Dave’s Archives

Oh... I see. Well, same to you with extraneous attachments. Nevertheless, after a short and somewhat unintentional break, I'm now ready to inflict myself upon you once more, hapless reader.

I shall commence by drawing your attention to the fine specimen that is federal MP Wilson Tuckey. (A fine specimen of what shall be left unspecified for now.) Nobody really takes Wilson Tuckey seriously on anything, not even his own party, but the simple fact that he's been elected (and continues to be re-elected) suggests that he does actually represent someone. This is rather a pity, in the general scheme of things.

Recently, of course, Tuckey has been piping up over the leadership of the Liberal Party, and Malcolm Turnbull's unsuitability for the role. I can't speak for anyone else, but the standing of the Liberal Party in my mind would be improved to a vastly greater extent by the removal of Tuckey than by the removal of Turnbull. Though Tuckey's replacement would have to represent the same constituency, surely he or she couldn't be quite so much of a callous, disreputable fruitcake.

By contrast, any replacement for Turnbull could easily be a lot worse. I find Turnbull to be a fairly un-objectionable leader, despite his poor polling. He's a much easier person to listen to than Kevin Rudd. He does come off as a little smug at times, and perhaps a little politically inexperienced, but I can happily live with such minor inconveniences if it means we won't be subjected to the Moral Crusades of Opposition Leader and Alternate Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The objectionable aspect of the Liberal Party is not (for the moment) its leader, but its policies and ideology. And people like Tuckey.

I read that the National Biblical Literacy Survey 2009 in the UK has reported a poor showing for Bible knowledge. I can't say I'm either terribly surprised or troubled by this; there are any number of other literary works more deserving of public knowledge, and at some level this must be reflected in the public's attitude.

There is, of course, some lingering sense that we "should" understand the Bible; that it above all other books has some special status. Well, that particular miscellaneous collection of ambiguously-translated ramblings is supposed to be the Definitive Word of the Infallible Creator of the Universe, isn't it? Of course it is - it says so itself. Comments from those affiliated with the survey are not much more moderate:

Brown said the survey showed the need to push for greater religious education among young people as knowledge of the Bible among the under-45 age group was in decline.

"We have got to recognize that it (the Bible) is the foundation of our society, upon which our whole culture has been based," he told Reuters. "To understand it and to live in it you do need an understanding of the Bible."

Well, I'm not entirely convinced. If only someone had conducted a survey to determine the relevance of the Bible to our society. Oh look, they did! This piece of logic evidentially fails on some people. The fact that few of us know or care about the Bible these days is fairly good evidence that it isn't relevant to much of our society at all, let alone forms the foundation of it. I assume, of course, that British and Australian culture are not too far removed.

To understand and live in Iranian or Saudi Arabian society, by contrast, I imagine you would need a solid understanding of the Koran and other sources of Islamic doctrine, but then that's because those countries are theocracies. The West has spent a good few hundred years slowly disentangling society and governance from religion, and frankly we're all much better off as a result.

The recycled water issue has arisen here in WA, where our state water minister Graham Jacobs has come out as a proponent.

There is nothing wrong with recycled drinking water. Surely all the water we drink has been through the digestive systems of a hundred million organisms over the history of the Earth anyway. Hence, the "yuck factor" is an astonishingly inane reason to reject water that we've recycled ourselves. It's entirely psychological - nobody has shown reason to believe that there are any actual safety issues (except insofar as dihydrogen monoxide is inherently unsafe, of course, but if you're worried about that then you're truly a sucker).

There are plenty of other things one might find cringeworthy about the food and drink we consume, from the component parts of a chicken nugget to sugar content of so-called  "flavoured water". These are far more legitimate points of concern than either the imaginary dangers or "yuck factor" of recycled water.

The shadow water minister seems to be hedging his bets, though:

The Opposition's spokesman for water, Fran Logan, supports the strategy, but says he is concerned about the public response to the longer-term recommendation to source water directly from waste water treatment plants.

"With respect to taking waste water directly from a sewerage works and then putting them through a recycling plant and turning it into straight drinking water, I think the Minister is going to have a big job on his hands convincing West Australians that's fine and that's ok to drink," he said.

One would have hoped that Mr Logan, being someone who purports to support the idea, might actually do something to help reassure the public of the safety of recycled water, rather than promoting the fears of its opponents.

Julie Bishop is making the case that Stern Hu - the Rio Tinto executive mysteriously detained in Shanghai - should be released after having been detained for 7 days without charge.

This is just a bit rich, considering her party's time in government saw:

1. the excessive detention for months and even years of completely innocent people - asylum seekers who are overwhelmingly genuine refugees; and
2. the implementation of preventative detention orders, whereby a person can be detained by the AFP for 14 days without charge. (One might argue that terrorism is a lot more serious than whatever it is Stern Hu may or may not be caught up in, but the legal principle of habeus corpus does not make such distinctions.)

She's basically right this time, of course - better to be inconsistent than consistently nasty - though I'm not sure of the wisdom of making an international incident out of it.

Paul Kelly's thoughts on this are interesting. For all its centuries of history and accumulated wisdom, this incident seems to suggest that the current Chinese regime is actually somewhat ignorant of the way the world works.

Any appearance of Andrew Bolt on the ABC's Insiders programme is bound to result in at least one deranged pronouncement on the conspiracy that is climate change. (This is something of a shame, because on other issues discussed on Insiders he does often approach sanity.)

In the closing comments, Bolt had this contribution to make:

The latest results just in a couple of days ago: the world has... the planet has warm... cooled for the last 8 years to normal levels; the land surface measurements cooled for the last 8 years; and sea levels - good heavens, Penny Wong was wrong in that too - that too has cooled over 5 years.

To put this into some perspective, NASA offers the following global temperature data:

"Normal levels" indeed. Bolt gave no indication of where his particular data comes from, and a more comprehensive denial of climate reality (complete with what could be a Freudian slip) would be hard to pack into such a small window of time.

Note - Bolt says that sea "levels" have "cooled". Either cooling or dropping would be a neat trick, since the data shows quite unambiguously that the sea levels are rising, with about half the rise due to thermal expansion. Bolt himself posted a graph on his blog showing the changes to sea levels just days ago, though with the reality-defying annotation "FLAT" (in comic sans, no less) plastered across the last three years (in much the same way you might expect a bright red sign to be cheerfully labelled "blue"). Bolt himself didn't add the annotation; that honour goes to former meteorologist Anthony Watts. Now, because one must always strive for betterment, Bolt has apparently decided that "FLAT" = "cooling", and that 3 years = 5 years. He was reading from notes, so if it was a slip-up it was a very well planned one.

As you can see, the above graph quite handily refutes its own annotation (which was not on the original, just in case you're wondering). One despairs at the futility of debating people who not only fail to notice such an astoundingly obvious trend, but manage to perceive precisely the opposite of what is staring them in the face.

I was also struck by the time frames Bolt was using. The normal denialist claim is that there has been no warming since 1998. Though that one is easily refuted (in no small part because 1998 recorded a temperature spike due to El Niño), it's still a stronger case than for the last 8 years. After all, 2001 looks to have recorded some of the coldest temperatures in the last decade (though it's still in the top 10 warmest years on record).

If I didn't know better, I'd say that Bolt simply printed off some three-year old (because then 1998 would be 8 years ago) piece of denialist propaganda and regurgitated it on-air as "the latest results". That's mere speculation, of course.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens has introduced the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009. It's been referred to the a Senate committee, due to report on November 26.

Plenty of time for a raft of both enlightening and cringeworthy commentary to materialise as public submissions. The bill isn't going to get far, of course (though I will be happy to be proven wrong). The ALP seems to be walking a path of compromise that it hopes will be minimally acceptable to the maximum number of voters; i.e. they do not support same-sex marriage, but they support everything that same-sex marriage is about.

Personally, I think that the same-sex marriage issue, more than almost anything else, shows vividly just how much sway religious and social dogma has over our society, compared to empathy and rational thought. There just isn't any remotely intelligible argument against allowing same-sex marriage - just a haphazard collection of inane and fearful pronouncements. There are precious few political issues where I'd feel comfortable saying that.