Some Stats and Some Questions

 

Pic courtesy paho.org

I have posted before about the potential for the Covid pandemic to work as a catalyst.

Apart from that potential, it also provides a snapshot of how well various communities (and societies) work in times of crisis.

An analysis of the performance of the 51 US states on their management of this major health issue provides an insight into how well they function at their most basic task, that of keeping their citizens safe, and how political values are reflected in the outcome.

The measure I will use is the Covid-19 death rate per million as published on the Worldometer website, which uses a variety of information sources to arrive at the various statistics, and is generally reliable.

Let's rank the various American states from worst to best in terms of the deaths per million as of today (29th December 2021), list the political affiliation of the governor, and then specify the vaccination rates at December 28th for each state. The first figure represents the deaths per million for that state, and the percentage represents the vaccination rate -

1. Mississippi - 3501 - Republican - 48.06%

2. Alabama - 3352 - Republican - 47.49%

3. Arizona - 3317 - Republican - 56.85%

4. New Jersey - 3256 - Democratic - 70.26%

5.  Louisiana - 3222 - Democratic - 50.15%

6. New York - 3067 - Democratic - 71.53%

7. Tennessee - 3018 - Republican - 51.17%

8. Arkansas - 3014 - Republican - 51.06%

9. West Virginia - 2951 - Republican - 54.89%

10. Georgia - 2948 - Republican - 50.65%

11. Massachusetts - 2922 - Republican - 74.41%

12. Oklahoma - 2920 - Republican - 53.33%

13. Florida - 2905 - Republican - 63.11%

14. Rhode Island - 2875 - Democratic - 76.1%

15. Michigan - 2868 - Democratic - 56.59%

16. Pennsylvania - 2828 - Democratic - 63.57%

17. South Carolina - 2826 - Republican - 53.01%

18. Indiana - 2812 - Republican - 51.89%

19. South Dakota - 2790 - Republican - 56.83%

20. Montana - 2717 - Republican - 53.86%

21. New Mexico -  2754 - Democratic - 66.06%

22. Nevada - 2725 - Democratic - 56.26%

23. Kentucky - 2708 - Democratic - 54.09%

24. Wyoming - 2637 - Republican - 47.33%

25. North Dakota - 2627 - Republican - 52.38%

26. Texas - 2619 - Republican - 56.78%

27. Missouri - 2589 - Republican - 52.89%

28. Connecticut - 2546 - Democratic - 74.47%

29. Iowa - 2472 - Republican - 58.67%

30. Ohio - 2462 - Republican - 54.97%

31. Illinois - 2435 - Democratic - 64.2%

32. Kansas - 2390 - Democratic - 56.71%

33. Delaware - 2337 - Democratic - 63.96%

34. Idaho - 2313 - Republican - 46.15%

35. California - 1935 - Democratic - 65.95%

36. Maryland - 1931 - Republican - 70.2%

37. Wisconsin - 1903 - Democratic - 61.73%

38. Minnesota - 1868 - Democratic - 65.18%

39. North Carolina - 1841- Democratic - 52.38%

40. Colorado - 1817 - Democratic - 65.09%

41. Virginia - 1816 - Democratic - 67.86%

42. Nebraska - 1722 - Republican - 59.52%

43. District of Columbia - 1713 - Democratic - 67.41%

44. New Hampshire - 1423 - Republican - 67.01%

45. Oregon - 1333 - Democratic - 66.39%

46. Washington - 1294 - Democratic - 67.7%

47. Alaska - 1292 - Republican - 56.1%

48. Utah - 1177 - Republican - 58.44%

49. Maine - 1110 - Democratic - 75.56%

50. Hawaii - 764 - Democratic - 63.38%

51. Vermont - 745 - Republican - 77.29%

And, just for the hell of it, let's list the same data for the various Australian states (which, to be consistent, requires some squirrelly maths to arrive at the deaths per million figure as expressed for the USA. The figures for Tasmania, the NT, WA, SA, and Qld are comparatively meaningless, as they are projections per million for the very few deaths that have occurred in those jurisdictions. You'll note that whilst only one person has died from Covid in the NT, my data says "4". this is simply a projection based on the population of about a quarter of a million. The same mathematical contortions are employed for Tasmania. I include these figures in the same form as the US figures to provide a basis for comparison. Again, the first figure is the death rate per million, and the last the percentage of fully vaccinated individuals) -

1. Victoria - 225 - Labor - 92.4%    

2. New South Wales - 80 - Coalition - 93.5%

3. ACT - 34.7 - Labor/Green -  95%

4. Tasmania - 24 - Coalition -  92.8%  

5. Northern Territory - 4 - Labor -  84.1%          

6. Western Australia - 3.3 - 83.4%         

7. South Australia - 2.8 - Coalition -  87.7% 

8. Queensland - 1.3 - Labor - 86.1%

Now, let's ask some questions.

It's up to you, gentle reader, to answer them.

1. Is there any connection between the political affiliation of the state legislature and the death rate? Of the top 10 worst performing states in the US, 7 are Republican, and 3 are Democrat. In Oz, it appears irrelevant, although Labor doesn't come up smelling of roses in Victoria.

2. Is there any connection between vaccination rates and death rates? In the US, with the exception of New Jersey and New York, the states with the highest death rates have the lowest vaccination rates.

3. What is the reason for the massive difference between the consolidated death rate in the USA of 2522 per million and the Australian figure of 85. Why is it thirty times ours?

It's somewhat sobering to understand that if that rate for Oz was the same as it is in the USA, we would have lost 64,000 Australians.

That's 7000 more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam.

They built a wall in Washington to remember them. Every person killed had his or her name inscribed. It made an impact when I saw it in 2018. 

Will the saving of so many Australian lives be acknowledged?

Julia Stone - Oh Come All Ye Faithful

This is a very different rendering of the Christmas song.

Growing up, I knew it as “Adeste fideles.”

Happy and holy Christmas, gentle reader....

Promises Promises (Reprised)

Image courtesy Business Insider

Back in January 2017, gentle reader, I made a promise to review Trump's promises annually and report back here. He'd made so many, so I felt it was the least I could do. 

I got distracted and failed to do that, so I apologise, but given that he was a one-term president, it may be constructive to now belatedly keep that original promise. Hindsight always makes some things more obvious, and at least I will have kept my promise.

There were so many, and I don't have time to check all of them.There's nothing to stop you from doing that and reporting back in the comments, of course.

Perhaps the most contentious was that he would build a wall on the southern border, and Mexico would pay for it. These are the first two listed in the linked post.

The actual outcome is simultaneously insignificant and outrageous. A March 2021 review of work on the wall revealed that a total of 47 miles (76 kilometres) of barrier had been constructed where none had previously existed. The southern border is 1954 miles (3145 kilometres) long.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that what has been done has actually made people smuggling easier, as the roads built to get machinery to the work sites along the wall construction have provided new access paths for the immigrants and those smuggling them. And Mexico hasn't put one cent towards it.

On a number of occasions, Trump declared that he would "get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something so much better..."

That's another promise that has gone through to the keeper, as a result of the votes of the late John McCain and two other nervous Republicans. McCain didn't come across as nervous, by the way. A better word to describe his demeanour is "resolute", an aspect of behaviour that has been absent in Republicans since Trump emerged.

Some of his more bizarre promises are worth revisiting. There was the one about "heavily surveilling mosques", and another about prosecuting Hillary Clinton for using a private email server whilst Secretary of State. The irony about this one is that Trump is under threat of prosecution now for his instigation of the January 6th incursion on the Capitol. To promote a cliche - the worm has turned.

Even when initially making a promise ("leave troops in Afghanistan because it's such a mess") he felt free to reverse it and negotiate a rapid withdrawal with the Taliban, leaving Biden to pick up the pieces. The fact that he blindsided his own military is a major contributing factor to the debacle. 

He also promised to "bring back the American dream". Instead he produced a dystopian nightmare. And that's without reference to his mishandling of the pandemic. Remind me about the statistics for American deaths.

Feel free, gentle reader, to point out any promises kept from the 76 listed in my original post. 

There must be one or two in there somewhere....

The Dimensions of a Tragedy

 I can't remember where I dug this up, gentle reader, but it is illuminating.

Statistics can't effectively describe the full dimensions of a disaster, but they can attempt to measure it. Max Hastings described the war in Vietnam as "an epic tragedy", and when you read this collection of information, you can understand why he used those words.

Hastings, a writer who has authored many books about the conflicts of the last century, has well and truly hit the nail on the head.

Perhaps the most horrifying number on the list is the first one - the list of overall casualties. It doesn't specify that this is a figure which includes both military and civilian, but this is an assumption. I'd be happily corrected if a better source is available.

There is a line listing an estimate of 587,000 South Vietnamese killed. This seems a little dodgy. In the first place, what is the definition of a "South Vietnamese"? There was a lot of movement in both directions throughout the conflict, and many born in the north moved south either to fight or flee, and the opposite phenomenon also applied.

Are we to assume that if the number of the total of "South" Vietnamese killed together with the number of South Vietnamese Military personnel killed is subtracted from the list of overall casualties, that the figure of 4,965,833 derived is the number of "North" Vietnamese killed? If anyone has a better source, please let me know.

Paul Ham has published his own set of figures.*

To an ex-Nasho like me, the figures about national Servicemen are interesting. Note that 804,000 20-year-olds registered, but only 18,000 actually served in Vietnam. Of these 18,000 it is reasonable to assume that many of them were POGOs (Personnel on Garrison Operations), so it is clear that the actual number of individuals who shared my experience of extended periods outside the wire patrolling and ambushing is very small.

Forgetting about the details of postings, the proportion of Nashos who went to Vietnam of those who were conscripted is actually 28%. Of those who registered, but either weren't balloted, or weren't posted to units that served in Vietnam, it drops to 2.2%.

Those figures provide a telling insight into the level of political cynicism that drove the National Service Act. If you're in government, you can probably afford to lose the support of 2.2% of the population and survive politically, and this worked until about 1970, when the public mood began to change. It's also important to remember that for quite a long period into the Australian commitment of conscripts, that these same conscripts were too young to vote and have a say into their immediate future.

Other figures of note include those relating to exposure to combat, in comparison to the experience of those who served in World War 2. The average infantry soldier in Vietnam had 314 days in combat (as defined by being outside the wire, I assume), compared with 40 days in WW2. That is 12% of what was the norm in Vietnam.

No wonder many Vietnam vets, when told they hadn't experienced a "real war" by veterans of earlier conflicts became more than a little upset. This happened to me in 1975. I was more fortunate that many in that 2.2% because I was posted as a POGO in June of my tour, but I still had around 100 days as a rifleman outside the wire.

The extremely efficient Dustoff process gets a mention, as it should. It saved many lives. Mind you, it was excellent when it was implemented, but I was present when for reasons lost in the mists of time it wasn't, and a fellow digger died as a consequence.

When you consider the amount of ordnance expended (10,000 artillery rounds daily - and the total tonnage of bombs dropped of 6,727,084) and the chemicals sprayed (19,000,000 gallons of defoliants) you begin to appreciate another dimension of the tragedy.

As an American veteran of the war said to me in July 2018 when I chatted with him at the wall in Washington - "What a f***ing waste". 

The wall lists the names of the 57,000 American military personnel who died.

Paul Ham's numbers -

“The personal cost of the war, in terms of personal grief and moral degradation, is immeasurable. In our helplessness, we surrender to statistics. 520 Australian soldiers dead and 3000 wounded. 58193 Americans dead and about 300000 wounded. 220356 South Vietnamese troops dead or missing in action, and 1.17 million wounded. 660000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops dead, with the possibility that a third were civilians mistaken for enemy troops or deemed legitimate targets

* Paul Ham, Vietnam, the Australian War, Harper Collins, 2007, p 663

Bill Logan on our War Heritage.

This is the recording of a speech given by Bill Logan at the Australian War Memorial about our war heritage quite a few years ago.

It resonated for me when I remembered Long Tan. 

I have been there twice. The first time was when we set out on our second operation in country in April 1970 after forming up there prior to an overnight insertion into our AO.

The second time was when I travelled to Vietnam in 2006 with my two sons, and we visited the memorial with its simple stone cross.

Apart from that, Long Tan is significant for me because a bloke who was my friend at Downlands college in 1961-62, Francis Topp, was killed in the first few minutes of the battle.

You'll find it here - https://www.shrine.org.au/conserving-australias-overseas-war-heritage-professor-william-logan

Vietnam veterans may find it interesting.

Simply click on the pale green triangle.

A Talent for Disinformation

Image courtesy ec.europa.eu

This post is an exercise in fact-checking. I'm addressing the claims made (most recently by individuals such as Craig Kelly and Bob Katter) about Covid-19 vaccines and Ivermectin respectively.

These claims have been floated extensively on social media, although in the case of Kelly on Twitter only, as his Facebook account has been suspended because he was using it to peddle misinformation.

Let's start with Bob Katter. Media reports circulating say that he claimed in a speech on Sunday 21st November in Cairns that several of his staff had died or been made severely unwell as a result of Covid vaccine administration. They are based on audio in which he stated that there were "eight or nine people" in his office who "had died or had been badly affected" by the vaccine.

On questioning, his staff insisted that what Mr Katter had said was that there had been "eight or nine cases come into our office" and it was not people "in" his office - obviously a complete misunderstanding. One can assume that the electoral office would have been put out of commission if this had actually happened. I don't know how many people work there, but "eight or nine" sounds more than a little suss....

The actual audio of his speech indicates that he said "into" and not "in", but is sufficiently unclear to allow for both interpretations. Let's allow Bob the charitable interpretation that he meant the eight or nine cases were were constituents in his Federal electorate of Kennedy, which covers 567,377 square kilometres and had an enrolment of 107,644 in 2019.

Now let's assume Bob was indeed referring to Kennedy constituents and that his statement that eight or nine cases of adverse reactions had occurred is correct, (although he didn't furnish any proof), and look at figures for that electorate.

I couldn't find a breakdown of vaccination take-up for Kennedy, but if you average Cairns (85% first dose) and Charters Towers (73% first dose) you come up with a figure of 79%. The only other large population centre in the electorate is Mount Isa, which is pretty much a mine town. There was nothing on-line that I could find about vaccination rates in the Isa, but unless the culture has changed since I lived there in the nineties, you can bet your boots that both the mines and the various government agencies, both indigenous and otherwise, are vigorously pushing vaccinations.

That 79% of 107,644 gives you 85,038 vaccinated. So if Bob is referring to his constituents, that's an adverse reaction rate of 0.015835, or one adverse reaction in about a thousand, on the lower end of what is typical of reactions to most vaccines, as a visit to the Australian Immunisation Handbook website reveals. In the case of the Pertussis vaccination, administered routinely to Australian infants, the incidence of adverse local reactions is approximately 10%. That's about ten times the rate for Covid vaccines. Why isn't Bob Katter getting excited about Pertussis vaccination?

Image courtesy UN ilibrary

Then we look at Craig Kelly. He's made so many bizarre claims about Covid (relating both to treatments and vaccination) that it'd difficult to address them all, but how about this one -

"The vaccines are not sufficiently effective, and they're not sufficiently safe" which you can hear at about 1:30 seconds into an unsolicited video he sent me from a speech he made at a rally in Melbourne last weekend. (This is despite the fact that I have messaged him on a number of occasions requesting that he cease sending unsolicited texts to my phone and removing the number from the UAP database).

Let's look at the first of these two statements - the first one that the vaccines are not effective. (I'm not sure what "sufficiently" means in this context). There are any number of published studies around the issue of vaccine effectiveness, but this one is very recent, and very representative. It reports -

Findings

The highest VE estimates against new cases in >16 year-old individuals, for all outcomes, were reached at the 15-21 day period after the second dose, ranging between 97.7% for deaths and 98.6% for severe/critical disease. VE estimates of the 14-20 day period after the first dose ranged between 54.3% for infection and 77.3% for severe/critical disease.

Interpretation

The *BNT162 vaccine is highly effective in preventing new SARS-CoV-2 cases. Among >80 year-old individuals, high effectiveness develops more slowly. In breakthrough cases, vaccination reduces complications and death.

Kelly has been pushing Ivermectin as a treatment, and demonstrating outrage that it is not prescribed. (Being of a cynical mindset, I do wonder if that concern has anything to do with his patron buying up copious quantities of the drug - but I digress).

Here is just one summary from a recent trial of Ivermectin conducted in June and published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. There are many more studies which came to the same conclusion -

In a retrospective study, a single dose of 200 ug/kg of ivermectin was explored for its effect on patients with severe COVID-19. In congruence with this evidence, no improvement in microbiological and clinical outcomes was found in the ivermectin group compared with the control group.

Similarly, in another randomised, double-blind clinical trial, ivermectin (administered at a dose of 300 ug/kg of body weight per day for 5 days) compared with placebo did not significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms among adults with mild COVID-19 infection. The evidence is of very low certainty for the effects of ivermectin in reducing mortality, need for hospitalisation, and reduction of time for clinical improvement in COVID-19 infection.

It's obvious, that when it comes to disinformation, both these politicians have talent.

It would be funny, if it wasn't dangerous. It kills people.

And Kelly's and Katter's claims - frankly bullshit...

*Pfizer

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Getting There...

(click to enlarge)

 Slowly but surely, I'm plugging away at my study.

The project is driven by two factors, the first is attempting to understand the motives and attitudes of national servicemen in regards to their service in Vietnam. That will comprise the research element once I complete all my course work. I'm in no hurry, enjoying the journey.

The second is the sheer excitement of discovery. There is so much material hidden away in archives, and so little time left to share the recollections of those of us who were personally involved. 

And, of course, there are myths to bust.

I was initially advised by the University to jump straight in at the deep end and begin to conduct the research. Apparently my memoir would have been sufficient to gain admission to a Ph D programme. This course of action would most probably have been a mistake, because my forty-year grasp of the conventions of academia is weak, and would have turned the enterprise into an exercise in frustration.

Entering at master's level means I can navigate my way through the minefield of referencing and the various academic conventions that, whilst they haven't really changed since I last studied in the late seventies, use very different tools from those I employed forty years ago. These tools are essentially digital, and whilst they facilitate research and save time, involve techniques that have to be learned. My fellow students (digital natives) don't have these issues. I have forty years of progress to catch up with.

The only downside has been the elimination of the face-to-face aspects of the course programme as a consequence of the pandemic. Covid has turned the physical presence of fellow students into a virtual experience. You will always learn as much from your peers as your supervisors, and that learning is a bit stilted via zoom.

Having said that, my supervisor is a veteran of Afghanistan, and has a very clear understanding of military culture, which is a distinct advantage.

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Out of the Mouths of Innocents

This family of musicians neatly nails the rubbish being promoted by those resisting vaccination.

It is, gentle reader, worth posting.

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That Black Foulness

Image courtesy Pinterest

Yesterday was Remembrance Day.

I paused for a minute or two in the middle of helping my son to move house to consider its meaning. I reflected on the fact that he is the first of three generations of my family not to be exposed to the black foulness of war.

And yet, the old orthodoxies glorifying the absurdity of making war persist, and these institutional commemorations often overwhelm the real significance of the day. 

All that is really required is a minute's silence. That silence speaks much more eloquently for those who died than brass bands, flag waving and bugle solos. Those we remember are, after all, forever silent.

Given that Remembrance Day commemorates casualties of over 40 million (twenty million deaths and twenty-one million wounded, including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians), it is indeed a solemn occasion.

When you recall that grievances resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (signed on On 28 June 1919, not November 11th as is the common misperception) were a large component of what led to the Second World War, it becomes even more tragically significant.

Consider the waste of so many young lives (and many of them were boys, not yet men, who could have had no idea of what they were fighting for) and the deaths of so many innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you begin to understand the depth of the catastrophe.

This was especially true in a  country with such a small population as Australia had at the time, where the impact of so many lost of one special generation was enormously significant.

And to acknowledge that twenty-one years later, Europe was once again tearing itself apart in another deadly conflict, is more cause for deep sadness. 

Wilfred Owen put the old lie starkly, a few short months before he was killed in France at age twenty-five, a week before the armistice.  

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The Transpacific Virus

Apart from Covid-19, there is another virus circulating at the moment.

It is just as dangerous as the Covid Pandemic, but it originated in the USA, not China. Its consequences are real, as can be observed by the chaotic state of US politics.

I'm referring, of course, to the epidemic of distrust of institutions and government across the Pacific since the Tea Party movement emerged towards the first ten years of the new millennium. That movement grew out a sense of grievance and entitlement precipitated by globalism, automation, and the GFC.

Political movements generated by national grievance rarely end well. Examples include Brexit, which is wreaking havoc on daily life in the UK right now, and the Tea Party itself, which has changed some Republicans from a credible conservative movement to a baying mob, despite the fact that it The Tea Party largely disappeared from the scene in its original form. National grievance was one of the major factors driving the rise of the NAZI movement in Germany in the thirties, and remains a large component of Chinese nationalism, used extremely effectively by the CCP under Xi Jinping.

Another component assisting the rise of grievance politics is the role of US corporate media, exemplified by Fox news, and these days, Newsmax. Gone are the days when the corporate media reported the public mood. These days they make a profit by exploiting that mood, monetising it, and then selling it back to the consumers of that same media. 

These same consumers are always prepared to pay for what they want to hear. They become opinion junkies, and this phenomenon leeches into social media. Recently, social media platforms have belatedly started to arrest the tide of misinformation and disinformation that feeds this sense of grievance. Facebook and Twitter have begun to do this, although with great reluctance, as it messes with their business model. It took an insurrection for Twitter to give Trump the shove. 

None of this would bother me very much, except that it is beginning to have an effect locally. One example of this is the imported outrage from the US about vaccine mandates and lockdowns.  Despite the fact that the Australian death rate from the virus per head of population is about 1/25 of what is it across the Pacific (67 per million vs 2297) there are voices here jumping on the culture wars bandwagon, and demanding an end to mandates and restrictions. They even use the same four word slogan.

 The most recent example is the introduction of legislation designed to require voters to present ID at the ballot box. It is designed to solve a problem which does not exist in this country, and has already been resolved in Queensland, where people on the electoral roll are posted an ID card to their address, and present that when they vote. I'm accumulating a collection.

A far greater problem than electoral fraud in this country is the rate of participation in state and federal elections - (91.9%) at the last federal poll. Despite the Electoral Commission seeing this as an achievement, we'd be doing better as a democracy if everybody got to vote.  How about the legislature take measures to ensure this disenfranchised 8.1% of the Australian electorate votes, rather than chasing the less than 0.001% of the electorate who allegedly tried to vote more than once at the last federal poll?

I won't hold my breath for an answer.

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Hugh White - Without America

Hugh White is always provocative, and doesn't pull any punches when it comes to criticising current defence policy.

In 1995, he was appointed Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence. During that time he was involved in the preparation of the 2000 Defence White Paper, entitled Our Future Defence Forces, published by the Howard Government. 

He has since admitted that many of the assumptions that paper was based on, particularly as they apply to the rise of China, and the balkanisation of the United States, no longer hold.

Given that the US has shown us that it has the capacity to "elect" dangerously incompetent and unstable Presidents, we may at some stage be on our own when it comes to defence.

In the light of that recent history, and AUKUS, this is worth watching.

The essay* he refers to is also a good read if you can get hold of it.

*Hugh White, Without America, in Quarterly Essays Issue 68 2017

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A Pinch of Common Sense

Courtesy www.statesman.com

I found this posted in Facebook a few weeks ago, when the faux outrage about mandated vaccination first began to appear in local and overseas media.

Unfortunately, I didn't take note of the poster's identity, so can't attribute it.

Anyway, after looking at it again, I've decided that it's worth posting, as it reeks of real common sense, which trumps faux outrage every time -

Vaccination history has long been required to travel (if you have been in countries where some of those ‘old’ diseases still persist) and they’re also required when you enrol your children in most kindergartens and  schools. 

When I was studying in the 90s, I had to show proof that I had been vaccinated for hepatitis B too. We can be stopped by police at anytime and asked to submit to a test to prove that we are not intoxicated and we carry licences to prove that we have passed our driving test, library cards, club cards, reward point cards, train/bus passes, credit cards etc.

 All of these cards are required to prove something at different times and places, and many of them track where we go, what we buy etc. (For the insidious purpose of making us buy more of the same usually too). Not to mention phones which record where we go (by GPS tracker no less), our heart rate, our bank balance, where we shop, what we listen to, what we read, what we look at online etc., AND we live with CCTV pretty much everywhere these days. 

So, we have not lived in a ‘free’ world for a long time, and I personally, don’t really have a problem with carrying a card which shows that I’m happy to help keep my community safe and limit my use of hospital resources should I happen to get sick. 

I’m just really grateful that I live in a country that can afford to vaccinate everyone for free, and also that I’m not living in Afghanistan or any other country at war (civil or otherwise). 

There are a huge number of people out there who are living through traumatic experiences every day and experience limitations on their rights and freedoms that we cannot even begin to imagine. I imagine that they would be astounded that we’re kicking up a fuss about government regulations which are being put in place to protect our lives and limit the spread of illness.

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I Don't Wish to Know That*

Image courtesy Penguin Inc.

One of the most interesting books I encountered when studying years ago, is Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

That was in the mid-seventies when I was completing my education degree. From memory, it was a set text. Postman's book was ground-breaking in that it rejected traditional educational practice by encouraging teachers to ensure that their students questioned everything. It set out to promote the importance of teaching enquiry skills that could be applied to a world increasing in complexity and encouraging students to question many of the half-truths western culture had accepted for centuries.

This was a revolutionary concept, especially viewed from the American notion of education which was largely about filling students up with knowledge and dogma whilst at the same time expecting them to accept it all without question.

More recently, I'm observing that same unquestioning attitude to on-line information, emanating mostly from the USA, and driven by the profit motive assaulting our local media landscape. What is now called the MSM (Main Stream Media) panders to one extreme of the political spectrum or the other and makes a dollar from selling opinions that are consumed like breakfast cereal. The consumer will always pay for what he/she wants to hear, and as the song goes, will disregard the rest.

Facts no longer matter, and reporting them has become a lost art. 

The outcome of this media manipulation is social division, the likes of which is tearing the USA apart. Unfortunately, it seems to be oozing across the Pacific. 

This post, gentle reader, offers advice on how you can discriminate between truth and misinformation when you encounter material on-line.

First up, there are a multitude of fact checking sites out there. 

Locally, we have TheConversation FactCheck, AAP FactCheck, and RMIT FactCheck.  The last of these is used by the ABC, which puts it, in my book as less reliable because of its affiliation with a mainstream media organisation.

In the USA landscape you will find FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com,  Snopes.com, and PunditFact. There are others that are part of media organisations like the RMIT ABC site, such as FactChecker (Washington Post) but I have not included them in my list as they aren't independent.

The four listed are run by non-profit groups, as they refuse to accept money from mainstream media or PACs in order to maintain their independence.

Apart from using these sites, there are few fairly simple verification strategies that the average punter can use. The first one is "triangulation", whereby you search for three different reports of the same incident, and find aspects on which they agree. Generally (but not always) these points of agreement approach the truth.

Then there is a strategy I've used, especially in regard to recent reports of BLM activity, particularly in the USA. Reports from deeply aligned media (such as Fox News) have promoted the notion that rioting and disorder have become daily events in locations such as Portland. At the height of this reporting, I would check two or three of the local (generally non-aligned) news websites, and a completely different picture would emerge.

A very good example of this phenomenon is revealed when you compare the local coverage of the Arizona County Mariposa audit as it is reported in the local media with how it turns up in NewsNow. 

This, from the Huffington Post, is a pretty good summary -

Postman's work is as relevant now as it was in 1971, and is still available in paperback.

It's a recommended read.

*From a running joke in the original series of the Goon Show

#Inbuilt Crap Detectors

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A Very Bad Example

Pic courtesy CNBC

I've always believed that watching what is going on across the Pacific is a pretty reliable way of predicting the future of this country.

This rule of thumb has held historically for a wide range of cultural phenomena, including media trends, music and changes in lifestyle. Note I wrote "changes", not "improvements". 

Recently in the USA, we've seen the election in 2016 of a populist one-term POTUS, who effectively destroyed whatever remained of his country's unity in his term, and then refused to accept that he was defeated at the election of November 2020. His break with the democratic tradition has plunged his country further into the pit of division that he exploited to get elected in the first place.

As part of the exploitation of this division, the Republicans (or at least some of them) instituted an audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county in Arizona, the state which, when called by Fox News for Biden, broke the news that Trump was a one-term president.

The goal of the audit was to prove fraud in order to get Biden elected. It was not an objective exercise.The results of that audit have finally been released, but without the blaze of publicity that was associated with the announcement of the audit in the first place. The report can be found here. 

An extract - 

What has been found is both encouraging and revealing. On the positive side there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.

Remember, that is a summary of the major findings of the Trump-inspired exercise carried out by his supporters - exactly the opposite of what it was intended to find. So the official results stand. In fact, the audit found that Biden actually won by 360 more votes than the official results, winning the state by a margin of 45,469 ballots.  You get the best reporting by reading the local non-aligned media. 

So in the washup, the audit was an exercise in maintaining the rage and frustration felt by Trump supporters with the goal of keeping his run in 2024 in the news, and maintaining a fund-raising base. It had absolutely nothing to do with election integrity.

In other words, it's now OK across the Pacific, that if you lose an election, to simply deny the fact, put it down to fraud, and throughly weaken your country's confidence in the democratic process as you go along. That is obviously extremely dangerous, and throughly immoral, and reminds me of Abe Lincoln's speech in which he quoted Matthew 12:22-28 - 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. 

So we should look across the Pacific, note the mess the USA is in, and use it as a reminder not to follow down that road. There are so many examples of this in terms of firearms legislation, a largely non-existent health system and the USA's dysfunctional electoral process itself.

The Americans could do with our independent Electoral Commissions, both state and federal, and our system of compulsory voting. They could also do with our NFA, our public health system, and our largely non-partisan judiciary.

Never take your own country for granted.

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Going Jack

 

Image courtesy Lion International

When I served in a rifle platoon a very long time ago, one of the worst insults you could offer to a fellow soldier was to refer to him as "Jack".

The term came from the phrase "F**k you Jack, I'm all right". 

Essentially, any soldier going "Jack" was either selfish, stupid, or both. 

Stupid, because our lives depended on each other. 

Selfish, because he was putting considerations about his own well-being ahead of that of his comrades.

A good example would have been a digger who coughed, sneezed, smoked, snored or farted in an all-night ambush. Such a soldier would have been given a swift kick up the backside by an NCO (or perhaps a fellow soldier, depending on who got to him first).

That principle of collective loyalty and cooperation is fundamental to success in any undertaking where disunity is death, and it is illustrated so clearly when we look at statistics emanating from the USA, where states with high vaccination rates are suffering far fewer Covid 19 deaths than those where vaccine hesitancy is rampant. 

It is almost a perfect negative correlation.

And yet we observe people of little brain and miniscule moral comprehension taking to the street in the name of "freedom" in this country. In the process, they have casually desecrated the Shrine of Remembrance.

The "freedom" they're advocating is the freedom to jeopardise the well-being of the group in favour of the selfish demands of the individual. I've blogged previously about how that glib notion has fallen in a heap with the advent of the pandemic.

We have also observed the phenomenon (relatively new to Australia) of rent seeking politicians appropriating the anger and frustration inevitably generated by the restrictions to their own ends.

This is one cultural trend that should be swiftly booted back across the Pacific from whence it came.

It is divisive, destructive and dangerous.

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Under the Radar

Cartoon courtesy The Guardian

The story of the week is Australia's move to acquire nuclear powered submarines.

But under the radar, is a much more important story, that is all about taking our foreign policy priorities back to the sixties.

Let's first examine the outcome of the decision to cancel the French project and consider the realities. Hugh White does just that.

The likely acquisition date of replacements for the Collins class boats is now further down the track than it was for the abandoned French project. We're talking about the 2040s. Let's hope our enemies, imagined or real, are prepared to give us that much start.

In addition, it is going to cost more, even before we compensate the French for the cancellation.

As Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said a few days ago -

"The irony is that when we chose the French-designed submarine a few years ago we actually took a nuclear-powered submarine and have been spending millions of dollars turning it into a diesel submarine."

So we have moved from modifying a nuclear powered boat to take diesel electric propulsion (a complicated and expensive proposition) to going full circle and deciding that we really wanted nuclear all along. That is at least bizarre, and almost unbelievable.

But it's real...

What is far more significant is the return to the strategic alignments of the sixties. A glance at a map reveals that Australia is located in the South Pacific, a very long way from both Pennsylvania Avenue and Downing Street.

We are much closer to Jakarta, Singapore and Hanoi. Yet, apparently there was no consultation with any of our neighbours. There was also no negotiation with the French at government to government level. The French are more than a little miffed - hardly surprising.

Perhaps if some real consultation had taken place, we may have been able to set up a deal where we leased the nuclear powered version of the Barracuda from France whilst we were waiting for the Yanks and Brits to get their act into gear.

As it is, we seem to have come out of the whole debacle with more expense, greater delays, and some seriously fed up neighbours.

But most significantly, any real sovereignty that we had in terms of our relationship with the USA has gone down the plughole. Perhaps we could be optimistic and hope that in the fullness of time, the acquisition of these boats may allow us to develop our own independent deterrent, rather than depending on the Americans, but how much time do we have?

As it is now, we are tied to them, and to their capricious foreign policy which bangs backwards and forwards like a dunny door in the wind driven by their dysfunctional and erratic domestic politics. 

If I'm still around when these subs finally hit the water under their own steam, (I'll be in my nineties), I'll be fascinated to observe what form of leader occupies the White House. Recent history has shown that the Yanks have the capacity to "elect"* complete snake oil merchants to that position.

And there will be five different POTUS elected between now and 2040. By the law of averages, at least one of them is likely to be a lunatic.

You only need to consider the results of domestic driven interventions and withdrawals in recent foreign wars (Vietnam Iraq, and Afghanistan) to understand the utter incompetence of the Americans. And we went along with them each time.

I lived the consequences of that incompetence fifty years ago in Vietnam. 

Let's hope that no more young Australians will have to do the same in the future.

*Probably the wrong word to use to describe the process.

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Israel and Delta

                                           Pic courtesy WSJ

Israel's experience with the Delta strain of the virus, and the success or otherwise of its vaccination programme is instructive for Australia, given the likely rocky road ahead on the road map set out by the PM and the NSW Premier.

As this is written, Israel is dealing with a third wave of the virus, specifically the Delta variant. On September 9th 2021, Israel reported 5861 new cases and 6 new deaths. This contrasted with the situation in 2020 when the country went into lockdown averaging 4000 new daily infections, and daily deaths reached a high of 101 on January 20th 2021.

So the rate of infection is higher in 2021, but the death rate lower. The other change since a few months ago is that the lockdowns in Israel were lifted prior to the increased rate of infections.

Because we are not comparing like with like in two aspects (a different more infectious variant and lighter restrictions) it is difficult to come to definite conclusions, but some things seem evident.

1.  More people are becoming infected, but fewer are being hospitalised and dying.

2.  The lockdowns were effective in reducing transmission, and lifting them has increased transmission.

3. More people are recovering, but it is too early to understand the nature of that recovery.

All of this suggests caution. 

This caution should emanate not only from the figures above, but also from the possibility (or likelihood) that new variants will emerge. That is, after all, how viruses behave.

Vaccination is not the silver bullet, but it does seem to help. It needs to be remembered that even in Israel, only 61.1% of people are fully vaccinated. 

That doesn't bode well for Australia, where the figure stands at 32.6% fully vaccinated as this is posted.

Song for Adam Goodes

Apart from the fact that this is a great song, it has an interesting back story.

It was written by Paul Kelly for the documentary "The Final Quarter", which looks at the last few years of Goodes playing career.

It won the Best Original Song Composed for the Screen in the 2019 Screen Music Awards.

Because Goodes' had the temerity to object to the crowd booing every time he touched the ball, he came in for a lot of criticism.

Indigenous players are supposed to accept that casual racism without a murmur.

He didn't. Well done that man.....

The song is about his mother, and how her values forged his success as a footballer and Australian of the Year.

  

Good News and Bad News

Pic courtesy Al Jazeera

Some elements of the old joke hold in relation to Afghanistan, but the good news pales somewhat in relation to the cost of the twenty year commitment.

We lost forty-one Australian soldiers, and that will always be the greatest cost. The damage done to all who served there, and the aftermath of the defeat also comes at enormous cost.

Vietnam veterans are only too familiar with that.

Frankly, the reputation of the US is neither here nor there. That reputation was permanently damaged in March 2003 when the Neocons invaded Iraq on a lie in order to "get square" for 9/11. What was David Kilcullen's reaction?

There has always been something entirely childish about US responses to terrorism, which in the final analysis, ensures that it will continue to be a problem into the future. Arrogance and ignorance creates its own issues.

All presidents since Bush have been trying to extract the US military from Afghanistan, and it would not have mattered in the long run who was in the White House when it happened. The fact that the deal that Trump "negotiated" included no consultation with the people or government of Afghanistan is more than a little responsible for the chaos we have seen during the last week or two.

But there is some good news.

No more American or Australians will die in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan we know now is a very different country from what it was twenty years ago. There is a generation of young Afghans who have known a different experience. 

Afghani women know a different way of life, and most young women have had some experience of schooling.

How these changes will play out will depend on a whole heap of imponderables, most of them poorly understood by westerners. 

There is very little we can do about it, so pragmatic optimism is as viable as despair.

What is absolutely essential is that we don't treat Afghanistan veterans in the same shabby manner as Vietnam veterans were treated, until they took reconciliation into their own hands with the 1987 Welcome Home march.

The other essential is that we treat Afghan refugees as generously as we treated the Vietnamese in the late seventies and early eighties. Since the poisonous atmosphere created by the Tampa incident in August 2001, I sincerely doubt that possibility.

The Thrill is Gone

For years (foolishly perhaps) I've been lurking on a blog that described itself as "Libertarian". It was fun whilst it lasted. Thanks, Professor Davidson.

It's gone. It persists only in archive. And this little blog survives, gentle reader. Darwin was spot on...

At the same time, a pandemic has killed six hundred and twenty-seven thousand in the Land of the Free. It's reasonable to conclude that the two situations (the deaths of over half a million Americans, and the demise of a "Libertarian" blog) are linked.

Libertarianism has always been a romantically destructive philosophy. It is associated these days with the American Right, but ironically has its origins in the later works of Marx and Engels (Ernesto Screpanti, Libertarian communism: Marx Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007).

Its ideological base has been co-opted by politicians such as Rand Paul and many Americans who admire the thought of writers like Ayn Rand. There is a depth of irony in this association, of course. You have only to read a few of Ayn Rand's quotes on  Libertarianism to understand that - 

Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication when that fits their purpose.

Libertarianism has always been impossibly romantic, espoused by dilettantes, and deemed fashionable by the shallow. It has always lacked substance and pragmatism, and of course, as a system of association and organisation, is entirely impossible. It is essentially the refuge of the intellectually lazy and the naive. God knows there's a few of those loose in the Land of the Free, and many of them post in the lunatic Right blogosphere.

That has been revealed so clearly by the consequence of the pandemic across the Pacific, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the attempted application of science to its management. The non-existent US health system has a lot to do with it, of course.

An even deeper irony holds when you consider that by most recognised criteria, The USA is not up there on international comparisons when it comes to actual Liberty.

The 2021 Index of Economic Freedom which promotes economic opportunity, individual empowerment, and prosperity puts the US at twentieth on the scale, well below countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Ireland. 

And I didn't use this post as an excuse to play some BB King. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, but the thrill of Glibertarianism has indeed gone...

 

The War on Terror - Guest Post - by Panda General

 

                                               Pic courtesy the denverchannel.com

I have decided to add a little variety by providing a guest poster. This person is less than half my age and has a unique viewpoint. He provides an original point of view, and his analysis is comprehensive. Let me know what you think.

 Though it's not really *over* over, I think it's fair to say that we're reaching a point where the War on Terror will no longer be the primary paradigm through which western powers engage militarily with the world in short order. So what I am thinking at the moment is - how will future historians define this era? Where does it start? Where will it end? 

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US seem like the obvious starting point - however, there had certainly been related actions to these attacks leading back to the 80's. Osama Bin Laden had officially declared war on the United States in 1996 - and he had actually already organized attacks on US targets repeatedly before 9/11 (most notably embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole near Yemen). 9/11 is probably when these conflicts entered the greater public consciousness, but even afterwards the goal of fighting terrorism became murky. Did they mean terrorism as a phenomenon? Did they mean Islamist terrorism specifically? Did they mean states that had sponsored terrorism? 

The answer was, of course, all of the above, but if that's the case then things go back much further than 2001. The countries that ended up on the 'axis of evil' - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, were all countries that had had antagonisms for the US stretching back decades (back to the 50's in the case of North Korea). There were also secondary 'axis' countries - Cuba, Libya, and Syria. Ideologically, none of these countries have that much in common, exemplifying a series of world views that include Marxist-Leninism, Ba'athism, Khomeini-brand Islamism, Juche, and whatever the hell Qadhafi thought he was doing that week. They weren't really allies (Iraq and Iran, in particular, were sworn enemies) and had few formal connections or organised alliances between them. All they really had in common were the fact that the US had beef with them. 

Also notable, none of them really ideologically aligned with Osama Bin Laden's own perspective - Salafist Jihadism. No state was really. The Salafi movement had been around for a while, but it really began to pick up steam in the 80's, when various states including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan essentially started exporting it throughout the Islamic world, pumping money and Wahhabist clerics (the particularly conservative brand of Islam that prevails in the KSA) into every mosque and madras they could - partially for religious reasons, partially as an ideological counter to Soviet Communism, Arab Socialism, and Iran's newly emergent Shia-infused Islamism. 

The combination of the Siege of the Grand Mosque by the sons of Ikwhan fanatics, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan meant that much of the 80's was spent pushing this ideology everywhere they could. and it became very strong in the Islamic world. 

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the collapse of the USSR, these guys basically reached the height of their prestige within the Islamic world - there were seen as heroes who had destroyed an evil atheistic empire. Foreign veterans of the Afghanistan war returned to their home countries and used this momentum to attempt their own overthrows there - this happened in Algeria most notably, but also in Tajikistan. Islamist-aligned officers overthrew the government in Sudan, setting up an Islamist-themed military dictatorship. 

The Taliban defeated the Afghan Warlords, remnants of the Mujahedeen, and set up their brand of Deobundi Islamist Fundamentalism in the country. Salafist Jihadists joined in secessionist and ethnic conflicts in Chechnya (Russia), Xinjiang (China), Kashmir (India), Palestine, the Philippines, and Bosnia. A lot of these insurgencies would become targets of the War on Terror paradigm after 9/11, but at the time most Americans, in particular, had no idea they were even a thing. 

So where does it start? It's fair to say its origins lie in the Cold War. but where does this conflict actually begin? In the 50's in Egypt, when Nasser banned the Muslim Brotherhood and drove them underground (and into more militant formations)? In '79, when the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Grand Siege of Mecca all occurred within a few months of each other, leading to the violent (and state-sponsored) radicalization of Sunni militants? in '96, when OBL declared war on the US, marking it as a direct target for these movements? Or 9/11, when the largest terrorist attacks in history bought this conflict to world attention? 

Trying to map things after this gets even murkier - trying to figure out how a solid *end* point might be murkier still. A lot of the states the US has problems with are still around, but blocs have been forming between them and more powerful nations. Salafi terrorism is still around, but its ability to strike much outside of Islamic-Majority countries is becoming increasingly limited. US security infrastructure is in the midst of pivoting away from focus on those groups, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, and no doubt minimising their footprint in Iraq before too long. They aren't looking at the little fish so much anymore - Russia and China have captured their imagination far more (though they remain, as ever, fixated on Iran and Cuba). 

This is a very different world to the one that dominated headlines for most of the 00's. 

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