I’m not quite sure what it was, but there must have been one, because the AGI health checks on indigenous children in the NT last year did not record a single case. (Update: this claim of zero cases of trachoma recorded, taken from the post linked to below, has been contradicted, although the rate recorded is still extraordinarily low.)
Fred Hollows must be causing a scene around the Pearly Gates in the way he’s kicking himself for missing such a simple and effective solution to a common cause of blindness that was a special concern to him due to Australia’s central desert regions having the highest incidence of trachoma in the world.
While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.
There, gentle reader, I have avoided using the term ‘catastrophe’ so that strong messages are appropriately wrapped. Martin Weitzman himself has been more forthright by titling his paper On Modeling and interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change. But then he has written 45 pages of mostly econospeak, which carries a different kind of fright. Not existential, but bad enough. Much of it is impenetrable to ordinary mortals. With the help of a couple of interpreters I’ll try to render his message understandable. Anyway this is what I took from Weitzman.
1. Doubling atmospheric CO2 carries a small but unacceptable risk of catastrophic climate change.
2. By catastrophic he means an outcome that threatens civilisation as we know it. We simply can’t ignore the risk. It must be attended to.
3. In the face of truly catastrophic risk the normal practice adopted by economists of applying standard cost-benefit analysis is “wrong, unhelpful, and a dead-end” (from Kevin Ummel, one of my interpreters). We should do whatever it takes.
4. The uncertainties that give rise to this risk are not the result of inadequate science. Rather they are inherent in the climate system itself.
The text of the papal apology, delivered this morning at a Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, can be read here.
The symbolism of the setting for the apology - a mass for seminarians and members of religious orders and the consecration of a new altar for the Cathedral - was no doubt intended by the Vatican to signal that the Pope was speaking sternly to those at the centre of the institution. But it’s also deeply problematic - as it suggests that the problem is only one for the church, excluding the victims who were left outside while the pomp and panoply of the liturgy took place for the exclusive benefit of the hierarchy.
I hope that Anthony Foster and his family, who intend to confront Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell in Sydney this week over the Catholic Church’s treatment of their late daughter, Emma Foster, who took her own life in January and her sister Katie, both of whom were raped as primary school children by Father Kevin O’Donnell, aren’t dismissed as “Catholic bashing” and raining on the World Youth Day parade or subjected to victim blaming as Anthony Jones was. Foster told the tragic tale of his daughters’ abuse and how it marked their lives horrendously for the worse, and probably brought Emma’s life to a close, on Lateline tonight.
Update July 3rd: the Medical Board has now approved the registration of the recruited doctor. Now they just have to get him sorted with a Medicare provider number and he can start providing care to Dorrigo.
* * * * *
From today the two doctors who service the population of Dorrigo are on strike, and at least one of them has resigned from the local hospital as part of their protest: they will continue to attend life or death emergencies and to provide palliative care for the dying, but anyone else in need of medical attention who can make it down the mountain alive to the hospital in Coffs Harbour will be sent there.
Their reason? After finally successfully recruiting a third doctor to alleviate their horrendous workload and provide better services for the Dorrigo community, their overseas-trained recruit (now an Australian citizen) has not been able to gain approval for his registration as a General Practitioner, without which he cannot come and practise in Dorrigo. This final piece of paper was originally supposed to be issued in April when he passed his Board assessment with flying colours, but there has been bureaucratic delay after delay, based on a (ETA) compulsory and arguably inappropriately rigorous assessment of his English competency when he has been working in hospitals here effectively for the last 6 years.
Dr Herb and his colleague just heard that the approval of the registration application has been further delayed until at least the 2nd of July. Unsure of whether this will merely be delayed again, they have declined to renew the lease on the accommodation they had secured for their recruit and his family, as they have been paying hundreds of dollars a week on an empty house since March while waiting for the paperwork to be sorted out, and are unwilling to keep on doing so with no promise of a timely resolution. Suitable accommodation is difficult to find in Dorrigo, and they now don’t know whether, when their recruit is finally approved for registration to practise, they will be able to secure him appropriate accomodation at that time.
In utter frustration, they have decided to go on strike.
As a follow up to my post yesterday on the Liberals’ revived climate change denialism and the the fear campaign they’re running, I thought I’d point to a couple of interesting signs of the times. Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge thinks the Libs have taken a leaf from the Canadian Conservatives’ book - the Tories in Canada are running a campaign against Liberal opposition leader Stephane Dion’s support for an emissions trading policy. It’s all couched in terms of “new taxes” and “driving up the price of everything” by putting a… wait for it… tax on petrol. The ads, which you can preview at this woefully designed website, are said by Watts to be going up in petrol stations.
Given Nelson’s populism/desperation on the Fuel Excise Cut, no doubt we can expect to see the same from the Coalition. There will come a time when the electoral value of climate change credentials will have to go head to head with back pocket concerns and the above is not an encouraging vision of the future. Whatever the substance of the response to the Garnaut report, the Government is going to have to engage in some pretty serious ground work in preparing the public for any adverse impacts….
There’s some fantastic coverage of the current situation in Zimbabwe in the lead up to the runoff Presidential election at the New Statesman this week - this link takes you through to all the articles.
Surely the bedrock responsibility of any state is to protect its citizens in the case of natural disaster. The bungling and incompetence shown in New Orleans was the lever for Bush’s free fall in the opinion polls. Far graver is the appalling regime in Burma, which has never shown any interest in doing so, and which held an absurd constitutional referendum to entrench itself in power and ban Aung San Suu Kyi from ever holding office even as many of its citizens were being devastated and killed by Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath. Its military is more interested in oppressing ethnic minorities than in disaster relief, and attempts at aid are failing because of the regime’s strict insistence on its border security and sovereignty.
Interestingly, there have been calls for humanitarian intervention from French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, from dissident Burmese media and Gareth Evans. The legal basis for such calls is disputed, although it may have legitimacy from the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine adopted by the UN in 2005. [The case for the invocation of this doctrine is discussed here.] But, while lip service is being paid to their own responsibility by the “international community”, will anything happen?
Offending national sovereignty is apparently fine when it involves oil, opium, Islam or a macho yearning to boast “regime change”. It is not to be contemplated when it is just a matter of saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
The exact magnitude of the effects of Cyclone Nargis on the people of Bruma remain unclear, and will likely be so for some time. But what we do know already is it’s the biggest natural disaster in the region since the Boxing Day tsunami, and without sufficient and timely aid it will get far worse.
In the aftermath of that earlier disaster, the blogosphere did its bit to help out, notably through the efforts of the good Professor Quiggin, who matched his readers’ donations one-for-one, raising nearly $5000. This time around, Club Troppo and the Professor are trying their hand again:
He is doing the same thing again, this time in collaboration with Club Troppo. We are hoping to persuade readers to give generously in the knowledge that every dollar of disposable income sacrificed translates to nearly four dollars of aid. John will donate fifty cents for every dollar pledged in the comments threads for this post, the comments thread for the twin post at his own site, or by email to John or me. Club Troppo contributors will put in another fifty cents.
Go over to Troppo to find out how to donate. I’m going to put in $100. How about you?
The unfolding mass human tragedy that is the Burmese cyclone (the specifics of which I don’t have anything except that a) I hope that the junta stops putting up barriers to international assistance, and b) that it’s going to make the global food crunch worse) reminds us of the awesome power of nature to inflict death and destruction. While we have great capacity for inflicting misery on our fellow humans, nature has similar capacities and inflicts them far more randomly and far more often. Particularly when compared small groups of discontents sitting in caves in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
But how is Australia prepared for such disasters? Not very well, according to a just-published report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. For instance, while everybody expects the ABC to handle emergency services broadcasting, ABC Local Radio doesn’t have redundant communications links to all its stations. We may have invested money in tsunami sensors, but there’s no centralized telephone warning system (something that could be done very cheaply, according to the report). Our hospitals aren’t really set up for a surge capacity in the case of even rather modest incidents.
This kind of stuff is often cheap, mostly relatively easy, and could potentially spare a lot of heartache when the unthinkable happens, be it through accident or malevolence. But why don’t we do it? Because it has the unique combination of being both scary and boring, earns governments no credit until the crap hits the fan, and we don’t have a historical precedent of a mass-casualty incident. And, over the past few years, we’ve had the distraction of the horribly overblown War on Terrah - something, incidentally, the ASPI has helped in its own small way to fan here.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the Rudd government has a bit more of a focus on the boring bits of government than its predecessor. This is one boring bit that I hope gets more attention.
Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
SMH Reports that the WWF and Climate Institute will join the CFMEU and Coal Industry to promote clean coal funding by governments
“If it’s going to work we need to know quickly. If it’s not going to work we need to know even more quickly,” Mr Bourne said. “If it’s never tested we are have deep problems on a world wide basis.”
As an aside, it’s hard to know whether there is actually a World Wildlife Fund funding, y’know, Wildlife behind the hyper-managed brand these days. They seem more concerned with planting vacuous stories in The Age about vacuous people publicising that they’ll be switching their lights off or getting photo ops with Telstra’s fanciful, Futurist exercises in potential reality-displacement.
What’s immediately concerning about Bourne’s statement is the implicitly Whiggish invocation of a ‘test’ that will resolve disputes about the place of carbon sequestration in the policy mix, presumably by speaking for Nature itself. If the last four decades of Science Studies research have taught us anything, it’s that testing does not magically resolve hypotheses. The best you can hope for on the boundaries of technoscience is some kind of closure. Continue reading ‘Annals of Naive Science, Episode 12938/WWF’
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos in this post, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
Once you’re out of the inner city, the vista the suburbs present to your eye from the train window is a tad undifferentiated. Sure, you can pick where weatherboard gives way to brick, as you travel through time as well as space, but if you’re not paying attention, it’s not that hard to miss your station. And in Brisbane you’re out of the inner city pretty quickly - the distance of two stations does it. Unlike Sydney and Melbourne, you’re speedily in the realm of big quarter acre blocks with old houses perched and shifting on their stilts as they hug the verdant hills, knowing that they’re interlopers. But some - landmarks is the wrong word - icons compel your eye’s focus.
No one who’s ever caught the Caboolture or Sandgate-Shorncliffe trains would ever miss Albion station. The old flour mill is too delightfully out of scale and incongruous to miss. It dwarfs its surroundings.
It’s lain vacant for six years now - as with so many other noteable Brisbane buildings, the victim of a tussle between the Council and developers, eventually to be resolved mostly in the latter’s favour - with the token addition of a modicum of public housing (which will give the new residents something to whine about) and a claim about economic renewal. The increase in the value of the surrounding real estate usually goes untouted - at least by the planning authorities, concerned ostensibly with public purposes as they are. It’s this sort of thing that led to a lot of disillusion with the Labor administrations of Jim Soorley and Tim Quinn, and probably contributed to former Labor leader David Hinchliffe almost losing his ward in the election just a few short weeks ago.
I always find it remarkable when people start claiming that war (or “humanitarian intervention”) is somehow in the interests of women.
TomGram has been running a remarkably moving and very disturbing series on women and war - from writers reporting from countries rarely raised by the Decentists and the “you must condemn” crew and some where supposedly “The West” is putting everything right.
In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group — Albanians, let’s say, or Tutsis — or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of “gender cleansing” or mass femicide. But we don’t speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of “crimes against women” at all?
And please think about concrete action you can take to do something about it. Any links welcomed. It takes more than an op/ed or a blog post.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Their reason? After finally successfully recruiting a third doctor to alleviate their horrendous workload and provide better services for the Dorrigo community, their overseas-trained recruit (now an Australian citizen) has not been able to gain approval for his registration as a General Practitioner, without which he cannot come and practise in Dorrigo. This final piece of paper was originally supposed to be issued in April when he passed his Board assessment with flying colours, but there has been bureaucratic delay after delay, based on a (ETA) compulsory and arguably inappropriately rigorous assessment of his English competency when he has been working in hospitals here effectively for the last 6 years.
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