Tag Archive for 'Tinfoil'

Coalition voters wanted, apply within

Published
by
Phil
2 months, 1 week ago
in Film, TV, Video etc and Media
. 23 Comments

Eric Abetz is at it again.

Senior Liberal Eric Abetz believes the ABC TV political talk show Q&A has failed in its attempt to provide a representative cross-section of the community because the audience was overwhelmingly made up of Labor and Greens voters.

Rather than seeing conspiracy everywhere, has Abetz considered the possibility that Coalition leaning voters have not applied to join the Q&A audience in the same numbers as Greens and Labor voters?

So, the important question for Abetz to ask of the ABC is how many self-identified Coalition voters have applied to participate as a Q&A audience member?

I’m sure the sign up form database would provide him with the answers he’s looking for, though I suspect he may not like what it reveals.

Or is it that Abetz prefers to take a free kick at alleged bias and lack of balance at the ABC rather than a deeper look at what may be a statistical or political (cultural) anomaly?

By the way, I presume he’s been happy with the panel representation to date.

They’re “bloggers”, so it’s new…

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Culture, Levity and Media
. 77 Comments

Warning: snark ahead

According to last night’s Lateline, “A growing number of bloggers are now using the internet to attack the science of global warming. Written by climate change sceptics, the blogs are hosting a new scientific debate over whether the world has become hotter or colder during the past ten years.”

The reporter’s evidence for this “new scientific debate”? Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy. You know, Bolt. The long-serving columnist with a regular gig in the Herald-Sun and Insiders. And Marohasy, the IPA employee whose glass-half-full schtick on the environment has been making its way into the mainstream media for many years. Both do run blogs (in Bolt’s case, to give him credit, he does genuinely blog in a way that most journalists haven’t tried), but the idea that they are in any way new voices on the scene is complete rot. And their “new scientific debate”? A rehashed version of the “world is cooling” nonsense - based on a high-schooler’s level of data analysis - that they’ve been running for years, which as Paul noted has been debunked in detail by any number of experts.

Note to John Stewart (the Lateline reporter, not the Daily Show host): just because somebody says it on the Internet doesn’t make it new, scientific, or interesting. And if you really want to report on climate change blogging, might I suggest there’s a whole other world of it out there that’s been doing a whole lot better covering not only the problem, but the merits of the various solutions, than your program has managed?

World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Australiana, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Levity, Masculinity, NSW Government, Photography and Sydney
. 33 Comments

Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.

Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.

Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’

Keelty rubs the lotion on the skin

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months, 1 week ago
in Crime and Levity
. 18 Comments

I don’t believe I’ve ever contributed to the Wikipedia’s article on Mick Keelty. But I wish I’d written this version.

(From The Age, obviously written by a reporter who has no idea about Wikipedia…)

Hope it’s not like this any more…

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months, 1 week ago
in History, Levity, Policy, Security and Terrorism
. 32 Comments

Our security services - ASIO, ASIS, and the AFP - have expanded a great deal recently, and we essentially have to take it on trust that this is a) a good use of money, b) being used to perform the intended goal - no more and no less, and c) being done in such a way that it doesn’t impede everybody else’s rights to be left alone.

In this context, an insight into how the intelligence agencies functioned over 30 years ago is still worth thinking deeply about, and the insights from the just-released reports of the Hope Royal Commission of the mid-70’s remain disturbing today:

During a three-year inquiry, conducted largely in secret from 1974, Justice Robert Hope identified a litany of problems in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, leading him to conclude that it “may be, or may have been, penetrated by a hostile intelligence service”.

The fresh volumes of classified material released yesterday paint a damning picture of ASIO, from its formation in 1949 by Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, through to the mid-1970s.

According to Justice Hope, record-keeping at ASIO was shambolic, staff morale was low and agents spent more time digging dirt on left-wing sympathisers than looking into the greater threat posed by Soviet bloc spies operating in Australia.

“ASIO could not be taken seriously as an efficient organisation, still less an effective security organisation,” he wrote.

Continue reading ‘Hope it’s not like this any more…’

Healthbook arrives, via Google

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months, 2 weeks ago
in Ethics, Government, Health, Levity and Policy
. 25 Comments

One of the more widely praised ideas coming out of the 2020 summit was “Healthbook”, something that was genuinely novel, large in scope, and with real potential to make a difference. As the interim report put it:

Create a “Healthbook” (like Facebook) for Australians to take greater ownership of their health information and electronically share it with people they trust – for example their doctor, nurse or family members. Users could control their health “friends” and their level of access, share data as desired, and ask for real time advice on health issues. By 2020, this might include sharing your own genetic data with your doctor
or family. This would put the individual squarely at the centre of the health system.

Well, lo and behold, Google Health appears in the news, which offers pretty much the kind of services - for American patients - proposed for “Healthbook”. Joshua Gans is impressed.

There are obviously big potential gains from centralized electronic medical records systems like this. As somebody who’s had the odd diagnostic test over the years for the odd ailment, this stuff gets lost - I have no idea where the back X-rays I had done once went. And, on a population-wide level, there’s obviously enormous scope for doing anonymized statistical research on this data. But would I want my medical records on Google Health, or something like it? No way in hell. Continue reading ‘Healthbook arrives, via Google’

Terrible, horrible, scary UNNATURAL chemicals

Published
by
tigtog
7 months, 1 week ago
in Language, Levity, Media, Science and Sociology
. 88 Comments

flasks Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.

This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about

“natural remedies, not those chemical ones”

Sorry Kochie, all those natural remedies are full of chemicals too. Chemicals don’t only come from factories, where they are not created but refined from naturally occurring raw materials and recombined to form new compounds.

Chemicals are also combined, recombined, recycled and recombined again every time you, me and every other animal breathes and eats, just for starters. Chemicals also gad about when every plant respires and photosynthesises - every plant and every animal is made of chemical elements and every natural remedy consists of active ingredients that have consistent conventional chemical names e.g. vitamins.

This idea that chemicals are nasty and unnatural and dangerous is rampant. Why? Continue reading ‘Terrible, horrible, scary UNNATURAL chemicals’

One man’s persistence

Published
by
tigtog
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in History, Levity, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 39 Comments

is probably a large part of the reason why the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) has decided to send all its documents investigating reported UFO sightings to the National Archive where they may be readily examined by the interested public. Beginning in 1999, and ramping up considerably after a change in the law to the advantage of applicants passed in 2005, David Clarke bombarded the MoD with requests under the Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation for copies of various reports of events known to the UFOlogy community. 1

The released reports are going to disappoint a lot of people, who will continue to believe that there is a huge cover-up of extra-terrestrial landings going on at the highest levels. Not Clarke though - he’s no conspiracy theorist with visions of Bug Eyed Monsters (BEMs), he is a scholar who is intrigued by how such reports are investigated and what the response to such reports tells us about our society.

For me these sightings are a part of social history and I’ve always been intrigued by how they were viewed by intelligence sources.

Continue reading ‘One man’s persistence’

  1. Apparently there are more than 7,000 sightings reported over the last 30 years, and there’s paperwork on them all.[back]

Alarmism 101

Published
by
Gummo Trotsky
1 year ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Levity, Media and Science
. 0 Comments

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo in exile)

I’ve been reading another bad book over the past week - a really bad book. It’s a long spray at consumerism and urban sprawl. It follows a fairly familiar formula - after the introduction (where you tell the reader what you plan to say), the author moves onto a quick survey of the human condition, cramming in as many references as possible, then launches into several chapters of condemnation and denunciation.

Writing that first chapter is a complex job. To show readers you’re not an intellectual snob, you have to mention popular culture, so references to pop music and movies (but not cinema) are a must, the earlier the better. Of course you now have to convince them that you’re not a bogan either, so you bung in the literary references. Reference one or two web-sites to show that you’re not a complete Luddite (very necessary in this writer’s case). Top that off with some guff about human evolution, neurology and psychology, add a dash of philosophy and religion and there’s your first chapter written.

Pull it off, and your readers will be convinced that you’re a very knowledgeable person, whose facts are reliable and opinion trustworthy. Well, some of them - enough, you hope to preserve you from the ingnominy of the remainer bin. As long as no-one notices the non-sequiturs and the fact that you’re relying completely on emotive argument - including the odd dose of alarmism - you’re home and hosed.

Here’s an entertainingly alarmist passage from that first chapter, with some explanatory notes from me.

Continue reading ‘Alarmism 101′

Media Watching fun: The Oz V Akerman

Published
by
Phil
1 year, 1 month ago
in Levity and Media
. 23 Comments

One of the more entertaining episodes to observe in the recent attempt to resurrect and pursue the Heiner “Shreddergate” affair and Kevin Rudd is the battle that has developed between the Telegraph’s crazy uncle in the attic, Piers Akerman, and the Australian (via Hedley Thomas and Greg Roberts) as they both sought to control the spin surrounding the issue.

Akerman got the dirt ball rolling and has posted no less than eleven malicious pieces on the affair from mid August to now, including some choice quotes attacking The Australian over it’s approach to the matter.

Continue reading ‘Media Watching fun: The Oz V Akerman’

The friends you keep

Published
by
Phil
1 year, 2 months ago
in Levity and Politics
. 56 Comments

Pauline Hanson backs Kevin Andrews on migrants.

PAULINE Hanson has endorsed Kevin Andrews’ views on African migrants, saying the Immigration Minister was right to be concerned about crime and other issues.

Far Right behind Shreddergate bid.

A COALITION of right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists has been identified as the driving force behind moves to revive the so-called Shreddergate affair as the federal election approaches.

Speaks volumes.

Update [by MB on 11/2/08]: The article linked to in this post was the subject of a determination by the Press Council which can be accessed here:

THE Press Council has upheld a complaint that The Australian unfairly associated author and webmaster Scott Balson with organisations known to espouse racist, conspiracy and extreme right-wing views.

Yup, peanut butter convinces me!

Published
by
tigtog
1 year, 2 months ago
in Levity, Religion, Science and Sociology
. 77 Comments

This argument is so bizarre it’s not even wrong: it’s wrong’s cousin who’s never been the same since that nasty accident with the Klein bottle..

Liberal denialism still on show in Senate

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 2 months ago
in Climate change, Environment, Levity and Science
. 45 Comments

The good Professor Quiggin said a few months ago that greenhouse denialism has “has collapsed so completely in Australia”. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case in the parliamentary Liberal Party. The context of the lunacy is a Senate debate yesterday on a proposal by Christine Milne, Greens senator from Tasmania, for a Senate inquiry into the effects of rising sea levels on Australia’s coastline. She notes that the latest evidence seems to be pointing to a faster sea level rise than that predicted by the IPCC reports, and points to a number of very practical issues that need to be addressed:

Australia is not even at first base. We cannot produce a map today that tells us what are the likely implications of sea level rise for vulnerable coastal communities. That is a disgrace when we know the science of climate change. So I urge the Senate and the “Prime Minister in waiting” to get realistic about climate change, to stop obfuscating, to recognise that we are facing the greatest crisis that we have known in our lifetime. This is a much bigger issue than terrorism. Climate change and the Earth’s vulnerability are in our face right now. We, as elected leaders, must respond to that.

Sensible stuff, and the Democrats - with a good comment from the blogosphere’s own Andrew Bartlett - and Labor supported the inquiry. Continue reading ‘Liberal denialism still on show in Senate’

Bewdy Norm!

Published
by
Gummo Trotsky
1 year, 2 months ago
in Levity, Terrorism and USA
. 11 Comments
Questions over [Osama bin Laden’s] beard cropped up at a Congressional hearing Monday featuring top US security experts, including Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell.”First, is this his beard?” Republican Senator Norm Coleman asked the spy chief. “Do we expect that — is it a signal?”

According to AFP, McConnell’s responses to Norm’s questions on the beard showed that the beard had “baffled the top US spy.”

I think it’s more likely that he was baffled by the same thing that baffles me - what is this wingnut doing in Congress?

Not a Major Headline

Published
by
Gummo Trotsky
1 year, 3 months ago
in Government, Howardia, Law, Levity and Politics
. 23 Comments

Here’s a report from Natalie O’Brien of News Limited that you might have missed:

Continue reading ‘Not a Major Headline’