Old accusations, new enemy

Think of the common labels thrown out against political opponents these days. What sort of political thinking would be labelled in the following way?

• The propagation of ideas like Darwinism, Marxism, the teachings of Nietzche, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism and Anarchism.
• A focus on Utopianism that is actually unattainable because of the underlying conspiracy within the group.
  
• A movement towards materialism.
• Supporting supranational entities notions such as World Government.
• A control of the media to promote these evil ideas, under the guise of a "free press" (which is actually controlled by the conspiracy).
• Sexual licence.
• An opposition to Christianity and a promotion of secularism and atheism - but with an actual evil religion undergirding it.
  

All those descriptions can quite easily be seen as being directed by conservatives against progressives. Consider the following:

• Conservatives often use progressive ideas as a perjorative, and will quite easily label a progressive by a general term. Labelling them as "communists", for example, even though they don't espouse Communism.
• An argument that progressive ideas are based upon a vision of a "false utopia".
• An argument that progressives cannot tolerate faith and are inherently materialist.
• Complete opposition to any notion that supranational entities like the United Nations and the European Union are useful. Such entities are either threats to freedom or full of incompetents. Those who support such entities are thus evil.
• That the "Mainstream Media" is inherently "liberal" and has an agenda to promote a particular point of view under the guise of the "free press".
• That sexual licence promoted by progressives will end up leading to the destruction of traditional marriage and enforced sexual perversions (like paedophilia and bestiality).
• That a conspiracy of progressives is trying to destroy Christianity and replace it with atheism, and that such a conspiracy has, at its base, Satanic and pagan influences.
  

Sounds terrible doesn't it? Or maybe it sounds true. Or maybe, just maybe, someone came up with the same sort of thing during the late nineteenth century and directed it towards a societal group that they thought was destroying the world?

In the case of the late nineteenth century, these beliefs were outright lies that were fabricated with the intention of creating ill-will and hatred towards their "enemy". It therefore gives you an idea of how these people - even those today - think.

Neturei Karta

Neturei Karta are a branch of ultra-orthodox Jewish belief who believe that only the Messiah can create a new state of Israel. Therefore they do not support Israel in the ongoing Palestinian-Israel conflict.

NSW Politicians cynically create media storm

From the department of look at the evil painting:

The Premier and the Prime Minister are again appalled, but a young girl photographed nude by her mother says the image, on the cover of the latest Arts Monthly Australia, is her favourite.

In the latest row over the depiction of nude children, Morris Iemma and the state Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, are so offended by the nude pictures of a young girl they want the magazine that published them stripped of federal funding. Kevin Rudd said he could not stand them.

But the girl says the picture is her favourite image and still hangs in the house.

"She just enjoys it. It's acting. She just loves it," said the 11-year-old girl's father, Robert Nelson. "Poli [Polixeni Papapetrou, the girl's mother] wrote a doctoral thesis on this. It's a highly researched body of work."

The images, part of a practice in which Papapetrou works with her daughter, were reproduced in an edition of the magazine that explores the storm over the Bill Henson photographs that were to be shown in Sydney in May.

Here is the offending painting:

That picture is NOT a form of paedophilic pornography. It's just a painting of a kid at the beach. It has nothing remotely to do with the Bill Henson photographs. The state government, so embroiled in other more worthy scandals, has basically created this media storm to deflect people's attention from them to the dirty paedophile elitist artistic community.

If that painting is pornographic, then this album cover is as well:

Time to burn our Led Zeppelin albums... 35 years after they came out onto the shelf.

Update:
The 1st picture above was sourced from The Sydney Morning Herald. It is different to the one that is actually on the front cover of the magazine. Here is the original:

So it's a picture of a child on a painted background, rather than a painting. Nevertheless there is nothing terribly offensive about this picture.

Space 1999 - The Immunity Syndrome

"Well, after last episode, I'm just glad to be out of the action, which gives me the chance to wring my hands and feel useless if anything goes wrong down on the planet."


In the 21st century, reflections of bright light usually indicate impending doom.


In the 21st century, people still wear false teeth.


Tony is driven mad by the bright light.


"I STILL can't get FOX on this damn thing!"


Predictably, Maya and Helena wring their hands and feel useless.


Tony begins to hunger for human brains.


In the 21st century, telescopes can shoot lasers while eye protection consists of 1960s Andy Warhol type sunglasses.


In the 21st century, RTA road crews still have morning tea breaks.


...and afternoon naps.


Frozen with fear, the ground party watch helplessly as the Commander's Eagle plummets to the ground.


Here is the ground party watching helplessly from a different perspective.


Koenig makes a radio communicator out of balsa wood, plumbing equipment, yellow sticky tape and bubble wrap.


Meanwhile, back on Alpha, Helena wrings her hands in anxiety, feeling helpless.


Suddenly the ground party discover an underground conceptual art gallery.


Maya and Helena put spacesuits on to give them the impression that they are doing something. They feel better.


Koenig, Carter and Frank begin watching Fox and Friends.


On Fox and Friends, they watch an interview with Mel Smith dressed up like a Cardassian.


Just like a pair of dogs sniffing one another.


The height of 21st century men's fashion.


That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.


Alan, Helena and Maya prepare a futuristic mortar in case Koenig needs artillery support.


Suddenly the show ends with no explanation of what was going on. Damn you Fred Freiberger!

Space 1999: The Immunity Syndrome.

US Energy consumption as percent of GDP

From Calculated Risk is this unsafe looking graph:

1970s oil crisis all over again? You bet.

Blogging is good for you

From the department of shamelessly cutting and pasting an entire article:

WHEN the first blogs (short for web logs, or online diaries) were posted in late 1998, they were a novelty. Today, blogging is so ubiquitous that health professionals have begun investigating the health effects of blogging as an activity - concluding that blogging can foster critical thinking and feelings of connection.

While some commentators have characterised bloggers as lonely, desperate souls in search of validation for their meaningless lives, recent medical research has indicated that the opposite might actually be true: bloggers appear to be less lonely and feel more connected and supported than those who don't blog.

Swinburne University researcher James Baker, along with Swinburne colleague Professor Susan Moore, will soon publish a paper in the journal CyberPsychology & Behaviour which concludes that people who blog feel less isolated and more satisfied with their friendships.

Their research focused on new MySpace users and tracked their emotional states after two months of social networking and blogging.

It found that all respondents felt less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking - but those who blogged felt better about their situation than those who didn't.

Researchers in the US have concluded that blogging also makes bloggers better thinkers. US neurologists Fernette and Brock Eide conducted a survey of the blogosphere and posted their results on their own site. The research began with the proposition that our mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains -not only what we think, but how we think as well.

They decided to focus on blogging because it represents a significant new activity that might be changing the way people think, and concluded that blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive and associational thinking.

The sheer ease of being able to publish a blog online promotes spontaneous connections and fosters creativity. The neurologists also concluded that blogging promotes critical and analytical thinking because blogs, at their best, are rich in ideas and promote active exchange and critique.

Those academics' assessments are shared by bloggers.

The active exchange of ideas between bloggers is what keeps Melbourne blogger Helen, from Yarraville, hard at it on her blogspot, Blogger on a Cast Iron Balcony. Being part of the conversation about contemporary Australian politics has become a creative outlet for her.

"With people that you know offline - not through blogs - you like them and spend time with them but you can't always talk about interesting things with them," she says.

"You can't just go up to a stranger in a pub and button-hole them and start talking about interesting things, either. But with blogs you can find a community of people who are interesting to talk to."

And while Helen is not one of those bloggers who like to reveal all about their personal crises online (and there are plenty who do), she still derives emotional support from her online network of friends.

"When I went through my own personal 'dark night of the soul' a few years ago, I certainly got an emotional boost from people reading my blog, liking my writing and having the mastery of that," she explains.

"I would definitely say that I was saner as a result of blogging."

Part of that increased sanity is derived from learning the craft of writing and receiving immediate feedback on her work.

"With my blog I have to write posts that people want to read. If I don't write in a way that is interesting then no one will read it, and I like that - it's sink or swim," Helen says.

Another blogger who shares her enthusiasm for blogging is Claire Robertson, a Melbourne artist and author of the hugely popular Loobylu. Robertson says that the discipline of sitting down to construct a readable 400-word post has definitely made her a better writer.

"My dad is my grammar and spell checker but I find I am getting far fewer phone calls from him these days saying 'you've got an apostrophe in an 'its' that shouldn't be there'," she laughs.

When her second child was a baby, Robertson found the rigours of keeping up her blogs took too much time from her young family so she put her blogs into hiatus for a year. Early this year she began posting to Loobylu again because she missed the creative community she had been part of.

"Now that I have life under control a bit again, I am doing my own creative work and feel I have something to say again," Robertson says. "I love documenting my art and the development of my work and I love the feedback I get from other people who are doing creative things, too, or who just appreciate what I am trying to do. I like that others are blogging about the same sorts of things and I feel a bit like I am part of something bigger - that there are people out there who are like me, who 'get' me."

Another blogger who draws inspiration from being part of a greater "whole" is "Suze", a blogger from inner-city Sydney.

Her blog, Personal Political, derives its name from the principle that the personal is the political, so she provides insights into her life as well as comments on current affairs.

Suze says that she attempts to provide some alternative to the mainstream thought and news.

"I don't think I always achieve this, but ideally I see my blog as an alternative to the increasingly banal, superficial and celebrity-obsessed mainstream online media," she says. "I like to write. I like to grapple with the complex and difficult aspects of daily life. Blogging is a very easy avenue for doing both of those."

On the more personal side, Suze says that her blog posts help her to sort out mental dilemmas in her own mind, as well as discuss them online.

"For me, it's a two-sided process," she says. "There's the writing, which helps me in itself, and there's the comments in response, which also help. So when I have problems, it's not that I directly seek help, but the process of blogging can be therapeutic and the community really is a community."

Indeed, many bloggers find that their online and offline communities blend and intersect in ways that complement each other. Loobylu's readership includes her parents, overseas family, offline friends and new friends she has made online. She says her blog helps her to find connections more easily with new friends.

"I find people really respond to me differently once they have read my blog," she says. "It can be initially strange realising that they know much more about me than I know about them but then it's like there's a sudden connection and they might start chatting to me about things that we have in common which we would have never found out about otherwise."

Steven Noble, Sydney author of the blog Life in Chippendale has also found that his blog has helped him to form connections with people in his local community.

"I will sometimes go into my local, the Duck & Swan, and see someone I know. They'll introduce me to their friends and say something like 'this is the guy who does Life in Chippendale' and that helps to start a conversation," he says.

Noble's blog is part of a sub-genre which focuses on specific geographical locations and celebrates the physical communities around them.

Brian Ward, author of Fitzroyalty, focuses on inner-city Fitzroy, while The Adventures of ShinyShiny and Halfeman is a project of two bloggers who walk the streets of Melbourne recording obscure details and eating ice cream.

While Noble uses his blog as a forum to discuss development issues in the tiny Sydney suburb of Chippendale, his blog also documents his exploration of the quirks and gems in his local neighbourhood. "I have always been interested in neighbourhoods," says Noble.

"This is the neighbourhood that makes sense to (my partner and I) so we have been willing to invest more in creating links to the people in it."

Noble's approach clearly works. Far from the stereotype of being lonely people holed up in their bedrooms, bloggers might actually turn out to be the cornerstones of our future communities.

I like the bit where they talk about blogging. The article speaks a lot about it.

Space 1999 - Planet of the Feminazis

Koenig and a Red Shirt discover a Telecom phone booth on an abandoned planet.


This man is about to die. In a few moments now he will be killed. For Arthur Jarrett is a convicted criminal who has been allowed to choose the manner of his own execution.


Koenig ponders a prison run by attractive women dressed in red spandex and wielding whips.


"The weapon appears to be yet another phallocentric symbol of male dominance that threatens the narrative we are trying to impose here."


"Dang! Forget to pack the Imodium!"


"I saw this brunette on the other side of the river. She asked me 'how do I get to the other side?' 'You are on the other side' I said to her! Silly brunette! Hee hee hee."


Meanwhile, Servalan manages to capture Avon for her own twisted ends.


Koenig threatens the dominant narrative by pointing a powerful phallocentric object in their direction with the intention of releasing energy upon them.


"Fear not! We have rendered useless Koenig's phallocentric threat by making it impotent. We must continue our struggle to re-assert our dominant narrative!"


But Koenig's virile resistance cannot be overcome. Here some woman succumb to his violent discharges.


This doesn't need a caption to be funny.


"Liberator... I mean, Enterprise... I mean... wait. Where's my comm badge?"


The women suddenly realise that red spandex has gone out of fashion.


The dominant narrative is finally subverted by, like, some sort of space virus I think.

Space 1999 - Devil's Planet.

Price Controls - a rethink

Prince Controls. They're bad. They're evil. Politicians and Economists who suggest them are idiots.

And for good reason. History shows us that whenever price controls have been used to control inflation, they neither solve inflation nor help people pay less. The Austrian School of economic thinking has convinced us - rightly - that prices should be controlled by market signals.

We're in the midst of another oil crisis. One thing which is different in this oil crisis is the lack of queues around petrol stations. Why were there queues back in the 1970s and not today? Well, back in the 1970s, Price Controls enacted by governments to control inflation meant that the ordinary behaviour of "supply and demand" was countered. So even though there were supply problems, the Price Controls ensured that consumers did not adjust their behaviour. Result? Petrol stations running out of petrol and long queues at ones that did have petrol.

Such behaviour was also present in the Soviet Union. The price controls of Soviet shops ensured that, while bread was cheap, there was never enough of it to satisfy - and so people queued. Queueing is the natural response to Price Control.

These days, with Price Controls gone, and with the market driving petrol costs, people are buying less petrol. This means there are no queues, because demand is dropping in response to supply issues. Price Controls have never served as an effective method of containing inflation.

Nevertheless, I have been in recent times rethinking them - not as a way of controlling inflation, but as a way of controlling demand. Rather than the government setting prices below what the market sets (which is a queue-maker), what if the government set prices above what the market sets, in order to reduce demand?

Our world needs to get off its addiction to oil and petrol. High oil prices have resulted in changed social and economic behaviour - people are buying more economical cars or taking public transport or riding or walking to places. Nevertheless, the importance of getting off oil is merely beyond the close-minded economic model. Global Warming is an important issue and getting our world off hydrocarbons altogether is important.

What I am suggesting, therefore, is that governments set Price Controls for Petrol that are above and beyond what the market is willing to pay. Rather than increasing taxes (which is effective but fraught with government revenue addiction) the government could simply mandate that petrol prices be set at an artificially high level.

Here in Australia, unleaded petrol is selling for around $1.60 per litre. If price controls were enacted to lift that to, say, $3.20 per litre (a doubling), the result would be a market that was very unwilling to buy it. Raising prices in America to US$8.00 per gallon would have the same effect.

In many ways, the setting of an artificially high price would result in the opposite of setting them too low. Queueing would not be a problem - oversupply would be. Petrol stations would not be able to get rid of the stuff because consumers are just not willing to pay.

Of course, such an action would have rather unfortunate side effects - notably a downturn in the auto industry, higher transport costs (which would be inflationary) and all the associated problems that these would cause as the shock travelled through the economy. Setting prices higher than the market average - way higher - would result in less oil used but will also result in higher unemployment and lower economic growth.

Nevertheless, higher unemployment and lower economic growth are going to happen anyway as oil prices get higher. Moreover, as the market adjust to a lower-oil-dependent economy, things will return to "normal" with economic growth and unemployment adjusting to the new way of doing things.

Sadly, setting prices that high would be political suicide. Imagine if Kevin Rudd (Australia's PM) announced tomorrow to the nation that he has decided that they'll pay twice as much for petrol as they did before? The outcry would be immense. Even if these price controls were set up in stages (say, a monthly increase), it is unlikely that the voting population would tolerate it.

And this is, of course, a pity. Our world needs to be taken off its diet of hydrocarbons - both in the form of oil for cars and coal for electricity - and setting prices above what the market is willing to pay is a way to force the market into adopting zero carbon energy consumption.

Market carnage tomorrow?

Despite my less than stellar record in predicting short term events, I will go out on a limb and say that Thursday July 3rd will be a very bad day for the American economy. Why?

1. The ECB will probably raise interest rates.
2. The June US unemployment rate will come out. I am expecting a substantial rise.
   

These together should do the following:

1. A big drop in the value of the US Dollar.
2. A big drop in US Shares.
3. Higher Oil Prices.
4. Higher Gold Prices.
5. Media reports where the word "depression" is used.

But, you know, these sorts of predictions sometimes go wrong!

Update 11.48 UTC:
ECB Raises interest rates to 4.25%.

Update 12.33 UTC:
Unemployment steady at 5.5%.

No carnage... but probably a bad day anyway.

Not enough new oil

One of the classic responses from Economists about Peak Oil is "Well, if prices go up then the market will increase production, either by pumping more out or discovering new oil fields". I know that this is a classic response because I believed it years ago before fully understanding Peak Oil.

It's a classic response because, well, it's actually true within an endogenous economic model. Economists often deal with economic theory and when oil is seen as just another "product" that can be bought, sold and made, then this sort of response is quite understandable. It's only when you start realising that the world's easy oil supplies have been pretty much discovered that things start to go wrong.

High oil prices have resulted in oil companies expanding their production and searching for new oil. The problem is that it is not enough. The Oil Megaprojects group at The Oil Drum is proving more and more that, while new oil fields will probably increase total oil production in the next few years, the effect of declining oil production elsewhere will limit this increase and, eventually, outstrip it.

Here's their nice looking graph that gives bad news:

Put simply - oil production will increase from now until around 2010-2011, but not enough to lower prices significantly. After 2011 the increasing production levels of these new projects will be negated by declining production levels in current oil fields. Oil prices will remain painfully high and the demand destruction caused by The Great Economic Downturn^TM won't be enough to lower them significantly (though I still expect prices to drop below $100).