A lesson from the US failure

According a a recent post in today’s Age, 4x4s, formally known as SUVs (sport utility vehicles) have been offsetting gains in fuel efficiency.

It is a point that I have known for so long, probably because my mother has long been angry that in many suburbs of Melbourne “every vehicle is either a BMW, a Mercedes or a four-wheel-drive”.

What I have learned independently, however, is that allowing 4x4s to have fuel consumption standards that are the same as those of commercial vehicles is the source of growth in 4x4 sales – along with the sinking of fuel prices into the depth of the Mariana Trench during the 1990s and over the past year. Less cheap petrol would certainly help but is politically suicidal, as is mass transit that would ire the mining and road lobbies.

However, making sure 4x4s are treated as ordinary passenger cars – even if as a distinct subset thereof – might well prevent or ameliorate the problems the United States has had with growth in 4x4 sales to something like half the passenger car market. Efforts to find a way of making the prices vehicles pay for the right to use roads correspond to the damage caused is another step, as would making sure all 4x4s pay the full luxury car tax – they are if anything less “essential” and more ecologically damaging than even a Rolls-Royce.

An always-forgotten contrast: simplicity and frugality

One common myth is that the lower consumption of Europeans and East Asians versus people in Australia and North American really means they have simpler and less materialistic lives. I can testify, however, from having lived in Europe for a month during the Australian summer of 2006/2007, the the life people in Europe and one presumes East Asia lead is anything but "simple".

It is also, contrary to what many perceive, exceedingly "consumerist" with a much greater variety of choices that is available in Australia leading people to want much more and also to want the most individual things possible. This is especially true of non-essentials like music and literature, where the much greater variety available in densely populated regions encourages radical tastes compared to the extremely conservative musical tastes of outer suburban Australia and Red America, where markets are smaller and only distinctly commercial music is viable for local selling.

I have long felt I have to explain these issues, but the author of a site called Blessed Simplicity does this very well. She points out that simplicity is ideally characterised by:

1. homemade products
2. individual, by-hand labour
3. personal fulfillment
4. goods like fresh bread, homemade soap, natural diapers for children and home-made remedies

The author contrasts this with "frugality", which she sees as

1. coupon-cutting
2. buying cheap and shoddy goods rather that waiting to afford better less cheap ones
3. deal-making to save money
4. having to self-consciously saving money

There is still some points that are overlooked.

One is that trying to buy the very best good is a form of materialism - indeed the form of materialism so harmful it seems to Europe and East Asia today, as Heath and Potter point out so well. Another is that if there is "frugality" in Europe and East Asia, it is forced by economics to achieve the living standards they do - even if they are not as high in many ways as those of Australia and Red America.

Still, the distinction between "simplicity" (always voluntary) and "frugality" (often if not usually forced) is one so seldom made I cannot fail to take note. It is critical for any person critical of the hyper-materialism that, as fertility rates show, is threatening most of the world today.

Rebuilding my laneway

This July, August and September the narrow stone laneway in which I have lived for the past eleven years is being rebuilt.

At first I though that the laneway might actually be being turned into a tar road - whcih I feel would be a genuine pity. It is actually being -resurfaced to make it less rough - my mother told me to recall my now-deceased father and how it was impossible to push his wheelchair westwards when we were taking him for an occasional trip from the nursing home in Balwyn where he lived for the last year and a half of his life.

The rebuilding of the laneway has been delayed by frequent heavy showers during most working days for the past month - curiously at a time when the weekends have been fine yet delightfully cool. The laneway has been grouted from its western end to the end of the swimming pool fence, but grouting to beyond my house was scheduled to have been done a week ago but has not been done yet owing to frequent showers during the working week. I have come to realise that this roadwork can only be done when the laneway is totally dry, so that even the sunny periods have not until today dried the moisture at the surface of the laneway sufficiently for grouting.

For me, it has been a little annoying because on one really wet afternoon I had to carry my bike through a huge pool of water. My mother said that the water was up to her knees when she came home that afternoon - at times I fear for the critical paper notes she carries every day from school!

Are Asperger's Syndrome and political correctness linked?

Having been as a child one of the firs people diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and long known how it affects my behaviour and leads to my pushy and often aggressive manner in public places (pushing in queues, running up to accost people about obsessions) and my inability to feel what other people think, I have in recent years as a self-taught social scientist wondered whether the political views of people with Asperger's Syndrome and other "autism spectrum disorders" tends to be substantially different from the mainstream.

The effects of inability to empathise on one's political and cultural views is something that has interested me a great deal over the past two years when I did a course of books about personality psychology for RMIT. What I quite swiftly concluded was:

• the more empathetic a person is, the more conservative and small-government his/her politics will be
• this is because the more empathetic a person is, the more feeling (s)he will have for not infringing upon other's privacy and hence right to private property
• the most empathetic and compassionate people will have great sensitivity to violation of private property
• autistic and similar people will have no such sensitivity and hence favour big government and public property

You can see an explanation for why I think this here.

One book I recently discovered when browsing for information about Alfred Seguine Kinsey, the father of the controversial sex researcher, said that Alfred Charles Kinsey may have had Asperger's Syndrome. My response was not that of somebody stunned, but of somebody half-expectant of such a revelation. It makes sense from what I know about Asperger's Syndrome that people with it would be socially as a radical as Kinsey was considered in his lifetime, and that, as his modern detractors point out, Kinsey ignored criticism.

To look for potential links between Asperger's and social or political radicalism, I have relied on Benjamin Wiker's books Architects of the Culture of Death and Ten Books that Screwed up the World. They provide the best general guide to the ideas conservatives oppose, but I found only Kinsey and Charles Darwin (see here) as "Asperger's possibles". Bertrand Russell, another writer to have a book on the hit list of the Right, is also listed, but there is no mention of the following from Wiker's lists:

• Thomas Hobbes
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Karl Marx
• Sigmund Freud
• John Stuart Mill
• Margaret Sanger
• Margaret Mead
• Peter Singer
• or Jack Kevorkian

as possible Aspergers' candidates. Of course, I don't rule out the possibility that the authors of these books know all or some of those simply could not have been autistic. I could still believe it that their sampling overlooked such peopleif the writers had not looked through every nook and cranny, but perhaps the problems associated with autism are not by any means necessary to develop the ideas hated by conservatives like Wiker. Either way, the hypothesis I have developed is worth a look.

Death of the Javan rhino?

In today's Jakarta Post (see the description here because I could not obtain accurate data from the paper) there is a description of the rainforest habitat of the critically endangered Javan Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) drying out because of weed invasion and global warming.

Whilst I accept that weed invasion is one of the most dangerous threats to wildlife throughout the world and that means of making far more attention paid to it are 100 percent desirable, the point made about climate change is hardly right. Even though an expanding tropical (monsoon) belt may shift the Intertropical Convergence Zone away from the equator, it is unlikely that rainfall in most of Java would be affected. Moreover, rainfall data from this year's super-monsoon do not suggest the equatorial regions will lose rainfall even as the edges of the monsoon belt become massively wetter. A larger area occupied by the Intertropical Convergence Zone is exactly what the "tropical expansion" that has desiccated southern Australia in the past thirteen years and will desiccate Tasmania within a decade or so would constitute.

It may be that climate models suggest the equatorial regions' climates will turn into something like East Africa with a bimodal rainfall regime and two short or fairly short dry seasons every year. The problem is that the uniqueness of East Africa is as much a function of its topography creating, as in Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Brazilian zona da mata, a climate in which rain comes from a "retreating monsoon" in the autumn. Rain shadows like that simply do not operate over the so-called "Maritime Continent" nor over most of South America.