A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on. Unless directly responding to the OP, all discussions of nuclear power, MMT and conspiracy theories should be directed to sandpits (or, if none is open, message boards).
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John Quiggin 
Unless we have some sanity things might go all the way, starting in the Ukraine.
@Tony Lynch
The usual dogs of war in the establishment press (NYT, BBC etc.) have started the lead-in propaganda already.
I hope fewer people buy it this time, hopefully enough to prevent the war. Without the silent or complicit consent of the citizens of UK, US and Australia they can’t do it. But I’m afraid they will get their way again.
@Megan
You fail to apprehend the opportunities for intervention that are provided by the conditions of war. For a start, if what the ruling classes want is war, then they should have it. But the ruling classes have not yet realised that their global state is trans-national and indeed surpasses the nation state altogether. The war they advocate is not in people’s interests. Remember, the bayonet is a weapon with a member of the working class on either end. We can, and ought, to bring ‘their’ war right home to where they reside and thereby show that the nationalist bargain between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat is come to an end. Why wouldn’t we seek common purpose with those with whom we might identify rather than the interests of a nice looking man in a suit. Turnbull. Shorten. Whatever.
It would be a disaster if the west allowed Putin’s thugs to continue their march through Europe. This evil clown is emboldened each time the free world equivocates.
* waits for Russia Today trolls to turn up …
I’d much rather a thread explaining what it is Andrew Robb is negotiating away behind our backs as to FTA’s- that is, given the failure of msm to do its reportage job as to these neolib issues.
Surely more useful that silly stuff about Russian plots.
Is that you, white mouse?
@Tony Lynch
Is white mouse a Poe?
It’s getting harder and harder to tell these days.
The hint would be “Putin’s thugs” marching through Europe. But still, it could be the real thing.
Megan, the other thing is the secret Soviet Divisions in Montana.
What mischiefs might they be up to?
Is John Quiggin linked to the left wing Can Do Better conspiracy theory website? I ask because some of his posts are reprinted by them. I’m hoping the answer is no of course.
The link is candobetter.net These leftoids are so creepy they even think Martin Bryant was framed in a false flag operation.
Megan, I think it is a riff on “Send in the Trolls”.
I’ve encountered the Martin Bryant conspiracy thing, but only ever from gun proliferation advocates, who are very right-wing, and very convinced that John Howard is a closet leftist who engineered the massacre to introduce strict gun control, then [U.N., chemtrails, groupstalking, LaRouche etc].
There are still 9/11 conspiracy theorists around too.
I couldn’t believe it when a post turned up on my fb page telling me that there are actually 22,000 – thousands! – engineers and architects – wow – who have evidence of this. We all have relatives and friends who do things like that, surely?
Perhaps white mouse doesn’t know how the internet works? The peeps who started the “I’m sticking with Tony” meme didn’t seem to understand how much fun ‘leftoids’ can have with teh electronic graffitti.
BilB, in another thread you linked to an article on shipping. It wasn’t a very good one because the headline so far has resulted in a number of people concluding that shipping results in more greenhouse gas emissions than road transport when road transport actually burns more than 10 times as much oil and contributes more than 10 times as much to greenhouse gas emissions as shipping. The sulfur and other pollutants ships spew out in huge amounts are not good, but they are a different category of nasty.
And the picture could have been better as Maersk has the most fuel efficient oil powered ships in the world and has significantly improved the efficiency of all the ships they build.
Nuclear power is too expensive and too dangerous, or in business terms the insurance premiums are too high, to be used for shipping. And there is the problem of where they would be used. If Australia had any sense we wouldn’t let any into our harbours without at least a billion dollar bond being posted because the iron rule of the nuclear industry is not “safety first,” but rather, “We do not pay for damage that occurs outside the facility.”
I think we’re covering old ground on shipping emissions. Bunker oil which is the black goo left when when fractional distillation towers have boiled off petrol, LPG etc is only about 30c a litre if I recall. Ship fuel tanks need immersion heaters to get it to flow in cold weather. However sooner than we think (my guess 2018 onwards) everything made from petroleum will be in short supply whether the price is high or not.
Fair point you probably couldn’t dock a nuclear powered ship in Auckland Harbour. Still the beleaguered people of Haiti were grateful when the USS Carl Vinson supplied desalinated water after the 2010 earthquake, energy supplied by a 194 MW reactor.
@The White Mouse
Anyone who wants to can reprint my blog posts. Candobetter also publishes responses to my posts, some of which have been blocked under my comments policy regarding conspiracy theories.
dear editor, re: “doomsday preppers” – left-wing conspiracy theory t.v. show? or right-wing conspiracy theory t.v. show? or do we the viewers decide? is it a “foxtel-you-decide-situation”? please advise. -a.v.
@Hermit
Provided every nuclear powered cargo ship comes equiped with 6,000 crew, some of the most deadly weapons ever devised to defend it, a flotilla of diesel ships to protect it, and the reputation of a superpower backing it safe operation, as the Carl Vinson does, nuclear accidents could probably be kept to a minimum. But as for a 25 year old Liberian cargo vessel with a crew of 9 non-Liberians, only one of whom will cop to being able to speak English – well, I’d be a little more wary, since that’s not too untypical of the international vessels that currently grace our beautiful and easily contaminated ports.
And just in case Mr Greenwood is around, I will point out that it doesn’t how much you point out that the water above the nuclear core that melted its way out of the bottom of a ship effectively blocks all radiation, if the dockworkers refuse to go near it, economic damage is still done. Declaring them to be scaredy cats in no way magically transports cargo containers from one location to another.
Oh oh here is another ‘lefty’ publication linking to a Prof Quiggin article.
“As the economist John Quiggin argues, recent volatility in election results actually reflects a very coherent and consistent view. Australians do not want governments that will further advance neoliberal economic reform as their central purpose and priority.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/09/abbotts-legacy-is-a-hairball-in-the-throat-of-the-body-politic-can-turnbull-dislodge-it
Nice title. Hairballs? ugh
Well put a.v. For mine, they appear to me to be yr average semi-literate shooters which would place them on the right. I’m unconvinced that imposing a left/right grid of meaning on other people’s ideas and beliefs is useful except in so far as the ideas themselves can be shown to have a right or left lineage.
@Ronald Brak
So what happens when you can’t get oil based fuel for love nor money? Great granddad came out from Old Blighty on a clipper ship but I’m not keen to do the reverse trip. It all points to the big coal revival.
At some point this week the results of all 89 seats in the Queensland State election will be declared, meaning that parliament will be able to sit and a government will be formed comprising the 44 Labor MPs with the support of Peter Wellington (Independent). The LNP canard that a government can’t be formed until the status of the seat of Ferny Grove is resolved by the Court of Disputed Returns has been debunked by Antony Green. It is thereby a matter for some concern that ABC TV journalists are retailing LNP talking points on this issue even after they have been debunked by the ABC’s own election analyst.
I recently met and talked to a young man who loves his guns – and that’s an okay thing out here in the bush, farmers need guns.
But the amazing thing is that I found out that he really truly believed that it was the Greens who changed the gun laws and did a bad bad thing. He was convinced that they – the Greens – want to totally disarm everyone. He is not stupid or particularly ignorant about the things he does for a living.
Seriously, he was amazed when he realised that it was Howard and the LNP who were responsible for the gun laws and then he was willing to listen to the arguments for the gun laws and then to understand and admit that the gun legislation as it stands does not impede his legitimate use of his guns and that – nanny state or not – it prevents the gun nuts from hurting other people who don’t have guns and it also significantly lowers the chances that people will accidentally or in a fit of ‘bad temper’ kill members of their family and that is a good thing.
Then he was interested in the Greens and what they offered that was different from the nonsense we have now. And I believe that he voted for the Greens in the last state election. There was a 2.2 swing to the Greens – I think – in our electorate. I can’t take credit for all that though.
The difference I see between this young man’s ‘libertarian’ tendencies and the other sort of libertarian tendency that is on display by the IPA boyz, is that when ‘left’ libertarians are convinced that there is no conspiracy by The Left, that there are no actual living and breathing Leftoids, they do want to be cooperative and be part of egalitarian community that accepts and respects them.
The IPA boyz not so much wanting to be like normal people.
But I agree Jungney that right/left dichotomy just doesn’t work any more.
Dan Kahan came up with an interesting way of categorising what he sees as the essential differences between people in different ‘cultures’ – with the cultures being the right and the left of politics in the US.
He suggests that the relevant ‘world-views’ that separate right and life are better captured by our ideas and values about individualism/community and hierarchy/egalitarianism. He discusses some of his data using these categories from a few years ago here.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/11/5/a-snapshot-of-the-white-male-effect-ie-white-male-hierarch-i.html
@Hermit
Hermit, if oil based fuel cannot be obtained “for love nor money,” then I would suggest using something else.
@Ronald Brak
Incat just built an LNG powered ferry for Argentina. Even the LNG transport ships with spherical cryogenic tanks run modified diesel engines on boil-off from the tanks. Perhaps the dour and pragmatic could have nuclear ships call in while the romantically inclined (NZ et al) could get their containers delivered by clipper. If synfuel cost say $5/L compared to bunkers 30c things could get desperate.
Another ‘something else’ scenario is that we earmark gas 100% for transport and everybody else (canneries, power stations, laundries etc) find another heat source. That would imperil the $13bn Curtis Island investment.
@Julie Thomas
It can get weird in the bush around politics. A man of my acquaintance, ‘Roadie’, as he is known, approves deeply of the Taliban. ‘Mate’, he said, ‘the way they do justice is right I mean they just line ’em up on the ground and then go down the line and boom, boom, boom.’
Now, I doubt that Roadie was ever a major consumer of msm, ever. In fact, I suspect he is functionally illiterate. But he sure knows how to use youtube and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
The sheer bullshit that is spread against The Greens, and environmentalists who are generically and sneeringly described as greenies, is so vile and uninformed as to be only comprehensible anthropologically. That is, public declarations of contempt for ‘greenies’, fed by years of bigoted msm coverage, are a display of tribal loyalty among the chronically ripped off and stupid.
The worst recent example is the favourable coverage givenby The Land to the hillbilly farmer who allegedly shot and killed a NSW environmental officer because he (the farmer) had issues with the way that he had been ‘persecuted’ by bureaucrats for breaching regulations around land clearing. The Land, without apology, published a series of articles basically saying ‘well, bad policies deliver bad social outcomes’.
Thereby adopting the logic of the terrorist, to which observation they remain obtuse.
It seems to me that the lunatic Tea Party god bothering far right of the Liberal Party would be on to a good thing if they were intelligent enough to cultivate and then manipulate the drooling, grievance bearing and armed lumpen proletariat of the bush. Maybe they scare even Cory Bernardi?
Let’s keep our eyes on that space. Watch out for an intelligent, articulate and persuasive authentic spokesperson from the bush who embodies rural ‘virtues’ and manages to link Australian xenophobia and racism to ecological values. That’s the real danger of fascist populism here.
Fortunately, the gene and money pool in the bush is pretty shallow. They haven’t coughed one up yet and look unlikely to do so for a while.
@Hermit
Hermit, if you are aware that ships can run off LNG, why do you suggest that synfuel at $5 a liter might be used when the energy eqivalent of one liter of bunker fuel of natural gas currently costs about 19 cents domestically and 15 cents in the US?
The gun guys are an interesting, eclectic bunch, comprising far right, full on libertarian, through to people who just enjoy target shooting, the skill of using a rifle, and of course farmers, who feel the need to possess the means of putting down animals in distress.
About the only ones you can’t really reason with are those who believe in the principle that they should be allowed to do anything they want, without government interference: they see it as a metaphorical “Up yours, guvm’nt!” to possess weapons of mass carnage, M16s, fully automatic, RPGs, and anything else that some one, some where, manufactures.
Aside from those clots, I think most people who like guns can respect the fact that possession of fully automatic firearms is unnecessary, and carries a greater risk of evil use on a large scale, than does a single-shot-at-a-time weapon. There really is no need for a farmer (for example) to own a fully-automatic, or even a semi-automatic, firearm. Single shot is good enough for the purpose of putting down distressed animals, or clearing feral animals from the property.
It is fascinating the learn that a number of the more rustic dwellers seem to think it was the Greens, and not John Howard and the LNP, which changed gun laws and performed the buy-back in the wake of the Bryant massacre. Bryant had/has a screw loose—sadly—but he also had weapons of mass carnage, which he used to most destructive effect. That anyone could believe in a “false-flag” operation involving Bryant is awful, awfully sad. I wonder what world they live in, meaning who their close friends are, that such a theory could hold any credence at all?
I live on the edge of Qld red-neck country, in a small town that is rustic enough to be aesthetically pleasing and close enough to a large town with some jobs and a Uni. But I can only live here because there is reasonable internet access.
There used to be a dairy industry out here but many of farmers now work for corporate farmers and blame the Coles Woolies duopoly for the loss of their jobs. There are conspiracy theories about this sort of thing, about corporations and bank.
But I never talked to anyone who thought that farmer deserved anything but locking up in a psych hospital for the rest of his life. He shot him in the back even!
The hatred of the Greens seems to come from the lies they were told about land rights – and that it was the Greens allied with the blackfellas who were going to take their land and the main thing that people seem to hate about Labor is the interest rates back in the ’80.
But these people are seriously confused and really do vote against their own interests, like they love their ABC but vote for cuts. Duh.
@Julie Thomas
…and yet, the high interest rates in the early 80’s came from Treasurer John Howard and PM Malcolm Fraser. Ditto the high unemployment. The ALP floated the dollar, which in turn changed the way the Reserve Bank of Australia had to use interest rates.
Tony Abbott’s talk-a-bout was about as convincing as lipstick on a pig in the mud. Heard, heard it all before.
Tony says we made some mistakes, they’ll fix it by changing a few things…meanwhile, people lost their jobs for no other reason than Tony felt like it. Of his own volition, he promised no cuts to health, education, ABC, and SBS…and then he did it. Noone held a gun to his head to come out and promise those things on the eve of the election.
Under 17 months of Shakespearean comedy, the economy is messed up. Regressive taxes are extolled, progressive taxes reduced or removed. The wealth in the ground is granted to international companies for them to export, along with the taxable earnings. Manufacturing industry has been gutted, along with the surrounding suburbs (think car manufacturing), the renewable energy industry in sudden and brutal attack, increasing deficit, and a housing market made unaffordable for young people and/or single-income people; homelessness, especially the hidden homeless, is up. Mental health services under threat; medical research slashed now, but a shining monument to medical research in a $20 billion “fund”, supported by the mysterious medicare co-payment, which is not marked for anything beyond helping our universal medical healthcare system, apparently.
Under PM Tony Abbott, our government is one of the most self-contradictory and confused group I’ve had the misfortune to witness. At least the ALP coalition could function and pass bills through Parliament, even as they fought spectacularly in public.
Please let this play out as Hamlet did.
@Ronald Brak
Pundits expect world peak natural gas about 2030 notwithstanding the transient success of US fracking. Closer to home LNP stalwart Ian MacFarlane has predicted NSW gas shortages by 2016, that’s next year. Since very little gas is currently used as a transport fuel we would have to put a moratorium in non-transport uses for gas including LNG export. Currently gas provides 21% of Australia’s electricity (coal 64%) with the rest going for domestic and industrial heat, ammonia production and plastics feedstock.
When it’s gone it will be hard to replace. We can’t produce enough fermentation biomethane or synthetic Sabatier methane to replace fossil gases like natgas and CSG. Same goes for biofuels unless we make liquid fuel from coal. That must mean a severe contraction in hydrocarbon based transport, a key idea in Limits to Growth.
Hermit, let me get this straight. You are saying we will run out of both oil and natural gas and you are saying it will be impossible to produce replacements for them in the future for some unstated reason, but it will be possible to build cargo ship nuclear reactors without a problem? In what whay is that not crazy? I can build an anaeorbic digester to produce methane. I’m so talented I can even provide the feedstock. But I can’t build a nuclear reactor. (Honest.) If you want to play pretend and say that in your imaginary future nuclear powered cargo ships will be cheaper and safer than other alternatives that’s fine. But you’ve got to state these rules openly otherwise people will scoff, as I did, when they clearly depart from reality. If you don’t want to use phrases such as “let’s pretend” or “let’s play make believe” then some other phrases you can use are, “In the hypothetical situation that…” or even just, “If… then…”
Hermit, you say that peak natural gas will be in might be in 2030? Well, we’ve been at peak oil for over ten years now with the recent peak in production only being about 8% higher than what was achieved in 2004. That’s a growth rate of about 0.7% a year. In that time world population growth has been about 1.2%. In other words we’ve had declining oil production per person for more than a decade. And you know what? It ain’t so bad. What have we seen happen in these past 11 years? Well, there’s been an absolute decrease in oil use in the US and many other countries achieved through improved efficiency and substitution. We’ve seen oil mostly eliminated for heating and electricity generation, we’ve seen internal combustion engine cars become lighter and more efficient, hybrid cars have become common place, just about every taxi in Australia become a hybrid or LPG powered, we’ve seen the development of an electric car industry. In other words exactly what one would expect to happen around peak oil. Well, one as in one me at least. I think one you might have expected something different.
If peak natural gas occurs in the far off year of 2030 I expect we will see the same sort of thing occurring, with gas use being eliminated where it is easy to eliminate which leaves production available for where it’s hard to eliminate. But let’s hope we don’t have to wait 15 years for natural gas production to peak.
Anyway, Hermit, you seem to be stuck in a pair of trousers. You seem to think that if you can’t go down the oil leg or out the natural gas fly, you have no choice other than go down the nuclear leg. But that’s silly because there are other options.
nuclear is so expensive and the smaller the reactor gets the more expensive it becomes per kilowatt-hour of energy produced and the higher the security risks go. Electricity from Hinkley C costs about 20 cents a kilowatt-hour. Let’s say we can magically produce a cargo ship reactor that will operate for that much while even including a multibillion dollar insurance policy. Large industrial users in Australia pay a marginal cost of about 7 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity. Hydrogen production can be over 70% efficient, but let’s make it 50% to make up for losses. That’s about two thirds the cost of nuclear. Spreading solar capacity is dropping electricity costs for large users across Australia just as they have in South Australia.
And again I acciently command my robo monkey to press the enter button too soon. Please ignore the above mess.
In today’s Guardian Australia: Huffington Post to launch in Australia in partnership with Fairfax.
RB quite a few bold assertions there. I too have made a methane digester but the stink and constant work was too much. The ACT is paying the same for commercial solar as the UK is paying for Hinkley C nuclear. The panels will give about 16% of their rated power for 25 years but Hinkley should give 90% power for 60 years.
True we are using less transport fuel in the West but about 2 bn people who don’t have cars aspire to them. We can’t keep cutting fuel use indefinitely. Sydneysiders are supposed to use about 35L of petrol a week. Maybe they can get by on 20L but when it is forced down to say 5L some outer fringe dwellers won’t be able to get to work or the shops.
In 2015 fossil fuels account for 87% of our electricity and nearly 100% of our transport and industrial heat. If that was easy to turn around we’d be further ahead by now.
thank you, jungney, “left-wing conspiracy theory blog” says less to me about the observed than about the observer. i know your focus is local these days & i dig that, but i’ll share this interesting development i found today, don’t know if it will penetrate the usual local news filters. http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/01/10/cabinet-gives-ok-for-russian-use-of-paphos-base/ -a.v.
Well, knock me down with a feather…
@Hermit
Hermit, once again, I will respectfully ask you to ignore what’s there.
@Tim Macknay
No surprise to me. The PM has a history of backing losers, and this is just another one in his quiver of broken arrows. Anyway, “climate change is crap”, so we don’t need to worry about ineffectiveness of CSS, by our PM’s logic.
On another note, I think Sean Edwards is probably feeling a bit peeved at having taken the PM at his word the other day: something about subs and competitive open tender being mentioned, but now it’s being called competitive evaluation process, something with no technical meaning. Kevin Andrews, when asked on the difference, basically said that words would mean what he wanted them to mean, or that he would choose the words he wanted to use—presumably meaning it is up to us to interpret what the f**k he actually meant. I’m sorry, these guys really get me down sometimes. I’ll end with the pertinent piece:
Will the adult running the show please stand up? [No, not you, Christopher, no not you, Mr Bookshelf Brandis, uh uh no not you PM Abbott, definitely not you Mr Andrews, sigh.]
@alfred venison
Those preppers on the Doomsday Preppers show are Left ,Right and everything inbetween . There are some old hippies ,young nutty people ,Libertarian types ,control freaks ,generally nice people with a paranoid streak, obsessive compulsives , socially awkward misfits , and lots of ex-millitary blokes.
@alfred venison
That;s interesting. I’m a student of modern Greek history and have been taking a close interest in the new Minister for Finance in the Greek cabinet since I read that he is a dual citizenship Greek Australian, Yanis Varoufakis. Apparently he taught at Usyd, maybe political economy. He;s very funny and has described his career as an economist as being like ‘an atheist in a Medieval monastery’. He sees himself as a debunker and, so far, especially in the light of this development, the Greeks look to me as if they have a good handle on the state of play in the Eurozone. Yanis Varoufakis has a blog and looks to me to be one of those occasional tough minded radical democrats that history throws up from time to time.
So, the Greeks, who had a good taste of fascism during and after the war, have scented gunpowder drifting down from the Ukraine. You’ll like this:
At the end of the war the Greek left had two million members and 150,000 hardened fighters under arms and failed to take advantage of their strength. I think they’ve learned a few things since then.
a.v., in relation the the article you linked, given the state of Greek finances I doubt they could pay for anything guaranteed to be effective. It is therefore very useful to have some heavy hitting armaments sitting around on your tarmac run by people who you don’t trust, but understand.
I hope I can raise this issue in the sandpit. Recently there have been several cases of police shooting and even killing distraught, oddly behaved or temporarily deranged people brandishing knives in public. There was a case today of woman being shot dead in Sydney. Usually, the arsenal of weapons mentioned as being available to police in those cases consists only of capsicum spray, tasers and pistols.
Police need not be limited to these now conventional weapons and then always go (it seems) for the gun. It would be relatively easy for police to be trained in the use of fighting sticks. With such sticks, approved only for use against knife-wielders, a suitably trained person or persons, could easily disarm a knife wielder who continued to approach. Blows to knees, elbows, forearms and wrists would soon disarm and/or disable them. This would certainly be preferrable to shooting them. A broken wrist can be fixed, a fatal shot of course allows for no fix.
@Ikonoclast
A long knife wielded irrationally can cause serious injury. Police are quite wisely taught to keep the distance and to talk. I agree entirely with you on the need to find non-lethal methods for incapacitating someone in this situation, and certainly the handgun is a depressing choice.
The trouble with the current non-lethal at-a-distance weapons is that they simply don’t work on everybody, especially on people who are full of adrenaline; once the police officer has exhausted their rather limited choice of non-lethal weapons which have range, they are left with either the handgun or the telescoping stick, the latter requiring them to be in hand-to-hand combat range, or just a step outside that. Even a quite competently trained person (by which I mean someone who is very well practised with the use of the stick) is at quite significant risk of physical injury in a full-on knife attack. There are simply no reliable one-on-one defences that are 99% effective against a knife wielding slash and stab attacker: once you are within their striking range, dumb luck plays a part.
Honestly, I think the best tactic—if possible—is to wait until there are several more officers, say five or six, surround the individual, one officer doing all the talking and making direct eye contact, and then they use a coordinated stick strike at the limbs, and jump them, basically. Perhaps the circumstances changed too quickly, forcing an officer into a terrible decision. The fact that there were four officers in close proximity certainly provokes questions though, such as whether they had sticks, or could have tasered her (more than once). I haven’t watched the video footage surrounding this, and I don’t intend to. If someone can come up with a better and effective way of incapacitating someone without serious harm to them or the officers, please do it.
@jungney
That’s an interesting post, Jungney.
I dont think morals will influence the troika and we must begin to see our own future in what occurs in Greece.
@sunshine
One finds this diversity of people out here in the rural areas; not the real ‘locals’, that is, those who were born here and never left, but of those of us who choose to come out here to live there is a great diversity of backgrounds and reasons for making this choice, but there is a also a growing consensus between and among ‘us’ and the locals about what is wrong and why we choose to leave ‘civilization’ and live among them and what we have to offer.
In particular one of the people I met that I would not have talked to in a larger social environment, was an ex-military bloke – lots of gravitas and and air of being someone – but who is very reticent about talking about who he was and what he did but he told me that he once took a picture of himself firing a rifle down the main street of the small town he lives in at midday and sent it off to ‘George Street’. He is into old cameras that use film and set up the picture himself.
I don’t really understand the significance of this act for him but it was clearly something that he valued and thought that he showed that he had done better than his former colleagues who were still in “George Street” and had made the right choice to move out here.
Despite being from such different cultures we were able to agree on one small thing, that more tourists would be okay in our respective little towns but we would want them gone by 10 am on a Monday so we can have our peace and quiet back.
Managing this diversity and using it to achieve a good outcome I think starts when we go about finding one area of agreement and then being motivated to work out what else there is that we can agree on. I think so anyway.
“There are simply no reliable one-on-one defences that are 99% effective against a knife wielding slash and stab attacker: once you are within their striking range, dumb luck plays a part.”
What about the way dog handlers manage out of control dogs? They wear body padding; could that be useful against a knife also?
It is worth the effort to try and resolve these situations without killing anyone because the social and emotional costs of a death like this in a family and a community are very significant and can have such a lot of repercussions.
@Donald Oats
Certainly, my suggestion would not suit all cases. But in this case at least 4 police attended and surrounded the woman. This indicates they had numbers and presumably some time and space to operate in. Equipment including a long fighting staff, with gauntlets and a stab vest (very similar to a kevlar vest) might suffice although the femoral and carotid arteries might also need protection. Perhaps they could contain such a person at distance until a unit arrives with such gear.
Other options also ought to exist for this situation. The riot shotgun is a possibility; a short barrel weapon shooting bean bag rounds (called flexible baton rounds) or rubber bullets.
I simply don’t think the authorities are using enough imagination in coming up with ways to non-lethally detain a “mad” as opposed to a “bad” knife wielder.
10 + years ago there was a kid with a kitchen knife shot and killed by police at the skate park behind the Northcote mall in Melb. He was having some kind of mental episode .At the time I never heard reported that the skate park is only about 150 meters from ,and is in direct line of sight, to a police station across the other side of the mall car park.
Holly crap. We have commenters on a lefty blog saying some people who like firearms are just possibly normal people. It seems pigs can fly.
Given the extremely remote but still possible idea that minds may be open I’ll just leave this here:-