I was thinking yesterday about a column for the Fin, on the subject of personal relationships between Australian PMs and overseas leaders (prime examples being Keating-Suharto and Howard-Bush) and arguing that such relationships weren’t in our long-term interest since they create a risk of conflict with the domestic opponents of the leaders concerned, who may themselves be in power in the future.
Somehow I suspect that, by the time my column runs on Thursday, that idea will look rather old-hat.
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Now that nearly everybody (except US Republicans, of course) accepts the scientific evidence on global warming, the problem is to determine the best available response. As I’ve argued before, the main obstacle to action is the belief that we can’t protect the environment unless we are willing to accept a radical reduction in our standard of living.
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.
Driving in Brisbane the other day, I noticed an ad for domain.com.au, claiming their website was so easy anyone could use it. This was illustrated by a picture of George W. Bush, looking mystified by a laptop.
It’s striking that the advertisers thought no potential customers (or not enough to matter) would be put off by the assumption that the leader of the free world is a byword for stupidity.* This in turn raises the question of why the Australian government remains so supinely obedient to this lame duck, over Iraq, Kyoto, the Hicks case and so on.
* Strictly speaking, Bush isn’t stupid. He’s shown himself to be quite sharp in the pursuit of his own short term interests and those of his backers. But he’s ignorant, narrow-minded, intellectually lazy and unwilling to learn from experience, a combination that produces reliably stupid policy decisions.
Now that charges have finally been filed against David Hicks, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if the trial proceeds and he is acquitted. The answer, it appears, is nothing. More precisely, if acquitted, Hicks will go back to Guantanamo Bay unless and until the US Administration chooses to release him.
That at least was the situation in 2002 according to this article by Ronald Dworkin, stating that the Pentagon reserves the right to hold detainees indefinitely, regardless of the trial outcome. And a group of Chinese Uighurs were held at Guantanamo for more than a year after military review panels had determined that they were not enemy combatants. This Wikipedia article includes a statement by Rumsfeld to the same effect.
Maybe this has been changed by the legislation passed last year. But if so, I can’t find any evidence to this effect. In fact, by removing any rights for aliens declared as enemy combatants by the Administration, the Military Commissions Act appears to confirm the power claimed by Rumsfeld to hold Hicks (or any non-citizen) without any resort to habeas corpus and regardless of any trial outcome.
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has joined forces with Alan Sokal, scourge of leftwing relativism and pseudoscience, in an LA Times op-ed piece on the current state of the Science Wars.
As Mooney and Sokal note, the decline of antiscience views on the left
frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Anatol Rapoport has died at the age of 95. Among many contributions, perhaps his most widely-known was the Tit-for-Tat rule for repeated games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, embodied in a four-line program Rapaport successfully entered in a contest run by Robert Axelrod. Rapoport’s program co-operates inititially, and thereafter matches the other player’s last action, defecting in response to a defection, and returning to co-operation if the other player does so. There’s more here from Tom Slee.
The fact that the American Enterprise Institute (currently funded by ExxonMobil, but not for much longer it seems) is offering $10K a pop to scientists and economists willing to attack the IPCC report is all over the press and the blogosphere (a PDF scan of one of the letters has been posted here. I was alerted by David Adamson, who pointed me to this Courier-Mail report citing the Guardian. It’s striking to think that when I started blogging in 2002, the AEI was still widely respected.
Meanwhile Brad DeLong has suggested that he and I should put our hands up for the cash. Since we are closely familiar with all the main denialist arguments, it would be money for jam after all. Sad to say, this appears to be an invitation-only offer and neither Brad nor I is on the list. In any case as radek points out in comments
10K seems like a pretty low amount to pay for a shredded reputation. Unless, I guess, you ain’t got much reputation to begin with. Even market forces, politics and ideology aside, predict that whatever comes out will be of extremely low quality. You get what you pay for.
Of course, this applies equally to anyone willing to hire AEI itself.
In related shenanigans, another recipient of the ExxonMobil cash spigot, the Fraser Institute (whose efforts on this point are headed by the egregious Ross McKitrick) is holding an event on Monday in London, aimed at discrediting the IPCC. The Fraser Institute report has already been leaked and dissected at DeSmogBlog, which suggests that Fraser may be fronting for AEI. Any readers who happen to be in London might want to roll up and join the Rent-a-crowd there. No guarantee that you’ll get paid for attendance only, though.
And on the lighter side, the search engine on the White House website has been rigged to return no results for searches on “global warming”
