Sorry for the dad joke, but I heard that awful song Listen with Your Heart on the radio in a cab yesterday and it occurred to me that technically speaking, you can’t listen with your heart any more than you can:
Erin Brockovich – the real one, not Julia Roberts – is in town at the invitation of the Climate Change Coalition to raise the profile of said party ahead of its run for the NSW upper house in the upcoming election.
But wait . . . isn’t there a party called, I dunno, The Greens or something that has a fairly strong platform on global warming and stuff? Ah, but it turns out the Greens have sold out to The Man. Or something.
And, having helped win a class-action suit against an energy company for poisoning the groundwater near a power station, Brockovich’s qualifications as a global warming spokesperson are . . . ? Oh, I see, energy companies cause global warming, Erin Brockovich hates energy companies . . . gotcha. Or as the great woman herself puts it:
I am absolutely convinced there is a link between environmental destruction and global warming . . . If mother Earth dies we all die. My purpose is to come to Australia and create greater awareness that individuals can make a difference.
OK, so convincing arguments may not be her thing, but that doesn’t excuse the Herald’s resident enviro-sceptic Michael Duffy for taking the opportunity to do a bit of Brockovich character assassination. He starts out by mentioning that Brockovich and her employers made a fair whack of moolah out of the class action suit against Pacific Gas and Electric, obviously implying her motive was profit, not a genuine concern for the cancer-riddled folks of Hinkley, California.
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Jewish people who don’t toe the line get called names by Colin Rubinstein, but the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis always loses the argument. Sam Brett plugs a whole bunch of other people’s books to discover the shocking truth that women like foreplay, but remains oblivious to the fact that her readers are bloody morons. Young, overpaid, testosterone-filled boofhead gets charged with sexual assault. John Howard and co will do anything and say anything to get re-elected (as will Peter Debnam?), but it just might not work this time despite the wishful bleating of his cheer squad. Paul Keating is piss funny when he gets fired up. And yet another example where right-wing idiots play the man when they have no real argument, but by now they really should be ashamed of themselves.
The most entertaining thing I saw on TV last night was Malcolm Turnbull spending nearly 10 minutes avoiding the question of whether or not electricity prices would go up as a result of using “clean coal” technology, specifically carbon capture (transcript and video).
This was the closest he got to an answer:
Tony, once you get the technology working, once you know it works, then the cost will come down. You and I are old enough to remember when a desktop computer cost $15,000. Now you go and buy one for less than $2,000.
Riiiight . . . because a computer is pretty similar to an enormous vacuum cleaner-like thing that extracts carbon dioxide from burning coal, compresses it and buries it several kilometres underground in saline aquifers. (The obvious advantage of this being the companies that bottle mineral water won’t have to pay extra to put the bubbles in.) Of course the technology isn’t proven yet and may or may not work – just like a computer! But let’s assume, for the moment, it does.
We know politicians are never fond of bad news, but people in Australia and other western countries generally seem to be quite comfortable with the idea of paying more for electricity if it reduces greenhouse emissions and stuff, whatever that Al Gore bloke was talking about when got on a crane next to a graph or something. Why not come clean?
While Kerry O’Brien and the regular crew are on holidays, I take it the 7.30 Report has been taken over by a crack squad of “fair and balanced” right-wing lunatic propagandists.
How else do you explain last night’s rabid anti-drug, anti-fact reporting on the Mental Health Council of Australia‘s report Where There’s Smoke, a study of cannabis use and mental health?
Technically the MHCA’s report is more of a literature review; it doesn’t contain any original research, just summarises and analyses what other people have already said and makes a series of recommendations. It is, to a fault, conservative and balanced in its findings, using cautious language such as:
The 7.30 Report was not so careful. Where the MHCA report cautiously finds correlation, the 7.30 Report loudly trumpets causation. Will journalists ever learn the difference?!
Friends and I often talk about what we would do if we were running a fascist dictatorship. I have a fairly long list of items for my utopian society such as sending all teenagers away to an island until they stop being teenagers. In a related item, I would institute the death penalty for contemporary R&B music.
A little harsh, perhaps, but a study by researchers at the Rand Corporation published in the August issue of Pediatrics found a hard-to-refute link between listening to songs with “degrading sexual lyrics” and early sexual activity. In other words, R&B turns kids into sluts.
I find myself constantly infuriated by, but unable to stop reading, the Herald’s Sam and the City blog . . . to the extent that I’ve had email wars with Sam after she refused to publish one of my more outraged replies.
In today’s post, Sam quotes Doing it Down Under by Juliet Richters and Chris Rissel and claims that men have an average of 17 partners in their lifetimes while women have around seven. Given the numbers of women and men in Australia are roughly equal, how is this possible? So I posted:
Isn’t anyone else suspicious about the maths here? If men are having 17 partners and women only 7, who are men having the other 10 relationships with? Other men?
Click on the pic to see the whole series.
Seriously, WTF? Russian translation websites tell me the label on the bottle says “wine product” and “Cahors wine”, Cahors being a wine region in France. Wacky.
I should really get some work done.
Oh goody, it’s bash-the-ABC week at The Australian again.
On Saturday, we had Christopher Pearson complaining that Radio National doesn’t apply the blowtorch enough to scientists who accept the notion of the greenhouse effect; a concept the vast majority of non-Republican-Party-funded scientists the world over also seem fairly comfortable with. The real charlatans are those scientists with their snouts in the fossil fuel lobby trough claiming straight-faced to merely be applying scientific scepticism. Ker-ching!
There’s nothing more two-faced, except perhaps a conservative complaining about a lack of balance on the ABC. Does Paul Gray honestly think the *cough* values of “ordinary conservative Australians” are somehow underrepresented in the Aussie media at large? Or as John Doyle put it in his Andrew Olle Media Lecture on Sunday:
And as it should be, [the ABC] still strives to put forward an alternative view. So that when the commercial media is dictated to by myopic intrusive ownership and ill-informed populism, is forced through thoughtless need to make irresponsible programs that lack both style and substance, caresses inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks to marginalize the already marginalized, that seeks to describe the world in simple terms, provide simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal outcomes, then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and it’s precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter. It’s preserving its skeptical asymmetrical smirk.
It becomes patently obvious when conservatives claim to want a diversity of opinion it’s the exact opposite they’re seeking: a bland uniformity of grey-suited drones mutedly applauding the Great Leader and his corporate masters.
It would be nice to have a few more extraordinary, iconoclastic, intelligent conservatives rather than the current regiment of cheerleaders for Team John and Dubya. Someone like Christopher Hitchens, for instance, who only ever seems to appear on Australian TV sets courtesy of, you guessed it, the ABC. The problem with ordinary conservative Australians and their values is not their conservatism as much as their ordinariness.
Interesting how easily you can turn something completely backwards by selectively quoting the bits you like. For instance, high-school student Justine Clarke ran an experiment while on a summer internship at the University of Illinois on the five-second rule — you know, if you drop something on the floor, it’s safe to eat if you pick it up within five seconds because the germs don’t have time to jump onto it from the floor. This research earned her an Ig Nobel prize.
So, is the five-second rule true or not? Through experimentation and an electron microscope, Clarke found that if bacteria are present on a floor, they can jump to a piece of food in contact with the floor in less than five seconds. So far so good, but by “swabbing 1-inch squares of floors in a variety of locations on the campus, including floors in high-traffic areas” she discovered that the average floor even somewhere as filthy as a university (and you know what those degenerate student types get up to) contained no detectable bacteria.
However, those serial killjoys at Snopes.com reported the first half of the findings — that bacteria can make the jump in under five seconds — while completely ignoring the second half — that there aren’t any bacteria on the average floor to do any jumping. Now why on earth would they do that?
One can’t help but think of all those disinfectant ads where the mother archetypes go around the house wiping “germs” off everything before the baby archetypes try to eat them . . . and be reminded of Brad Pitt’s character in 12 Monkeys, Jeffrey Goines, who remarks:
I go in to order a burger at this fast food joint, and the guy drops it on the floor. James, he picks it up, wipes it off. He hands it to me like it’s all okay. “What about the germs?” I say. He says, “I don’t believe in germs. Germs is a plot made up so they could sell disinfectants and soaps.”
Are those shady characters at Snopes.com part of the germ conspiracy?