Parched

I have been following John Quiggin's excellent blog lately. He was recently on a radio national program about the politics of water in Australia and the world. You can listen to the discussion here. Once again however, there was a gigantic elephant in the room called overpopulation that nobody wanted to talk about.

Only one of the speakers touched on it, and then only very briefly. In a closed economy (like planet Earth), demand for water -and indeed every natural resource- is driven by two things: per capita demand, and population. The bigger our population, the more we must constrain our lifestyles in the long term.

In discussions like these we often treat population levels as a given, but here in Australia we are doing everything we can to increase our population as fast as possible. At the same time, we seem completely unable to talk about the consequences for the environment and our enjoyment of life. Until we face up to this, and start including population as one half of the argument in any discussion about natural resources, we cannot hope to truly deal with the problem.

“They would have been happier having someone closer to president Bush's policies.”

The quote in the title is from this article, about al-Qa'ida getting worried about Obama's popularity.

Now that's funny isn't it? I thought they would "pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats." Could John Howard have been wrong?

Los Angeles Forest Fires

Look at this guy. He's all decked out, with all the equipment he'll need to survive this emergency. The only thing he forgot is how not to be a wanker.

Columbus

I'm reading a book about Christopher Columbus. Let's put ourselves in his head for a moment, and believe that in sailing west from Europe across the Atlantic, he had reached India, rather than the New World. Why then, did he call it the West Indies? That doesn't make any kind of sense. He had clearly reached the most easterly point of India. Anybody who thinks that that sounds reasonable, and that it makes sense to speak of "India in the West" is either trying to make me angry, or has not properly understood the concept of the spherical Earth with it's arbitrary meridians.

Update: Geoff falls into at least one of the above categories. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

I'd forgotten how messy it is eating a mango with a beard.

That's it. That's the whole post

US elections

If McCain wins the US election, I will be very upset. Why? Partly because I am a left wing pinko, and partly because I have US$250 riding on it. That's right, I put my money where my political mouth is and bet on the intrade prediction markets. As a result I stand to gain a cool US$31 playing the stocks.

It seems as though this political betting system could use some "innovation." The odds of all the individuals mentioned as possible winners add up to more than 100.% I should be able to exploit arbitrage opportunities to rectify that. Also, I would like to short sell McCain shares. I think that at 12.7%, they are overvalued. Maybe we could introduce options trading. It certainly couldn't hurt. I mean, can you name me one occasion when exotic derivatives did harm to the financial system?

Update: Maybe I wasn't so smart after all. I bought the shares at 1AUD= US 60.8c. Now the exchange rate has improved to 68 something. I'm going to find a window ledge somewhere.

Australia Needs To Have A Superficial Conversation About Religion.

The people of Australia need to put aside their differences and come together on common ground. Especially at this crucial moment in our history. How better, I ask, to achieve this goal than to engage in an inconclusive, protracted, ignorant, and superficial examination of the issue of religion?

Forget that old refrain about not mentioning politics or religion at the dinner table, emotive asseveration is all the vogue.

Before we get started though, I think we need to set a few ground rules. First of all, let's be really drunk and loud, and only get started at about 3am. Sobriety and appropriate courtesy are the twin killers of any incoherent, boorish argument. Interrupt as often as possible. Every time your opponent verbally completes a train of thought, baby Jesus cries. Crucially, the personal enmity grounding this vitriolic nonsense should centre (at least at first) on mistaken identity, where the semiconscious mind of a juvenile inebriate projects the hebephrenic pro-fascism of one drunken idiot onto another (drunken idiot). The fact that a certain disliked character in "Die hard 4" bears a passing resemblance to your adversary cannot be brought up enough.

After we've interrupted the other side's facile, vapid nonsense, we need to replace it with our own; pick out the most irrelevant part of their ill-considered diatribe and argue on a complete tangent. Allow the conversation to oscillate randomly from religion to the War on Terror. No rejoinders please, that would get uncomfortably close to a logical debate. The format should be assertion, interruption, rebuttle, personal attack. In fact if at all possible, we should maintain logical coherence only at the level of the individual sentence. Contradict ourselves as often as possible. Confuse male circumcision with castration. One person who thinks the US government organized the September 11 attacks should use it as evidence of the absence of a benevolent creator, the other side should recycle half remembered BBC documentaries that fail to address the question, and then claim that no one in Afghanistan supports Al-Qaeda.

During an intermission, we should play drinking games, but even then, residual nastiness is key. When playing "I never" (normally a way to discover the other's adventurous side) we should declare "I never met a supervisor of Kim's that I respected."

On the pro-religion side, we need to make liberal recourse to the "appeal to consequences" fallacy. Let's insist on the existence of local metaphysical truths applicable to the whole universe, which vary from person to person depending on mood and circumstance. Deny the atheist's right to an opinion; assume their lives lack personal tragedy, and argue that as a result they are too shallow to think about this.

For the anti side, 2 simple words; Scientific Chauvinism. Deny any possibility of being wrong, even the solipsistic one intrinsic to all empirical observations.

Only by opening an embarrassingly one- dimensional dialogue on the most simple and wholly ignorant level can we ensure that we, as a nation, never get down to the deeper issues about religious identity that truly threaten to tear this country apart.

Who's with me?

With apologies to the onion.