Insane Clown Posse -- Part II

ONE of a career in Etruscan semiotics’ great attractions was also the easiest to grasp:  you could make it all up as you went along. Well, not make it up exactly, because there were already a few, a very few, pioneers when the Professor charged like a bull into the field some decades back. Citing their scholarship kept them flattered and happy and, once deference had been demonstrated and fealty proclaimed, the door swung open on wonderland of academic ingenuity.

Say, for example, the department needed a little assist from the sods and saphies at Queer Studies, always being aware that it is very important to have allies when budgets are being thrashed. No worries, very easy to arrange. Add to the PowerPoint an ancient fresco of, say, Chiron doing some naked mentoring with an adolescent Achilles and present “the image” – there is no such thing as a mere illustration these days -- as proof that any lingering disdain for pederasty defies history’s precedent and is solely the legacy of joyless Victorian repression.

Note next that intolerance is the curse from which society must free itself, that discrimination is vile, that there must be “societal growth and evolution”, not to mention “confrontational honesty”, and make frequent use of the always popular “need for the appropriate response”.  For the money shot, suggest all present put their names to a public letter protesting restrictions on older gents who loiter near school groups at the municipal baths. By this stage, someone at the table will have surely announced the intention to pen a Phage opinion piece along the lines of “Priestly Abusers Demean Man/Boy Love”. Another voice will note that Tony Abbott is a Catholic and all present can then enjoy a little chuckle about his six-pack, Speedos and hypocrisy. Then it will be on to the agenda’s less weighty items. 

With fresh dollars in the departmental pocket it is good to give the impression of diving straight back into the work at hand, which mostly means fostering the next crop of PhDs who, upon graduation, will hail their old professor’s magisterial corpus as they peer-review each other’s output. Thus does the circle of academic life renew itself – and a good thing, too, both for members of Australia’s intellectual elite and the financial institutions holding their mortgages.

None of the above is anything that would have been admitted back in the day when there were papers to be graded and hungry post-grads to do all the marking. That reticence once seemed appropriate, even ethical. Now things have changed -- thanks to that Hungry Beast rap video, which has revealed how other areas of academic inquiry follow very much the same methods that built the budget and profile of Sydney Orr’s Faculty of Etruscan Semiotics. All thanks for the eye-opener go to Melbourne University’s Ailie Gallant (below), one of those hockey-sticking hos from the science ghetto whose rapping and cursing demonstrated why climatologists command the respect they do. Ailie is quite proud of that video, by the way, and has even added mention of the performance to the “Media and Outreach” section of her bio page in the Parkville Asylum’s staff directory.

It is not Allie’s efforts to attract attention  (which can also help with the funding), but her co-authored paper on water flows in the Murray Darling Basin which has brought so much re-assurance. In particular, it is the remarkably specific conclusion that there is precisely, and she is very exact about this, a 2.3% likelihood tht any of the many droughts over the past 1500 years were worse than the one just ended – the same dry spell during which the she began smokin’ dos’  stats in her climate crib. It was a popular meme a few years ago, back when rain refused to fall and climate change was replacing global warming, so her enthusiasm at the time was understandable.

And her methods? Well, let’s just say that the Professor is -- yo, lab bitches -- down with them.

The Original Custodians were not big on meteorological records, so that was a problem for Allie right there. She might have gone off to Barmah (a lovely spot) and cored a few red gums or somesuch, measured their transected rings and deduced when it had been hot and dry or cool and wet. That was not her preferred method, however. Rather, nice and comfy at a Parkville work station, she consulted those who went before, mining their studies of celery top pines in Tasmania, teak in Indonesia, some tall timber in Western Australia, Tongan corals, kauri in New Zealand and other interesting bits of Bali, Fiji and the Great Barrier Reef. The closest survey site was a good 900 kilometres from the Murray, the furthest a 10-hour flight, even for Tim Flannery. Data sources so far removed from the river she intended to study might have suggested an insurmountable obstacle to those who know not the miracles of modern modelling. By reviewing numbers here, sifting charts there and rejecting discordant figures in accordance with recognised climatological norms and norming, Ailie was able to feed what was left into a computerized vitamizer and – golly gosh, guess what? – demonstrate with charts and graphs that the recent drought really was the worst in centuries, just as the Phage, ABC, Guardian, World Wildlife Fund had been saying all along!

Indeed, by Ailie’s reckoning, it was even worse, which must have convulsed the WWF’s fund-raisers with shivers of delight: the drought was not the nastiest in 100 years or even 1,000 years – it was a full 1500 years since Australia had seen the arid like. Just to put things in perspective, that is not too long after the Romans pulled out of Britain. Amazing, ain’t it, what climate science can learn about a river in southern Australia from a bit of Bali coral someone else has studied? And don't getting suspicious, thinking nobody could be that precise on the basis of such much-handled data.The science is settled, Ailie assures us, and to a 97.7% certainty, no less!

And that, as Ailie rapped the other night, is what climate science is all about. She is proud of her research, naturally, and quite probably eager to tackle the next challenge -- pinpointing Warrnambool’s worst hailstorm since the Council of Trent, perhaps. As for the Professor, there are no regrets at the Billabong. Climate science might be better funded, but the case for pederasty was, while almost as open to question, much easier to make. And, as any self-respecting climate denier would add, much more convincing. 

   

Insane Clown Posse

THAT racket on Hungry Beast last night – you know, all those learned sorts getting down with the youth and rapping up a gale of yo-this and motherfucker-that – engendered such curiosity at the Billabong that it seemed worthwhile investing a few keystrokes to learn what it is, exactly, that constitutes a “climate scientist”, at least as the ABC recognises that peculiar occupation.

The answer, it turns out, is not much, although a careerist eye for the main chance would appear to be a key element of your up-and-coming climate practitioner’s CV. That’s not a personal opinion, mind you. It is spelled out in the sales pitch to students by the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Center, where four of the rappers do their sciencing. Here’s how UNSW”s pamphleteers pitch catastrophism’s bright side:

The need for students who understand environmentally relevant physical sciences has never been greater.  Demand is currently high for graduates of programs in this area worldwide … Recent PhD graduates from the CCRC have gone on to research positions at CSIRO and in several overseas research institutions.  A Masters’ or Honours degree can be a stepping-stone to the PhD, or a great asset to anyone seeking non-research employment in areas that will be affected by environmental issues and changes.

Two of the UNSW contingent in Hungry Beast’s insane clown posse are not quite yet climate scientists, as they are still working on the modeling exercises that will earn them their PhDs. Youthful enthusiasm excuses many lapses of taste and judgment, so perhaps they deserve a pass this time. But how to explain the compromised dignity of three full-blown faculty members who tested their tonsils?

Katrin Meissner (above) would seem to be the living proof that there is truth in advertising. A youngish, fresh-faced slip of gal – one who would have done very well indeed in Etruscan Semiotics had she placed herself under a mentoring Bunyip – she has nevertheless bagged a very nice swag of grants and appointments. No doubt she is more brilliant than a solar array (and probably quite fetching in a little white coat and heels), but such achievements in a lab bitch so young really do stoke the suspicion that being in the right field at the right time does wonders for one’s prospects.

 (“Lab bitch”, by the way, is not a term that rolls easily off any gentleman’s tongue, but in the light of Katrin’s enthusiasm for yelling the prime procreative vulgarity, now a staple of the ABC’s nightly programming, it seemed those words needed to be used at least once in this post. UNSW’s hockey stick ho might otherwise be miffed at having been mistaken for a lady.)

Her UNSW colleague, Dr Jason Evans (above), added even more intellectual heft to the choir, as he has published many, many papers and prognostications about what the weather might do next. He is also the performer ABC viewers will remember as getting in the camera’s face at the 1:53 mark of the two-minute video. That is the instant when he announces with aggressive tunelessness that he is no mere a climate scientist, not him! No, he is “a fucking climate scientist.” There may be one thing, however, Jason Evans PhD (with a self-conferred FCS) regrets publishing, and that would be his prediction in late 2009 of the Saharan future facing the Murray-Darling basin.

''Certainly the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which includes the Lachlan, [is] looking at hotter and drier projections in the future,'' a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, Dr Jason Evans, said.

Pity about all that rain we’ve been having.

And pity, too, about those pesky Climategate emails, because one particular sequence of correspondence provides a glimpse of the world in which another academic rapper, Victoria University’s Prof. Roger N. Jones (the little bald fellow below and at 1:05 in the video), does business.

Debating how best to present climate projections that might not be quite so dire as the World Wildlife Fund would wish, Dr A. Barrie Pittock, recently retired from the CSIRO’s Climate Impact Group, tosses around ideas with colleague Mike Hulme for making the package more palatable.  It’s all very technical and, for a layman, rather difficult to grasp, except for the broad point that they are really, really worried their stats and charts won’t be scary enough to keep everyone happy.

“I would be very concerned,” writes Pittock, “if the material comes out under WWF auspices in a way that can be interpreted as saying that ‘even a greenie group like WWF’ thinks large areas of the world will have negligible climate change. But that is where your 95% confidence limit leads.”

Fortunately, the human connections that link and bind the “climate change community” are much more accessible than the science. Here is an especially fascinating excerpt:

Dear Mike,

….. I should perhaps explain my delicate position in all this. As a retired CSIRO person I have somewhat more independence than before, and perhaps a reduced sense of vested interest in CSIRO, but I am still closely in touch and supportive of what CAR is doing. Also, I have a son who is now a leading staff member of WWF in Australia and who is naturally well informed on climate change issues. Moreover, Michael Rae, who is their local climate change staffer, is a member of the CSIRO sector advisory committee (along with some industry people as well) and well known to me. So I anticipated questions from WWF Australia, and from the media later when the scenarios are released, regarding the scenarios. I did not want to be in the position of feeling the need to seriously question in public their presentation or interpretation. You have allayed my fears on that score, so that is great.

Career opportunities in climate change? You bet there are – including a bit of extra work for Prof. Jones, mentioned in passing by Pittock to Hulme as a useful chap who might “respond on behalf of the group” and “may still follow up with some more detailed comments he is collating”.

What’s that sage advice the old hoofers give stagestruck wannabes? Oh, yes, that’s it, “Don’t give up your day job.” In this case, and despite the boffins’ dreadful din, it might be better  if that counsel were to be reversed.

Yes, as performers they are thoroughly awful, but urging them to abandon “genuine climate science” might prove less taxing for the rest of us, even allowing for the cursing and the racket.

Aunty's Foul Mouth

IF ONE gives the Gillard government the benefit of the doubt on matters of motive, then its most enduring legacy will be a tutorial on the treachery of good intentions. Labor brought with it to power in 2007 an evangelical zeal to wipe clean the sins of Howard The Beast and the planet-raping, baby-drowning racists who joined him in marching Australia into the wasteland of amoral indifference. It wasn’t mere politics Kevin Rudd and his then-loyal deputy peddled from the stump -- although there was plenty of that, of course -- but a niggly and chiding campaign of moral betterment.

Consider an issue, any issue, and ponder how the shadow of the left’s favourite preachers and pulpits blocked the light of reason, inevitably casting perceptions and prescriptions in the stark white and black of virtue and wickedness. Far from representing the well-heeled upper crusts of the world’s many Trashcanistans (who else can meet the people smugglers’ steep fees?), those who arrived uninvited at Christmas Island were taken as the living proof that the law and attitudes were evil and needed to be changed. The law was changed, almost immediately, and the result has been wrecked boats and lost lives, roof-sitters, riots and, coming soon, a fresh and bizarre trade in human flesh that will see a series of unequal swaps between Australia and Malaysia. As the floundering Gillard makes its incoherent attempts to restore that eroded popularity the one possibility that her government will not consider is that its sliding numbers are all its own doing.

Or global warming, as it was once known, that has seen so much more of the same. Rudd branded it the great moral question of our age and jetted off to Copenhagen with an entourage large enough to reflect that pressing urgency. Result: Much posturing and many photos of the former PM and ….  well, nothing much that can be measured, other than the polls’ calibration of the public’s growing disbelief. An astute government might have stopped there and cut its losses. Instead, because it found their company more congenial, it listened to GetUp’s crowd wranglers and the Youth Climate Coalition’s children’s crusade. Now we have Gillard’s carbon tax and her policy's insufferable advocate, the jet-setting Tim Flannery, whose salary, shuttlings and pseudo spirituality are daily reminders that theology has usurped both science and rational policy.

Fix education? A government that heeded none but teachers’ union reps bought, seasoned for taste and swallowed at a gulp the dogma that public works projects produce smarter kids. The result has been twofold: a mushrooming of gold-plated shelter sheds and the opportunity to observe the much better value for money private schools’ lean bureaucracies consistently achieved.

And now comes the budget, which is salted with many further examples of a government attempting to do well by doing what it hopes voters will perceive as doing good. The most striking examples are those set-top boxes, which grannies are to have connected at considerable taxpayer expense. Again, while this initiative must have struck Gillard & Co., as a hands-down vote winner, the likely trajectory from largesse to debacle is easy to plot. There will be shonky installers and horror stories -- lots of those. There will be another industry ruined, just as the home-installation industry was cruelled, by the flood of market-distorting subsidies and state-sponsored competitors to existing aerial installers. And we will see the greatest inevitability of them all: baffled oldsters needing many publicly funded follow-up visits to reset their boxes every time there is a power outage or granddad fouls the wires with his mobility chair. Gilard & Co. may not have noticed, but geriatrics are not renowned for techno savvy.

Nor for their indulgence of obscenity, which makes what the grey battalions might find to watch via those boxes somewhat problematic. Yes, The Bill will screen forever on some UK-themed channel devoted to repeats. And yes, Midsommer Murders and Antiques Roadshow will not be going away. But suppose your Aunt Violet had tuned in to last night’s Angry Boys premiere, what might she have made of it? While intermittently amusing, Chris Lilley’s latest vehicle was more memorable for the dialogue’s relentless obscenity. This sort of thing is always justified in the name of realism, but it was the closing credits that put pay to that excuse. As the names of gaffers, best boys and other mysterious crafts rolled down the screen, a voiceover concluded the episode with a sentence that climaxed in the word “motherf___er”.  There was no need for most of the show’s salty language, but that parting shot characterised the shock-the-squares attitude and the ABC’s endorsement of it.

Or suppose your Auntie Violet had stayed tuned for Angry Beast. Once again, purposeless obscenity was endemic. Andrew Bolt has a clip of one segment and he asks, quite rightly, why taxpayers should underwrite not just propaganda but filthy, raucous and grossly offensive propaganda?

The ancients will get their set boxes and Michelle Grattan, Peter Hartcher and all of Gillard's media courtiers will once again have an opportunity to make their inspired excuses for waste and incompetence. But those set-top boxes, they will bear 24/7 witness to a national broadcaster’s misguided sense of mission and our government’s well-intentioned gift of toxic rot.