Today in the Age, Penny Wong appears to be complaining about the Coalition's refusal to sign up for totally unacceptable greenhouse emissions reductions.
Whilst, as I have said way, way too often, Wong is herself ludicrously half-hearted, the real issue of what the ultraconservative, poorly-understood Australian public wants and thinks is unfortunately never mentioned. The mere fact that polls suggest support for emissions reductions - though surveys are not done in a manner such as to create what I feel is necessary - is hardly sufficient when evidence from abroad suggests those who are most sceptical of global warming are likely to have the largest families. Moreover, the Coalition may well sense (and in my opinions they have every right to) that the apparent recession provides, as the one in the early 1990s did, an opportunity for radically downsizing public services and quite possibly for much more thoroughgoing deregulation than carried out by Kennett and Howard.
The failure to realise the possibility that Australia's next generation will be greenhouse-sceptic to an extent unforeseen abroad has another side: that, as Dennis Prager said, Europeans really care about little apart from their own leisure and pleasure. If they really did care about global warming, they would be trying as hard as they could to nullify Australia's immense advantage in cheap land by conscientiously refusing to ever buy food grown in Australia and to use as little as possible of materials from Australia.
Even if such a move does not reduce Australia's wealth to the level of the rest of the world, it would at least increase the wealth of Europe, East Asia and New Zealand above absolute zero. That of itself would enhance their culture's chance of survival and reverse the masculinisation (secularisation) that is leading to problems like lowest-low fertility and collapsing pension systems.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Sunday, 26 April 2009
Yet another list to be found
Today's web browsing has made me realise that there was actually much more work in compiling the 50 greatest footy players than just that of judges Bob Davis, Ron Carter, Tom Hafey, Ron Barassi and Ken Hands. In addition to the list I described in my previous post, there was another list by Scott Palmer of the legendary "Palmer's Punchlines" during my childhood.
Although Scott Palmer's list is not so similar to the one of Hafey et. al., it still displays marked similarities, so much so that the top seven players are all among the top ten of the list published in the Age last June, and there is no surprise in the entire list apart from perhaps inaugural Brownlow Medallist Edward "Carji" Greeves and Des Fothergill, who in 1940 carried Collingwood almost single-handedly through a terribly tough year.
My mother, responding to the list as I described it properly, said that she could not agree with the way in which Wayne Carey had come to be seen as perhaps the best player ever. Knowing as she does some of the stars of the AFL through working at school with their children, she said Wayne Carey was a "horrible" person and that he did not deserve to be near to the top of such a list!
Although Scott Palmer's list is not so similar to the one of Hafey et. al., it still displays marked similarities, so much so that the top seven players are all among the top ten of the list published in the Age last June, and there is no surprise in the entire list apart from perhaps inaugural Brownlow Medallist Edward "Carji" Greeves and Des Fothergill, who in 1940 carried Collingwood almost single-handedly through a terribly tough year.
My mother, responding to the list as I described it properly, said that she could not agree with the way in which Wayne Carey had come to be seen as perhaps the best player ever. Knowing as she does some of the stars of the AFL through working at school with their children, she said Wayne Carey was a "horrible" person and that he did not deserve to be near to the top of such a list!
A peek inside the mind of another judge
Last year, I noted that The Age has been making a list of the 50 greatest footy players of all time, based upon the opinions of Bob Davis, Ron Carter, Ron Barassi, Ken Hands and Tom Hafey. Because I love lists of any sort, I have been really curious about this one, because like the list of John Woodcock in the 1998 Wisden, it shattered preconceived notions I had possessed.
Today, searching for comments on that list (I am wont to see what people think about every list that seriously garners my attention), I found this list by longtime footy commentator Mike Sheahan. The surprising thing is that with three exceptions it is the same as the Top 50 of the others. The three players Sheahan included that were omitted later were:
- Len Thompson
- Syd Coventry
- Albert Collier
- Robert Harvey
Three of these were Collingwood players, which leads one to think there might have been bias detected in Sheahan's list by Davis, Carter, Barassi, Hands or Hafey. The players omitted were:
- Horrie Clover
- Reg Hickey
- Allan La Fontaine
- Dave McNamara
This suggests that the judges realised Sheahan's older players were too focused on Collingwood, so that some correction had to be made. Neither Len Thompson nor Albert Collier were even listed as "Near Misses" in the later Top 50, though a few readers thought "Big Len" deserved inclusion with one saying he was the best player from 1971 to 1975.
Today, searching for comments on that list (I am wont to see what people think about every list that seriously garners my attention), I found this list by longtime footy commentator Mike Sheahan. The surprising thing is that with three exceptions it is the same as the Top 50 of the others. The three players Sheahan included that were omitted later were:
- Len Thompson
- Syd Coventry
- Albert Collier
- Robert Harvey
Three of these were Collingwood players, which leads one to think there might have been bias detected in Sheahan's list by Davis, Carter, Barassi, Hands or Hafey. The players omitted were:
- Horrie Clover
- Reg Hickey
- Allan La Fontaine
- Dave McNamara
This suggests that the judges realised Sheahan's older players were too focused on Collingwood, so that some correction had to be made. Neither Len Thompson nor Albert Collier were even listed as "Near Misses" in the later Top 50, though a few readers thought "Big Len" deserved inclusion with one saying he was the best player from 1971 to 1975.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Ecological leadership needs to be forced on Australia - and hasn't
Adam Morton's post in WA Today pointing Britain's commitment to deep emissions cuts is really revealing for the point it makes not only about Australia, but about the way the self-centred populations of Europe fail to realise that by concentrating on reducing their own emissions, they can claim to be environmentally sensitive when they are not.
The facts are:
1) the free market encourages high efficiency in Europe and low efficiency in Australia
2) high efficiency comes at a human cost that is clearly unaffordable demographically
3) that low efficiency is ecologically unaffordable in Australia but not dangerous in Europe simply because its soils and oceans are a renewable resource
4) that any really serious attack on greenhouse would focus almost exclusively on changing Australia from the country with the highest per-capita emissions to the one with (by an order of magnitude or more) the lowest
5) that reductions in Australian emissions would have much more effect upon living standards in Europe than reductions in European emissions
6) that European people are far more unwilling to accept reductions in living standards or quality of life from not having access to Australian goods than Australians are from the decline in environmental quality brought about by runaway rainfall declines and hotter temperatures
7) that sustainability in Australia would mean rigid laws eliminating cheap baseload electricity and all private cars but would encourage immensely more innovation in even a smaller private sector
8) that governments in other OECD nations and international conservation bodies should have tried to gang up on Australia during the Howard era to encourage something approaching sustainability - or if that was impractical, to try and encourage policies that would have made the rest of the world less dependent on Australian minerals and especially food
It is so annoying to see the claims one does by people like Penny Wong. If Australia was a real leader our museums would have a scene (or picture thereof) like that at Denmac Ford during the 1980s, only saying "LAST NEW CAR" instead of "LAST FALCON V8". In addition, unnecessary street lighting would be completely eliminated (I know too well that bike lights are sufficient) and houses and/or clothing would be much better designed so people could live without baseload power. That is what Australia would be like if it really wanted something approaching sustainability, whilst the rest of the world would get its food from less labour-efficient but more ecologically suitable places whatever they might be.
The facts are:
1) the free market encourages high efficiency in Europe and low efficiency in Australia
2) high efficiency comes at a human cost that is clearly unaffordable demographically
3) that low efficiency is ecologically unaffordable in Australia but not dangerous in Europe simply because its soils and oceans are a renewable resource
4) that any really serious attack on greenhouse would focus almost exclusively on changing Australia from the country with the highest per-capita emissions to the one with (by an order of magnitude or more) the lowest
5) that reductions in Australian emissions would have much more effect upon living standards in Europe than reductions in European emissions
6) that European people are far more unwilling to accept reductions in living standards or quality of life from not having access to Australian goods than Australians are from the decline in environmental quality brought about by runaway rainfall declines and hotter temperatures
7) that sustainability in Australia would mean rigid laws eliminating cheap baseload electricity and all private cars but would encourage immensely more innovation in even a smaller private sector
8) that governments in other OECD nations and international conservation bodies should have tried to gang up on Australia during the Howard era to encourage something approaching sustainability - or if that was impractical, to try and encourage policies that would have made the rest of the world less dependent on Australian minerals and especially food
It is so annoying to see the claims one does by people like Penny Wong. If Australia was a real leader our museums would have a scene (or picture thereof) like that at Denmac Ford during the 1980s, only saying "LAST NEW CAR" instead of "LAST FALCON V8". In addition, unnecessary street lighting would be completely eliminated (I know too well that bike lights are sufficient) and houses and/or clothing would be much better designed so people could live without baseload power. That is what Australia would be like if it really wanted something approaching sustainability, whilst the rest of the world would get its food from less labour-efficient but more ecologically suitable places whatever they might be.
Is there such a thing as "properly using natural wealth"?
In a very recent post "South Africa Fades", Rod Dreher is pointing out that South Africa is failing in exactly the same way other states of sub-Saharan Africa did. The very first commentator attributes this to the inability of black Africans to develop efficient capitalist businesses, claiming they simply rob the country of its mineral wealth. The article from which Dreher based his news points out that South African education is very poor even compared with other countries in Black Africa.
Yet, people never make similar claims about Australia, despite the fact that a couple of days ago I saw that Australia's private sector invested an exceptionally small fraction of its income in research compared with that of European nations - and this was back in 1984 before increasing criticism of Australia's lack of innovation during the John Howard era emerged.
Yet, it is tempting to ask how much the poor economic performance of Black Africa would really be improved with the recommendations of Austrians and their allies. Austrians themselves admit that scarcity drives innovation in performance but never, ever consider what happens where there is no scarcity or even a glut as is the case with the supply of usable land in Australia and many parts of Black Africa. The answer, quite simply, is that if there is no scarcity there is no incentive to innovate, especially as people's desires are likely to be less when resources are abundant. (If resources are so scarce relative to demand that conservation becomes impossible or impracticable, then the incentive is to substitute for them completely. This is why mercury was phased out for most uses, not concern over its toxicity.)
Although South Africa's white minority is quite small, if it was as innovative as European nations of comparable or slightly larger size like Sweden or Switzerland, it could still achieve a great deal. The problem is that it is in the same position as Australia's population, and thus tends to become stuck with the attitudes developed when it colonised the area. It is tempting to say that if Bantu (or, I should point out, Nilotic or Cushitic or even Austronesian) farmers had not expanded into Southern Africa before Europeans, we would see the similarity between Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa much more clearly. As it is, there is much more poverty, but it is wrong to assume that extreme pro-capitalist reforms would turn sub-Saharan Africa into an innovative industrial powerhouse. The only exceptions that I would call likely are East Africa and the Gulf of Guinea coast, and even these do not have the land scarcity of the Alps or Himalayas or California or Japan. The best it could become is an Australia-like ultraconservative primary-product dependent land, and Australia's current history shows the dangers of that.
Yet, people never make similar claims about Australia, despite the fact that a couple of days ago I saw that Australia's private sector invested an exceptionally small fraction of its income in research compared with that of European nations - and this was back in 1984 before increasing criticism of Australia's lack of innovation during the John Howard era emerged.
Yet, it is tempting to ask how much the poor economic performance of Black Africa would really be improved with the recommendations of Austrians and their allies. Austrians themselves admit that scarcity drives innovation in performance but never, ever consider what happens where there is no scarcity or even a glut as is the case with the supply of usable land in Australia and many parts of Black Africa. The answer, quite simply, is that if there is no scarcity there is no incentive to innovate, especially as people's desires are likely to be less when resources are abundant. (If resources are so scarce relative to demand that conservation becomes impossible or impracticable, then the incentive is to substitute for them completely. This is why mercury was phased out for most uses, not concern over its toxicity.)
Although South Africa's white minority is quite small, if it was as innovative as European nations of comparable or slightly larger size like Sweden or Switzerland, it could still achieve a great deal. The problem is that it is in the same position as Australia's population, and thus tends to become stuck with the attitudes developed when it colonised the area. It is tempting to say that if Bantu (or, I should point out, Nilotic or Cushitic or even Austronesian) farmers had not expanded into Southern Africa before Europeans, we would see the similarity between Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa much more clearly. As it is, there is much more poverty, but it is wrong to assume that extreme pro-capitalist reforms would turn sub-Saharan Africa into an innovative industrial powerhouse. The only exceptions that I would call likely are East Africa and the Gulf of Guinea coast, and even these do not have the land scarcity of the Alps or Himalayas or California or Japan. The best it could become is an Australia-like ultraconservative primary-product dependent land, and Australia's current history shows the dangers of that.
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