While we’re on the subject of world-class cliches, does anyone else find “back to back”, as in “back to back premierships” a trifle bizarre? Applied to people, or to any objects with a back and a front, it implies “facing in opposite directions”. And after putting two wins (or whatever) “back to back” what are you supposed to do with a third?

I’m definitely in a minority of one in thinking that the odds of war with Iraq have declined over the past month. The Slate Saddamometer has the odds rising from 50 per cent, just before the Iraqi declaration (or non-declaration) to 72 per cent after Powell’s declaration that Iraq was in ‘material breach’. And virtually every newspaper commentary has declared that war is on the way.

It’s true, contrary to my expectation, that the Iraqi government seems to have made no serious attempt to account for (or even explain away) the stocks of WMDs that were unaccounted for in 1998. I’m more impressed, though, by the dogs that haven’t barked in the night. Two are particularly notable. First, at any time after the declaration, the US Administration could have brought the process to an end by producing the clear evidence it had claimed (or at least strongly suggested) it had of Iraqi weapons programs. Second, on Thursday the US could have declared that the omissions in the Iraqi declaration were, in themselves, grounds for war.

Now that neither of these has happened, the decision has pretty clearly been deferred until Blix reports on 26 January. According to todays NYT, the US will now begin handing over its evidence to the inspectors, but no-one seems to expect too much from this.

Obviously, if the inspectors discover weapons (or a susipcious factory with locked gates and armed guards) the game is up for Saddam. The same is probably true if interviews with Iraqi scientists produce a really convincing defector, though presumably such a defector could point the way to physical evidence in any case.

But the likelihood that the inspectors won’t find anything and won’t face serious obstruction has risen, not fallen, in the last month. Over a hundred sites have already been inspected, including those that the US and UK governments pointed to as most suspicious. Apart from a couple of low-grade incidents where the person with the keys was out to lunch, there don’t seem to have been any compliance problems. Presidential palaces, supposedly an insuperable sticking point, have been opened up promptly.

Suppose that this continues until 26 January. By then, hundreds of sites will have been investigated, the best US intelligence will have been tested out, and the key Iraqi scientists will have been interviewed. If nothing has turned up, I can’t see how Blix’s report can possibly provide Bush with a casus belli. And by then, it will be too late to go back to the omissions in the declaration.

If I thought that those predicting war had some particular expertise, I’d defer to their wisdom. But on issues of this kind, I’m happy to back my own judgement even against an overwhelming majority. After all, I’d be willing to bet that most of those reproducing war hype today swallowed the hype about Y2K three years ago.

As I predicted, it didn’t take long for the global warming sceptics to deny the latest evidence that the world is getting hotter.

Irony alert on At least in the case of Australia’s Bureau of Metereology, Bizarre Science charitably prefers to blame incompetence rather than the political bias that is usually imputed to bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Apparently, the BOM’s statistics are wrong because they fail to take account of urban ‘heat islands’, a phenomenon of which anyone even casually familiar with the global warming debate has been aware of for years. Well, they are only meteorologists, after all … Irony alert off

Seriously, the urban heat island problem is a dead horse that shouldn’t be flogged any further. The issue has been investigated extensively, and found to be of very modest significance.

Here’s the IPCC summary

Clearly, the urban heat island effect is a real climate change in urban areas, but is not representative of larger areas. Extensive tests have shown that the urban heat island effects are no more than about 0.05°C up to 1990 in the global temperature records used in this chapter to depict climate change.

And obviously the BOM doesn’t think heat islands are a big problem or they would be adjusting their measurements and historical statistics to take account of them.

Update The irony alert didn’t work (sigh!) BS takes violent exception, accuses me of Lysenkoism, then sets the record straight (!) by saying ‘The BOM is not incompetent. But it is being selective about which data it uses to justify its “warmest year on record” claim.’ If I were with the BOM, I can’t say I’d be any more pleased by this imputation than by the suggestion that they had simply stuffed up.

I had a dispute with William Zinsmeister a while back over his use of clearly erroneous statistics on European productivity. I must admit I assumed his American Enterprise magazine was a fly-by-night operation ripping off the respected, if clearly right-wing, thinktank American Enterprise Institute. This post from Brad DeLong shows that the truth is worse.

Zinsmeister’s outfit is the real American Enterprise Institute, but it has gone downhill a long way in the last few years. As DeLong says “Back in the late 1970s, the American Enterprise Institute ranked close to the Brookings Institution as a thinktank you could trust not to deliberately lie to you. Now it has fallen very deeply into the pit indeed”. Apparently, Zinsmeister used analysis of the political views of teacher’s in women’s studies courses and presented them as representative of the leftwing bias of academics in general.

Professor Bunyip asks “Is there anybody else who winces at the use of “world class” as the all-purpose, inspirational modifier of Australian endeavour?” Me, me, me!

The same post suggests a panel confrontation between Windschuttle and his opponents, with the loser to be ‘driven from the academy’. But I think Windschuttle and the academy parted ways some time ago, so he’s on “a hiding to nothing”.

I’ve set up a new special purpose blog. I’m writing some entries for a proposed dictionary of modern thought and I’d very much appreciate comments, suggested references and so on from my fellow bloggers and blogreaders. It’s here. I plan to try a few experiments like this and see what happens.

My column in Thursday’s AFR (subscription required) pointed out how the government’s own statements made the case for the renationalisation of Telstra. Among the political elite (that word!) renationalisation remains virtually unthinkable. But at least in the UK, that is not true of the general public. Thanks to Jack Strocchi for alerting me this Guardian survey which reported

The extent to which the pendulum has swung against the privatisation culture is demonstrated by the 76% who say they want to see the railways brought back into the public sector and is nearly matched by the 60% who want to see an end to private prisons.

OK, it’s the Guardian. But it’s backed up by this piece in the Economist, which argues that the reason the Tories are doing so much worse than the US Republicans is because British voters are far more leftwing than Americans. In particular, a substantial majority supports higher taxes.

Hans Blix has come in for a lot of criticism and caricature but he’s revealed himself as one of the cleverest political operators on the world scene today. His critical report on the Iraqi declaration got him exactly what he wanted. The US Administration passed up any chance of an immediate declaration of war based on the December 8 trigger and effectively made Blix’s interim report, due on Australia Day 26 January, the new trigger. On the other hand, the references to omissions and inconsistencies have put maximum pressure on the Iraqis to comply with all his demands.

All of this is good. If the Iraqis are hiding WMDs, the pressure Blix is now putting on will make it hard for them to conceal the fact. Even without an actual discovery, another negative report from Blix would certainly pave the way for a US invasion.

On the other hand, the Administration has given far more ground than seems to have been realised by most commentators. If Blix’s report is along the lines of ‘Iraqi compliance has been generally satisfactory, but more time and more inspections are needed’, it will be very hard to get UNSC support, or even domestic support in the US, for war. This in turn gives Blix a lot of leverage in pressing the US to hand over its evidence against Saddam (if in fact it has any useful evidence).

To summarise, Blix, not Bush, is now the person who will have the biggest say in deciding whether or not there is to be a war. When those inside the Beltway wake up to this, expect a dramatic change in the tone of discussion.

Here’s a history of SPAM and the Internet from the makers of the real thing.

Keith Windschuttle has made a lot of play of errors and wrong interpretations by his opponents and the title of his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History makes it clear that any such errors and misinterpretations can arise only from ‘fabrication’ that is, academic fraud. He clearly has found some serious errors in Lyndall Ryan’s work, and has managed to discover one misattributed quotation by Henry Reynolds. His other line of criticism is semantic, attacking the use of words like ‘genocide’ and ‘guerilla warfare’, derived from European history, to describe what happened in Australia.

In only a few days, I’ve heard at least as many errors and misinterpretations from Windschuttle and his supporters as he’s managed to discover in years of painstaking work. First, there’s this statement reported by Miranda Devine

It told how Australia’s academic historians have “failed their public responsibility to tell the truth”, said Claudio Veliz, Boston University emeritus professor of history, who launched the book. The truth, he said, is that: “This is the first major nation in the history of the world to have secured full independence and sovereignty without killing anyone.”

This isn’t true even as regards Europeans. Veliz has apparently never heard of the Eureka Stockade and the Castle Hill rebellion, and obviously Windschuttle didn’t enlighten him. More importantly, even on Windschuttle’s own account of Tasmania, substantial numbers of Aborigines were killed in clashes with settlers and soldiers, so this claim must have some sort of postmodernist interpretation in which ‘killed’ doesn’t mean ‘killed’ but something else like ‘killed unlawfully’. Veliz’s claim that ‘no-one was killed’ is far more egregiously wrong that Lyndall Ryan’s suggestion that the Tasmanian Aborigines were victims of genocide – after all, nearly all of them died in a very short period. (Another possibility is that Veliz is talking about Federation – but if so, there’s no possible sense in which progressive historians have failed in their responsibility to tell the truth. In fact, as Donald Horne observed, it’s the conservatives like Howard who prefer the blood-soaked Anzac myth to the boring story of a peaceful referendum. In any case, this has nothing to do with Reynolds and Ryan).

Next, there’s Windschuttle’s statement quoted by Robert Manne, that the Tasmanians became extinct because ‘they prostituted their women’. Leaving aside the nasty racism of this, Manne correctly points out that prostitution is a concept that makes sense only in a money economy. Its application to a tribal society is considerably less justifiable than Reynolds’ suggestion that such societies could practise ‘guerilla warfare’. And there’s the implication that sexual relations between whites and Aborigines were invariably voluntary. For Windschuttle, rape didn’t happen if there weren’t any police reports.

Then there’s his performance on Australia Talks Back, which you can listen to here. Among the contradictions and errors:

Windschuttle initially suggests that the fabrication of Aboriginal history is the work of radicals in the last thirty years. But by the end of the program he’s claiming that fabrication started in the 1830s and has been going on ever since.

Windschuttle claims that the British were uniquely sensitive colonists, as witness the fact that Indian tribes fought for them against the French. He didn’t mention the French and Indian War, the American component of the Seven Years War. Although some Indian tribes fought for the British, at least as many supported the French.

A caller who had done extensive research on Fiji and New Zealand in the 19th century asked him why, if Australian treatment of Aborigines was so good, Europeans in Fiji and NZ saw it as a model of what not to do. Windschuttle gave a non-answer to the question, either because he misunderstood it or because he had no answer. Since for Windschuttle, there is no such thing as innocent error, I’m counting this as a fabrication.

That’s five errors I’ve noted in my spare time in the course of a single week. I’m sure there must be more. People who live in glass houses …

Update I mentioned this previously, but I’ll note again that David Morgan has lots of good stuff on this topic.