The blog was pretty much out of action over the weekend owing to problems with my antispam software. I’ve fixed the worst of them, but I’ll need to do a bit more, so posting may be light. If there’s anyone reading who’d like to act as technical support for me, I’m very much open to offers.
DDT as a repellent
I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.
How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?
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Sherman on war
Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!
Quiggin on Bush
Autogoogling, as you do, you find out interesting things about namesakes around the world. My most prominent namesake is Canadian terrorism expert Tom Quiggin, who is a good source of information on quite a few topics. Now he has a blog> His opening posts seem very promising
Why Bush Has it Wrong
Intelligence and the Moral High Ground
Two weeks behind the Zeitgeist
I’ve been following the Peak Oil debate with a mildly sceptical eye for some time, and it struck me a while ago that despite high prices, global oil output hadn’t grown much, but hadn’t declined either. I came up with the innovative description of our current position as “Plateau Oil“. If I had bothered with Google, I would have noticed that the International Energy Agency had offered the same description two weeks earlier. And if I’d thought about for more than a couple of seconds, I would have realised that the supply of topographical metaphors is so limited as to make this a forced move (We Australians use “Tableland” to describe the same landform and there’s also “mesa”, but Mesa Oil is taken, and “Tableland Oil” sounds silly)
Anyway, why are we (apparently) observing Plateau Oil and what does it mean?
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Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
The coming Australian debt crisis?
My article in Thursday’s Fin is over the fold. At this stage the US mortgage/CDO/Debt panic is not a likely direct source of major problems for Australia. Still, we are badly exposed to the same general kind of risk.
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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.
Double or nothing on Haneef
Having made a comprehensive mess of the Haneef case while he was in Australia, and having paid for his flight to India, the government and the AFP, might reasonably have sought to turn the page, and given a “No comment” or other non-response to further questions on the subject. Given the Minister’s broad latitude under the law, it seems most unlikely that Haneef’s appeal against the visa cancellation can succeed, so they had a chance to get the story off the front page.
Instead, they’ve decided to go double or nothing. Andrews won a round of the media cycle with his carefully timed and staged release of allegedly secret information on Tuesday. With no time for any real response, he got a perfect run on the TV news and the morning editions. It took a day or so for some of the problems to emerge, of which the most significant were:
* The information wasn’t secret and had been put to Haneef by the police in interviews (for which the transcripts have apparently not been made available)
* The apparently damning quotes (mostly from Haneef’s brother) were tightly edited extracts from a translation of a conversation in Urdu
* Andrew’s presentation ignored the fact that Haneef had called the British police four times without success in an attempt to resolve the SIM card question
Not content with this, Mick Keelty suggested that further charges “might” be laid against Haneef, managing in the process to misspeak yet again regarding the location of the SIM card. Then there was the convenient leaking of an Indian police dossier (apparently just a summary of material provided by the Oz and UK forces).
Perhaps all this will succeed in political terms. But most people must be aware by now that seemingly clearcut evidence presented by this government has a habit of turning out to be flimsy at best. Having made the latest claims, the government should either lay charges against Haneef or agree to Rudd’s call for an inquiry in which the whole issue can be examined by someone credible.
Federalism at its worst
If there has ever been a worse contribution to Australian federalism than this decision by the Howard government to provide special funding to a hospital in Tasmania (naturally located in a marginal electorate) I don’t recall it. I say this as someone who has repeatedly called for the Commonwealth to take over hospitals.
Interfering in the funding for one hospital is worse than useless, and the transparent political opportunism of this decision makes it worse still. Why not have the Federal Health Minister review waiting lists, and push swinging voters up the queue?
This is part of a pattern with the Howard government, in which it funds or mandates politically appealing extras while leaving the states with the responsibility for providing the basics. We’ve seen this in schools (chaplains, values education, compulsory history and so on), TAFE (the Commonwealth’s new colleges) the Murray (where the states are still stuck with managing land use), Aboriginal communities and a whole host of other areas. The result is even more duplication and waste than we had before. Howard is now more centralist than Whitlam, who at least encouraged the states to join his efforts.
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John Quiggin 