Bloggered And Buggered

THE odd random thought was ready to go up yesterday, but the Blogger publishing system was being difficult. Is Wayne Swan moonlighting as their webmaster? Whatever the reason, the techno elves have fixed it and posting can can now resume. Apologies to any whose comments and linking were frustrated.

Newspaper Moose, er, Muse

YOU find gems in the strangest places, sometimes even in the words that follow Jonathan Green's byline. Give the man his due -- his analysis of the Fairfax papers' woes and his suggested remedy are spot on. There is certainly wisdom in this observation:

[Fairfax] may well be a media business that continues to publish newspapers. But they cannot be papers of the kind we see today. They will need to be papers that publish information of sufficient value to readers that their cover price goes a long way to recovering the costs of their production.

The key, as Green sees it,

The Age must move away boldly from a day-to-day news agenda - news that was being delivered better and more quickly elsewhere - and focus on the paper's strengths of intelligent contextualisation, analysis, and investigation. It must remake and re-imagine itself: a new kind of daily paper, one that was all about breadth rather than immediacy.

Easily said, but almost certainly impossible to implement with the current management and reporters. The Phage and Silly, remember, each neglected to make any mention whatsoever of Larissa Behrendt's notorious tweet until, finally, they published an opinion piece insisting that the affair was no big deal. Three weeks is quite a spell, enough time for even a skeletal news operation to scrape together a few words. But that didn't happen, presumably because editors did not want to burden one of their favourite people with more grief. Behrendt no doubt appreciated the kindness; readers (and Fairfax shareholders) have no reason to be grateful.

And there is one ingredient Green neglects to mention, possibly because he has never noticed its absence at The Drum: the need for decent, lively, compelling writing.

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.

Eating And Beating

IN The Australian, Gavin Atkins writes of the Drum and its editor’s peculiar idea of balance. The article lacks an illustration, which is a pity because this picture of the spread Jonathan Green put on to celebrate Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election would have been perfect.

(Hat tip to Sophie Cunningham, who long ago flushed her Flickr snapshot of Green whacking a John Howard piñata at the happy gathering, but allowed the ABC editor’s celebratory chocolate cake to remain. Thanks, too, to Sophie’s life partner, Virginia Murdoch, for preserving the Howard pinata’s image in her own Flickr stream.)

UPDATE: Jonathan Green, what a class act! Not only a superb (and modest) pinata-whacker, the Drum editor puts Gavin Atkins in his place:

GreenJ Jonathan Green

@GavAtkins you're so right! commissioning you is scraping the bottom of the barrel!

3 hours ago

Funnier than a dead baby's doll.

iPrimus? Maybe You Shouldn't Primus

A GAGGLE of ABC and Fairfax future recruits is organising a boycott of Andrew Bolt's new show. They are mostly kids (even the adults), and at the campaign's Facebook page you will find this comment:

Andy Lee

I am the Marketing Manager at iPrimus. The advertising in question was a bonus spot provided by the network and usually advertisers are only notified of bonus spots after they air. It was in no way a targeted move by iPrimus to advertise during the show or to sponsor the show. After receiving feedback from our customers, we have instructed the TV network to cease allocating bonus spots to iPrimus for this particular TV show. At the end of the day it is our customers that are most important to us and we listen to them.

Now it is true that, as a private enterprise, iPrimus can decide where, and where not, to place its advertising. That said, the company apparently responds to pressure, so why not get in touch and tell them you will be switching to, say, TPG.

And because Young Andy apparently believes in supporting those who would silence free speech, why not follow his example and endorse the notion that Andy should be fired, which is what Channel 10 is being asked to do to Bolt?

NOTE: Typed and posted from the side of a country road, this item went up with several typos, which readers kindly noted needed correcting. They have been.

Swingers' Party

THE science is settled. Ill-hit golf balls sink just as readily in the Murray as they do in water hazards further to the south. Back late tomorrow. Probably.