager to control rhino poaching, it does seem to me that it is not as tough to identify those profiting from the extinction of rhinos as many other criminal cases. This provides further support for a tougher line on poachers than has been taken by governments in Africa and Asia ever since the rhino crisis began over a hundred years ago.

Christian Ganaban’s zero stroke

2011-02-17T14:48:00.003+11:00

Today, for the first time since Sports Delivered closed at the end of 2010, I met up with Name A Game boss Christian Ganaban in order to list for him the games I had ordered which needed mastering from VHS. Ganaban had been to the master library only once since returning after handing over the offices to a woman called Even during the first two weeks of 2011, but for this trip he was getting the master tapes for twenty games from 2002 - the last year during which Name A Game sold VHS tapes. The person who was buying these 2002 games was buying them to do a university examination in which he was examining the statistics of many players. Because of the greater variety of ground conditions before Docklands and global warming, I felt that it would be better to look at games from 1997 or better still 1996 to see the details this person wanted, but when I asked why this student was not buying games from 1996 or 1997 I was told the student was required to buy and study games broadcast by Channel Nine, which date only from 2002 or later.

Because I was very eager to help with time until 16:00, and in spite of the horribly hot and humid weather, I decided to sort out a large number of unshelved Name A Game DVDs. In the process I found that several of the games I was looking for had either long been mastered (Round 11, 1997, Port Adelaide v Sydney) or recently mastered (Round 13, 1995, Sydney v Essendon and Round 19, 1996, Melbourne v Carlton).

At first, I sorted earlier games that had recently been mastered (and ordered during 2010), with my first step being to sort out the pre-2000 games from those of 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 (which in conversation are called “oh-oh”, “oh-wuhn”, “oh-too” and “oh-three”). Whilst I was doing this, I noticed some games that did not look as though they could be from 2000, when the St. Kilda softies owing to their virtual amateurism won only two games out of twenty-two despite many talented players. Knowing from experience that 2000 was the most popular year on Name A Game except for 2010, I wondered if Christian had suffered from his urge to write “00” on every DVD case even when the game was not from 2000! When I looked inside the case to see what the game really was, I found that actually Ganaban had labelled a 2008 game “00”!

This process repeated twice. Even as I gradually got through a large number of games, it amazed me that Ganaban was suffering from the same problem that affected Germans during the infamous 1923 hyperinflation, at the peak of which prices doubled every two days. Because of the popularity of games from 2000 amongst Essendon fans and probably many others who are amazed by the Bombers’ 20 game unbeaten streak (in fact 27 consecutive home-and-away wins), Ganaban is consistently having to copy and master these games, with the result that there are seventy percent more games on the shelf from 2000 than from 1998 (a very weak year with all the popular Victorian teams doing badly) and no doubt a faster turnover time. The result is that, perhaps without checking inside the DVD case (which I am very reluctant to do because I do not think he would want it), Ganaban has written “00” on games that were actually from 2008 (a reasonably popular year being recent and with a Victorian team winning the flag). Although during the rest of my session (for my work I obtained the Round 9, 1993 Fitzroy v Collingwood game) I focused on sorting the games by year and earning the reward for terribly hard work in horrible weather, I found it so strange that I could not forget about it even when I had sorted all the games from before 2000 and was at work sorting 2000 to 2003 games!

An encouraging sign against the anti-hunting lobby

2011-02-16T00:00:00.003+11:00

Although I have had contact with the anti-hunting lobby for a long time, I have never had much sympathy for its aims of completely eliminating hunting of wildlife throughout the world.

It is true that in Australia and southern Africa, owing to the lax competition created by scarcity of phosphates in soils, species do not rise to numbers sufficient to allow for hunting on a scale beyond the most basic subsistence. Even their traditional foraging peoples were almost exclusively exactly that and did not in general hunt large game. However, on the enriched continents where young soils from recent tectonic activity and glaciation allow for the most competitive species to reach large numbers, hunting of species can even in the presence of agriculture be extremely valuable. Sharon Astyk in her A Nation of Farmers shows indeed that even after farming became the dominant mode of subsistence, hunting remained of importance for millennia, as is often recorded in English folktales. In the unenriched continents of Australia and Southern Africa, adaptable pests like feral pigs and cane toads produce valuable goods (food in once case, skins in the other) that are much superior ecologically to materials from farming whose sustainability is doubtful at the very best.

In spite of these common sense arguments, most on the Left have for a long time argued against hunting in an extreme way, often arguing that animals must be treated in exactly the same way as humans or even in a superior fashion given the extreme self-centredness of the Left tends to cause it to be often anti-human in its ideals and its behaviour. Pressure to ban hunting and guns has been a major force in most developed nations throughout the world, and with the Port Arthur Massacre became dominant in Australia as John Howard took power. Restrictions on guns - whilst there is very reasonable justification for them when one considers people like Martin Bryant - can be a problem whenever and wherever there are terrible pests like rabbits, cane toads, foxes and feral pigs to control. People in Australia’s very sparsely populated rural areas can do a great service to the country’s unique ecosystems by killing animals that are not native to the country and very dangerous to its uniquely adapted inhabitants designed for a geologically normal low-energy environment where soils have not been enriched by orogeny or glaciations. Frank Miniter in the best book of the Politically Incorrect Guide series argued very effectively for the value of controlled hunting, which I agree with strongly, but this argument is too often ignored under cries of “animal welfare”, though nature in the enriched continents at least is extremely competitive and often, as Annie Dillard shows in what I have read of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, even violent.

In this context, it is wonderful to see the left-wing magazine Mother Jones take a rational view of the value of hunting. Kiera Butler’s essay is a most effective argument for hunting of pests and for, from an ecological perspective, the use of these pests’ bodies for whatever purpose is possible. Having the sympathy I do for localism on the grounds that it uses less energy and creates more community, it would be great for the left of politics to see the value of hunting as more conservative (often to most eyes ultraconservative) groups do. Hunting has been practiced for so long that its sustainability when properly practised is to me not in the slighted doubt, yet environmental groups have tended to rely on blanket protests against any form of overhunting rather than on more rational and historically accurate views. This changing would be a major step forward for the environment and possibly for many species.

Get them back, get them back, get them baaaack

2011-02-13T00:24:00.005+11:00

…get them back on “G”, back on “G”

The above line is a parody of AC/DC’s song “Back in Black” that may well be very appropriate from both my own experience and the latest e-mail exclusive article by Human Events under the title “Family Events”.

In their e-mail exclusive “Why Manners Matter”, Family Events are arguing that over the past three decades, American society has become less civilised and that people have much more trouble avoiding really nasty conversation or aggressively criticising strangers’ political or religious beliefs in public:

Only a generation ago, it was still shocking to hear coarse language in public or in mixed company. It was still considered rude to pry about personal subjects like sex and household finances. Children used to learn not to criticize someone's religious or political beliefs …

The way I heard a great deal of coarse language as a child makes me think that the problems Family Events describes have been around for a lot longer than imagined. Whether or not it would be feasible for me with my erratic behaviour, I have always hoped that it would be possible to have a place where people did not bully me for my inability to confirm to “normal” patterns of behaviour. I do know from awfully bitter (and progressively worse with age) experience that much of what I do in public is abhorrent and so unacceptable I get banned from closed public places like libraries, but under conditions where violence and harrassment were less prevalent, then maybe (and only maybe) I would have had more time to think about how I should behave in public.

If kids at school had been more respectful of my behaviour, however, it could equally easily have been worse in the long term because I might been even worse equipped for working on my own in public. However, it is probably fairest of all to say i learned absolutely nothing about how to behave from the bullying I received in school, even though as an adult my mother says to me all the time:

They didn’t hate you, they hated your behaviour

Resource-free environments don’t moderate as they age

2011-02-10T20:38:00.004+11:00

Many political scientists have tended to think of Europe’s population as likely to become more politically moderate as it ages because they believe that Europeans with a median age of fifty or more will possess more knowledge and insight which could counter the tendency to take up such extreme views.

However, the way in which the working classes of Greece in particular have responded to the current financial crises seems to indicate that, as Time is showing here, in fact Europe’s population, although its median age has increased since the 1950s from twenty-five to forty, has not moderated politically at all.

Time in this issue shows that in traditional socialist and anarchist hotbeds of Italy, Spain and Greece, violence by groups describing themselves as “far left” or “anarchist” (in the traditional, syndicalist sense) has risen by forty-three percent. although these groups do not have clear policies, they are at war with government cuts and wish for the wealthy of these nations to have to pay for the economic costs they have created. They are also angry in many cases at the way Italy, Spain and especially Greece have joined the European Union and believe that they should be much more independent of that group. Political scientists also say that the small new European generation is nonetheless activist in tone and urban guerillas (don’t confuse this word with “gorilla”!) are becoming increasingly frequent.

What this comes down to is the fact that Europe, as a result of the devaluing of its one natural resource - its young and uniquely (in geological terms) fertile soils - due to the opening up of the geologically normal soils of Australia and Africa for extensive farming means that its population is left without a single valuable resource to base its economy on. The result is extremely intense competition for the production of technologically advanced goods, and a situation where competition for the few goods these countries are at least disadvantage in producing (tourism, electronics) becomes very intense. Although the resulting poor conditions at the beginning of the devaluation of their soil resources is generally though to be the source of the working class militancy for which these countries are known, the fact that it is continuing and looks likely to continue must make one look seriously at why these nations look to take not from those nations with a monopoly on industrial resources (of course very, very difficult without a global direct democracy) or see the benefits of a less selfish and materialistic society.

Comparing this year with 1909, 1923, 1941 and 1955

2011-01-15T23:54:00.018+11:00

Although the weather in Melbourne for the foreseeable future will stand as very warm and sunny, all over the state‘s television channels is news that torrential rain has caused rivers in the north and west of the state to reach record levels. At Charlton the Avoca River is supposed to have reached its highest level in over 100 years of gauging as a result of the heavy rainfall on saturated ground. Because of the global-warming-induced dry period since 1997 (2010 is a story I can explain without remotely discarding the influence of man-made global warming but will not here) people in Victoria clearly are not aware of major flooding on the state’s rivers. On the news tonight it was stated by witnesses at the Maribyrnong River in the western suburbs of Melbourne that they had not seen bigger flooding since the 1970s.

I have read about the floods in May 1974 that were certainly much bigger than the current ones but will look at a number of floods earlier than 1974 to:

see how these floods really do compare with floods under natural climate cycles (as I see it, anything after the early 1970s in Australia must under no circumstances be considered a “natural” climatic occurrence as rainfall data can clearly show it unlikely that they would be possible without extra CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O.)
see what differences can be found between a flood produced by an incursion of the super-monsoon vis-à-vis one produced by natural frontal systems or easterly lows

1909:

The year of 1909 was a year of only about average rainfall (relative to 1885 to 1967 average of about 440mm) over the whole of Australia and indeed only modestly above average rainfall over Victoria for the year as a whole.

In spite of this, the rainfall over all of Victoria except East Gippsland was very heavy during the autumn and winter, with the partial exception of July. August was indeed the wettest over Australia as a whole since 1891. It was this persistent rain and lack of sunshine that caused the ground over western Victoria to saturate by June and even a fairly dry July could not dry the ground because it was so cold: Adelaide’s mean maximum of 13.5˚C was the coolest on record for any month there. As a result, the ground was saturated in August and the weather became utterly appalling for the first three weeks of that month: rain fell almost every day and on the eighteenth it became unusually heavy, with many daily falls of over 40mm in the Western District, Wimmera and Northern Country. On completely saturated ground, that rain simply ran off onto extremely flat land, with the result that western Victoria became a vast lake. Donald, now the focus of rescue efforts in Charlton, was completely inundated and many sheep in the Western District died from foot-rot.

Flooding in August 1909 was certainly more severe than this year in the Barwon basin and the West Coast, where Warrnambool was under water and two people died from drowning. Stock and crop losses, considering the much lower total 1909 rainfall, were also severe.

1923:

Averaged over Australia, 1923 was even drier than 1909, but if we take only the winter rainfall zones of southern Australia, the West Gascoyne and Fortescue, 1923 was one of the most consistently wet years known. In Adelaide, for example, 1923 was the third wettest year since 1885.

However, the first four months of 1923 were some of the most rainless known in Victoria: April was the driest month on record in Victoria and followed the driest March. However, when the blocking anticyclone that caused the rainless weather moved away, rain fell ceaselessly for the next three months. June was the wettest on record over Australia by twenty percent and saw flooding all over the West Australian “Wheatbelt” (when it was climatically that). With no opportunity for drying off as the rain continued and continued, at the end of July the Avoca river rose to a flood level at the time seen only in 1909 and the pre-1973 record wet year of 1870 when Bendigo received nearly a metre of rain. That three-month period saw rainfalls over the Mallee and Northern Country that in relative terms are more astounding than the occasional heavy summer falls over the region: at Swan Hill June rainfall was five times the average. Thus, in spite of the ground being as bone-dry as for most of the post-anthropogenic-global-warming period before May’s rainfall, there was as much soil moisture by the end of July as would have been the case in a much wetter year. This was especially true when rain from the last of a dozen big lows in June and July exceeded all previous falls during the period.

The consequences for Western Victoria were seen via a major rail accident on the night of August 1/2. A train carrying both passengers and first class mail from Melbourne to Adelaide was travelling at a speed of 65 kilometres per hour, when ten mail vans carrying three thousand bags of mail from England, followed by a first class compartment and two sleeping cars, were derailed at a crossing of the swollen Wimmera River just out of Glenorchy and adjacent to Old Glenorchy Road. These derailed vehicles fell into the waterlogged ground, leaving only the second-class carriage and the guard’s van on the washed-away line. It took a long time before the sleeping cars and mail carriage were removed because of the boggy conditions.

This accident, in part owing to changed development, was certainly worse than any seen in 1909. However, the northwestern floods were not as high, and August was a cool, dry month that eased the problem. September, however, saw record floods in and around Adelaide owing to two vigorous fronts producing over one hundred millimetres in four days. At the peak, Adelaide resembled a lake more than it did a city.

1941:

Unlike 1909 and 1923, 1941. was somewhat wetter than average over Australia at 477 millimetres (about one twelfth above the 1885 to 1967 mean). In Victoria, though, the rainfall was a fraction below normal - though above normal in the Wimmera, Western Plains and West Central districts.

However, January 1941 was quite clearly the wettest ever known over Victoria. In the South Wimmera, Upper Northeast and East Central it was the wettest January on record; in the Western Plains, West Central, East Gippsland and North Mallee it was the second wettest on record. Because the rain fell in very heavy thunderstorms (Melbourne had more thunder days than in any other month since records began in 1856), less overall rain was needed to produce flooding. The result was that after the heaviest rainfall around Australia Day, record floods occurred on many tributaries of the Maribyrnong (Saltwater) and Werribee Rivers near Gisborne. Landslides were common in this area and in the Grampians.

Though this flooding was more akin to this year’s floods than those of 1909, 1923 or 1955, they were as a whole not so vast with the exception of a few specific areas, because of the drier soil from the February to October drought of the previous year, which was in fact drier than the corresponding period of 2007 or 2009 in currently flood-affected areas of Victoria. Overall, in fact, even with the man-made desert of 2006 in southern Australia, 1940 still remains the sixth-driest year over Victoria since 1871, and had that not been an influence the January 1941 rains - amazing as they are - would probably attract much more attention in climatic histories of Australia. They were after all much heavier than some more modern rainfall events that are more widely remembered by Australians.

The record rain of January did not continue for the rest of the year. Only in March, July and September was Victoria’s rainfall generally above normal for the rest of 1941 as a second successive El Niño took hold. June was however above normal in the Mallee, so the wheatbelt escaped drought, which was moderate and confined to the Northeast. That drought ended with another record wet month in May of 1942.

1955:

Unlike the previous three years, 1955 was exceptionally wet over Australia, being the twelfth-wettest year averaged over the continent since 1885, and by area-averaged mean decile probably the seventh-wettest over the same period. Rainfall became heavy in Victoria at the end of January after Melbourne had had its longest rainless spell on record of forty days from 17 December 1954 to 27 January 1955. Except for April and July, it was above average in every month from February, coming on top of heavy rainfall in November and December of 1954. As a result, at the end of July, western Victoria was already in a distinctly wet state.

However, what happened in August 1955 is something never to be replicated in this age where the Hadley circulation has expanded ten to twelve degrees poleward since 1967. Owing to powerful blocking patterns in the upper atmosphere, the whole of southern Australia was subject to what was described in the August 18 Age as:

“a vast belt of stormy weather stretches from South Africa to just west of the Macquarie Islands.
From almost as far south as Antarctica there is a series of separate storm centres continually moving clockwise”

The result was that throughout August 1955 southern Australia was subject continually to gale-force west- to northwesterly winds and utterly incessant shower activity. Although none of these showers were unusually heavy, they were so consistent that by the ninth of the month flooding set in over the wet Western Victorian catchments and persisted through to the end of the month, with further peaks on the 25th following an increase in the intensity of showers.

Owing to the lack of really heavy short-term rainfalls, the floods on the flat land of western Victoria during southern Australia’s “big wet” of August 1955 did not break any records. However, the flooding was remarkably persistent and widespread, with most rivers having several peaks during the month - a trend seen on other flooded rivers in southern Australia such as the Torrens in South Australia, the Blackwood in Western Australia and the Tamar in Tasmania. This reflects how it was persistent rather than heavy rainfall that cause the record falls of August 1955.

In contrast, this summer and in most other major flood periods all flooded rivers in western Victoria have had a single major flood peak. The flooding, combined with very mild overnight temperatures, did cause major rust outbreaks in wheat crops during the spring, although there was not nearly such persistent wet weather. Flooding, though extensive further east in September and October, was not nearly so severe in the west of Victoria.

Top Ten Censored Books

2011-01-11T16:00:00.000+11:00

Today in Time, as a response to the removal of the work “n***” from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a list of the Top Ten Most Censored Books.

The full list - I cannot tell whether it’s in order or not but I do not care since nothing in the text implies a definite order - is:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Lolita
The Catcher in the Rye
Harry Potter (the whole series)
The Anarchist Cookbook
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Candide
1984
The Satanic Verses
Brave New World

If this list is accurate, it makes Elizabeth Kantor’s claims in The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature seem on the dubious side even today.

Not one of the “most challenged” books is challenged for its politically incorrect values about anything like race (The Bell Curve, Why Race Matters, The Global Bell Curve) or gender (Why Men Rule). Nor does it include books by writers like Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh whom Kantor claims support extremely politically incorrect ideas.

Indeed, more of the books listed are books that my brother says would be likely to be attacked by schools if Kantor and the PIGs had their way. My brother thinks that authors like Toni Morrison and Angelou whom the PIGs dislike would be banned from education if PIG-sympathetic people came to power in the US. I actually doubt that this would happen, even though experience suggests that the societies the PIGs do admire were by no means free of censorship.

What everybody must know about climate change in Western Australia

2010-12-31T22:51:00.003+11:00

The recent record dry weather in southwestern Australia and record wet weather in the “Red” Centre, along with the announcing of the most undesirable coal power projects in the very state most affected by man-made global warming, makes me think that an online “pamphlet” is needed to help people in Western Australia come to grips with how increased CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and halocarbons have radically altered the state’s climate since the middle 1960s.

Most climate research since these alterations intensified in 1997 has unfortunately been focused on things like the Indian Ocean Dipole and “Asian Haze” that unfortunately do not, as I have emphasised in previous posts, look at the likely cause: that a poleward shift of pressure patterns from global warming has moved the rain belts in such a way that northern and central WA receive more rain and southwestern WA significantly less. Both these features fail to explain key changes:

The Indian Ocean Dipole theory cannot explain why the decline in southern Australian rainfall is concentrated in the autumn when it is ineffective (here)
As I note here, the “Asian Haze” theory fails to model observed increases in rainfall over the Eucla region.
The most logical explanation for the changes is that the Hadley circulation has shifted rapidly poleward and that the monsoon has expanded into the continent
The result of this is that historically humid regions in southwestern Australia are rapidly becoming arid, whilst historically arid regions to the east are becoming monsoonal and humid
There is clear evidence that land clearing is not the cause of the rainfall decline.
Circa 2000 climate models suggested a decline of 60 percent in rainfall over southwestern Australia could be expected by 2050: already, if 2010 rainfall figures are a guide, a decline of 44 percent on pre-global-warming averages has occurred
The probability that the observed decline in rainfall over southwestern Australia is not one hundred percent anthropogenic is minute: Perth’s average wet season rainfall for 2001 to 2010 is four point four two standard deviations below the mean ten-year average pre-global warming. The probability of this occurring by chance is less than one in two hundred thousand!
In the Northern Territory, the ten-year moving average wet season rainfall for the decade ending April 2006 was eight and a half standard deviations above the mean ten-year moving average for the pre-1967 era!
Such a consistently wet spell would have a probability of around one in 10¹⁷ (100,000,000,000,000,000) assuming global warming is not the cause! Such a probability is far smaller than the number of years the Earth has existed!
In Forrest in the southeast of Western Australia, the ten-year mean annual rainfall for the decade ending 2006 was five point nine three standard deviations above the mean ten-year moving average before 1967. Such a wet decade would be expected to occur naturally only once every 698,966,090 years!
Paleoclimate data available as early as 1984 suggested very strongly that the mediterranean climate would disappear at carbon dioxide concentrations above 300ppmv. We are already at 400ppmv and under present political and demographic conditions in Australia are likely to be at 700ppmv by 2100.
These same data (and a number of climate experiments done by computer) also suggest that at present carbon dioxide levels the midlatitude arid climates characteristic of areas on the lee side of the mountains present in all mediterranean-climate zones (the Darling Scarp and Stirling Range do this with Western Australia) would also disappear. This result is in complete agreement with observed rainfalls in Forrest.
There is no likelihood primary productivity gains in the state’s east will offset the disappearance of farming in the southwest from desertification. This is because the already-impoverished soils will lose what nutrients they have from the more humid weather
Biodiversity losses from the desertification of southwestern Australia could, even in the short-term future, exceed anything that has been seen in the world. The region contains 45 percent of Australia’s native plant species, most of which occur nowhere else and none of which can survive in an arid or monsoonal climate.
These biodiversity losses could already occur in the humid karri forest country though fires this year. Not one station in southwestern WA received even 800 mm of rain during 2010, yet the generally accepted minimum for karri is 900 mm and that for yellow tingle and red tingle even higher.
If we presume that 2010 rainfalls are the absolute maximum likely to occur in this area in the future, we can say that these magnificent tall trees have already lost all suitable habitat to global warming and that only a rapid reduction in carbon dioxide levels can save them.
Australia would need therefor to eliminate by law all fossil fuel energy and restrict itself to what renewable energy can provide immediately.
It would need to outlaw at least private cars and coal-fired energy and the revegetate all areas where these fuels occur as National Parks or Aboriginal Reserves.

Is it intelligent radicalism or compassionate conservatism - or both?

2010-12-31T20:41:00.002+11:00

As I was checking my e-mail, I found an interesting finding: that conservatives have a much more emotional brain than liberals. Today’s Age says that recent neurological research gives strong evidence that people’s political views are related to the structure of their brain.

People with very conservative views are shown to have much thinner “anterior cingulates” than people with left-wing views. This suggests very clearly that people who are conservative really are much more emotional than people who are atheistic and big-government. Although my brother says that this means conservatives are much more self-centred and less objective than liberals, one really has to take into account the finding of Arthur Brooks in Who Really Cares if one wishes to show that it is not true that leftists’ calls for radical redistribution of wealth via income caps do not result from an empathy problem.

Many other scientists have argued that intelligence is correlated with atheism and left-wing politics - citing the many European Jews who were unusually intelligent according to all studies and became Marxists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this token, people who are right-wing are simply less intelligent than those who are more liberal.

The logical means of doing this - and the only one that I find remotely fair - is as I outline in “Why to Expect Compassionate Conservatism” - that thinking types (the political Left) and feeling types (in general constituting the political Right) work in very different ways that can be complementary (as with many early twentieth-century families) but in many cases are totally opposed. The reasonable thing to do is simply to realise that the political ideals of both thinking and feeling types are a natural result of their personal virtues and vices. For instance, thinking types who find inequality from statistics tend to believe that it is bad and that people should try to remedy it by changing the structure. Feeling types, on the other hand, who see inequality would tend to see it as a personal matter and think that much can be destroyed if radical change is attempted.

The lucky break for us with the holidays

2010-12-30T02:11:00.000+11:00

Today, as my eldest cousin has his first child and indeed
the first child of any of my mother’s siblings, I can look back on the 2009/2010 and 2006/2007 holidays and think how fortunate I really was travelling when I did to the northern hemisphere (I joke about it being to escape the Australian summer but in fact even I admit I would rather travel in hotter weather).

In the news consistently over a Christmas period that has been rather uneventful with my brother away in Japan - and due to be away in Singapore for next year as he has taken a job in NUS from April - has been the violently stormy weather over Europe and the east of North America. Although on my 2009/2010 holiday I did experience some exceedingly snowy weather during my stay in Helsinki, it failed to cause any delays in either ground-based or air transport. This northern winter, however, snow even in normally mild England has been sufficient to ground flights and halt surface transport. It is painful to imagine what we would have done had we been forced to cancel or alter large portions of our trip last year because of snow blocking the possibility of travel across a region. Since our holiday was planned in November of 2009, we would never have been able to alter our accommodation schedule should the means of transport between cities have been completely eliminated as they have been this year.

Although people might expect these kinds of travel problems to arise with people who travel in the off-season for reasons of cost or schedule (as with us), such problems are not impossible even in peak tourist seasons in some places. This can be seen with occasional winter floods in the northwest of WA and the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. I recall Daddy travelling on the Birdsville Track during the winter of 1986 and seemingly forgetting about him. Yet, in Birdsville, the rainfall for July 1986 was twice that of any other winter month in the twentieth century! In fact, the 107 millimetres rainfall is two thirds of the normal annual rainfall and ten times the average for July. Daddy must have been lucky to be able to get through: roads in the north of South Australia were quagmires after torrential rain early in the month originating from a series of systems that had flooded a number of Pilbara rivers in June moved slowly eastward and caused major flooding in the Flinders Ranges and even in Central Australia. If Daddy had planned the trip earlier or later, he might well have been totally bogged rather than seen an unusually lush outback landscape in what is normally the “drought” season. The same thing would have happened to many visitors in northwestern WA in 1992 when the coastal highway was cut by severe storms in June, and in 1998 during a winter very like the August to November of 2010.

The whitewash at its worst - from those who should know perfectly

2010-12-20T01:17:00.001+11:00

Today, after a relatively minor glance at the weather sites and the website for Perth’s water supply, one wonders really just how much control - even if it is cryptic to the eye of the vast majority of Australians - the fossil fuel industries really do have over Australia’s political system?

In my previous post I did say Kevin Williamson whitewashed the point of how, as Guy Pearse showed five years ago, fossil fuel corporations have an immense amount of control over policy-making in Australia. What is really dreadful is that the people who price and regulate water usage in Perth, who should know from the comparative tables here that man-made global warming has shifted climate belts eight degrees or more poleward. They are under the dreadful illusion that the observed drying of Perth’s climate is part of a natural cycle, when in fact the possibility of ten May to August periods so dry as the past ten occurring in succession is maximally a microscopic one-in-two-hundred-and-five-thousand and quite probably even less. Although the mid-2000s craze over the “Asian Haze” has died down, it has not given way to demands from scientists for militant protest to reduce Australia’s deplorable and still-rising emissions. Rather, it has given way to what I would call a gentle resignation: that we are unlikely to do anything to reverse climate change and that the free market will allow for the least costly adaptation.

However, as the table shows (the predictions for 2050 being based on winter rainfalls in the north-west of Western Australia) what this will mean for Perth as a growing city is devastating. With the last runoff most likely already flowed into Mundaring Weir, no targets for water consumption can avoid:

the drying up of once-renewable fossil groundwater
this point is critical because the climate of Western Australia has changed so much that what under pre-1970s climates would be renewable groundwater use now uses up water from a period when May to August rainfall was twice what it is now
the need for desalination plants that can only be fired with coal power that will make the problem worse
further changes in the climate that, even if more frequent cyclone or thunderstorm rainfall does partly offset the practically certain 95 to 100 percent loss of winter rainfall, will increase demand beyond what these can provide as the summers become even hotter

What WA’s water authorities should be doing if they were serious about providing water for Perth is:

making sure prices of water really fit present runoff rates and predicted future ones, and that pre-1974 - maybe even pre-2001 data are totally ignored
such a price would need to be at least 100 times historical prices and probably a thousand times higher than European, north American or New Zealand water prices
such a price would make Western Australia a much more innovative place with water use - perhaps rivalling or surpassing Israel in the 1950s and 1960s
they should join up with Adrian Whitehead’s (for the curious not the former Carlton player) “Target 300” programme that aimed for the “negative emissions” that should have been unequivocally demanded of Australia in 1997 or even in 1990.
Such a move may be politically very difficult given the influence of government and hence the fossil fuel industries on what WA’s water policymakers write, but it is 100 percent certain that a restoration of pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels would immediately restore runoff into Perth’s dams from the present level of 0.o11 km³ to the historical mean of 0.34 km³.

Kevin Williamson’s whitewash of Australia

2010-12-18T00:49:00.001+11:00

For a long time this year I assumed that the Politically Incorrect Guide series would end after The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War, which was originally supposed to be published in June 2009 but was delayed by something like nine months in the effort to produce three Politically Incorrect Guides that were apparently intended as a response to the election of the conservatives’ archenemy Barack Obama as President. Once the reasonable Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, and the disappointing Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties were published, Regnery took a further half-year to finally publish The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War.

Even when it finally appeared, I guessed that The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War would be the last-ever Politically Incorrect Guide. No evidence appeared on any site or on Regnery itself that any more Politically Incorrect Guides were in the works for a very long nine months. The result was that I asked on amazon.com whether The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War would be the last Politically Incorrect Guide?

In October, however, I found that Regnery were in fact writing a new Politically Incorrect Guide titled “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism”. The amazing thing about it was how prototype copies had exactly the same “did you knows” as the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, so I did not know what to expect as I thought about the series beginning again (if you will). My basic thought was that Regnery had already made most of the arguments it had to about socialism (well, people like Murray Newton Rothbard had done so before PIGs existed).

However, once The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism became fully finalised, portions of it became available on amazon.com, and I decided I should have a look. Most of the chapters as I could see them were fairly familiar from such authors as Thomas Woods and Arthur Brooks, but there was some interesting arguments about the contrasting histories of India and Hong Kong. Given Hong Kong’s loss of traditions and its lowest-low fertility, I definitely feel conservatives should be far more wary of praising it as an example of how the free market works in small city, small island or high mountain states. India, in fact, has retained rather more of the traditions conservatives ought to be concerned about than Hong Kong.

In fact, Hong Kong really is quite similar to Sweden: both are resource-free nations (even pre-industrially neither was that resource-rich) where high technology and energy efficiency are economic necessities because ordinary sources are scarce and expensive.

The really interesting - and ultimately terrifying - thing about what I could read of Williamson’s book is how it looks at the way socialism effects the environment. It makes familiar arguments about:

how socialism caused immense pollution and destroyed the Aral Sea through the Qaraqum canal.
how the Left today is “watermelon” - green inside but socialist at its core

However, when he looks at the environmental record of socialism, author Kevin Williamson makes a big omission. In his effort to show how socialism effects the environment adversely, Williamson looks at nationalised oil companies and aims to show that they have been much worse than private ones because of the absence of property rights. Nonetheless, as Williamson points out in the texts coloured red, in energy-resource-rich nations, it is likely that the energy companies will “seize the government”. The problem is that the majority of readers will not realise there is a genuine whitewash in what Williamson is saying - analogous only to Christopher Horner in previous Politically Incorrect Guides. This whitewash is Williamson’s failure to note the observations made in the 2006 documentary “The Greenhouse Mafia” that by far (I imagine) the worst example of energy companies taking over a country’s political system.

Ecological science, as documented by Tim Flannery and Tom McMahon, shows that Australia’s terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems are much less productive and much more fragile than those of all other present-day continents. Flannery in The Future Eaters shows this leads Australian native fauna to have much lower metabolic rates than those of other continents except sub-Zambezian Africa.

If we apply this to human ecology, one would necessarily conclude that because of the known climatic sensitivity of Australia vis-à-vis other present-day continents that Australian per capita CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O emissions should have to be no more than one twenty-fifth to one hundredth those of European, Asian or North American nations. In reality, as anyone who has read this blog or heard the news will know, Australia’s per capita greenhouse emissions are four times those of Sweden, Denmark or Switzerland, and the difference is growing. Given the evidence of permanent climate change globally this southern winter and a refutation of key argument of greenhouse sceptics concerning high snowfalls in hotter years, the culpability of Australia’s “greenhouse mafia” and the state of which they - as Guy Pearse has shown - are an integral part must not be denied.

If Williamson wanted to avoid this problem, he would at least show that big business taking over government is as bad - or given Australia’s dreadful greenhouse gas emissions - worse than government taking over big business. That big business can be destructive to liberty, family and the environment is a point noted well by “distrbutist” factions of the Right in books like Crunchy Cons, but one neglected by “Austrian” ones. Nonetheless, dealing with this fact is an absolute necessity for any conservative faction. Indeed, those who are critical of “bigness” could see much to criticise in the very character of Australia, a fact Jared Diamond ignores in Collapse. Australia’s geographic “connectedness” is in fact much greater than that of China which Diamond does quote. This connectedness means:

political debates are very weak and the wealthy energy companies can control the whole continent without opposition
with the resources available, Australia has
little incentive to innovate
much incentive to be extremely conservative with respect to such issues as energy consumption.

The results in terns of greenhouse emissions speak for themselves, and the world ignores this at its peril.

Is this the end for diets based on winter grain?

2010-12-12T23:36:00.001+11:00

Today in West Australia Online, there is news that the predicted bumper wheat crop of New South Wales and Queensland is likely to be decimated by excessive rainfalls. the newspaper claims hope that a spell of dry weather will sooner or later allow the crops to be harvested exists, but I would not become too carried away with such hopes.

The combination of extraordinary heat in the northern hemisphere and quite extraordinary drought in southwestern Australia should alert people to what man-made global warming will do for the human diet in future. It is clear from such old studies as the 1984 “Origin and Evolution of the Mediterranean Vegetation and Climate in Europe” (which unfortunately I cannot get hold of) that mediterranean climates like those of southwestern Australia are absolutely unique to the Quaternary, and that before the Quaternary the transition in rainfall from arid to temperate:

was seasonally uniform
occurred at a latitude where rainfall today is absolutely seasonally uniform on continental west coasts
such a latitude is typically around 45˚ to 50˚ from the equator, or around 15˚ poleward of the current equatorward limit of mediterranean climates

Owing to “super-monsoons” that were far more penetrative and intense than those observed in instrumental records before man-made global warming began to take effect, there was never a dry spell during summer in any humid region before the Quaternary. If man-made global warming is leading in this direction, harvesting of winter crops in the summer will become increasingly difficult. There will also be the risk that in hotter and more humid weather, crops will be more prone to the spread of hot-climate diseases which could lead to the disappearance of winter grain crops.

Then there is the danger that historically very cool or cold regions that could grow winter grain even in a much hotter world would be in demand for housing should those socially progressive nations become in trouble with the collapse of their welfare states from low fertility and their culture’s inhospitality and inability to attract migrants.

All these factors combined could very soon see the world have to change its whole staple food system. Wheat, barley and other mild-climate grains would disappear, to be replaced by less efficient yield-wise but more efficient land-wise hot-climate grain, root and tree crops. In the process, many of our present specialties would disappear, and Australia would be farming foods quite alien to us now!

The question is whether such a system can work given the history of attempts to farm tropical Australia outside of the alluvial and volcanic soils of the Burdekin Delta and most of the Wet Tropics, or whether the variability of climate and resultant high risk in eastern Australia can be better managed in the future is a less hospitable and probably even more variable climate?

Will Australia ever stop lagging behind when it should be decades ahead?

2010-12-07T22:01:00.005+11:00

In a response to my brother’s dismissal of my emphasis in speech on cars as the primary cause of global warming and public transport as the solution, in an email today he showed me a piece whereby anaesthetics used in surgery are supposed to have as much impact on the climate as one million cars.

I certainly knew that anaesthetics, which use compounds called halons (or bromofluorocarbons) were environmentally very dangerous because of the very high global warming potential of covalently bonded fluorine. However, I had assumed that anaesthetics remain stored in the body and that a very small proportion of anaesthetics used actually reach the atmosphere as greenhouse or ozone-depleting gases. What the study my brother showed me said was that anaesthetic gases had major impacts and did not as I had thought remained in the body.

What is really, really embarassing is that yet again the EU is doing much more than Australia. The EU will be banning these games from 2011, whereas Australia will continue to use them for who knows how long. It is time everybody recognised the untenability of Australia having much lower environmental standards than European nations. In fact, even from a European perspective it is best that Australia have the toughest environmental standards in the world. Strict and high-standard greenhouse emissions regulations may attract the intellectual community, but for ordinary families and less skilled workers they are a deterrent, as Arthur Brooks and Clint Johnson in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South show. Johnson says that the South has:

“…lower taxes, a family-friendly atmosphere… rather than a sense the State should take care of everything”

clearly attract potential migrants much more than an exceptionally clean environment and a high level of innovation.

If we follow Johnson and Arthur Brooks, we should see that tough environmental laws are a very good way to reduce population. There is very clear evidence from data on water storages that most of southern Australia is overpopulated - and the increasingly well-watered north simply cannot be farmed because of its weathered, stone-hard soils that increased rainfall will make even tougher to improve.

In contrast, the extremely young soils of Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand can, as Tim Flannery said in The Future Eaters “support population densities orders of magnitude higher than Australia”. In many ways, these soils are a renewable and limitless resources because repeated glaciation and mountain building is replacing any soil that is lost.

For this reason, everybody in the world should wish it that Australia’s environmental laws - rather than being in Flannery’s wordd ridiculously lenient regarding energy efficiency - are the toughest in the world by a considerable margin. Once it is accepted that weak environmental laws are for the ordinary working people an attraction because of the gentler, warmer culture that results, we see the untenability of present trends.

Why the workers have to do the job

2010-12-07T20:07:00.002+11:00

On today’s news, it has been revealed that former politicians - including members who have been out of Federal parliament for over a decade - have been using the Gold Passes given to parliamentarians to spend something like half a million dollars on air travel this year alone.

These Gold Passes have been shown to cost Canberra an unknown sum of money that could, if we add all the sums and multiply by the years many politicians have been using them (ten years in the case of Ian Sinclair) run into the millions of dollars.

People such as Bob Brown and many journalists have been saying something needs to be done, but the current affairs programme on which I found these reports was one hundred percent clear that because of the vested interests of parliamentarians in maintaining benefits that they will eventually get, there is no way even after an extensive report that they will be significantly changed, no matter whom ordinary Australians vote in.

However, politicians’ pay is a very good way to unite people from disparate views to protests against the government. Most writers whom I have read over the past fifteen years have been very critical of government privilege. On the Right, it is argued that privilege should be abolished; on the Left it is argued it should be extended to all with the money of the super-rich. Whilst these views are genuinely opposite, it would as Thomas Woods implies be good if there could be united protest against the Gold Passes. Protest - genuine mass protest - and demonstration is the only means of stopping a waste of money that could if unchecked rival the obscenity of CityLink.

The New York Times are telling here

2010-12-02T19:32:00.001+11:00

Over a week ago, the New York Times wrote an article about how electronic media effects the way people work, titled "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Destruction".

Although I forgot to look through my Google Reader blog of Front Porch Republic, even before I read it I felt a great deal of connection to what the Times appeared to be saying.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

Recent times, in which I myself have read fewer print books and relied more on Internet websites and what few journal articles are available to me as a non-student, give a remarkable sense that article author Matt Richtel is most definitely correct. When I was reading more print books or (very old) articles from print journals, I was writing more and more able to concentrate on the vast number of long-term projects I once wrote.

Though I still had a tendency to read and read books in bookshops to the point that they were obsessions, I do very firmly believe that I wrote more and had a much better rhythm than I do now. Especially in Victoria's recent hot and humid weather, I have rarely had enough sleep to get up seriously before 12:00, and whenever Mummy is not around I often do not get into the shower before 13:00. Even in the two years after leaving RMIT for assaulting a security guard, I was much better on these issues whilst I was buying more print books on eBay. In these two years I did often get up around 10:00, and generally slept better even during ordinary sleeping hours. I also did not do appalling things like staying up naked and not getting into the shower after taking off my pyjamas at midday - which of course I do not do when Mummy's around!

The best bookshops - one hopes they’re not a dying breed

2010-11-21T00:44:00.002+11:00

Today - or yesterday since I am writing this so near midnight as I hopelessly failed to get to bed last night before 4:00 proper - I have found a list of the best bookshops I have ever seen from Lonely Planet. I really hope bookshops survive the e-book revolution since I have a strong romantic love for books and CDs that I enjoyed in my childhood, but I am not optimistic judging by the news on this topic that has arrived lately. (Paper will still be in demand even if print books become obsolete for such uses as paper towelling, which when dealing with coffee and similar stains is totally indispensable since cloth cannot be washed). Often I feel that change makes things slip away from me and I continue to look for books in print - preferably early hardcover editions like one of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s proto-Wicca Lolly Willowes that I lent to my half-sister whilst she works in a rehabilitation clinic for her alcohol problems. (To be honest, I feel perhaps I should have done that sort of work when I had really nasty temper tantrums that had me banned from RMIT and Monash when I masturbated in the library, but I do not know what Mummy’s response would have been nor whether I could have done something like that just for violent burst of anger).

In any case, Lonely Planet’s list comperised:

City Lights Books, San Francisco
Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Livraria Lello, Oporto, Portugal
Shakespeare & Company, Paris, France
Daunt Books, London, England
Another Country, Berlin, Germany
The Bookworm, Beijing, China
Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Bookàbar, Rome, Italy
Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece

It’s perhaps too bad that although I went to London and Berlin a few summers ago , I never went to either of the bookshops listed and in London came away a little disappointed at what I saw despite buying a couple of good books on my favourite hobby of old county cricket - even something as romantic as old county cricket is being digitised as I collect Wisdens even older than a few years ago I ever dreamed I would.

It’s also a pity in the context of this e-book revolution and my love of old things that secondhand bookstores appear to have been ignored. Strand Books in New York was for me more of a highlight of my trip last summer than even City Lights, which I did visit (and told my brother in reference to the Catholic influence on the Beats that Pope Benedict XVI would be more at home there than in most of the atheistic Pacific Northwest). If what I experienced of England is a guide, there must be a lot of really good secondhand shops there that have many valuable classic books (it is only since he died that I have even looked at my father’s collection) and a list of these would be wonderful - more so than of new bookstores.

A strange, uncompelling list on a forgotten topic

2010-11-13T16:00:00.001+11:00

For a long time during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, fantasy and science fiction literature grew a great deal because the younger Silent and Boom Generations wished to imagine different worlds and civilisations from one they regarded as corrupt, even diseased. Although very few of even the most aware music critics spend that much time on the impact it had on the rock world, there does not exist much doubt that science fiction and fantasy novels of various types and viewpoints did make a major impression of many rock bands. The best-known case - and one that I as a cultural commentator do enjoy emphasising because of how it shows the Sixties counterculture different from that of the “punk” and rap revolutions - is that of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Another well-known case is how Ayn Rand influenced Rush’s “2112” (pronounced “twenty one twelve”).

In this context, it is interesting to see that Paste Magazine have published a list of “The 23 Greatest Sci-Fi Songs of All Time”:

“Space Oddity” by David Bowie
“Iron Man” by Black Sabbath
“Particle Man” by They Might Be Giants
“Many Moons” by Janelle Monae
“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” (Part One) by Flaming Lips
“Mr. Roboto” by Styx
“Still Alive” by Jonathan Coulton
“We Will Become Silhouettes” by The Postal Service
“Astro Zombies” by the Misfits
“My Science Fiction Twin” by Elvis Costello
“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland” by Sufjan Stevens
“2112” by Rush
“10,000 Years” by Honeydogs
“Subterranean Homesick Alien” by Radiohead
“Space Travel is Boring” by Modest Mouse
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett (in Outer Space)” by They Might Be Giants
“Spaceship” by Angie Aparo
“Spaceman” by the Killers
“Rapture” by Blondie
“If the Government Could Read My Mind” by The Vandals
“The Humans Are Dead/Robots” by Flight of the Conchords
“Rocket Man” by Elton John
“We Will Robot Rock You” by Daft Punk and Queen

Overall, this is a terribly unsatisfying list and not what one would expect from a serious musical expert or an expert on literary fantasy who might well know about its influence on the rock music world. Most of the choices are either too familiar or with very little justification.

The man who put “three too many letters” dies

2010-11-04T23:49:00.000+11:00

On the radio tonight, I was surprised to hear of the death of rock musician James Freud. Most famous for writing the 1985 hit singles “Barbados” and “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” for new wave band The Models, Freud had a long career in rock music beginning with his hit “Modern Girl” with backing band The Radio Stars through his Models years to less successful projects like Beatfish with Mental As Anything’s Martin Plaza.

It is, however, for his last notable project that I came to remember James Freud in the long run. When Tony Lockett kicked his 1300^th goal in May of 1999 to beat Gordon Coventry’s record which had stood since the 1930s, Freud with a band called “The Reserves” wrote a song “One Tony Lockett“ to pay tribute. “One Tony Lockett” was played on the radio quite widely but spent only one week in the Top 40 at number thirty-nine.

However, being at the time obsessed with the appalling quality of spin bowling in 1980s cricket and how it allowed teams with no proven ability to play against spin bowling of a quality such as Ashley Mallett shows must have existed before the advent of artificial fertilisers (with resultant lush pitches and outfields) and limited-overs cricket and curtailed boundaries (which made the enterprising buy-at-all-costs slow spinner a liability) to dominate world cricket, led me to think quickly that James Freud had written three too many letters in his song, which should have been titled “One Tony Lock” after the great spinner of the 1950s and 1960s.

There really were in 1999 fewer English spinners comparable to Tony Lock than full forwards comparable to Tony Lockett, as shown by how no English spinner in 1998 had taken even 35 first-class wickets - a figure that in the 1950s was often attained by spinners in a few games. Even in 1984, when the supposedly great West Indian sides were at their peak, the standard of spin has declined alarmingly, especially with Underwood - in his last “top-flight” year - banned for touring South Africa. For years I have insisted that if the West Indian sides of the 1980s had had to face spinners of the calibre of Lock and Jim Laker on pitches like those of the 1950s, it would have been another game entirely from the cricket of the 1980s. I cannot imagine any side of that era, experienced only on plastic pitches protected form rain, having the skill required to last against spinners of the calibre of Laker and Lock - as Ashley Mallett said around the time Lock died in 1995, they failed when pitches took spin against much worse bowling.

An overdue list, if not what is should be

2010-10-22T01:07:00.001+11:00

Ever since I began to read popular music lists seriously, I have always felt that far too much focus is on the guitar vis-à-vis the other major rock instruments of bass, drums and vocals. Lists of best guitar albums are common, but for bass, drums and vocals one almost never sees them and when i listen I find this a gaping hole.

In this absence, Stuart Hamm’s Ten Greatest Bass Albums of All Time is refreshing. He pull no punches with looking at what he considers to be the ten greatest bass albums of all time:

Fragile by Yes
Live at Leeds by the Who
Yessongs by Yes
Funkentelechy versus the Placebo Syndrome by Parliament
Stanley Clarke by Stanley Clarke
Heavy Weather by Weather Report
Jaco Pastorius by Jaco Pastorius
Reach for It by George Duke
Masques by Brand X
Shadows and Light by Joni Mitchell

All these albums date from the 1970s, and almost all are related to progressive rock or fusion jazz. It would be good if other genres could be appreciated and the role of the bass understood therein.

Still, Stuart Hamm in his notes compensates a good deal for this stereotyping because he offers such a good account of how he came to appreciate the albums he lists as the best bass guitar albums. He relates all of these to his own experience and history with the material he recommends, a vital step to draw the reader/listener in.

Not your Pancho Villa

2010-10-22T00:52:00.001+11:00

The main headline of Time this week has been a list of the most dangerous drug barons in Mexico.

In the public eye Mexico is not associated with drug barons (also called “drug lords” or “high level drug dealers”) in the way the “Andean” nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia are. Many would know about the story of such drug barons as Pablo Escobar, who was in 1987 estimated to be the seventh-richest man in the world, but Mexico’s drug barons are not nearly so familiar at least to me.

Coca is certainly grown in Mexico despite requiring a wetter climate than most of that country possesses, but I had assumed the country’s main claim to criminal activity resided in a quite different sphere: political corruption and so-called “people smuggling”.

None of the people are at all famous to me in the way Escobar was, but the “Sinaloa cartel” apparently is as dangerous as the more famous Medellin cartel in terms of its control over world markets for cocaine. There are also the “(Ciudad) Juarez Cartel”, the “Gulf Cartel” and “Tijuana Cartel”.

The descriptions do evoke a situation where drug-related crime is much closer to the centre of drug consumption than remote lowlands of equatorial South America. If this is so, it ought to be easier to do something about cocaine than Ameriricans probably imagine, but the images are really bad in themselves.

Global warming threatens the koala - ZERO emisisons must be immediate goal

2010-10-21T23:36:00.000+11:00

As I have said earlier, Australia’s sensitive ecology dictates that its population’s energy use efficiency should be much higher than countries in Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand.

In reality, of course, owing to dirt-cheap coal-fired power that is six times cheaper than any energy in Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand, Australia is (or ought to be) notorious for its poor energy efficiency and high emissions.

I have noted once previously that the iconic koala is now threatened by disease and global warming. However, today, there is more detail as to what is affecting the koala. It is a disease known as chlamydia, which

causes respiratory infections, incontinence, pink eye and a number of other side effects, most notably, infertility.

It is thought that if chlamydia continues to spread across the koala population, it could cause the species to cease breeding in thirty years. By 2040, too, global warming is likely to mean that Australia’s dry schlerophyll forests will be too dry to support any trees, and extremely hot so that if it ever would rain fires would be extremely likely.

Thus, we are at war on two fronts. Whilst scientists may have a solution to the problem of chlamydia in the future, they alone can do nothing about a problem towards which Australia is by far the world’s worst offender. The only people who can do anything are those who would inform - in much more detail than I can by trying to harass people I meet - the public of Australia’s apolitical outer suburbs that unless they demand a zero emissions target for Australia immediately iconic species like the koala will be gone within their lifetime.

Whether this zero emissions target should be achieved by pressuring Australia’s apolitical masses or foreign governments is a very big question, but that we need it there is no doubt.

Is this the woman I saw at Melbourne University?

2010-10-06T02:51:00.000+11:00

Ten years ago, I was obssessed with the theories of Tony Cliff that the USSR was really a capitalist country, which I would later call in conversation with my brother the ESCD for “Empire of State Capitalist Dictatorship”. My brother called Tony Cliff “TSBTOAC”, for Tony Should Be Thrown Off A Cliff. Sometimes he would stutter when saying the five middle words of the name.

Even before I knew who Tony Cliff was, I listened his followers intensely at Melbourne University, and they seemed to offer a very good explanation for the dreadful, pro-freeway transport policies of Australian governments over the past eighty years. These followers, who formed groups called Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation, argued that a ruling class has a vested interest in maximising profits, and that building a huge number of cars would bring them larger profits than a modest number of more sustainable public transport vehicles. Despite the fact that I have become wary of the cultural character of these radical groups in demographic terms, there is still much to be said in favour of their argument that working class militancy is the key to good environmental policy.

The effective leader of Socialist Alternative was and still is a woman called Sandra Bloodworth. My brother used to say that she was a mother who abandoned her children to join anti-uranium protesters and turned to socialism with Tess Lee Ack, a veteran of early 1970s radicalism. When I tried to meet the insiders of Socialist Alternative, I certainly saw Tess Lee Ack, who seemed rather bland. Later, I met a woman called Sandra, and assumed she was Sandra Bloodworth, but was terribly unimpressed. This Sandra had the appearance of a witch and - unsurprisingly when one reads Arthur Brooks - seemed totally uncaring and very rude. She would not even introduce herself to me and seemed to want me to go away even though I was then really interested in socialism.

For a long time, I though I had seen the real Sandra Bloodworth and frequently described her in this way to people I met. My brother, however, always doubted that the socialist whom I admired as a student really did look like a classic “witch”, but I never thought I would be able to check until today, when coming home, one of the very familiar Socialist Alternative posters I found hada picture of her. I must say that the real Sandra Bloodworth does not look nearly so much like a witch as I had thought! There is still a possibility Sandra has groomed her hair to make it straighter, but when I saw her face again I really cannot see the wrinkled, witch-like face I recall from that one encounter at Melbourne University!

Rhino paching syndicate has a curious character

2010-09-22T11:28:00.000+10:00

Today, there is news that Limpopo Province police have found the leader of a major rhino poaching gang. the police are adamant (though there is no evidence they are certain) that the members arrested are the most senior members of the active rhinoceros poaching gangs of northern South Africa.

What is amazing is that the leader of the rhino poaching ring include veterinarians (presumably they work for South Africa‘s farming sector) and people who manage game reserves which are supposed to protect rhinos!

The question that this begs is whether and to what extent the involvement of wealthy professionals in poaching of rhinoceroses is evidence that there is popular support in Southern Africa for the kind of moves advocated by Robert P. Murphy in his The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. On one side one can argue that the wealthy professionals who involve themselves at the top of the rhino poaching syndicates are far removed from the masses of South Africans; on the other side one can argue that these wealthy people are supported by the masses and those masses feel that they gain real benefits from rhino poaching. The best thing is to wait for more evidence!

Making the guilty parties pay for natural disasters

2010-09-21T01:43:00.002+10:00

A petition site is arguing that because of the devastating Pakistan floods, that country’s debt should be permanently frozen for two years so that it can rebuild.

Whilst doing that would help Pakistan deal with the crippling costs of unprecedented rainfall, there is the trouble that the amazingly fertile Indus Valley - watered by a river through reliable summer floods so large and muddy that the Indus has no real banks - will be under larger concentrations of carbon dioxide flooded by super-monsoons every year in such a manner as to drown a land that has retained its fertility for extremely long periods under the most intensive use. To destroy some of the most proven farmland in the history of agriculture would be very costly to the world, especially should less proven land be dried out or leached by global warming.

For this reason, I firmly think petitions should focus on those countries that are most responsible for emissions of gases like CO₂, CH₄ and N₂0. Relative to its population, and more so to its ecological character and the rate of observed climate change, Australia is by far the worst offender in this regard. Having some of the cheapest energy in the world due to its abundant black and brown coal has meant that, in spite of its extremely fragile hydrology and ecology, Australia has carbon emissions four times higher than the European Union and 25 percent higher than Canada and New Zealand.

If ecological and hydrological fragility determined allowable greenhouse emissions, Australia would be permitted maximally one percent the per capita carbon emissions of Europe, Asia, North America. One percent is roughly equivalent to the ratio of typical Australian to typical northern hemisphere ratio of yield to runoff for a climate on the arid/Mediterranean boundary. (The typical Australian runoff for this climate is about a tenth that of typical northern hemisphere streams, but the ratio of storage is inversely proportional to the square of the runoff ratio.)

Thus, those who are concerned with the Pakistani floods should first of all know who is to blame - Australia and its appalling carbon emissions - and actively do something to combat this. If they are outside Australia, they should protest for international pressure or voluntary trade boycotts that might involve working for themselves to reduce the overwhelming dependence of the rest of the world on Australia’s monopoly on mineral resources. If in Australia foreigners need to use statistics - which I have in many places on this blog - to show that Australia cannot tolerate any CO₂ emissions whatsoever and regardless of convenience to follow a strict zero-emissions standard. Australians themselves should also do the above.

“100 Worst Songs” shows Harrington’s trends spreading

2010-09-18T22:02:00.000+10:00

A few days ago, I found that AOL of all people had compiled a list of what it considers to be the 100 worst songs of all time. I had trouble finding it on the web, but today I have found it and decided I should listen to a few of the songs with which I was reasonably familiar.

On the whole, the list is not entirely unfamiliar from previous lists of the worst songs of all time like that by Blender magazine. In fact, one can see twenty-one of the Blender songs on AOL’s list:

“Ebony and Ivory” by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder from 1982
“We Built This City” by Starship from 1985
“Party All the Time” by Eddie Murphy from 1985
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel from 1989
“Hanging Tough” by New Kids on the Block from 1989
“Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice from 1990
“From a Distance” by Bette Midler from 1990
“Rico Suave” by Gerardo from 1991
“Achy Breaky Heart “ by Billy Ray Cyrus from 1992
“I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred from 1992
“What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes from 1993
“I’ll Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” by Meat Loaf from 1993
“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies from 1994
“I’ll Be There for You” by The Rembrandts from 1995
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something from 1995
“Cotton Eyed Joe” by Rednex from 1995
“Barbie Girl” by Aqua from 1997
“Make Em Say Uhh!” by Master P featuring Silkk, Fiend, Mia-X and Mystikal from 1998
“My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion from 1998
“She Bangs” by Ricky Martin from 2000
“American Life” by Madonna from 2003

What is particularly notable with hindsight about both the AOL and Blender lists is that the vast majority of the songs on both come from after the “punk revolution”.

The only ones on the AOL list that did not were:

#07 “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy
#63 “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks
#79 “Tie a Yellow Robbon” by Dawn

and from the 2004 Blender list:

#42 “The Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel
#48 “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by the Beatles

This suggests a definite affinity with Joe S. Harrington’s brilliant Top 100 albums list from 2001 to 2003, whereby commercially successful albums from before the “punk revolution” are common but major-label or commercially successful albums afterwards completely ignored. What one notices having read reviews written over the period since 1992 is how commercial albums from the 1980s that were regarded quite well in 1992 are generally disparaged completely. This can be see with the following artists on Blender lists:

Mike and the Mechanics
The Hooters
Arrested Development
solo Mick Jagger
Storm Front by Billy Joel
Was (Not Was)

A dialogue describing my quarrels with Jonathan

2010-09-17T18:02:00.003+10:00

Today, as I was coming home from Irwin & McLaren in Richmond, I had a look in a Salvation Army store. Although the books to be found therein seldom reach the standards I look for, I still enjoy having looks for old Choose Your Own Adventure books and others from my childhood. Given the nasty verbal fights I have had with my brother and mother over the issue of whether miraculous inedia as claimed of Thérèse Neumann, Marthe Robin and other stigmatists can be true, I am always interested to see what is claimed by old editions of the Guinness Book of Records before it stopped publishing fasting records. My brother says this was not because of hounding to accept the records of people like Marthe Robin, Thérèse Neumann, Alexandrina da Costa (thirteen years without food and water except the Eucharist) and Nicholas of Flüe (twenty years without food and water except for monthly Holy Communion). He says more likely - and I have confirmed this since - that it was because Guinness World Records were concerned that people would die if they tried to break established fasting records. When I think of how many people have died trying to break the World Water Speed Record since it was set by Spirit of Australia in 1978, I find Guinness World Records’ argument a little weak. I am by no means sure a person would die if they tried to break these fasting records, and if they really need food then a failure ought to be able to be declared!

When I found a 1999 copy of the Guinness Book of Records, I had a look to see if its abandonment of fasting records had already occurred. What I found was they had not, and that it said the longest anyone had gone without food and water was eighteen days. This was by a man named Andreas Mihavecz who was put in a holding cell in Höchst, Vorarlberg and forgotten. He had been a passenger in a crashed car on April 1 and was found on April 18. Some say he survived by drinking water from the prison wall!

My response to finding this later record was to message my brother on my mobile. He was so quick to respond I will describe the dialogue in full:

Me: The last edition of the Guinness Book of Records to have fasting records (1999) said that the longest anybody had gone without food and water was 18 days (by Andreas Mihavecz who was put in a holding cell by police in Höchst and totally forgotten). Do you think the real record is closer to this than those claimed of Thérèse Neumann, Marthe Robin or Nicholas of Flüe?
My brother: Vastly closer.
Me: How much longer would daily Holy Communion add to the time a person could survive without any other food or water?
My brother: The wafers have almost 0 calories (based on a google search) so it would change very little.

After that, I tried to tell my brother and mother that people as anti-religion as they are had verified Thérèse Neumann’s miracles. Their response was that newspapers derided by author Adalbert Albert Vogl as “socialistic” (which actually reminds me of my brother in the days when I read the likes of Sandra Bloodworth and Tess Lee Ack) told the truth about Thérèse. I would actually like to read them, but am by no means sure they would be easy to find let alone to translate. I do wish to be open to evidence that people have by experience disproved claims that people like Thérèse Neumann lived for 40 years with no food except the Eucharist, but dislike the way my brother approaches the issue intensely.

Where the best answer is omitted

2010-09-15T22:58:00.002+10:00

Today, after looking through an e-mail account for the first time in several days and finding it cluttered, I found a list that aimed to ask which influential band had inspired the worst bands.

Because I have my own opinion about this which I will talk about later, I wanted to see whether or not I could myself comment on the list since I wondered and wonder what the response of people on the site would be. Unfortunately the rules do not permit me to comment, so I have to place my comments here.

The bands listed as possibilities were:

Nirvana
Iron Maiden
Sex Pistols
Jethro Tull
Radiohead
The Velvet Underground

I had a look through a few of the comments in the book, but was really surprised to realise that the band whom I think would rank as #1 - and recall when in the Brunswick Street Off Ya Tree store was ranked as #9 in a list of great bands who were bad influences - was not listed.

The Who, in my opinion, have always been to blame for a good deal of terrible, childish power pop bands. Even through listening to the Who’s music on classic rock radio for a long time, it is clear that, whilst the Who were talented and even mature and deep, they were extremely good at inspiring people without talent to make annoying, tuneless, music. One can take the ludicrous lyrics of Slade and Gary Glitter, who were popular in Australia, as an example.

Why ZRB and a CFC are so overdue, despite what we see in Victoria

2010-09-13T17:19:00.001+10:00

As I probably noted in my previous post, those in Victoria will be hopeful that global warming generated by road wastage and appalling refusal of Australians to rally for an transport policy in which one hundred percent of government transport investment was directed towards either railways or road demolition (which perversely is likely to reduce traffic congestion by creating more money for rail and other public transport investment).

This wet season (May to August or MJJA) in southwestern Australia has been certainly the driest since before 1885. Rainfall has, as you can see here
, been as much as 47 percent below the pre-anthropogenic global warming average, which I will take as the average up to and including 1967. (Though exact data from 1885 to 1899 are not available, sufficient rainfall records for southwestern Australia do exist to show that including these years will not make much difference.) What is alarming is that of the nineteen wettest wet seasons in southwestern Australia, not one has occurred in the past twenty-two years and only one in the past thirty-six. In fact, not one May to August period since 1989 has had a southwestern Australian rainfall reaching the pre-global warming average.

If we accept Tim Flannery’s view that major climate shifts began in 1976, then we can take a “pre-global warming” average May to August rainfall over southwestern Australia up to and including 1974. Under such a scenario, 1996 is slightly above the pre-global warming average by five millimetres or one percent, but every other of the last twenty-two years has had below normal wet season rainfall. More than that, six of the nineteen driest wet seasons in southwestern Australia since 1885 have occurred in the past decade alone (1894 has no exact average available, but was certainly as dry as the “nineteen driest” wet seasons listed here).

The key point is that everybody concerned with global warming should see that these changes are in fact less than what can be expected with my estimated poleward expansion of the Hadley circulation of around ten degrees since 1967 (data unfortunately only exist from 1979, by when southwestern Australia’s climate was already severely affected by anthropogenic greenhouse gases). On this basis, Perth is climatically today well within the tropical belt and right amidst the descending air of the Hadley circulation, whilst the ascending, rain-bearing air is well south even of Northcliffe, before 1968 the wettest town in Western Australia. The rainfall and temperature data for the winter of 2010 suggest that what we are seeing, as we did in the winter of 1998, the development of a “tropical easterly jet” over Australia that drives moisture in from north of the edge of the Hadley circulation to large areas on inland Australia that have historically been rainless during this time of year. Tropical Australia this drought season has had a remarkable number of rain events, so that parts of the historically arid interior have had totals as high as that of Perth! The observed extremely high sunshine and frosts over southwestern Australia result from the region under this new climate pattern being the centre of a high pressure system north of which moist air is fed into the rest of the continent.

Even should the arid zone become less arid, it will not become more productive because the soils will become like those of tropical Australia: ever since agriculture began the most intransigent obstacle in the world to its spread. What is worse is that at the present rate even the historically humid karri-forest regions will quite soon under present rates of CO₂ concentration increase be too dry for the extraordinarily diverse flora and wildflowers of southwestern Australia. Already decimated by land clearing for cheap food, the unique kwongan now faces anthropogenic global warming as its greatest threat.

Saving the kwongan is something that would under present rates of climate change be an amazing feat. Green Left Weekly suggest that the preservation of the Mediterranean climate to which it is adapted would require an actual reduction in CO₂ concentrations, a view supported by paleoclimate data.

To achieve such an actual reduction would require the masses of Australians:

to be more aware of how much the climate is drying out, via such steps as using only pre-anthropogenic global warming (say pre-1968 or pre-1975) rainfall averages
to demand a restoration of the mining tax, constitutional laws to ensure governments will spend all transport funding on railways or road demolition
to ultimately campaign for the abolition of private motorised transport from Australia, a step that with the climate and biodiversity data known in 1980 could have been demanded then.

The Democratic Socialist Party suggest that abolition of private road vehicles could be achieved without any loss of mobility if the profits of mining and car companies were redirected into mass transit

Even if they cannot directly achieve the goals of zero roads budget (ZRB) and a car free continent (CFC), people can take it as a duty to not use roads and to cycle even if it is less convenient. In the gorgeous 15˚ to 17˚C weather southern Australia has in the cooler months, this would be a very good sacrifice to make. In the very warm to hot weather of southern Australia in the summer, it is more difficult but I don't think it impossible for people fitter than myself. Still, ZRB and CFC are such essential goals that any sort of protest is justified to achieve them.
the trouble is to inform the ultraconservative outer suburbs that they could have equal mobility through really first-rate mass transit without a solitary car - something that would be incomprehensible to them - and the climatic consequences resulting from the failure to achieve ZRB and CFC by 1985 or 1990. If they realise Melbourne and Perth will be some of the most arid places in Australia within a decade or two under likely emissions scenarios and that any form of carbon-based energy use in fragile Australia is incompatible with the maintenance of present economic systems, goals that should have been achieved a quarter century ago can be aimed at.

A major criminal break-through in the rhino poaching war

2010-09-02T02:26:00.000+10:00

Today, amidst contrasting climate news that I hope to discuss later, I have found some news that in South Africa, five people have been captured on charges of poaching rhinoceroses. They are being held in Limpopo Province in Lephalale Magistrate's Court and should be trialled fully in five days.

They were originally arrested when policemen spotted a vehicle driving near a private game farm. Apparently, they were indeed caught before any rhinos were actually harmed, so that there is hope we are seeing a sustained fight against the killing of these endangered species.

One cannot wait to hear of impoverished governments actually doing something about rhinos being killed to meet the market for jambiyas in Yemen and for medicine in Taiwan (the worst offender) and other Asian nations. One sincerely hope that if rhino poachers are arrested other African adn especially Asian nations will follow suit.

The spread of the super-monsoon

2010-08-25T15:12:00.001+10:00

The recent floods in Pakistan have led to questions that should have been answered a year and a half ago when catastrophic bushfires and two weeks of record high temperatures in southern Australia combined with extreme flooding in Queensland.

What people like Ian Smith have shown is the a poleward shift in the Hadley circulation has caused a movement of climate belts approaching ten degrees of latitude since the 1970s. In effect, the pre-settlement climate of Kalumburu is now located near Wolfe Creek, that of Kakadu now near the Barkly region, that of Charleville now in Melbourne, and that of Carnarvon now near Perth. The boundary of the climatological “tropics” in terms of tropospheric height has shifted from around 25˚N and ˚S to 35˚N and ˚S since 1975, and what paleoclimate data exists suggests that it will most likely settle around 45˚N and ˚S. Such a shift would mean the end for Mediterranean climates and a major shift in the arid and monsoonal belts.

Moreover, if one thinks about it seriously, it would most definitely mean more monsoonal rain in Pakistan. Since the Himalayas restricts the passage of the monsoon northwards, unless monsoonal cells can begin to form over Western Asia or Central Asia this will mean a very intense cell over northwestern Pakistan, into which strong winds are drawn with the result that Pakistan receives extremely heavy rain, as would Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry gives clear evidence that, like in Australia, the monsoon belt is changing with reference to the heavy rains in North West Frontier Province:

The only explanation can be the link to climate change. Because that area very rarely receives monsoon rains

The very heavy rainfall over the northern edge of the monsoon belt in Liáoníng does suggest that there is a strong tendency towards more powerful Asian monsoons

Other sources say that rainfall in northwestern China - historically an arid zone - has increased by 33 percent since 1961 (less than observed increases in northwestern and central-western Australia, but relative to natural variability more). This, like the increase over central-western Australia, is almost certainly related to the growth of a super monsoon because, at the very least, more unstable air comes in from the east.

A “tyranny” we forget

2010-08-13T01:41:00.000+10:00

The brilliant writer Bill Kauffman has noted how time standardisation has had major deleterious effects on how people organise their life.

Kauffman says that time standardisation began only when long-distance rail services had to schedule themselves to arrive at major stations as consistently as possible. He says that before this, clocks kept time according to the passage of the sun, so that midday would always be when the sun was as far overhead as possible. Over the years, especially with the spread of daylight savings. time has been removed increasingly from reflecting what I agree it is supposed to do. Though Kauffman neglects to mention it, daylight savings time is again driven by big businesses and government to maximise work and leisure during daylight. This reasoning almost becomes obsolete when activities like sport shift to the night to maximise television revenue, so that there is further reason to argue as I have come to in recent hot summers against daylight savings at all in Australia.

The life I have today - where I often am awake until 2:00 and sleep until 12:00 or even 13:00 - is the ultimate reflection of a tendency I must condemn even as I condemn my own behaviour. I know it would be better for me to get up earlier and not work after midnight, but my tendency to shift focus from one obsession to another makes this very tough.

A prediction for the 2010/2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot

2010-08-13T01:33:00.000+10:00

Last year, I did a prediction for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot for 2009/2010. I will confess that it was completely wrong with the exception of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Chantels, neither of whom were voted in. Even among my “Bubbling Under” artists only two were nominated: Donna Summer, the Stooges and the Hollies, the latter two being voted in. The fact that there seems to be extraordinarily little activity discussing who will or should get in to the Hall for 2010/2011 makes me nonetheless eager to consider who the likely inductees will be.

In 2009/2010, the Hall of Fame increased the number of artists on the ballot from nine to twelve. For 2010/2011 it is apparently considering reducing the number of years of eligibility from twenty-five to twenty - a move I wholeheartedly disapprove of. Digital Dream Door, in an email to me, said that there is no artist “remotely deserving” who is newly eligible for 2010/2011, so that we are left with looking at artists already discussed by the Nominating Committee as of 2009/2010.

I predict that the following twelve artists will comprise the ballot for the 2010/2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

- The “5” Royales: The Rock Hall has shown a very strong tendency to “juggle” around many candidates from most black genres - which lack the respect of the white critical establishment but which are undoubtedly of major influence. The “5” Royales were nominated in both 2001/2002 and 2003/2004, so they undoubtedly have support from the Nominating Committee and with the need of another vocal group and somebody from before the FM radio revolution of the late 1960s they are a likely shot this year.

- The Chantels: Already nominated last year, they look likely to obtain another chance as the only vocal harmony group remaining for discussion. Girl-group pop, like doo-wop, is an area which one does not generally see discussed by most critics but which is still a very important part of rock as Digital Dream Door notes. Under a genre-based approach the Chantels would seem inevitable on the ballot whether voted in or not.

- Randy Newman: Although Randy did not make the ballot for a second time after I predicted he would last year, reading about the way in which the Rock Hall Nominating Committee seems to be restructuring its choices makes me think Randy must have a chance for a second nomination. His consistent critical acclaim from Rolling Stone is a very important factor in his favour.

- Deep Purple: With the Hall seemingly wanting to reconsider styles for a long time rejected by the critical establishment, Deep Purple appear a very natural choice to represent hard rock or heavy metal. The trouble with them is so many changes of line-up, but the classic group of Ian Gillan, Richie Blackmore, Jon Lord, Roger Glover and Ian Paice did enough with Deep Purple in Rock, Fireball and Machine Head in defining heavy metal that those three albums could easily be judged sufficient for a place.

- Yes: With the induction of Genesis and the Hall aiming for a “style-by-style” approach, Yes seem a natural choice. They have even been cited as an influence by such bands as Metallica, which will not hurt their chances, nor would Rick Wakeman’s links with Sabbath.

- The MC5: With the Stooges finally inducted after I had expected them to be neglected after repeated failures, it would only be natural for the Nominating Committee to turn to their protopunk contemporaries. The MC5 have already reached the 2002/2003 ballot, and it is very tempting to think that this could be their year for actual induction - twenty years after vocalist Rob Tyner died.

- War: Already nominated in 2008/2009, War would fit the bill for a black rock act, though they like Sly and the Family Stone were in fact multi-ethnic. I expected them to get in in 2008/2009, and with the lack of major early funk acts for 2009/2010 it would seem that War would be likely to get another chance with considerable hope of being inducted. The problem of ex-Animal Eric Burdon leaving the band after two albums seems unlikely to affect them.

- Donna Summer: Like the Stooges before and alongside her, she has been a perennial choice of the Nominating Committee who has great trouble managing to get in. Also like the Stooges, I had doubted her staying in line but the way in which Summer got on last year suggests that they have nor given and are unlikely to give up on her.

- The Cure: The manner in which Charles Crossley breaks down the nominations for the 2009/2010 Rock Hall gives me a suggestion that the Cure will be used to represent post-punk or even goth. They are the only band in either genre except Depeche Mode with sufficient recognition to have a chance. so Crossley’s suggestion and their increasing recognition in the late 1980s means this could be their year?

- Def Leppard: The discussion of Bon Jovi gives me the impression that those in the Nominating Committee recognise the cultural impact of pop metal enough to warrant an artist from that genre being inducted. Def Leppard are undoubtedly the most important group in that genre, and would thus be favoured for a berth on the ballot in this scene.

- The Beastie Boys: With the approach of the twenty-fifth anniversary of their classic album Licensed to Ill, they seem to the most likely rap candidate before Public Enemy and N.W.A. become eligible in 2012/2013. Were extremely innovative and rarely followed in sampling metal acts such as Black Sabbath, Slayer and AC/DC and have a similarly unique status as a white rap band. They continued to be commercially successful into the 1990s.

- The Red Hot Chili Peppers: They were overlooked in 2009/2010, but the very fact that the Nominating Committee put them onto the ballot make me sure the Chili Peppers will be inducted soon. Whether Jack Irons and Hillel Slovak are inducted with the “classic” lineup of Kiedis, Frusciente, Flea and Chad Smith is far from certain, but it is hard not to see them on the ballot.

Bubbling Under

If the artists listed above do not make the ballot, it will probably be because the following artists make the list:

- Darlene Love: She failed on the 2009/2010 ballot, but appears to be popular with many in the Nominating Committee such as Steven van Zandt so that she may well have a serious chance this year, especially with the Committee’s characteristic tendencies to juggle around a set of artists.

- The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Already nominated in 2005/2006, they could fulfil the role of blues in the ballot - one I have not filled in myself. Their role in transforming rock guitar into an improvised format made them highly influential on artists like inductees The Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers Band, but they never had a Top 50 album or any hit single so they might fall short with commercially-oriented sections of the voting body.

- The Monkees: The induction of the Hollies makes me think that they are a likely shot, although they have been consistently disfavoured by many in the Nominating Committee their vital role in popularising video as a medium for music ought to be of very valuable importance - as should their many hit singles.

- T. Rex: They have been long discussed by the Nominating Committee and their critical popularity as a representative of the glam rock movement, along with significant influence on many indie bands and noticeable popular success via the recognisable “Get It On” makes them a very likely chance especially with the Stooges inducted and no other glam band considered.

- Dr. John: Extremely influential upon the singer/songwriter movement (most notably cited Van Morrison), so that if the Hall wishes to acknowledge this unique sector of rock history, Dr. John would seem very likely since he has already been discussed before for a long time and this year could easily be his chance.

- Kraftwerk: Although almost completely neglected by the Nominating Committee since reaching the ballot in 2002/2003, Kraftwerk should not be neglected if the Hall thinks it ought to acknowledge genres of rock missed in the past two decades. As popularisers of electronic music, Kraftwerk are the only potential choice in their genre and that gives them a chance.

- Chic: Perennial candidates even though they have not been inducted on five tries since 2002/2003, Chic seem certain to be here forever until enough voters put them in. Their recognition may be limited to a few hits like “Le Freak”, but the importance of such musicians as Nile Rogers and Tony Thompson gives them a serious chance unless the Nominating Committee decides they have too many enemies within the voting body to get in.

- The B‘52s: The most popular New Wave group not yet inducted, the B‘52s have the recognisable songs that might well appeal to a Nominating Committee that wants to find a branch of rock not discussed in 2009/2010. Doubts exist because they had two incarnations before and after Ricky Wilson died of AIDS, which will diminish voters’ perceptions of them as one group.

- Afrika Bambaataa: The most important artist in “old school” hip hop and the only one to have reached a ballot, Afrika Bambaataa is clearly acknowledged as a major founder of the only genre to maintain both critical and popular acclaim since the “punk revolution”, which may well give him a serious shot in a year with no new chances.

- Stevie Ray Vaughan: “Modern” blues guitarist of tremendous acclaim for his live work and albums before being killed in a helicopter crash, Stevie Ray Vaughan was discussed by the Nominating Committee during 2009/2010 and is generally touted as a certainty. Some question over influence but a genuine chance this year with no worthy new candidates.

A link people in the northern hemisphere should know

2010-08-11T22:20:00.000+10:00

Today, as a result of major floods at the northwestern fringe of the Asian monsoon belt and heatwaves in Russia, there has been a thought that the two are connected by the New York Times.

Whilst the Times are to be congratulated on this point, the problem is that they should have known all along that super-monsoons brought about by global warming are likely to cause heatwaves in temperate regions beyond this super-monsoon’s reach.

A study of summer temperature in Melbourne, which is as shielded as it gets from the northerly airflow of a super-monsoon like those of 1973/1974, 1975/1976, 1996/1997 to 2000/2001, and every year since 2005/2006, shows clearly how appallingly hot weather is increased under the conditions of a super-monsoon.

If we take these summers alone, Melbourne’s mean maxim four the four main months of the tropical wet season (December to March) is:

In December: 25.1˚C as against 24.1 ˚C
In January: 27.5˚C as against 25.8˚C
In February: 27.8˚C as against 25.8˚C
In March: 25.1˚C as against 23.8˚C

What this shows, especially when one does comparisons with adjacent seasons with less powerful monsoons, (e.g. only 23.9˚C in January 1975 or 25.1˚C in January 1996) is that when super-monsoons become the norm, hotter and very dry air flows into temperate regions on the leeward side of these super-monsoons.

This would logically mean that for European Russia, on the northwestern side of the great mountain and plateau mass of Asia, hotter and drier air would be forced into the region, resulting in less rainfall and higher temperatures - as observed for decades in southern Australia.

Keltner analysis of undiscussed Rock Hall Artists: Joy Division

2010-07-17T11:55:00.000+10:00

The site A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, discusses various artists' credentials for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

After finishing my analysis of the Rock Hall backlog, I always intended to analyse artists who have never been discussed by the Nominating Committee, but still might have credentials to justify induction. The aim of the process is to find out whether, on the basis of the Keltner list for a Hall of Fame, the Nominating Committee really is completely ignoring artists who have undeniable credentials to be in the Hall.

I do admit that there are some problems with the criteria, especially given known biases of the Nominating Committee and how they effect who is already in the Hall, but still I cannot see any better alternative.

I have so far done six Keltner tests on undiscussed artists:

The Smiths (eligible 2008/2009, not worthy)
Slayer (eligible 2008/2009, worthy)
Sonic Youth (eligible 2007/2008, worthy)
Janet Jackson (eligible 2007/2008, worthy)
Steve Earle (eligible 2007/2008, not worthy)
Hüsker Dü (eligible 2006/2007, not worthy)
Dire Straits (eligible 2003/2004, not worthy)

My next artist, first eligible in 2003/2004, is Joy Division. They formed in 1977 in Salford as a reaction to the Sex Pistols' shows in Manchester. Guitarist Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook were the initial members, and were soon joined by vocalist Ian Curtis, who when Sumner and Hook met them had

"HATE"

on the back of his jacket. Terry Mason joined as drummer, and the band maned themselves Warsaw after a song from David Bowie's album Low. After a single gig, Mason became the band's manager and Tony Tabac, the Steve Brotherdale, joined as a drummer, only to be replaced because he wanted Curtis to join his other band Panik.

When they asked for a replacement drummer, there was only one response, a schoolmate of Curtis in Steve Morris. Because another London punk band was called Warsaw Pakt, at the start of 1978 the band renamed themselves Joy Division after the prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp. Their debut EP, An Ideal for a Living, was released at the beginning of June 1978, but during that period Joy Division made many other recordings that were never issued. They contributed in September to a compilation EP titled Short Circuit and very soon after signed with Factory Records and recorded along with the Durutti Column, John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire for A Factory Sampler, the label's debut release.

After this Joy Division began work on their first full-length album Unknown Pleasures. Released in 1979, it was critically acclaimed from the beginning, but failed to sell even in the UK. Since that time, however, it has become one of the most acclaimed albums of its era.

Following the release of Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division had a number of appearances on BBC2 television and made a nationwide tour during the autumn of 1979.

They then released the single “Transmission” during November and the devoted following they developed earned them the nickname of “cult with no name”. The beginning of 1980 saw the band tour Europe, but Ian Curtis experienced tonic–clonic seizures, and lack of sleep and long hours completely destabilised him. The latter half of March saw Joy Division record their second album, Closer, and May saw them planning to tour the United States for the first time.

However, on the eighteenth of May 1980, all Joy Division’s plans were thwarted immediately when vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide. He had been diagnosed as an epileptic in 1979, and had been taken ill earlier that year. By May, Curtis was suffering from a failed marriage and he hanged himself after visiting his wife on the seventeenth.

Following Curtis’ suicide, interest in Joy Division’s music continued to rise, and Closer peaked at number six on the British albums chart and later charted even higher in New Zealand. The single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” charted also in Australia. The remaining members of Joy Division, who had vowed before Curtis’ suicide that they would change the name of the band if he left, continued with Morris’ girlfriend and later wife Gillian Gilbert as New Order. (New Order might themselves have some case to be in the Rock Hall, and some have suggested that they could be combined with Joy Division for a more viable Rock Hall candidacy, though nobody in Cleveland has ever thought of this and probably never will.)

An evaluation of Joy Division's Rock Hall credentials based on the Keltner criteria, which actually come from the Baseball Hall of Fame follows.

1) Were Joy Division ever regarded as the best artist in rock music? (Did anybody, while Joy Division were active, ever seriously suggest Joy Division were the best artist in rock music?): This is very doubtful. Joy Division had many rivals in terms of critical acclaim and name-dropping by musicians amongst the post-punk bands of the late 1970s, and at no time did they really stand out from such bands as Television, Wire or X, plus there was such bands as proto-thrashers Motörhead and hardcore punks Black Flag to compete with even if purely artistic merit is one’s criterion.

2) Were Joy Division ever the best artist in rock music in its genre?: The same thing, in essence, applies here. Even after Lloyd and Verlaine split up, there were such new bands as X and Wire emerging to equal them or nearly do so. Then there are such lesser-known and even less commercially successful bands as Pere Ubu and The Pop Group who were even more artistically adventurous and difficult to listen to, and who writers like David Keenan and Piero Scaruffi have considered as definitely superior.

3) Was any member of Joy Division ever considered the best at his instrument?: No. Ian Curtis’ despairing lyrics might have been viewed as outstanding, but none of the band's members have dominated polls for lists of best at their individual instruments.

4) Did Joy Division have an impact on a number of other artists?: Yes. Their dark, brooding sound is cited as the key to understanding first-generation U2 and their use of electronic rhythms inspired the mainstream emergence of groups like The Cure who began at the same time, and as Joe S. Harrington points out, later even The Smiths.

5) Were Joy Division good enough that they could play regularly after passing their prime?: No. They disbanded when Ian Curtis committed suicide, and even if we consider New Order as a successor to them, New Order did not play after they began declining in the early 1990s.

6) Are Joy Division the very best artist in history that is not in the Hall of Fame?: Certainly not. They had a very brief career that despite its considerable influence in the world of electronic music and the development of synth-pop cannot be considered of overwhelming significance artistically compared to many other bands like the MC5, Captain Beefheart or Can. Nor were they at all commercially successful in the United States.

7) Are most bands who have a comparable recording history and impact in the Hall of Fame?: No. Even with the 2009/2010 induction of the Stooges, most of the important critically slaved alternative bands remain out of the Hall of Fame. One can list Big Star, Television, Wire, the Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Black Flag and the Misfits have rarely been considered.

8) Is there any evidence to suggest that Joy Division were significantly better or worse than is suggested by their statistical records?: There is little to say here. Ian Curtis' personal problems were in no way unique for a post-punk band, and there is nothing of note that might have influence on one's judgment.

9) Is Joy Division the best artist in its genre that is eligible for the Hall of Fame?: in the field of synth-pop, yes artistically as they were ahead even of Depeche Mode who have already been discussed by the Nominating Committee. However, Joy Division were too experimental at large to be considered a pop group, and as I have said in 6), they cannot be seen as the most essential omission from underground rock groups eligible for thw Hall.

10) How many #1 singles/gold records did Joy Division have? Did Joy Division ever win a Grammy award? If not, how many times was Joy Division nominated?: Joy Division never dented the Billboard Top 200 whilst active, and even in Europe and New Zealand where they did have some significant success, they did not have anything approaching a number one single or album.

11) How many Grammy-level songs/albums did Joy Division have? For how long of a period did Joy Division dominate the music scene? How many Rolling Stone covers did Joy Division appear on? Did most bands with this sort of impact go into the Hall of Fame?: As said before, Joy Division never won a Grammy and they dominated the music scene for a single small year at best. Very few bands wiht this lack of impact are likely to go into the Hall of Fame.

12) If Joy Division were the best artist at a concert, would it be likely that the concert would rock?: Probably not sufficiently. In comparison with most bands of the time there are not many live documents of Joy Division, and those are not discussed nearly as much as other artists from the “punk revolution”.

13) What impact did Joy Division have on rock history? Were they responsible for any stylistic changes? Did they introduce any new equipment? Did Joy Division change history in any way?: Yes. Joy Division made synthesisers a legitimate part of alternative rock and in doing so helped pave the way for modern electronic music. They also changed post-punk music away from the “hard and fast” standard into a slow drones that were very influential in indie rock in the 1980s and 1990s.

14) Did Joy Division uphold the standards of sportsmanship and character that the Hall of Fame, in its written guidelines, instructs us to consider?: Ian Curtis’ suicide can make one think that they did not do so, but overall apart from that they had few problems either as Joy Division or alter as New Order.

Verdict: There is a pass on very few criteria as Joy Division, so one feels the verdicts has to be “don’t induct”. One could consider inducting them together with their spinoff New Order, but unlike with Parliament and Funkadelic this has never been considered by the Nominating Committee (who haven’t actually discussed New Order).

7.5 million fewer cars could have been

2010-07-14T10:54:00.002+10:00

Today, in Trading Room, it says that the outback is the key to cutting Australia’s appalling greenhouse gas emissions. The argument is that improving the methods of grazing would allow for greater storage fo carbon in the extensive grasslands of the outback.

The trouble is this:

the method will do nothing like enough to counter runaway climate change, as is admitted by the authors. 5 percent reduction will still ensure a shift of the arid belt to the far south of Australia, and a huge increase in outback rainfall that will, however, decrease grazing profitability. This paradox occurs because the soils in the wet/dry tropics are so poor that the food value of grasses is to poor for any large herbivore. The grasses are rich in toxic aluminum and managanese which makes them impossible to digest on such a large scale. In the relatively rich clay soils of the southeastern outback, fairly nutritious grasses and herbage feed extremely efficient and extensive grazing
7.5 million fewer cars could easily have been achieved if people in Australia had been willing to fight for a first-class public transport system through demanding that rail and tram services become the exclusive recipient of government transport funding and that freeway building be constitutionally banned.
If all the money spent on CityLink, EastLink, etc. etc. had been spent on railway extensions and on giving buses priority on busy roads, Melbourne could have a public transport system equal to the best systems in Europe and Asia. With rigid laws against increasing road capacity and efforts to actually reduce it dramatically, such a system might actually more than recover costs
Such a move could reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions by at least 30 percent by now and potentially by even more in the future.

The funniest few minutes for a long time

2010-07-03T14:10:00.007+10:00

The past few short minutes have seen my brother do something that one could hardly imagine him ever trying to do. After he had discussed his view that the apparently defunct Politically Incorrect Guides are basically a tool to increase the power and wealth of the ruling class and the Catholic Church - exactly the view Socialist Alternative would have but one I never noticed on the surface of PIGs which claims that they are about protecting ordinary people from an over-powerful “Daddy State” - my brother then did something remarkable:

Being still in bed because he often works very late at night in debating and/or travels to places like Geelong and Bendigo, my brother tried to imitate how he thought Thérèse Neumann would have actually been living. He said in the silliest imaginable fashion that he had blood on his hands - he thinks that Thérèse’s wounds were deliberately inflicted as a show of piety rather than, as Adalbert Albert Vogl says, a consequence of her extreme suffering from a barn fire in 1918.

He then went much further into trying to fit Thérèse’s story into his own utterly dogmatic rejection of any claim made by religion. Because, my brother says, previous so-called “fasting girls” had been found to eat donuts at night, my brother said with his very limited knowledge of German:

“Ich bin Thérèse Neumann”

“Ich habe keine Eucharistie gegessen”

“Ich möchte viele Krapfen”

“Ich möchte schlafen” (it is supposed Thérèse did not sleep after 1926)

He even imagined himself imitating Marthe Robin, but said he knew no French.

The whole way in which he trivialises how people observed these women live years with no evidence they could or were even able to eat or drink anything apart from the Eucharist is shocking to me. My mother even refers to it as “religious pornography”; given the graphic nature of the images of stigmatists, I actually tolerate this view but still steadfastly think it is nothing like so bad as Gail Dines shows ordinary pornography to be. According to Thérèse Neumann: Mystic and Stigmatist, even atheists actually observed her miraculous inedia without any kind of refutation.