For reasons that aren’t clear to me, Tim Blair seems eager to remind everyone about an article on DDT by Miranda Devine in which virtually every significant statement was both easily checkable and obviously wrong. You can check, point by point and with extensive references at Wikipedia.[1]
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Month: February 2006
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
RSS
Quite a few people have been having trouble with my RSS feed. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 in the hope that this might improve things, but instead this managed to replace the main feed with the comment feed. Pushing my coding skills to the limit I managed to find and implement the necessary fix which also requires a rebuild of the permalink structure.
I’m hoping that the earlier problems may have been resolved in this process. Advice on this much appreciated.
Cuckoo
Last weekend my wife pointed out a channel-billed cuckoo chick being fed by its “adoptive” parents, two crows. Crows are fair-sized birds but the cuckoo was already bigger than either. I’d never seen this before except in books.
Call for help
John Humphreys is asking for some help for a Khmer friend and colleague whose family is having a rough time.
On a related note, while I was at AARES, I got talking about co-authors and it struck me that mine come from at least a dozen different countries. Going roughly from east to west they include NZ, Australia (obviously), Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Greece, Italy, France, Netherlands, Spain, England and the US. It’s certainly one of the great things about an academic life that this kind of contact is natural and taken for granted.
What can’t be sustained, won’t be
The US recorded a trade deficit of $725.8 billion or 5.8 per cent of GDP in 2006. That’s roughly equal to Australia’s entire GDP. With short-run interest rates having risen, the income component of the current account deficit is bound to start growing rapidly soon. If the trade deficit doesn’t turn around this will generate an unsustainable explosion in debt and deficits.
Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer …
A Bush appointee at NASA, in the news for trying to censor statements about the Big Bang, and silence climate expert James Hansen, has lost his job for falsifying his resume, after being caught out by a science blogger
Great work by the blogosphere, and another data point on the close links between climate change denialism and creationism, and of course, between the Bush Administration and fraud.
AARES
I haven’t posted much lately as I’ve been busy preparing for, and, for the last few days, attending the Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society, which ends today. This year it’s been held in Sydney, by the beach at Manly. The weather has been great and the beach tempting, but I’ve barely had time to do more than look out the window at it, as the quantity and quality of papers has been great. In particular, there has been a lot of work on salinity (irrigation-related and dryland) which I’ll be going over for some time to come.
The conference has crystallised some of my concerns about policy in this area, which I’ve referred to in the past, and will probably write more about soon. Broadly speaking, I think it’s time for governments to bite the bullet and either scale back entitlements of water for irrigation (in catchments where over-allocation is clear) or else buy them back from irrigators to be used for environmental and urban flows. At present, there is a lot of resistance to doing this, and a big focus on technical solutions.
Cartoons
A couple of people have asked for a post on the great cartoon controversy. It’s a basic principle of a free society people should be able to publish material of this kind without fear of prosecution or physical attack, and anyone who threatens or incites such physical attacks should be prosecuted.
Having said that, my reaction to the displays of bigotry and (largely confected) outrage associated with the whole business are pretty much summed up by Chris Bertram.
John Quiggin 