If this poll gets some traction, and Turnbull overtakes Gillard as preferred ALP leader, my idea avoids any charge of Turnbull being seen as an opportunistic traitor.

Seriously now, what else can the ALP do?  It’s got to be their best chance of getting rid of Gillard while not looking like a cynical desperate machine-driven coup to favor another Labor hack.

To be fair, it’s better structured than a typical yes/no "do crims get off too lightly" reader poll in a tabloid, but it is still dangerously simplistic.

At the end of the survey is a list of factors that might alter sentencing, things like whether the person was drunk, low IQ, impact on the victim…  This should have come first, before the section asking for judgements on case studies.  (Ask any teacher about well designed exams – you do the bits with individual elements first to get people warmed up, then give the questions that require all the elements to be integrated!)

The people putting the question together know the difference this arse-about structure makes … and how reticient people would be to go back umpteen web pages to moderate prior judgements after being prompted by a general principle.

Even then, the list of general principles was devoid of nuance, and some pretty basic elements were not there.

Sure, there was low IQ to moderate sentencing, but nothing about significant depressive episodes or financial stress.  Nothing to allow you to say "financial distress or depression or low IQ are reasonable reasons to lighten a sentence if it’s a theft not an assault; previous good character and being intoxicated/remorseful might moderate sentencing if you’ve put a brick through a window, but not a face."

Was there anything about penalties for theft being bumped up or down if the person was wealthy and didn’t need the money?  No.  Surprise!  They don’t want that meme to whip up popular opinion and appear in their report!

And now to the case studies themselves that came first, each giving a very brief account of events, the maximum sentence, a call for your notion of a sentence and non-parole period.

At first glance, one case study might have nuance – but the nuance is completely voided by the lack of similar cases with one variable changed.

There is no indication of current sentencing practice for similar cases – just the maximum for the worst instance of that offence and no indication of what the worst circumstances are.

Take the question about the Year 12 and 10 students, aged 18 and 15, sex occurring in the bedroom, after the boy had gone out to buy condoms as agreed between the kids.

Now, was the boy nearly 19 and the girl just 15, or the boy just 18 and the girl nearly 16?  It makes a difference.  Did they have a similar case studies with the age/genders the other way, or with two male students, or two female students?  Did they ask a similar case where there was no condom use, no special planning?

Especially these days, with so many 15 yo old girls sexually active, I’d want to know more about the relationship – how the one that was caught might have been gentler and more constructive than the many unreported that have one manipulative person, no real care, and the sex happens somewhere grubby.

Were there in each case a short list of the factors to allow you to indicate whether you considered them relevant?  No.

Oh… Yeah, nice chunking of the multiple choice sentences – almost as bad as "fine, 0-1 year, 1-2 year, 2-5 year, 5-25 year, life"  Would it have been that difficult to ask for a number of years?

A friend, a lawyer, got angry very early on – had to stop – saying she needed much more infortmation.  I had exactly the same feeling.

Oh, there is room for general comments on sentencing – but on the PDF for you to write on and email back, you could bare fit a tweet in that box!

And… no I’m looking at the "long survey" not the quickie! 

Now, it cannot be about impact on lives, as having your life savings taken by a white-collar criminal is just as damning.  It’s not about developing good guidelines as there is nothing in the case study design, taken together, that will allow any reliable teasing-apart of just what people consider important about particular crimes and their circumstances (likelyhood to re-offend, etc)  It’s not about getting any subtlety as otherwise there’d be more than a couple of lines for free-form comment, probably less than twitter’s 140 character limit and certainly less than a facebook status update of 400 characters … unless you wrote it with a microscope!

It’s for headlines, not reform, and not for long term safety.

This isn’t Ballieu’s Liberal Government unless he has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing all his life.  Is he actually in control?  If not, he should resign to prove his internal party enemies, the Abbott-loving extremists, are running the show.

Notes/See Also

• At the Victorian Department of Justice:
  • Survey as PDF
  • The Website: myviews.justice.vic.gov.au
• For information on the inadequacy of information and sentencing practice, see "Sentencing by plebescite" by LegalEagle at Skepticlawyer (2011-08-03) … and follow the links. LE, a lawyer teaching at Melb Uni, says
  

  If you look at the Sentencing Advisory Council website, you will see that a variety of research has been conducted which confirms this research.  Consequently, the general trend is this: people who have the information before the court think that judicial sentences are appropriate.  People who have a newspaper-style article with limited information are more likely to think that a sentence is inadequate.

• "Dodgy DOJ Survey designed to trick Victorians into calling for harsher sentencing" – Jeremy Sear at Anonymous Lefty (2011-08-29) – and thanks to LE at skepticlawyer for alerting me to Jeremy’s post.  Jeremy has correctly covered the politics and motives:
  

  Pleasing the Herald Sun, pleasing donors who build and run prisons, looking like you’re doing something about crime (that will, conveniently, probably get worse as you train minor offenders in prison to be more serious offenders, thereby prompting the building of more prisons, ad infinitum), enjoying the satisfaction of putting poor people behind bars.  I don’t know – I’ve never quite grasped why locking someone up is such a vicious pleasure for people not motivated wholly by revenge.

For one, the US dollar needs to be treated on its merits, devalued by the market rather than priced at a premium on the basis of nostalgia.

A default, then backdown of the Republicans so employees are paid, would through a low greenback and deserved loss of consumer confidence, might help muzzle consumerism first in the US and then across the world.

A generation-long technical depression is not incompatible with decent lives everywhere, if capital and production moves away from supplying the affluenza addiction and redirected to real human needs.

A population can be fed, housed, literate, and concentrate on human-heartedness more efficiently without skewing production to trinkets, without the extra floorspace for the wealthy to house those trinkets.

A long technical depression is not inconsistent with better lives, better provision of necessities – and politicians who can only manage a wasteful economy with GDP growth not merely illusory but counterproductive, are unfit for their positions as leaders.

This redirection is useful, no, necessary (if not sufficient) for managing the misery climate change will cause.

People fear economic adjustment to climate change, a percent or two cut on growth, without considering that it is possible for cuts to be targetted, indeed, cutting non-essentials more than the environment requirements permits an increase in economic activity in essential sectors.

A plummeting avoidance of trinkets, a redirection of reduced total economic activity to increase economic activity where it should have been concentrated anyway … if a US default can hasten this, then bring it on.

"Higher Height, Higher Ability: Judgment Confidence as a Function of Spatial Height Perception" (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022125) looks at self-perception of ability, and shows being higher (or even thinking you are up higher) makes you pump up estimates of your own judgement and abilities.

Based on grounded cognition theories, the current study showed that judgments about ability were regulated by the subjects’ perceptions of their spatial height. In Experiment 1, we found that after seeing the ground from a higher rather than lower floor, people had higher expectations about their performance on a knowledge test and assigned themselves higher rank positions in a peer comparison evaluation. In Experiment 2, we examined the boundary conditions of the spatial height effects and showed that it could still occur even if we employed photos rather than actual building floors to manipulate the perceptions of spatial heights.

So… it would be interesting to do followup studies on wage differentials, workplace attitudes (including friction, resentfulness, arrogance) from staff to senior management, and from senior management to staff, based on building layout.

What effect does this have on resistance of those on high to requests or suggestions from those on the ground floor, and what might this do to organizational efficiency?

Hell, in city blocks, adjusting for rent differences and wages, do voting intentions change?  Might this paper affect town planning for high-rise buildings, one party pushing it more than another, even pushing it more or less depending on how marginal a seat is?

No wonder Kirk never took any real notice of Scotty down in the engine saying "She canna handle any more o’ this Cap’n"!

Even fixing up the biased Christianity in our schools, replacing it merely with comparative religion and ethics classes: good, but not good enough.  We need to provide kids with the tools for consolation and strength, the classical personal philosophies of the likes of Marcus Aurelius.

It’s deprivation, deprivation bordering on abuse.

Over the last couple of years, contact with a few of old uni friends has been re-established – and a couple of them have been having a hard time.  Intelligent folk, decent, crap from the fates, from spouses, from family courts … and there is one bit of advice that seems to have done the most good – and started doing good almost straight away:

Seriously, check out wikipedia on "Meditations" and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who wrote it, check out his wikiquotes, and remember this guy had the weight of the known world on his shoulders, and despite later (unprovable) diagnoses as suffering from depression, ruled pretty damn well, and his notes on how to view the world and the crap happening allowed him to rule well.  Have a browse, and if some of it rings true, get yourself the Penguin translation and open it at random – each paragraph stands on it’s own, so even if depression is hitting your cognition as you say, it’s in easy to digest bite-sized pieces.  Then come back to me if you want more of the Stoics and the Epicureans.

Well, usually within a day I’m getting emails that are "Wow!  Never knew this stuff – I mean, I’ve seen him as, you know, the good emperor in ‘Gladiator’, but …"

… and then will come a few quotes that have struck them, in their situations, as particularly apt and helpful – in a way the bible isn’t.  And every few days, for some time, the emails will contain the next quote that has made a difference.

Marcus doesn’t just say "turn the other cheek", he reminds himself how to differentiate between the person and the act, look at the extenuating circumstances such as ignorance making the next act not revenge but teaching, how important it is to focus on your own acts allowing self-respect and that nature has fitted you to endure the crap that comes.

• Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.
   
• What’s bad for the hive can’t be good for the bee.
   
• We humans are made for each other, so either teach them or put up with them.
   
• Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
   
• Whatever the world may say or do, be like an emerald, and keep your color true.
   
• Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.
   
• If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.

I’ll get regular emails that include "Oh today I found this quote… and it’s really good for me now".

For centuries, Marcus Aurelius was considered an excellent book for the bedside table (in Victorian times, just next to the bible) to pick up at random, read a thought or two, and think about before lights out.  It was considered an excellent "consolation" for sensitive souls beset by troubles, which makes sense as it was written mostly by someone who’d love to have been a librarian, harming no-one, helping everyone, but was forced to go and fight the Germans who were giving lots of grief to the northern empire.  (A peaceful man forced to kill is tortured.)

And yet, while we have Christian proselytes in primary schools brainwashing young children with the least useful and least applicable aspects of Christianity, while our governments are pushing chaplains into schools where social workers and people with psych majors are needed, where the Commonwealth Ombudsman says there is no way to actually define when the bastards are proselytizing contrary to regulations, we give nothing to the intelligent kids, especially the "sciency" types, that they won’t reject because they are too smart, won’t reject because it has too little depth, won’t be able to use because it’s too removed from actual emotions.

The "crap that happens" is timeless, the tools to deal with it, with enough sophistication to avoid being simplistic, have been available since the high points of Greek and Roman civilization, the easiest entry point is Marcus Aurelius, who was not an academic, but, like so many people, a professional facing existential problems, a tough job, and pressures from all sides.

And if a kid, or adult, exhausts Marcus Aurelius, they can be pointed to Epicurus ("The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."), and Epictetus ("First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."), hell, let them work their way through all the Stoics.

Why would this be wrong?  Where would be the harm?  What is stopping this from happening?  Why do we deprive the best and brightest of our kids of the best and brightest consolations in western civilization?

This deprivation is almost as abusive as refusing to teach kids to read and write.

Notes:

• It should be noted that Epictetus is attributed as inspiration by Albert Ellis, the developer of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, which is quite effective, proven even able, with appropriate work by the individual, to help schizophrenics manage the way they react to their hallucinations – something drugs cannot do, except perhaps in large enough doses to knock out thinking entirely.
   
• Gibbon‘s marvellous "Decline and Fall" (to my tastes, perhaps the most gorgeous prose with depth, detail and insight in the English language), describing the reigns of Antoninus (through most of which, Marcus Aurelius was pretty-much a partner rather than merely, from the death of Hadrian, the nominated successor:
  

  Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth.  His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
   
  …
   
  But (Marcus Aurelius’) life was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno.  He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfection of others, just and beneficent to all mankind.
   
  …
   
  The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.  The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect.  The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.  Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.
   
  …
   
  The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable, and the only defective, part of his character.  His excellent understanding was often deceived by the unsuspecting goodness of his heart.  Artful men, who study the passions of princes and conceal their own, approached his person in the disguise of philosophic sanctity, and acquired riches and honours by affecting to despise them.

  If one’s only defect is to treat people too mildly, to have an unsuspecting goodness of heart, it is surely no vice: indeed, were all the world to have such a defect, it would be no defect at all, but the strongest foundation of that happiest world.
   

• Marcus Aurelius is the only Roman Emperor still on coins nearly 2000 years later, on the Italian Euro series along with Dante and Leonardo.

We in the left should acknowledge those on the right who are thinking logically, with decent motives, and help them clean up the fifth column of bastards and inflammatory voices within the right.  It will give us on the left a chance to have a proper debate where we’ll have to keep on our toes – be protagonists not antagonists.

But those on the right who choose not to reflect, choose to dismiss Breivik as unrelated to the rhetoric of right-wing pundits, are fair game for derision and exposure by the left.

The decent righties can be troubled and reflective.  We on the left need them, and need to help them reflect rather than attack the good with the bad, causing knee jerk defences, the debate about extremism turned merely into "two dogs barking"

Consider the predicament and honesty and basic decency of "Anonymous John" from Sweden, commenting on the sweep-Breivik-under-the-carpet post over at OzConservative – it’s something every lefty should read and reflect on to know what we should do next:

From John’s multiple comments to "More News on Breivik", OzConservative, 2011-07-24:

Personally I am deeply troubled that I have quite a lot ideologically in common with Breivik. Discussing what went wrong this friday is a serious challenge for the new radical right.

and

I do not have any coherent thoughts right now, so forgive the rambling.
 
Sharing ideological points with Breivik feels like making a political speech and getting applause from a bunch of thugs with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads.
 
We might share enemies, but if the options are a society degenerated into the islamic republic of Europe or being ruled by a bunch of mass murdering crypto-nazis I’m going with the slow descent into European irrelevancy.

There’s another example, again from Skepticlawyer, who, in a comment to her previously mentioned post, points to a good piece from the Adam Smith Institute, "Free Market Anti-Corporatism" (2011-07-25).  We lefties point to the corruption in markets, and we are absolutely right.  But… let’s help the decent righties who are actually trying to help society rather than themselves personally, aiming at utilitarianism, clean up the bastards who are a fifth column inside capitalism.  From the Free Market Anti-Corporatism piece mentioned – and it’s my bolding:

Too many people think that supporting free markets is the same as supporting existing businesses.  This is wrong.  Capitalism is a system of profit and loss, and the latter is crucially important for it to work.  I think this is Moore’s point.  Take his critique of the banking system:

…when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens.  It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few.

Politicians have an aversion to business loss, because losses are messy and, in the short term, disruptive to the economy.  But loss is crucial for capitalism to work.  Bailouts given to avoid losses now create a long-term moral hazard that will only encourage the recklessness that caused the last financial crisis.  There’s no better recipe for irresponsible behaviour than the knowledge that someone else will pay for your mistakes.
 
To favour a genuine free market is to be directly opposed to the interests of big businesses.  As a libertarian, I want a system where any firm, however big it is, can go bust, and where market entry is easy and cheap so new players can compete with the old ones.
 
Businesses that already exist don’t want this free system – they want protection from new entrants, to avoid being competed out of business. Businesses don’t want free markets, because in a free market, they’re vulnerable to competition.

Damn.  This little lefty me has to give a big clap to the invisible hand faithful.

Can you imagine if the free-market philosophical types got their way?  If we could show to all that the Laboral coalition are acting in a way that is anti-environment, anti-worker and anti-business all at the same time?  That they are prostituting themselves to bastards?

Can you imagine how much we lefties would have to shape up ourselves?  Avoid sloppy arguments?  Can you imagine the improvement in the dialectic and the policy outcomes?

Now, the worst of the right deserve to be attacked with all non-violent means available.  They are playing dirty.  We must support the "loyal opposition", the decent righties (conservative and libertarian) who play hard and fair.  Sure, we’ll fight with the good righties, we’ll cop and give unintended hockey sticks to the shins, the bruises from a clash going for a ball, the occasional cracked head – and there’ll be sincere apologies all around.  Nothing better than a good game played hard and fair by both sides.

But the other righties?  The hypocrites in it for the money as shock-jocks, the ones who bleat and twist the arms of politicians for their own gain knowing it is at the expense of the group?  They need to be exposed, their pants pulled down, in front of their duped victims in the general public, their pox-ridden pudenda for all to see, and all to shun.

But please read Skepticlawyer’s post and her comments which include a series of links to howlers – a rightie prepared to take to task the likes of rightie shock-jock Beck comparing the dead teenagers to Hilter Youth … (and you won’t find an article on Beck’s outrageous statement anywhere on news.com.au).  We on the left need the voice of the right to be people like Skepticlawyer, even though they’ll give us much tougher arguments to deal with and respond to.  This would be good for the true right, the true left, the general public.

So how about we make sure our targets on the right are the ones that need targetting.  How about we make it easy for the decent righties to muzzle the rabid dogs they’ve thought were loyal for too long?

Notes

Skepticlawyer is the name of the group blog, and Skepticlawyer is the screen-name of the founding author – a staunch libertarian, whereas the others are at different points on the political spectrum.  It’s my favorite place for civil discourse with protagonists of different views.  Play nice.

What’s bad for the hive can’t be good for the bee (Marcus Aurelius).

Find out what you are good at, and do Good with it.

(That’ll do Pig, that’ll do)

The research shows a relationship between average erect male member length and economic growth – an inverted U shape – with not-too-big, not-too-small, but just right (13.5 cm), leading to the best economic growth.

Imagine the spam: "Dear CEO – are you giving your stakeholders enough satisfaction?"  Imagine the econometric pages – we might get gory statistics on current accounts and budget balances per-cm as well as per-cap.

It’s not like it is only a minor effect:

Somewhat surprisingly, male organ was a stronger determinant of economic development than country’s political regime type at the Polity IV autocracy democracy spectrum.

The authors try to explore various reasons for this (including the male tendency to seek self-esteem in the wrong places, and they have interesting ties to gender equality, given the value women bring to the workplace:

First, could the size of male organ be non-linearly related to the value society put on women and thus aggravate economic development?  A brief observation of the data suggests that gender equality is less established at the extremes of the male organ distribution, namely in Asia and Africa.  This would be consistent with the nding that the the 1985 GDP and male organ experienced an inverted U-shaped relationship.  However, this does not reverberate well with the result that GDP growth between 1960 and 1985 and male organ are negatively associated.  Ignoring these contradictions it is also sensible to ask why penile length and gender equality would be even related in the rst place?

Of course, it’s econometrics, so there has to be some underlying maths, and something about competitive advantage of nations:

Third, in an evidently Freudian line of thought the notion of self-esteem might be at play.  In particular, male organ size s and income y could be considered factors in the aggregate ‘self-esteem production function’ f and hence affect utility u.  Assuming the following functional form and decreasing returns of self-esteem, namely u = f(y+s) and f’(.) > 0, f”(.) < 0, the ‘small male organ’ countries would gain more utility by expanding their economy than the ‘large male organ’ countries.  Actually the latter populations would simply exploit their nature-given, non-disposable groin-area endowments.

"non-dispoable groin-area endowments" – well non-disposable without medical intervention anyway – but it’s a bit of a m…, um, I was going to say… um, an awkward phrase to mix into economic conversations.  Oh well, that’d be nothing new.

However, on a more serious note, it is interesting to see self-esteem discussed as a driver of economic output – and of course, this would be independent of gender.  Do bosses make their employees less effective by belittling them or making them insecure?  Are executives and managers who are up-themselves and arrogant less effective than more reasonable folk.

The notion that self-esteem could be involved somewhere in the causal chain is useful – even if it does make bosses uncomfortable.

However, these findings entail one major caveat as they can only establish statistical correlations, not necessarily causalities. Hence to conclude that small male organs have driven GDP growth since 1960 is premature, however strong the correlation. Yet the results still suggest that if penile length is not the culprit, then some interplaying unobserved country or population characteristics could manifest itself in economic development. Be it as it may, any non-trivial statistical correlation with explanatory power of 15 to 20% should be taken seriously and warrants more elaborate research.

If this paper, by raising the importance of self-esteem in a workforce or the entire economy, leads to less workplace bullying, efforts by management to improve the self-esteem of workers, then the low-brow titallation and jokes (including of course, this post) will be a small price to pay.

See Also

• Hat tip: The Economist "Free Exchange" blog: Size Matters
   
• Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter? – Helsinki Center for Economic Research Discussion Paper No 335, Tatu Westling, University of Helsinki, July 2011, ISSN 1795-0562. And yes, the paper is listed in with other papers with probably no smiles in them at all… titles like "Forecasting U.S. Macroeconomic and Financial Time Series with Noncausal and Causal AR Models: A Comparison" or "The role of city managers and external variables in explaining efficiency differences of Finnish municipalities".

I’d thought the label "madman" would be applied if the mass-murderer was white and non-moslem, if the mass-murderer was from the left or the right.

But, thinking about the effect of who was killed by Breivik, the gutting of the Norwegian lefty talent base, I think the likes of the Murdoch press would identify such politically-motivated terrorism as such, if and only if it was something like a (very hypothetical) watermelon mass-murderer, going into a Young Liberals annual general meeting and wiping out a similar proportion of talent.

If a red, a green, an atheist, or even a small-l-liberal worried about climate change, took out a similar percentage of conservative proselytes and propagandists – especially if wiping out a generation of them, it would not be portrayed as the work of a sole lunatic, it would be labelled by Bolt and Murdoch as the inevitable consequence of the ideology, and the tabloids and other conservative organs would be calling for latte-sippers to silenced, bugged by anti-terrorist squads, and removal of habeas corpus from all those who are left of Genghis Khan, who side with the vast majority of climate scientists, they’d want the Greens to be a proscribed terrorist organization, they might even push for scientific journals to be blocked by ISPs.

Can you imagine Tony Abbott at a press conference, asking questions indirectly of Bob Brown about whether he, as Greens Leader, accepted responsibility for a decimation of Young Liberals?  The Mad Monk would leap at the chance.

I don’t want to imagine what Bolt would write, but I can imagine the likes of Gerard Henderson, in measured tones, saying "It’s not surprising this happened, a fundemental precept of the environmental movement, adopted by many in the left, is that the world’s population and need for resources is at critical overload, and together with the left’s hatred for Tony Abbott especially and people who wait for more science on climate change, with people who want economic growth and the resource consumption required … well … it’s an effective way of getting what they want.  Even the left-wing press like The Age, and websites like GetUp must recognize the effect of their rhetoric on susceptible individuals, and adjust their reporting and propaganda accordingly."

Of course, I’m a watermelon, so while I think the tragedy in Norway was a terrorist act, perhaps one of the most effectively targetted bits of political violence in decades, I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone who reads Hayek or Bolt should be considered suspect, that Hayek (useful if taken in context), that Bolt (bad, but should be ridiculed and shamed rather than banned), or even that the school of conservative will inevitably lead to the destruction of civilization..

But … what do you think the rightie media and the unprincipled politicians who make up most of the vocal right would do if the perpetration of a massive crime on their political allies by their political opponents took place?

I guess that’s the difference between the current leaders of the left versus those on the right who use and support the likes of Bolt.  The decent righties, and there are quite a few of them, would probably join the left, after consideration of the effects of Breivik’s actions, and label them terrorist, and label as terrorist the (extremely hypothetical) action by a greenie against the young libs.

Those who refuse to label Breivik as a terrorist, who refuse to recognize the impact of extremist righties, are probably hypocrites, would probably be happy to label left or environmental opponents as enemies of civilization given the least excuse.

Of course, it’s not the average righty who would be such a hypocrite – they just mightn’t want to think so hard about Breivik as a terrorist.  Let’s be clear – it’s time the good righties took charge and muzzled the rabid dogs among them.

And just as importantly, the left should not use the tragedy as a pretext to attack reasonable righties, to remove freedoms – merely ask, but ask strongly, that the rabid dogs should be muzzled, and that we can have a debate with the reasonable righties, not be forced to engage with the unreasonable ones.

Notes/See Also

• "Dummies Guide To Mass Murderers" (2011-07-24).
   
• "What turned Breivik into a gunman and/or bomber?" (2011-07-23)
   
• "Was the Norwegian atrocity strategic?" (2011-07-24)

It’s wiped a massive proportion of the talent the left has, talent about to enter real-world politics over the next decade.

It has gutted the left’s talent pool, effective for the next few generations: – the young talent so tragically removed would doubtless have had children and grandchildren of similar talents, of similar leftist leanings.

There are indications about the net that Breivik thought strategically.

There is scuttlebutt about the net that Anders Breivik proposed a long term plan to change Norwegian politics – a newspaper (he should have just called Rupert and he’d get that in 10 seconds), infiltration of NGOs, etc. CORRECTION: Not scuttlebutt, not confined by Norway, and with documents admitted correct by Breivik’s lawyer. See here.

This was not to instill terror, not (as some decent and intelligent righty friends have suggested) merely a means to get a pulpit in the courtroom, not merely to install terror, not revenge.

The youth camp had about 500 of the best and brightest.  Not a random collection of people, no non-political-combatants.  Breivik wiped out nearly 100 of them: that’s nearly 20%.

I have no doubts Breivik would have killed the lot of them if he could have.

Twenty percent?  Risk management disciplines define a 10% loss of income, budget, or resources, as "catastrophic".

If there was a similar double-decimation of targetted killings, for political purposes, it would come close to being labelled (albeit problematically) as genocide.

What Breivik as an individual did was not much different to what fascist parties mid-century did – trying to wipe out communism with targetted killings.

Imagine the effect of an individual with a machine gun or bomb at the annual conference of any political party, at a world conference of climatologists.

Imagine the effect on the stocks of a company if 20% of the best-and-brightest shareholders were taken out at their AGM.  Imagine if a cancer patient, family owning a lot of Woolworths shares, wiped out 20% of the most influential Coles stakeholders and executives.  The cancer patient’s family would have massively more valuable assets overnight, and would cash in.

Breiviks actions probably had more impact.

The strategic nature of Breivik’s plan demonstrates his insight.  Unless there is massive recruitment to the left, others will see Breivik’s action as extremely effective – and there will be more of the same, and not just from right-wing extremists.

The only possible means of nullifying the damage Breivik has done, and the ongoing damage of those who would use similar strategies, is for a population to rise up and become politically active, to become "radical moderates" at least, and preferably ardent lefties/greens.

Unfortunately, moderation correlates with political apathy or at least inertia, unwillingness to rise up.

I fear that Breivik has already achieved many of his goals.  I fear that his strategy will be followed by others.

See Also:

• The "not-a-lone-madman" but "leaderless resistance" model for Breivik is described here, and worth glancing quickly through, although I don’t subscribe to the notion of Breivik being the "perfect product" – that smacks at least a little of the same errors the right commits when slagging off lefties.
   
• Here is (apparently) a translation of some detailed correspondence from Breivik to the propaganda wing of his fellow-travellers (who may, or more likely not, have similar attitudes to violence).  It is worth reading to see the absence of typical "madness" that can be evident in such communications – he writes like a cold hard manager – albeit one with a surfeit of arrogance.
   
• I actually wrote this post trying to be less emotional than perhaps was warranted, and I did a bit better in a comment over at LP.
  

  Even if there was gloating about any red-faces of right-wing pundits (it’s unlikely they’ll actually feel their faces go red), the left should ponder just how many of the best-and-brightest of the left were pre-emptively removed from history, and the effect this could have on the quality of political debate over the next decades in Norway specifically, and western Europe in general. It is a massive loss not just in personal terms. not merely a horrible and undeserved shock to a peaceful nation – the difference to society these kids would have made is considerable, and that includes any influence the quality of political debate in Europe has on the quality of debate world-wide.

• Update: The Age in Norway’s Breivik planned carnage: lawyer (2011-07-24) reports the long time this was planned – long enough for any associates, extremist or not, to pick up anything that would mitigate, such as depression or schizophrenia:
  

  The internet document – part diary, part bomb-making manual and part political rant in which he details his Islamophobia – explains how he set up front mining and farming businesses to prepare the attacks for which he was arrested on Friday.

  "The reasoning for this decision is to create a credible cover in case I am arrested in regards to the purchase and smuggling of explosives or components to explosives – fertiliser," the tract says.

  Note he is only talking about having a credible legal cover in order to be able to execute his plans, NOT legal cover to excuse himself.  He won’t be pleading insanity, will he, however much the right-wing pundits would like this to be the public perception.

Personally, I’d classify all four as mad, and where frank psychosis is incomplete, the evil results come from improper education, incitement by others in the same demographic, and twisted readings of the texts of the ideology.

In other words, things that could be largely prevented by a combination of decent community mental health services, and an education system that gives fair exposition of all texts used by nutters as pretexts for action, stressing the humanity in those texts, and showing how the inhumane parts should be deprecated.

But that table above (although in arabic countries, the polar opposite labels) is how the popular press presents the assumptions and interpretations, and that’s how the bogan majority, whether they are on the dole with thongs for formal wear, or in finance wearing gucci shoes while relaxing at home, see the world, and treat others according to those views.

Even respectable papers came out in the wake of the Norwegian tragedy printing assumptions of Islamist terrorist cells as the perpetrators.

Even the language of all the politicians hinted at terrorist groups, of you-know-what nudge-nudge wink-wink varieties.

The tabloid press, even after printing (in small print) corrections, kept running "evidence" of terror cells in Norway – terror cells being detected and dismantled quite competently by the Norwegian justice system.

The headlines, even after the arrest of the white, christian, freemason righty who listens to classical music and reads Adam Smith, still screamed "Norway’s 9/11" rather than "Norway’s Oklahoma".

Of course, the Norwegians are good examples, especially with a Labor/Green coalition, of watermelon latte-sippers – so whereas Dubya Bush immediately issued statements about "we will get you!" and then proceeds to dismantle human rights and freedoms, the Norwegian PM issues a statement saying "we will retaliate by strengthening our democracy.".

Perhaps the Norwegians are channelling Marcus Aurelius: "refusing to emulate is the best revenge".

But even latte-sippers have a problem – when do we use the labels "evil" or "insane" for persons or ideologies?  Or, as a lawyer friend puts it – there’s "mad, bad and sad" in the mix, and sometimes it’s hard to figure out how much of what is mixed with what, whether we need psychiatric, corrections, or social services.

It seems in the anglophone world that the politicians and press are quite happy to whip up a frenzy, preferably against minorities, so they can have an arms race of hairy chests, crying "more prisons", "deportation", "no immigration".

I suppose simplistic interpretations and policy development is perfect for political success – don’t let the masses think – they might actually want the powerful to do something decent, the masses might actually disagree with those in positions of power and undue influence.

The favored approach of the powerful – promoting hypocrisy, will NOT do a damn thing to prevent the next tragedy – only make it more likely.

Imagine a world where the latte-sippers, the left and right wing versions having their polite disagreements, actually did dominate journalism, actually did brainwash all the kiddies into babyccino-sippers, actually got decent mental health and education systems in place!

It probably wouldn’t stop all the lunatics before it was too late, but it would stop many.

It definitely would lower the levels of fear, distrust and hate that promote ideologically-motivated violence.

And who could object to that?

Ummm… the religious nutters (the non-latte-sipping varieties), the power brokers, the tabloid press, the back-room politicians and strategists…

…the arms manufacturers, …

…the prisons industry, …

…yada…

…yada…

…yada…

Here’s the best way for the ALP to keep Tony Abbott and the Liberal Backroom Bastards out of the lodge – offer to support Malcolm Turnbull as PM on the floor of the house.

… Malcolm as PM, not in the ALP, but supported by a coalition of ALP, Independents and Green … and maybe a few decent moderate Liberals if there are any others left in that party.

In theory at least, the PM merely has to have majority support in the House… and there is no constitutional requirement for the PM to be in the major party among supporters.

In theory, with ALP, Green and Indy support on the floor, Turnbull could be offered the Lodge without joining the ALP – without him resigning from the Libs even – or at most, being a party of one.

Turnbull is about the only politician of talent and principle the public knows about – especially with Kev out of action – and especially on great moral issues such as climate change risk management.

Of course, there’d have to be a few nods and winks about how Cabinet would operate, but then, with Malcolm in the Lodge, it’d probably be easier to get responsible policy through, policy closer to traditional ALP values than those it currently follows in the race-to-the-bottom with Abbott.

So, with diminished threat of a by-election, with added incentive for the small-l-liberal independents to stay the course, probably with Greens happier with an intelligent principled PM, even if Malcolm had veto over some policies, a minority Malcolm-Party government (with ALP/Green/Indy support) could keep everybody happy and truer to their principles – leaving the perfidious Mr Rabbit and his followers high and dry.

Hell…. I wonder if there’d even be a few other decent members of the Liberal Party prepared to support Malcolm.

Hell, call it a "Government of National Unity" – better than the stupid situation we currently have of point-scoring regardless of fact or decency.

• Is there an easier way of keeping Tony Abbott out of the Lodge?
• Is there an easier way for Turnbull to become PM (especially given the back-room hacks of the Libs
• Is there an easier way for ALP members to improve their chances of re-election?
• Is this the only leadership change that wouldn’t be seen by the public as desperate backstabbing (ok, desperate, but not backstabbing).
• Most importantly, would this Malcolm Party-of-One Minority Government supported by ALP and moderates, lead to a better Australia?

Is there any other way, realistically, for the ALP to get out of this mess keeping any remnants at all of a popular vote or a shred of decency, any other way to keep Mr Rabbit from getting into power and making life hell for everyone?

Yes… my fever is getting the better of me… but, there is a weird kind of logic to it.

….So, have fun ticking these dot points off for Muroch’s Melbourne rag for the first few points, using the Hun’s most notoriouspopular propagandistcolumnist as a touchstone: Andrew Bolt, or indeed, even the Murdoch broadsheet, The Oz:

• 1. Accuracy
  • 1.1 Facts must be reported impartially, accurately and with integrity.
  • 1.2 Clear distinction must be made between fact, conjecture and comment.
  • 1.3 Try always to tell all sides of the story in any kind of dispute.
  • 1.4 Do not knowingly withhold or suppress essential facts.
  • 1.5 Journalists should not rely on only one source. Be careful not to recycle an error from one reference source to another. Check and check again.
• 8. Discrimination
  • 8.1 Do not make pejorative reference to a person’s race, nationality, colour, religion, marital status, sex, sexual preferences, age, or physical or mental capacity. No details of a person’s race, nationality, colour, religion, marital status, sex, sexual preferences, age, or physical or mental incapacity should be included in a report unless they are relevant.

Given the extent to which Abbott dances to the Murdoch tune, I wonder if the same standards should apply to him?

Of course, when you are making unsubstantiated assumptions and banging on about groups hated by bogan readers, and those assertions turn out to be false (like the blaming of muslims for the Norwegian mass-murder), that’s not reporting, is it, so 8.1 might not necessarily apply.

Enjoy filling this out and scoring various Murdoch organs and personalities.

Um… and excuse me, but the feather-over-the-wrist look-the-other-way penalties … um … where are they spelt out?

So, if you want some of my shorter thoughts and notes …

• Google Buzz has all my shared gReader items, with a few comments, as well as other links I find interesting.  (Mind you, most of those I follow have their Buzz feed from their tweets.)
   
• Short Posts (well, the public ones unless you are in my circles) are for short posts, links, and the occasional personal comment.

Oh, and regular readers here, if you still need an invite to get into Plus, get a gmail address to me one way or another and I’ll send you one.

Impressions of Plus

GooglePlus isn’t all prettily wrapped up yet, and it’s an odd mix of twitter, newsfeed, email and blogging with a bit of linkedin thrown into the mix – even without blogger.  The one thing I really like is the way it is well integrated into gmail – add posts, get notifications, respond to comments, all without leaving your gmail windows.

And yet, if you expect a facebook clone, you’ll be disappointed.

It is, however, already very good at letting you choose what bits are seen by who – public, one circle, or another circle.  At the very least it means I can easily choose to not annoy my younger friends with geeky science posts, not waste more politically-oriented interlocutors with posts about funny things my grandson said when I came home that night… that’s a real boon.

I’d expect integration will get even better as things get settled, but it is different, just like people thought gmail was silly because it lacked folders – until they realized google were spot on with tags – effectively allowing the same message to be in as many folders at once as you needed.

Certainly, the ability to edit comments and posts, get rid of a typo, insert the missing "not" is a boon – and the absence of silly farmvilles and texas poker is a real boon.

The thing is the integration… by following someone’s Buzz, I get little notes, as well as their tweets (if they’ve hooked it up).  Unlike facebook, they don’t have to follow me back.  Most of what you need, apart from setting up circles, is done in gReader and gMail.

Now, the integration isn’t perfect yet. It seems to be a little better than it was a couple of weeks ago, and I expect that before the year is out, it will be pretty damn sweet.

And notifying people who aren’t in g+ yet, by emnail, is a breeze, as long as you’ve set up your circles nicely.

But in the meantime, you’ll be able to judge the success of g+ by how many other sites start adding "+1" buttons, and by other media looking through Buzz, not just tweets.

Niggles

Better differentiation and/or integration of gmail groups, google groups, and gplus circles would be a boon, as would the ability not to just display thouse in one or more of your circles, but only to those people who are members of the same circle.

The full browser interfaces are pretty good, but non-HTML5 browsers, especially ones like OperaMobile on my phone, have functionality degraded just a bit too much.  It means I’ve got to keep separate bookmarks on my phone for buzz, gmail, greader, and gplus.  I expect this isn’t as high a priority for google as getting the interface for circles and contacts tidied up in full browser versions, but I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t tidied up in a month or two.

I wonder what filled the gunman arrested in Norway and linked to the Oslo bombing, Anders Behring Breivik, with so much hate?  (Here is the untranslated original.)

I wonder if he reads papers filled with the same Tea-Party-esque anti-watermelon rhetoric as we have here…. Or are the Norwegians too damned nice to have a popular columnist equivalent to our bogan-inciters?

The guy probably has a pinup of Sarah Palin on his wall and a bible by his bed.

I wonder how long F*x News pushed an islamist terrorist line, or whether even F*x realizes that those nice nordics are so nice, that they’ll only be attacked by individuals or a "losers’ club" in desperate need of psychiatric care – the types who probably needed remedial reading classes but didn’t get enough of them.

Can you see tabloids around the anglosphere (or indeed anywhere) demonising as "the face of evil" people who look like the following?  Calling for incendiary right-wing groups to be shut down?

The man arrested over the shootings and bombing in Oslo - a profile that will not be demonized by Andrew Bolt

No… I don’t think so.

Oslo bomb: suspicion falls on Islamist militants
Norway’s role in Afghanistan and its decision to file terrorism charges against a Muslim cleric may explain the Oslo bomb attack
…
The question now is who is likely to be behind it.
The most obvious conclusion would be a jihadist group.

Ye gods, could the The Guardian attacking Murdoch be not a principled stand but a takeover bid for the ability to spout rubbish to bogans?

Update: This page apparently lists Breivik’s facebook interests, favorite books, etc … saying (in my view correctly from what we know), that he is "Norway’s Timothy McVeigh" – except McVeigh wasn’t exactly bright.

Update: – I was wrong about the remedial reading if the reports about his facebook reading list are correct.  I still reckon he’ll turn out to be a nutter not a terrorist.

Update: Yes, Andrew Bolt did as expected:

Once the identity of the attackers becomes known, the consequences for Norway’s immigration policies could be profound

Yes…. paragraphs on moslems, and any corrections or focus on the real problem tucked away, not blasted in bold….. but read the comments to Bolt’s article and see what ordinary voters who drive the policies of both major parties are like..

UPDATE: THE BEST TWEET I’VE SEEN: from @ElineGiske

ElineGiske Eline Giskeødegård
G.W. Bush, 9/11: “We’re gonna hunt you down.” Stoltenberg, 22/7: “We will retaliate with more democracy”. I’m proud to be Norwegian.

Tony Abbott’s 2011-07-07 interview transcript on the Liberal Party website proves a half-way decent 3rd grader knows more science.

See, one of the things that people haven’t quite twigged to is that carbon dioxide is invisible, it’s weightless and it’s odourless.

By saying carbon dioxide is weightless, it shows Mr Rabbit never paid attention to Julius Sumner Miller on chocolate advertisements, or Deane and Rob on The Curiosity Show.

Even Dan Quayle, the US VP who was filmed at a school spelling bee telling a kid to mis-spell "potato" had a better excuse than Abbott.

But the Australian public (apart from the latte left and latte right) won’t laugh, they won’t notice the error.

Pauline Hanson, even Humphrey B. Bear is an intellectual giant by comparison.

And yet Mr Rabbit believes in sky fairies!

Did John Laws, the golden tonsils sounding erudite only because of the resonance of an empty head, pick up the clanger?  If he did, why just keep agreeing with everything?  Did anyone in Liberal Party headquarters have the sense to put "umm", "errr" or "(inaudible)" and the offending part of the transcript – they are very good at misquoting when it suits them!

A guy capable of such stupid assertions should barely be allowed to vote let alone sit in parliament.  But then, this you-aren’t-smarter-than-a-fifth-grader is about as accurate as everything else that comes out of his maw.

And yet the great unwashed (apart from being brainwashed) seem to believe him time after time.

Is his economics any better?  Um… no – he can’t find any to back his figures or assertions.

Moral calculus?  Um… no.  He’s a sock-puppet for an organization that protects sexual predators.

Maybe that’s why he is so often in bike-riding gear or budgie smugglers – he cannot afford anyone with a brain to look at his words.

I wonder if Malcolm Turnbull was listening to the interview or read the transcript.  He’s probably the only Liberal Party MP able to pick up the stupidity of Abbott.  I hope he laughed more than he cried.

Notes:

Of course, if a Tory leader, indeed a Tory hero, had a science degree, here is what she would say (and I quote extensively, as the Abbotts and Moncktons of this world are trying to twist these words):

But the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

Our ability to come together to stop or limit damage to the world’s environment will be perhaps the greatest test of how far we can act as a world community. No-one should under-estimate the imagination that will be required, nor the scientific effort, nor the unprecedented co-operation we shall have to show. We shall need statesmanship of a rare order. It’s because we know that, that we are here today.

For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

Now we know that this is no longer true.

We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man’s activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.

(…)

But the need for more research should not be an excuse for delaying much needed action now. There is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level. The IPCC tells us that we can’t repair the effects of past behaviour on our atmosphere as quickly and as easily as we might cleanse a stream or river. It will take, for example, until the second half of the next century, until the old age of my [ Michael Thatcher] grandson, to repair the damage to the ozone layer above the Antarctic. And some of the gases we are adding to the global heat trap will endure in the Earth’s atmosphere for just as long.

The IPCC tells us that, on present trends, the earth will warm up faster than at any time since the last ice age. Weather patterns could change so that what is now wet would become dry, and what is now dry would become wet. Rising seas could threaten the livelihood of that substantial part of the world’s population which lives on or near coasts. The character and behaviour of plants would change, some for the better, some for worse. Some species of animals and plants would migrate to different zones or disappear for ever. Forests would die or move. And deserts would advance as green fields retreated.

Many of the precautionary actions that we need to take would be sensible in any event. It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it’s sensible to develop alternative and sustainable and sensible … it’s sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it’s sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it’s sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it’s sensible to tackle the problem of waste. I understand that the latest vogue is to call them ‘no regrets’ policies. Certainly we should have none in putting them into effect.

And our uncertainties about climate change are not all in one direction. The IPCC report is very honest about the margins of error. Climate change may be less than predicted. But equally it may occur more quickly than the present computer models suggest. Should this happen it would be doubly disastrous were we to shirk the challenge now. I see the adoption of these policies as a sort of premium on insurance against fire, flood or other disaster. It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later.

Margaret Thatcher – 1990-11-06

The research indicates just how damaging the lies and innuendos of dodgy politicians and press can be – retractions and corrections have relatively little effect on later decisions by victims.

It means truth in advertising, and even more, truth in reporting, needs heavy-handed policing, heavy penalties for intentional misrepresentation, and strong statutes.

Research reported in Scientific American "Lingering Lies: The persistent influence of misinformation" gives a stunning example of just how strong the effect misinformation, even when immediately corrected, can have.

Psychologists asked college students to read an account of an accident involving a busload of elderly passengers. The students were then told that, actually, those on the bus were not elderly. For some students, the information ended there. Others were told the bus had in fact been transporting a college hockey team. And still others were warned about what psychologists call the continued influence of misinformation—that people tend to have a hard time ig­noring what they first heard, even if they know it is wrong—and that they should be extra vigilant about getting the story straight.

Students who had been warned about misinformation or given the alternative story were less likely than control subjects to make inferences using the old information later—but they still erred sometimes, agreeing with statements such as "the passengers found it difficult to exit the bus because they were frail."

It means that if a democracy is to be anything than a charade, the citizenry must be well-informed, or at least, free from influence of misrepresentation by politicians and partisan mass-media.

It means there should be statutory demands on the news media to present accurate and balanced reporting – not unlike the rules governing the ABC (and similar "Aunties" in other countries), but with penalties for trangressions that really bite, rather than the slaps-on-wrists-with-a-feather that self-regulation of press and adveetisers are currently under.

"I withdraw that remark unreservedly Mr Speaker", "The jury will ignore that statement", and worse, the tiny-font page 26 retration in a newspaper are not enough, especially when the misinformation was introduced with knowledge and intent to influence.

But how to undo the damage?  Would F*x News in the US be forced, for a month or so, to replace it’s "Fair and balanced". Slogan with equally prominent and frequent "Half-truths at best"?  Should politicians caught out be forced to wear a placard at press conferences or in parliament with "Bullshit" is big letters?

I suppose the only thing stopping it being worse is that there is some evidence the emotive context in dodgy news outlets and political rants might not make things worse – unless perhaps, the lie is memorably phrased and keeps coming to mind:

In three experiments, participants read a report of a fictitious plane crash that was initially associated with either an emotionally laden cause (terrorist attack) or an emotionally more neutral cause (bad weather). This initial attribution was followed by a retraction and presentation of an alternative cause (faulty fuel tank). The scenarios demonstrably affected participants’ self-reported feelings. However, all three experiments showed that emotionality does not affect the continued influence of misinformation.

"Terrorists brought down the plane!—No, actually it was a technical fault: Processing corrections of emotive information"
doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.497927

But does it make a difference in the real world?  A significant difference?  The authors of of the above-mentioned study in this paper ("Explicit warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of misinformation" 10.3758/MC.38.8.1087) specifically point to the belief by the general public, despite later corrections (albeit never raised by the like of Murdoch’s organs) in the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, permitting a belligerent US President and lickspittle allies to start a war.

As the saying goes, "No one died when Clinton lied"

Of course, these academic papers are merely hard evidence – the likes of the Murdoch press and it’s War On Science, and almost every utterance of Mr Rabbit since getting the Chief Disinformation Officer job for the Liberal Party, shows that they’ve known this intuitively.

The other good news is that (again from the same authors), a really strong retraction can lessen the damage of the lie, but not fix it.

From "Correcting false information in memory: manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction" Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 Jun;18(3):570-8.

Information that is presumed to be true at encoding but later on turns out to be false (i.e., misinformation) often continues to influence memory and reasoning. In the present study, we investigated how the strength of encoding and the strength of a later retraction of the misinformation affect this continued influence effect. Participants read an event report containing misinformation and a subsequent correction. Encoding strength of the misinformation and correction were orthogonally manipulated either via repetition (Experiment 1) or by imposing a cognitive load during reading (Experiment 2). Results suggest that stronger retractions are effective in reducing the continued influence effects associated with strong misinformation encoding, but that even strong retractions fail to eliminate continued influence effects associated with relatively weak encoding. We present a simple computational model based on random sampling that captures this effect pattern, and conclude that the continued influence effect seems to defy most attempts to eliminate it.

I wonder … perhaps the best thing to do to political liars is to have published, without risk of legal action, digitally altered images of the offending politician doing something unspeakable to cute furry animals?

Of course, for Tony Abbott, there’d be no need to alter anything, just take home movies from his laptop, because he admits getting enjoyment from filming himself doing unspeakable things to cute furry animals.

Well… no, he doesn’t admit it.  No, he probably doesn’t have such things on his laptop.  I retract that remark unreservedly.  It was a lie.

Note:

• Yeah, Murdoch and Abbott are the worst offenders on the most dangerous topics in Oz, but the Gillard government is also engaging in a war on science – appointing a Chief Scientist and giving her an oubliette for an office.

It was the hacking (and destruction of evidence) of the phone of a teenage girl who had disappeared (and later discovered murdered) that finally got things moving against Murdoch’s empire in the UK.

It will be the hacking of phones of the World Trade Centre attack victims that will probably get things moving in the US.

These are hardly the most serious of the obvious illegal acts – the bribing of police is a greater crime against the functioning of a society, so the general public is damned by being galvanized by the pure tabloid headline offence, that only affecting individuals, rather than being concerned about corruption that eats away at civil society for all.

The greater crime against civilization committed by the Murdoch empire is hardly causing pain to Murdoch at all.  This damns the public even more, who have had the opportunity, through the sum of individual actions, to hurt Murdoch’s methods – not just used by Murdoch, but any media magnate.

Consider the corruption of the political process – the offers of support or threats of attack to manipulate politicians into particular policies to advance Murdoch’s empire – the unscrutinized, unpublished determination of public policy by first decisions within a company, and then backroom muggings of politicians who are too gutless to stand up and make those muggings known to the public.

It’s like a kind of sadomasochism, the politicians accepting repeated torture by press barons, and perhaps because of this, predisposed to pass on similar pain to those under the thumb of politicians, the general public.

But yet worse is the effect of the headlines that intentionally lead the public to incorrect positions on high policy issues with global impact.

• The war-mongering, unsupported by fact, enabled wars causing massive direct and indirect harm to thousands, hundreds of thousands, of individuals.
   
• The scary headlines caused massive changes in civil freedoms – undoing basic things like the rights of habeas corpus, and enabled a surveillance state to be created, powers that would give Joseph Stalin a wet dream.
   
• The utter misrepresentation of data, especially in the domain of scientific consensus generally, and climate change in particular, something that is massively threatening the stability of civilization as well as the probable anguish of billions if the misrepresentation holds sway.

I’m glad this draft sat unpublished for a day, because meanwhile, a perfect example of what most of the press pushes on the public, with a vicious circle through focus groups then politicians and back to the press and public, came up from Business Pundit (2011-07-14):

11 Dumb Scandals vs Actual Important Issues.

Why stop at 11?

And why doesn’t the public emulate the Liverpudlians who almost as an entire city, turned from a Murdoch tabloid?  (See "Scousers never buy the Sun" by Skepticlawyer 2011-07-15).

What makes the piece especially interesting is Billy Bragg’s awareness that the whole Murdoch blow-up not only reflects badly on media and politicians, but also on us, the (fairly) willing consumers of this kind of prurient crap.

Is this yet another example of market failure?

Now, skepticlawyer is a faithful disciple of pro-free-market philosophers, so when the wisdom of consumer crowds (indeed, the consumer crowds’ integrity) is questioned from such a source, we should take notice.  (SL, btw, is always a worthy read, and though we are known to have our respectful disagreements on the site, we have very friendly off-line conversations: she is NOT an Andrew Bolt or Gerard Henderson)

Politicians, the Murdoch pundits, or their unthinking majority audience – the whole darn lot, should ‘fess up and say, "The fault, dear brutes, is not in our ‘The Star‘s, but in ourselves".

Notes:

• Pretty much every rag names "The Star", Murdoch-owned or not, is indeed a rag – but the Murdoch press are the most widespread and frequent offenders, and perhaps those claiming not to be tabloids, claiming to be journals-of-record, through distortion, commit the most heinous crimes.
   
• "Confession time at News Ltd" – Gary Sauer-Thompson (2011-07-15)
   
• Cheryl Kernot, former Democrat leader, makes a couple of telling points and confessions in "Too cosy here too?" – ABC Unleashed (2011-07-14)
  

  And yes, that includes politicians in Australia who have been, and currently are, in thrall to the power of media proprietors and shock jocks; seeking to court support, in the belief that a newspaper’s endorsement is one of the powerful keys to election success. The trade-off is timidity in the face of a newspaper’s "policy line".

  The Press Council is limited to print media. Nightly television programs masquerading as news and current affairs with their increasingly tabloid behaviour are also in need of heightened scrutiny and accountability. This is territory where many journalists are not formally required to subscribe to a code of ethics; where stalking, ambush, pursuit and cheque-book journalism are common.

• "What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown?" The Guardian, (2011-07-16) points out that Murdoch’s Fox and the like have a heavy hand in any US government default in the next few days – and in my opinion, the Australian and The Sun have caused huge damage to our economy over the last decade or so.

The principles they operate by when deciding whether an act is good or evil becomes apparent after a little thought.

On the one hand, the Murdoch empire defends itself when its agents hack the phones of politicians, royalty, and even murdered girls – aiming at profit by gaining unlawful access to information that is obviously private.

On the other hand, hackers who hijacked the F*x News twitter feed, posting untrue news reports, are totally reprehensible, and get the US Secret Service involved to chase down what could be termed incompetent and untruthful journalistic volunteers.

It is not as if it’s the first time F*x has reported counterfactuals, it’s not as if it is the first time the Murdoch authors, even in broadsheets, deliberately cause people to believe falsehoods.

So there can be no damage to journalistic credibility of Murdoch’s propagandists – which among the well-informed is zero or even lower.

In fact, the erroneous tweets could even increase metrics for journalistic integrity, raising the number of times Limited News makes prominent statements about errors in information through its outlets – their retractions normally provided buried on page 23, in 2pt italic, with white ink on a white background.

So, what is the principle that absolves the repeated transnational hacking actions of Murdoch’s minions but condemns mere twitter hijackers?

The diagnostic difference Murdoch’s co-conspirators aimed at profit, while the twitter hijackers were out on a lark and sought no private gain.

The principle separating the two even explains why Limited News Corporation publishes the counterfactuals it does:

The rule seems to be that anything, absolutely anything, committed with the intent of financial reward deserves absolution, while anything without such a motivation is a hanging offence.

That hypothetical principle is simple, and has much explanatory power beyond the hacking incidents.

Those legal and ethical niceties about those our soldiers capture that have worried our brass include the practice that means if a single US private (4th class) is alone in an entire brigade of Australian soldiers, and any opponents are captured, it is the US, not Australia, that does the capturing.

As detailed in "Australian POW policies risk: top secret papers" (The Age, 2011-07-04) and "Revealed: Defence confusion over POWs" (ABC, 2011-07-04), show that the military brass were worried about not merely the legality of their operations, but indeed, whether it was principled:

Confidential Defence documents reveal that Australia’s policies on handling prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2003 were so contrived that they ran the risk of being neither ethical nor in line with international law.
 
The risk was starkly outlined in a top-secret memo from former chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, to defence minister Robert Hill in February 2002, which warned that Australia’s prisoner arrangement "may not fully satisfy Australia’s legal obligations and in any event will not be viewed as promising a respect for the rule of law".

– The Age

And what does Mike Kelly, now a politician but previously Australia’s top military lawyer in Iraq, have to say about responsibility for prisoners we capture?

He says the country that captures prisoners of war retains a responsibility over their welfare.

- ABC

So, lefties (and principled righties), accused of being latte-sipping intellectual elites, accused of undermining our military, accused of being pro-terrorist, copping all the mud Andrew Bolt and other Limited News propagandists can throw, are, probably because they are the intellectual elites, capable of working through these kinds of correctly, or have a better intuitive feel for them, than the bogan jingoistic rah-rah brigade can understand, or the politicians want the public to understand.

Are we beginning to see a pattern here?  Opinions on the actual existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?  Legal and ethical requirements of and for military action?  Hell… what about the environment, privatization of state assets, welfare funding…?

Now, will we see Murdoch’s Limited News pundits, and the jingoistic race-to-the-bottom politicians, and the bogan-minded majority, pointing out the latte-sippers were right?  No.

Maybe it’s the latte-sipping types, of both small-l-liberal and lefty persuasion, that people should be listening to.  The politicians know this.  They are not (all) stupid.  They just don’t want the public to think.

See Also:

• "Military resented Howard" – Sydney Morning Herald 2011-07-03
  

  Former Prime Minister John Howard’s 2001 decision to use the armed forces to turn away boatloads of asylum seekers was resented by sailors and soldiers who had to carry out his orders, retired senior military officers have revealed.
   
  …
   
  But 10 years later, some are speaking out. They reveal that one of the most popular decisions taken by a federal government was resented by many who had to put the prime minister’s words into effect.

Who benefits from this? Only the negligent – the privatised power supplier cutting corners on safety, or a government unwilling to pay compensation, or politicians in both major parties who do not want a proper evaluation of the fundamental dogma that pushes privatization of state assets in general and utilities in particular.

For more than two years, investigation of one fire concentrated on the man who raised the alarm, living next door to power lines known not to have been fitted with sensible safety devices, a blind eye turned to SP Ausnet despite strong evidence.

Lawyers for victims are refused access to evidence.

Information from various completed investigations are withheld from the public on the increasingly flimsy basis that investigations from tardy, misdirected, or incompetent teams are ongoing.

Evidence is even being hidden from relevant judges – by lawyers for the new Liberal government, not just the old ALP one.

While there are doubtless dodgy cops in the force, it’s hard to believe police corruption is so rife that an always promising line of inquiry was ignored without pressure from on high – Spring Street.

Further, even if flawed safety installations is eventually blamed, systemic flaws unlikely to have existed under management by the old State Electricity Commission (always accused by private-enterprise proponents of being over-engineered, "gold-plated" and therefore poor value), the costs will remain socialized, while profits from cut corners will continue to flow to private pockets.

If the incompetence causing death, destruction, and drain on the public purse was limited to SP Ausnet and the oversight of the previous government, was limited to the particulars of this case,the new government would surely take advantage of the ability to make significant political capital of it – it’s a highly charged issue that does not need any effort to capture the public’s attention.

This means there is greater advantage to the current party in power, either through ideological commitment, addiction to corporate donations for future privatizations, in defending the dominant model of privatizing everything as fast as possible and with the flimsiest of pretexts.

The current party in power also likes having it’s partner, counterfactually labelled "the opposition", not pilloried or even destroyed as deserved, as this would cause all the left-leaning voters to desert the ALP for a party that more truthfully represents the interests of the people rather than their masters.  The Liberals treat the ALP as an ally, or at worst a frenemy, their real targets being the Greens and the citizenry.

Oh, by the way, despite this being an issue ideal for sales of honest tabloids, despite the "hang-em-high" rhetoric in The Herald-Sun when mere individuals were being investigated, do you think Murdoch’s Limited News organs are similarly pushing for lynchings of corporate executives and the privatization model?

Do you think these abuses are limited to Victoria?

Do you think it is merely the privatized power suppliers that are happy about what seems to be a cover-up, or the entire plutocratic predator classes and

The general continuity of policy under Liberal Premier Ballieu will be tested to see if it can use legal smarts to annul the 10 year pokies contracts the came out of deceitful behaviour by one, if not all parties.

Will Ballieu use the chance to kill two birds with one stone – sink the ALP in Victoria for a decade or more while helping the states coffers to the tune of billions at the same time?

It’s a win/win for Ballieu and Victoria if he does, and if he doesn’t, there is no reason to believe the Liberals will be any more honest, any more competent.

Today’s The Age gives an advance look at the Auditor General’s report on the 10 year polies rights to Bruce Mathieson and Woolworths, the dodginess of the patently flawed tendering process, the internally inconsistent instructions from government (before the tender, saying to maximize returns to the state, during and after the tendering, to aim for nebulous social targets).

After investigating for a year, there is proof of NO social advantage, and billions down the drain.

Unfortunately, it’s expected that the former cabinet that ran the thing will get off scot free, and department personnel will be the scapegoats.

It wouldn’t surprise me if senior personnel, appointed by the Brumby government, deserved at least some of the blame – probity and competence were never criteria for advancement under Brumby, both as Premier and as the puller-of-strings under Bracks.

If three billion dollars, a process that reeks of corruption, and no social benefit whatsoever isn’t cause enough for Ballieu to go for the throat, then what is?

Failiure to properly punish the guilty, failure to make robust efforts to get the money back or at least restart the process properly, will give us billions of reasons to distrust the Ballieu Liberal Party, to believe they are in bed with the same predators, and wonder where the hell we can find an honest government, let alone one that is capable as well.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way

- A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens

Let me show you some of those pointers – both the big and the small:

1. • When I was born, the US could not put astronauts in orbit – only the Russians could.
   • As a child, humanity set foot on the Moon, the film "2001 – A Space Odyssey" showing what seemed a realistic rate of advance.
   • Within bare weeks from now, the US will no longer be able to put astronauts in orbit.

    

2. Education: Forget the number of bits of paper given by universities, the "grade inflation" politicians encourage to make themselves look good – and look at what proportion of the population can actually do things.  For example, I’d wager the percentage of the population that could even tell you what integration and differentiation are, let alone look at a curve and sketch the integral or derivative, will have peaked and fallen – and there is a fair chance that it’s not just in relative numbers, but absolute numbers.  And then, there is the proportion of people who can spell with moderate accuracy…
    
3. When I was a kid, the average person was motivated by anti-rascist sentiment, Martin Luther King was saying "I have a dream" in the US, a referendum here in Oz on treatment of indigenous peoples passed almost unanimously – and today, regardless of legislation, politicians are willing and able to push buttons in the majority that rely on unacknowledged, covert, and even admitted, rascist sentiments.
    
4. Health standards: While we live longer, I’d wager the age at which strong medical measures need to be taken has fallen – mainly due to diseases of affluence, the national waistline expanding, the incidence of diabetes II, along with expansion of the costs to the community to manage those diseases and their consequences.
    
5. The secular society ideals of the Enlightenment have receded, as the more non-sensical wings of religion gain in both popularity and influence.  This could well be a cause of the other problems, but even if not, it’s certainly comorbid and accelerates the pathology.  When I was a kid we had Vatican II providing evidence of churches being dragged into the 20th century, and now we have a Christian Taliban, lead by the likes of ArchVilliansBishops Jensen and Pell, wanting to drag society back to the religious domination and interpersonal intolerance of the time of Constantine, and the freedom from secular controls over the clergy.  It’s a cause for despair and shame among those calling themselves Christian that the more humane messages of Jesus have been again vanquished by the inhumane attitudes of Paul and Leviticus.
    
6. Even on the mundane levels of time with family we have gone backwards, the progress to the 8-hour day undone, trumped by the rise in unpaid overtime driven by fear, a donation to the plutocrats of time that removes the opportunity for employment of others – indeed a double donation to the plutocrats, by the pay-as-you-go employees covering a greater percentage of their wages to cover the unemployment benefits of those kept out of employment by that donated overtime.  Families are caught behind the looking-glass, the Red Queen chewing up family time, parents and partners running harder than ever to stop going backwards.
    
7. When I was a kid, there had been the "better living through science" meme (even in the counter culture, the "better living through chemistry" applied to synthetic psychoactives).  The basic scientists were trusted more and more, while their paymasters and their agenda were being trusted less and less.  Consider the difference in trust of the scientists versus paymasters then, compare the advances against Big Tobacco then with the losses against Big Carbon now.  The death threats against Australian climate researchers remind me of the horrific torture and murder of Hypatia who dared to promote education in the wake of rising Christianity.  That’s a regression of nearly two millenia.

The pointy end of all these things is the threat to stability, and indeed civilization, posed by climate change and humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet.

Despite the logic and evidence being as peer-accepted and strong as for evolution a century ago, and probably because of falling levels of rigorous thinking combined with the rise in magical thinking, there is no real change for the better on lifestyle carbon intensity by the most privileged, and even the most basic prudential measure of cutting population growth is unused – indeed it is being flouted by such things as a baby-bonus.

The hopes of meeting the needs of a 2 degree average increase in temperature, and all the atmospheric fury implied by even that amount of extra energy, as well as our ability to adjust, are receding.  A 4 degree incease might not be containable, the runaway feedback in ocean current failures, the dead zones it will create on top of rising seawater acidity and collapse of food chains … it fall in line with some of the worst projections in New Scientist a couple of years back – the possibility of a 90% drop in the human population by 2100: an ugly culling full of conflict and suffering because we cannot control ourselves, cannot create a managed drop of even 50%, an unwillingness to even contemplate the obvious possibilities of increasing human happiness with a contracting population and economy.

There are more politicians inflaming the worst in us now than there were politicians decades (or even centuries) ago seeking to make us aware of, and correct, our worst flaws.  The appeals are no longer to the better angels of our nature, but to our demons.

It is hard to see anything that can fight the decline.  Perhaps a radical education overhaul and get-tough policy on magical thinking might do it, for it would attack the causes of so many problems, but there are too many inhibitors to expect a return of the flame of Englightenment ideals in enough hearts to make enough of a difference in time.

And how complete will the collapse be?  How much more difficult will it be to rebuild civilization given the resources needed for an industrial age of steam and fossil fuel will be unavailable?  Any future renaissance, any climb from the new Dark Age, will be much slower than the last time.

It will be worse if the resource scarcities and geographical pressures cause those nations with nuclear weapons to use them in a desperate bid to command resources and decrease demand from other nations.

So, I’ve witnessed many wonders never before seen by humankind, the timing of childhood and young adulthood to be such a witness the best in 100 millenia of human experience – lucky me.  But I’ll also be one of a generation that, for the first time since the collapse of feudalism, looks at my grandson and cannot hope he will live in a better world, indeed, has justifiable fears that his world will be the worst since the Black Death swept Europe – woe is me.

If there is any hope to encourage action, it is not for a better world any more, it is merely to try and stop the world falling so far and so hard, the hope that things won’t be so bad that the Dark Age won’t be so long.

Notes/See Also:

• I do see the life and times of Hypatia as providing useful inside into modern times, the signs of the inevitable fall of civilization amidst apparent wealth, and the victory over reason by the power-hungry using religion and anti-intellectualism to gain power over an increasingly stultified and fearful population.  See these posts for more.
   
• I stress the loss of the Enlightenment Ideals rather than the Renaissance, because of the motivations of the Enlightenment being superior in my view to that of the Renaissance.  From Wikipedia:
  

  The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe to mobilize the power of reason to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in Church and state.

  There are few appeals to true reason from modern politicians at the top of the major parties, we don’t get good reasons but bad rationalizations to exonerate evils, in the manner of Dr Pangloss.
   

• We should not forget the Scottish Enlightenment, which was not as limited to politics, but productive science, with improvement not only in the power of citizens, but their virtue.  Again, from Wikipedia:
  

  It was this latter feature which gave the Scottish Enlightenment its special flavour, distinguishing it from its continental European counterpart. In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterised by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief virtues were held to be improvement, virtue and practical benefit for both the individual and society as a whole.

  Those aims for society as a whole have been happily brushed aside, even by the majority (fortunately not all) who use Hume and Smith to justify political decisions. Those regressive modern capitalists, deny the validity of trying to improve human behaviour like the Scottish thinkers, yet while agreeing with the contemporaneous but English Malthus that human nature could not be improved, reject rational Malthusian warnings about population exceeding carrying capacity.

• While you may not be able to see the article "Science as a threat to far-right fringe" (doi:10.1038/467788d) in Nature on threats to science and prescience on death threats to scientists (how long has it been since it was acceptable for power to "show the instruments" to Galileo), you can see the editorial "Science scored" in peerless peer-reviewed Nature 467, 133(09 September 2010) doi:10.1038/467133a:
  

  There is a growing anti-science streak on the American right that could have tangible societal and political impacts on many fronts — including regulation of environmental and other issues and stem-cell research. … In the current poisoned political atmosphere, the defenders of science have few easy remedies. … As educators, scientists should redouble their efforts to promote rationalism, scholarship and critical thought among the young, and engage with both the media and politicians to help illuminate the pressing science-based issues of our time.

  The author of the "Science as a threat to far-right fringe" article is, I believe, wrong that the enemies of reason are on the fringe of anything but coherent thought- but is absolutely correct to write the following in a comment on his piece:
  

  I would be interested in hearing, in confidence, from any scientist that has received death threats based on their research (email to rick.kool@royalroads.ca). These are not normal times.

  Actually, they are too often normal times – civilization goes backwards as often as it progresses.

Cats, for their massacre of native fauna, could be called "furry cane toads" – but that would be unkind to cane toads which at least don’t impose a significant cost to human health (see "Kill cats – save humans and the health budget" – 2009-06-09).

Possums might be a little annoying with their kxkxxxx noises during the mating season, but they don’t make noises all damn year, and don’t mimic the sound of a human baby crying.  That sound gets deep down, reaches into even my sleep, and wakes me up, having grabbed at my basic human instincts to attend to a distressed infant.

Possums?  They make good "wild buddies" for the famil – while you cannot establish the reciprocal affection you can with a magpie family, it’s pretty easy to develop some trust from them.

Personally, I think kids can learn as much, if not more, from a wild buddy than a pet.

All it takes to develop the trust of possums, or at least young and females (especially when pregnant) is a calm attitude, and something sweet like some juice or dried fruit (paw paw and mango spears work a treat).

The possum box to keep possums out of your ceiling space is a relatively unknown tactic.  – even more unknown is that you should compete with your suburban neighbor to have the coolest possum nesting spot: with a territorial range of a few houses, an inhabited possum box in your back yard will definitely keep other possums from your roof, while you are less protected if your neighbor’s possum box is occupied first, as you won’t get your own resident protective possums.

While prevented from putting up possum boxes myself (rented homes), I’ve often had possums nesting in trees close by.  They have been a source of joy, particularly when my daughter was little, going out with fruit late at night to have a female covered with clinging young eating from our hands.  Those memories have stuck with her – and the fact she still delights in those memories from a couple of decades ago gives me joy, the joy of having given her memorable pleasure that many kids don’t get.

But cats?  If you dislike possums for eating introduced trees, but love cats that kill native fauna, then you not only have problems performing a moral calculus, but downright un-Australian.

Notes/See also:

• The protests of cat lovers "Mine aren’t a threat and don’t have Toxoplasma gondii so people won’t get sick and unborn babies won’t get killed" are about as logical as people saying that speed limits, drink-driving laws and third-party rego aren’t necessary because they are careful drivers.
   
• Cats cause significant harm to human welfare, even to those innocents who detest cats, by dramatically increasing the rate of car accidents and triggering severe mental illnesses, even without the better known problem of killing unborn babies.
   
• There are some good instructions for buying or making possum boxes available from a range of government sites: e.g. Build-your-own from NSW (important: Do not use treated timber, toxic paints, chipboard or smelly glues), or get a list of suppliers in Victoria or email customer.service@dse.vic.gov.au.
   
• It’s not like our possums aren’t pretty.  The kids of a US friend of my daughter, after getting a copy of "Possum Magic", kept asking her mum "Why are our opossums so ugly and the Australian ones are so cute?  Why can’t we have cute possums?"
   
• While I think we should encourage urban possums here in Oz, I think it is totally justifiable for the New Zealand government to try and exterminate them from cities and countryside.
   
• "Kill cats, save humans (and the health budget)" 2009-06-09 has lots of links to scientific papers so you can assess the tax burden imposed on us all from allowing cats in Australia – or at least, by not forcing them to be chipped, registered, killing any that aren’t registered, and fining the hell out of owners who let their cats wander.  It’s not just a problem cats cause for humans – the effects are significant for economically important animals like sheep and cattle when infected during pregnancy.  It’s based on the fact that T.gondii wants to get back into the cat for the next stage of its life cycle, so affects the infected host’s behaviour, changing the brain chemistry to decrease IQ, decrease vision and motor tone, while increasing risky behaviour and diminishing aversion to the smell of cats, so the unfortunate mammal gets caught and eaten by the next cat (if you are a mouse, or historically for us humans, something like a lion or sabre-tooth tiger).

U can haz Toxo ... then I eatz U ... NOM NOM

Perhaps the royals were worried about crudity, given what The Chaucer authored last time after seeing DCameron.

Goe uppe the ille, ryght uppe the myddel,
goe downe the knayve, the ryng than twyddel.
We practysed words, the dressyes mocked up,
for we do and don’t want ryght royle cock up.

- The Commoner’s Tail

For those readers who don’t get it D.Cameron is British PM, while Prince Gay Otter is the alternate title of The Decameron by Boccaccio, a series of often bawdy tales which inspired Geoffrey Chaucer to pen Canterbury Tales.

If Australia has a problem with a flood of asylum seekers, Abbott that should be giving congratulations to Julia and KRudd for cutting applications from the peak when Abbott’s mob ran the joint in 2000 – when numbers were 50% higher than today.

It’s also worth comparing Australia to Sweden, which had approximately the same percentage increase in applications last year.

The real wonder is why so few refugees are attracted to our society… if we are such lovely people as we claim.

Australia, population 22.3 million, got 8250 applications, or 0.37 applications per thousand Australians.  Sweden, population 9.3 million, got 31800 applications, or 3.4 applications per thousand Swedes.

Yes, numbers are increasing, about 30% in a year in both countries in 2010 compared to 2009, however Sweden, unlike Australia, is surrounded by civilized developed nations – hardly the nearest safe haven for a refugee from just about anywhere (unless hordes of Norwegians are fleeing the risk of being trampled by rampant reindeer or thousands of Danes are fleeing floods of British soccer hooligans).

8250? About the only way 8250 people would cause a problem is if you stuck them all in the toilets in the MCG at half time during a sellout match.

If we wanted to decrease the burden of 8250 troublemakers, we could send a fair proportion of politicians, backroom operators and staffers to Antarctica.

Now we do have more asylum applications than New Zealand.  Surprise!

It is primarily in Australia that the increase occurred with 8,250 claims, up 33% from 2009. However, despite the fact that figures have gone up for the sixth consecutive year, asylum levels in Australia remain not only below those observed in 2000 (13,100 claims) and 2001 (12,400 claims) but also below those recorded by many other industrialized and non-industrialized countries. 

UNHCR 2010 report

Our politicians mislead, say mountains need to be moved when there are molehills, and small ones at that.  The press report the hairy-chest competition, not the nature or extent of the issue.

May the gods help us if the pollies and press are similarly misleading on important issues, including the economy and environment.

Ummm…. errrrrr…

May the gods help us if the pollies and press are misdirecting our focus and their efforts in other areas – concentrating on the trivial and avoiding work on the important stuff.

Ummm…. errrrrr…

May the gods help our tourist industry if so few people want to come here.

Ummm…. errrrrr…

…. oh bugger.

See Also:

• UNHCR – Asylum Levels and Trends in Industrialized Countries 2010: Statistical Overview of Asylum Applications Lodged in Europe and Selected Non-European Countries

Australia 2020 Summit Logo to Australia 2020

(You’ll need to turn GIF animations on)

China and the US Talk Money

Wargame this – as soon as Asian consumption (which is paid for) starts to get close to US consumption (put on the credit card), China can release those floodgates and hit the US economy so hard it will find the cost of any military action, even maintaining existing capability, prohibitive.

Watch for more and more long-term international contracts where people want to buy in greenbacks and sell in baskets of other currencies.

See Also

• Barnaby was right and should have gone further (2009-12-15)

And yes folks, with Zombie Dei, take good care of your brains.

Brains ... Brains ... I want to eat your brains

If two people getting government benefits were as closely coupled, but receiving benefits as if singles, Centrelink would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Sorry, but when the majors are that close, fighting together against the minors and independents, do Labor and Coalition deserve a separate party room, payment for both ministers and shadow ministers, any more than we’d allow the members of the Nats and Libs to have shadows for the same portfolio and pay both of them?

What would the ACCC say, if looking at political parties like they do with other domains rife with cartels, like carboard manufacturing?

If the pollies in the majors truly wanted the taxpayer to get value for money, they’d declare the partnership and we’d get economies of scale.

At the moment we are paying for two and getting one… often with the same donors to both parties.

Then we know have the right-wing unions and big business joining together to make people eat their children’s future, like some twisted Greek tragedy.

The majors want to screw each other, but not in the traditional sense.