In Australia, and more generally in the Western world, we are accustomed to take seriously only opinions that come from our own languages and cultures. We will notice what the Americans say, the British, and the Dutch, for example. But if the opinions come from Russia, or China or India, we discount them. If they come from Brazil or Chile, we are unlikely even to know about them. A knowledgeable friend (peer-reviewed, yes, and an IPCC reviewer) pointed me towards an op ed piece in The Times of India, and I read it with some interest. The author is Sanjeev Sabhlok, who…

Good government and federalism This essay rises from musing about British PM Boris Johnson, Brexit and the European Union, and of course musing about our own situation in Australia. Since human beings came to settle in villages, grow crops and domesticate animals there have been two competing forces affecting ‘power’. The first, and certainly the earliest, was that power resided in the headman, the warrior-chief, and then the king. The second, and the weaker, was that the people of the village were able to make their own decisions, perhaps with the guidance of the headman or the elders, but they…

Two conversations a few days ago made me think again about the electric vehicle, that proposed panacea for all our energy ills. One of my granddaughters has an important role in the advertising of the new VW concept car series that promises just about everything, and she is excited about them. She lives and works in New York City, and the cars are not yet for sale. What none of them has is a long run before recharging — about 500 km seems to be the limit. Anyway, the series is said to be launched in 2020, and when Australia…

My mixed feelings about the Eucalypt A few days ago some Canberra citizens in newly planned suburbs  asked the ACT Government not to plant eucalypts as street trees. My sympathies were entirely with them. I don’t dislike the trees at all, but I think they have no place in streets or backyards. In a bushfire the oil in their leaves becomes volatile, catches fire easily, and a strong wind behind the flames can send fire travelling at frightening speed. In the great Canberra bushfire of 2003 hundreds of houses were lost because of this tendency. More, eucalypts are territorial, and a…

W I wrote an essay on something like this subject a few years ago, but I don’t seem to be able to find it. I felt the need to write another one, anyway, and if I can find the earlier one, I’ll be able to see whether anything much has changed.  Because I have been a data-monger since my early twenties I regard good data as the essence of any attempt to assess the value of a proposition, accompanied by good and relevant argument. What I see as the lack of both good argument and good data in the domain of…

This is the last of a series of essays dealing with some social issues that emerge again and again in our society, not just Australia’s but in the ‘developed’ Western world. Concepts like sympathy and empathy are built into other concepts like ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’ and ‘care’. Indeed our whole social welfare system, the details of our education system, and the mammoth public health services, constantly growing, make no sense unless there are real meanings for sympathy and empathy, and the action following these sentiments. In 1958, my History Honours year, I studied a difficult book, The Idea of History, by the…

Somewhere in this or a recent thread an alarmist asked me did I think there was some massive conspiracy involving learned societies, universities and governments, all of whom were missing the points I was making. I said No, I don’t have much truck with conspiracies, small or massive. The notion that the choice was binary — either you thought there was a conspiracy, or you accepted the alarmist position — stuck in my mind, and this essay is a response to that common orthodox position. First, there has to be a message, and it has to be of some moment,…

Thinking about things When I was an undergraduate I was not excitedly exploring the life of the mind. Far from it. I was studying in order to become a high-school teacher, like my parents. I was doing the subjects that would equip me in time to become a subject master, and I did whatever my teachers required me to do. It was not until my honours year (and I was lucky to get into it) that I began seriously to ask questions about life, nature and the rest. My History teachers had equipped me for such work: I was always…

  This essay was foreshadowed in a recent essay on Inequality, and it has something of the same problems. For ‘poverty’ is an over-used word, meaning whatever the speaker or writer wants it to mean, which may not be at all what the audience or reader understands by it. As a word, poverty comes to us through French from the Latin paupertas, and we still have ‘pauper’ in English, where it means someone very poor. Poor in what? In everything, income, health, life expectancy, food, shelter, you name it. Like inequality, poverty is best seen in relative terms. I am poorer than you…

WW The recent EU elections, so close to our own, have prompted me to write about the climate-change business from a different perspective, and I have drawn on a piece by Ben Pile, who is not a warmist at all, and writes at Spiked. What he points to in his essay is the sheer confusion around the energy issue, with all sorts of claims being made. Much of it is relevant to us in Australia. These EU elections, not much reported here, showed a continuing rejection of the major parties that we have been witnessing in our own country. Who…