Stuart MacGill and fast food sponsorship of sport:
Rosemary Stanton, nutritionist, writes: Re. “Just Chew It: don’t sell KFC, MacGill tells his cricketing mates” (yesterday, item 1). It’s good to see Stuart MacGill standing up for what he knows is right.
Sponsoring cricket, little athletics or any other sport is popular with sellers of junk food. They then claim some kind of moral high ground for encouraging exercise that leads to the line that exercise will balance their fatty/sugary/salty junk foods.
Studies in NSW show more kids are taking part in sport but they’re still fat and the fat ones are growing fatter.
Playing sport does burns kilojoules but not nearly as many as are put back into the body from the sponsor’s junk foods and drinks.
David Havyatt writes: Could this be the same SCG MacGill who hosted a TV show called Stuart MacGill Uncorked which was all about wine? Did he not do commercials for Wolf Blass?
While I get the point about the evils of sports stars promoting fat and sugar laden foods, promoting alcohol consumption is just as bad!
A GST reconstruction:
Harvey James writes: Re. “Richard Farmer’s chunky bits” (yesterday, item 12). Like Richard Farmer, I have a healthy respect for Nikki Savva’s abilities as a spinner and her political insight. Which is why I can see through her clever reconstruction of the debate that preceded the introduction of the GST.
Nowhere in her piece did she mention the $500 million taxpayer funded advertising campaign the Howard Government hurled at the electorate. Imagine the outcry if Julia Gillard tried to win a debate about a new tax using taxpayer funds.
But the real clincher is the line about the anger over the GST and the Business Activity Statement subsiding around July 2001.
“By then people knew Kim Beazley had little to offer,” she says. Really? How masterfully Ms Savva manages to avoid mentioning the Tampa and the September 11 terrorist attacks (and the disintegration of Ansett Airlines).
Complaints about the GST were comprehensively buried by these events, ensuring an incumbent Government would be re-elected in 2001.
Anti-Semitism:
James Burke writes: Re. “Rundle: what’s with Galliano, Gibson ‘n’ ******’s anti-Semitism?” (yesterday, item 4). Guy Rundle’s analysis of the resurgence of anti-Semitism makes a number of points, none of which I necessarily disagree with, but some of which are emphasised at the expense of others.
Of course, Rundle underplays the role of “leftists” in this issue.
A revolting feature of the post-Cold War era has been the continuing moral relativism of so many politically-minded people toward bigotry and fascism. The loyalty of “conservatives” to the likes of the Saudis and Pinochet, the embrace by “liberals” of Gaddafi and Musharraf, the admiration of “socialists” for Castro, Chavez, even Ahmadinejad and the Taliban, has been nauseating. A low, dishonest decadence has seen public benevolence showered on such vicious bigots as Joerg Haider, Avigdor Lieberman and the alumni of One Nation, now pursuing their various careers in reality TV, talk radio and the opinion columns.
As the web has broken open the global conversation, conspiracy mania (largely derived from anti-Semitism), pseudoscience, propaganda and disinformation have thrived. I have heard, from superficially sensible people, theories that the Twin Towers were brought down from the inside, or the levees at New Orleans were deliberately breached, or that civilisation itself is threatened by a sinister conspiracy of ex-communists who have suborned the international scientific community.
The “left” and the “right” are intellectually and morally bankrupt, as they were in the 1930s and 1940s when communism and fascism slowly strangled democracy, almost to the death. Anti-Semitism was a feature of both, as the ultimate conspiracy theory. It is also part of the new Islam-centred conspiracy theory of Beck et al, as it is part of the conspiracy theories peddled to Islam by the remnant Trots.
Maybe if we can learn not to tolerate these forces of darkness in our politics, we can extend a genuine tolerance throughout our society.
Climate change:
Nicholas Adams writes: Re. “Academy of Science: how has climate changed during the recent past?” (yesterday, item 10). It’s nice to see that the Australian Academy of Science is helping you to wade through the (steaming) swamp of climate change evidence, but it is worth pointing out that some science is more, well, scientific than others.
The scientific method involves the following steps: observation of a natural phenomenon, development of an hypothesis to explain the phenomenon, and finally the design and execution of an experiment to test the hypothesis. Unfortunately, this last crucial step is missing in a number of scientific disciplines because it is either impossible or impractical.
These disciplines include geology, palaeontology, cosmology, economics, history and of course climatology. We only have one universe, one earth and only one global economy to observe and this makes proper experimentation impossible. Scientists in these disciplines are forced to resort to models of the real world to test their hypotheses. All models of complex systems like the economy or climate, no matter how sophisticated are only flawed imitations of reality — we only construct the model because we don’t fully understand the system, so it follows that the model will be imperfect.
This lack of true experimental testing of hypotheses is the crippling flaw of these semi-sciences. It is interesting that many of the protagonists in the science change debate come from similar semi-scientific disciplines (e.g. Plimer — geology, Calderwood — economics). Not many physicists are weighing into the debate because they don’t see any hard evidence to talk about.
Apart from the use of models, the other concept that keeps cropping up in the climate change debate is scientific consensus. Apparently, if all the scientists agree on something it must be true, whether the evidence is there or not. Well, in my field of medicine we have developed a hierarchy of evidence to guide us in deciding which treatments work and which don’t.
Multiple randomised trials (a form of experiment) constitute the highest level. And down near the bottom? That’s right, consensus of expert opinion. Just above the opinion of your taxi driver or that talkative old bloke down the street…
Australian complacency about land:
David Thackrah writes: Urban fringe development is starting to impact on the use of arable land for food production. Similarly, in the wheat, barley, oats and sheep farming sectors the use of cleared land is possibly reaching “unproductiv” status.
Driving around farming regions shows large tracts of land seemingly untended and in some cases eroding from wind action. In the “hills” sub-regions near Perth, Adelaide and Sydney the effect of the 2.5 hectare house block is sucking up quite viable and arable land useful for horticulture and fruit production.
As Australia consumes about 20% of its’ food production, in a general sense we are quite well fed. However, for defence reasons over the longer term it seems sensible to be planning for efficient use of cleared land in producing food for export.
There is also a complacency in the population where farmers tend to be aging with the traditional family “following on” disintegrating. Presently is appears foreigners are keen to buy up tracts of farmland but they don’t seem to know what to do about dealing with the farming responsibilities.
So, if we have a social and defence issues developing, why isn’t the government looking at more support for small farming communities and the encouragement of younger farmers ?
Nicholas Adams, since when is “history” a scientific discipline? It is a discipline of the humanities.
Nicholas Adams, I would like to take issue with your glass-half-empty approach to the scientific method and its application in the climate change debate. You see the Lab as being “….. one universe, one earth and only one global economy to observe and this makes proper experimentation impossible.”
Not impossible I reckon. The hypothesis about the greenhouse effect has been tested over and again. It is not a model. It is tried, tested and, importantly, proven.
Now a reasonably curious intelligent species can take this proven knowledge (a ‘known known’ if you like) and apply it to the real world – not to ‘prove’ but to demonstrate that the climate is changing under the influence of a greenhouse response to measured emissions increases. Some people of course need the demonstration to include some sort of colour and movement and so science gave them models – much like Dinky toys in the sand pit, they give the general idea without being realy necessary. The models said the sea level would rise and blow me down, when the technician got out the ruler, the sea level had risen. The models said if you take borings into the growth rings of old trees they will show some response and blow me down some tree lopper with a drill found a correlation. The models said the seas will slowly become more acidic and blow me down a Pacific clam farmer could detect the changes…. while he was rescuing his veggie patch from the high tide.
Any person with a high school education can follow the thread of logic that connects our industrial emissions to climate change and its pretty inevitable and gradually emerging consequences. What else is there to know?
James
In your spray about moral relativism, supporting dicataors blah blah, you somehow failed to mention how all this makes anyone anti-semitic. In fact you seem to offer no alternative account of the phenomenon at all. Try switching on brain, then laptop, in that order.
Nicholas Adams: My field is medicine too. How do you go about making a diagnosis and determining treatment in an individual patient? An RCT (that’s Randomised Controlled Trial, not multiple randomised trial, laddie) , a case control series, expert opinion, or guess and hope? Not bloody likely. You look at individual parameters, do appropriate investigations, formulate a diagnosis (and a differential diagnosis, unless you’re an overconfident idiot) and treat with careful monitoring and follow-up. Sure, you should know the current literature but it doesn’t help you much with the patient in front of you until you are sure of what you are looking at, and I still come across things that I haven’t seen or read of before in 30 years of practice and research. The detection of significant change, and the mechanisms behind it, in the vastly complex “organism” of the only biosphere we can study (and happen to inhabit) is far more analogous to clinical diagnosis and treatment of the comparatively simple and well studied human. It does not behove you to sneer at planetary scientist’s overwhelming opinion regarding climate change as “mere expert opinion” one step removed from the talkative old bloke down the street, who as you well know, is likely to be a contrarian crank, or a Graves-aflicted hereditary peer. Look up the relevant literature before you pontificate, and, if you don’t have the training to understand it, Google Dunning & Kruger as well as hubris. Perhaps you had also better go and get some advise before you diagnose and treat yourself too.
An interesting and thoughtful comment, Nicholas Adams.
My point is that we are undertaking a large-scale experiment right now (record CO2 emissions) and the world is not responding as the models predict (it hasn’t warmed for 13 years, etc), so the theory must be wrong.
And I totally agree about the value of “consensus”.