Age bin

Actually, that's three rules, which I suppose casts some doubt on my arithmetic in this letter to the Age.

Costello and Turnbull are complaining that if we go into deficit our grandchildren will still be paying off the debt. And what exactly is wrong with that, pray?
Let’s look back a little. In 1932 Australian governments were running a collective deficit of nineteen million quid. The bankers of the day objected to this profligacy, pulled the government into line, and by 1937 the governments were a million quid in surplus (pity about the depression, though).
If instead of cutting costs the governments had quadrupled the deficit in order to put more people in work, and paid for it by issuing 100-year bonds at 10%, Australians would now be groaning under the burden of paying back 99 million dollars a year, five dollars a year per head, or a swingeing 0.04% of the federal budget – except that that’s probably an overestimate, as the economy would actually be larger than it is now because of the higher growth on a larger base.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t begrudge paying my grandfather ten cents a week. I suppose that’s why I’m not a banker.

The Spirit

Why do I do these things to myself? I'm over sixty, I have a limited number of evenings left, why do I waste them on things that are not simply worthless but represent an actual subtraction from my capacity to enjoy the world?
I went to Miller's Spirit. I'll spare you the torrent of point-by-point no no nos, and cut it back to two rules.
1) When a comic book movie won't let you look at one frame of the original comic over the titles, they're so ashamed of the comparison that you should take their word for it.
2) When a comic book movie shows the face of someone who in the original has their face hidden (Stallone as Judge Dredd: Samuel Jackson as The Octopus) they show they don't understand what was going on in the comic and won't be able to draw on it effectively.
3) Frank Miller can't handle any movie that doesn't have rollerskating japanese ninja whores in it.

Acland Street

One of the folk over at Yglesias is talking about civility in political debate, and says, inter alia,

"After several generations of negotiations and concessions, I may not think there’s much room for further reconciliation between pro-lifers and pro-choicers in the United States. That I don’t necessarily feel the same way about Israelis and Palestinians, though, doesn’t betray an inconsistency at all. Frankly, if that conflict began to resemble the culture wars in America, and the political debate cooled along with it, it would be the most promising development in the Middle East since the creation of modern Israel."

Sorry, that I really don't get. We're dealing with facts on the ground, yes, we can't wish ourselves back to a point where we had better options, sure, but surely if we were back in 1945 or 46 with the wisdom of hindsight we can see now that it would have been better not to do this at all? If somebody had cleared their throat and said "Yes, moving millions of Europe's jews into a part of the world where they're surrounded by and infiltrated with people who hate them and are going to go on hating them as, among other things, usurpers and displacers is a good idea exactly how?" then that, surely, would have been a very promising development. Then all the jews could have come to Australia and we wouldn't be in the situation we are now where Cafe Scheherazade in Acland Street is having to close for lack of custom.

Catching up

A pre-Xmas one from the Age bin:
Letter to the Editor

Sarah Wilson says that applied behavioural analysis (ABA) therapy for her autistic child costs $22,500 a year, and wants the government to pay for it. Other parents give the cost as closer to $60,000. Given that the prevalence of people with autism in Australia is variously given at 12 to 35 per 10,000, suggesting a total autistic population of between 25,200 and 73,500 (not to mention the larger total of 135,000 people with the broader diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder) that indicates that the government could be up for between 567 million and 8.2 billion dollars p/a. If we confine ABA to children under 18 then that’s only 140 million to 2 billion a year, but that’s still quite a lot, especially considering that there’s no particularly strong evidence that ABA works. Its fame rests almost entirely on a 1987 study that nobody’s ever been able to replicate, and recent work by researchers such as Dr. Morton Gernsbacher has shown that in properly controlled studies ABA shows very little gain at all and certainly no greater gains than other cheaper and less taxing therapies. ABA hasn’t shown it can produce a cure, or anything even remotely close to a cure, for autism, and we shouldn’t let our natural sympathy for worried parents rush us into open-ended commitments to enormous expenditures.

Chris Borthwick,
West Melbourne

Caped crusaders

I was adding it up the other day, and if I'd given my life over to being ready to explode in crusading violence every time the occasion arose I would have got into fights twice, some forty-five years ago. Unless I actually went around starting fights myself, which is hardly the done thing.
Riffing off that, Batman can apparently run into thugs mugging someone in an alleyway about what? Once, twice a week? I mean, he's looking for them, but even so, if a mugging takes (let's be generous) ten minutes, and if it takes him ten minutes to cover a single (multi-alley) block...
Let's say he's patrolling after dark five nights a week...say 50 hours, or 300 ten-minute periods... and has two hits. One in 150.
Let's say that Gotham City has 500 downtown blocks (he doesn't seem to do the suburbs much - nowhere to swing from). That means that in any given ten night minutes there are three and a bit muggings, or a total of a thousand muggings (or break-ins, bank robberies, or gang hits, or arson cases) a week.
That seems about right; if Batman's strike rate was much more than 2 in a thousand it might reduce crime below the level where there's enough of it to keep him busy . An ecological balance.
Though... a thousand crimes, given recidivism, probably implies between three hundred and five hundred actual criminals. And he takes out two a week - that's a hundred a year. Or a one chance in five of going down. You'd think that odds like that would have to reduce the attractions of crime.
Except that, to be fair, a number of Batvillains aren't homo economicus; in the latest movie the Joker, for example, makes rather a point of it.
The same, of course, applies to Spiderman, though his spider-sense may mean he has a wider search area at any given moment. On the other hand, he doesn't have a car, so it probably evens out.

Celebs

My faithful commentator has sent me this - the pledge video (I include the link even though broken because I'm really not doing enough linking for a respectable blog) for comment - I think I'm supposed to tut-tut at the lack of fit between the upbeat exhortations of the video and the general commitment of the viedeoees, otherwise, to mindless hedonism, but I have to say what really struck me is that I couldn't recognise a single one of the idols of today earnestly mouthing banalities. I couldn't decide at first viewing whether it was supposed to be celebrities doing it or whether it was just a vox pop out the front of the studio. And I wasn't much better off when looking up the names on Google. I'm not sure whether it's better or worse than not being able to remember any pop song since the seventies, but it's a reminder that I have totally lost the ability to follow any new trends and shouldn't presume to try.

They were American, of course, but I'm not at all sure I could do better on Australian youth idols. [Insert spittle-flecked rave about how much more talented/significant/seminal the celebrities of my day were than this present crop of jumped-up nobodies].

Australia Day

Yes, Australia Day needs to be moved. Not only is it a revolting relic of imperialism, it comes at a time when we have lots of leave time already rather than in August when we really need it (there are no public holidays at all between June and October). Either Australia Day, Anzac Day, or Easter needs to be shifted to August, and all things considered Australia Day is probably the easiest. How about August 27, the discovery of gold in 1851? Or even better, August 17? That's when the dingo took Azaria. Works for me.