Tetherd Cow Ahead

While Violet Towne and I were out on our bikes yesterday, our conversation turned to philosophy and politics, as it sometimes does. Specifically, I was defending the Mars Lab/Curiosity program against her assertion that it was a waste of money when there were so many much more important issues on the political plate. Well, I agree that there are numerous pressing matters that need our attention (and money) but I was most vehement that there are a lot of other things that could lose a few pounds (metaphorically speaking) before we should start carving up great and inspiring science projects.

“For instance,” I said, “Do you realise that the 2012 Olympics cost more than twice as much as Curiosity? And that the US bank bailout was more than ten times the budget of the Mars Science Lab mission?”

I don’t think she believed me.

“Show me the numbers!” she said, defiantly.

Well, Acowlytes, you all know it’s best not to challenge the Reverend when he’s on his soapbox, even if you’re the Reverend’s wife.⁽ⁱ⁾ When we had pedalled homewards, I went straight to Captain Google, and plugged in my questions. You might understand, dear Cowpokes, my utter amazement when I found my figures were wrong. Wrong by an order of magnitude. But not in the direction VT had hoped. It’s FAR worse than I had even imagined. Here ya go. I made a graph:

As you can plainly see, the budget for the Curiosity/Science Lab project is not even one pixel high on this comparison scale.

So, in order to get some perspective on how much that little rover trundling around on the surface of Mars costs, let’s examine some of those figures and related issues. First of all, it’s obvious that the military budget for the US for one year (2012) and the amount of money spent on the bank bailout are each in a completely different league to the kind of expense put aside for Curiosity. It isn’t hard to see that even NASA’s entire budget for 2012 is hardly a blip on the radar for the government accountants when compared to sums like that. What’s even more gobsmacking is that each of these figures (that is, ONE SINGLE YEAR of US military spending, or the humoungous pile of money forked out to save the US economy from the destruction wrought by the excesses of greedy and morally reprehensible assholes) exceeds the budget of NASA’s entire 50 year existence.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ The yearly outlay for military air-conditioning alone exceeds NASA’s annual budget by 4 billion dollars.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

The London Olympics cost, in fact, nearly 6 times more than Curiosity – not merely double as I’d thought – and we’re only talking about the money spent to stage the games.^(iv) It’s plain that large amounts are poured into the Olympics from elsewhere as well, including every participating nation’s competition expenses, and not insubstantial amounts from all the bids made by countries attempting to secure the Games every four years. That’s a frikkin’ ginormous pile of cash for a sporting event. Even if you amortize the London expense over 4 years, the yearly figure still exceeds that of the Mars Science Lab mission. Of course if we permit that, it should be fair to amortize Curiosity’s cost over the Mars Science Lab program’s lifetime (9 years), making the contrast even greater and returning an expense to the US taxpayers of $277m per year (or, less than a dollar per person per year). For 2012/13 the Australian government has budgeted over 10 times that figure for sport.^(v)

To put that per-person/per-dollar/per-year expense into perspective, Americans^(vi) spent 4 times the cost of the Curiosity mission at the cinema in 2010^(vii), and are spending something like $137 billion dollars a year on alcohol^(viii) and somewhere in excess of 30 billion dollars a year on cigarettes. In 2011, the US government spent 313 billion dollars^(ix) on ameliorating the problems caused by the abuse of all that alcohol & tobacco. And, while we’re on the subject of substance abuse, coming in at a staggering 30 billion dollars,^(x) America’s so-called ‘War on Drugs’ costs the nation over 10 times the budget of Curiosity (or, nearly twice the annual NASA budget) every year and that is widely argued to be a complete waste of money.^(xi)

I could, of course keep going with this – I haven’t touched on gambling, or government inefficiency, or tax breaks for religion or a half dozen other areas where large amounts of money seem to slush around without a proper degree of scrutiny. But what does all this mean, in the end?

For me, it’s simple. As humans we can, of course, choose to put our resources wherever we like. So far, I believe that choice has always leaned far too heavily towards the things at which animals are good – being the fittest, the strongest, the fastest. Or being the greediest, the most aggressive, the most dominant. It has not served us well. The result is that we have become powerful animals facing an existential crisis, and the traits that we carry as animals – the aggression, the greed, the power-mongering – are the exact opposite of what we need to get us out of this crisis. We are starting to encounter problems that we will not conquer by being fast, or strong or fit.^(xii) Being better at animal things was once enough. Now it isn’t.

The things that humans alone are good at – the things that our brains enable us to do such as imagining the possibilities of the future, pondering the poetry of our existence, turning our curious gaze onto the mechanics of the very universe itself – occupy the very tiniest parts of the minds of most people (and therefore most governments). This ability that humans have to plan for the future by creating a mental vision of it is more-or-less nonexistant in all other animals.^(xiii) So what do we do to the people who are very good at this kind of inspirational far-thinking? We vilify and undervalue them. When they tell us ‘There is a big problem with the climate and we should do something about it!’ the powerful apes get up on their boxes and beat their chests, so that they might remain popular and powerful, and the greedy apes use all the cunning that their superior brain has given them to make arguments that everything is OK and we should all just kick back and consume, and the fit and fast apes run around entertaining everyone. If we cannot use the leverage that nature has given us to come to terms with the world-destroying problems we now face, we are truly doomed. We have squandered the one advantage that we have over other animals. Our difference will have enabled us to wipe ourselves out, rather than allowed us to achieve that future which we alone can imagine.

So what has all this to do with a little vehicle pottering around in the dust of a cold world some 225 million kilometers from our home? Well, in my opinion, projects like Curiosity help us turn our gaze outward – out of ourselves and away from our tiny little human preocupations. Indeed, I think that this curiosity to know stuff that has no direct consequence to our animal existence is a marker that says that we may, perhaps, have a chance after all.

There are, of course, many areas where we might have directed the 2.5 billion dollars that went to Curiosity. Violet Towne considered that it would have been better spent going towards helping solve the climate change problem, for example. Well, I agree that climate change research is an area that could really use that kind of money. And there are numerous pressing compassionate issues that are desperately in need of money also. I hope my argument has convinced you (and her), though, that stealing the funds from visionary human endeavours like the Mars Science Lab is entirely the wrong tactic if you want to help address these probems. I want to make it quite clear that I’m not advocating doing away with sport, or stopping everyone from imbibing reality-altering substances, or even saying that we could conveniently curtail all our military spending, but to me it seems that all these pursuits – these profoundly ‘ape-like’ pursuits – are where we should look first for money that could be better off spent elsewhere. I’m pretty sure they could spare a little of the quite exorbitant amounts of cash that are currently rained down on them.

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Violet Towne fears that I have portrayed her as a Luddite here, and as somewhat anti-science. I want to assure you that she is not, and that I respect her views, and her willingness to challenge me on my own, very much. You all know that it’s unlikely I would last long with a partner who didn’t have a vibrant and informed worldview. But I think I am right in saying that, like many people, she had formed an opinion – almost entirely concocted by irresponsible and ignorant media reporting, in my view – that NASA spends excessive amounts of money on things no-one really cares about. My intent with this post is simply to demonstrate that, in the grand scheme of things, NASA’s budget is relatively well spent. It seems to me that robbing Peter to pay Paul by redistributing NASA’s budget to areas of more pressing need is a kind of madness fanned by a perplexing and distressing anti-science sentiment creeping across the world.

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Footnotes:

1. You’d've thought she would have figured this one out by now… [↩]
2. Here. Do the sums. [↩]
3. The Pentagon rejects this figure, which was calculated by Brigadier General Steven Anderson, a military logician for operations in Iraq. They have, however, not put forward an alternative anywhere I could find. I’m open to correction on this. [↩]
4. Arguably, some of that expense is recouped in benefits of one kind of another by the British taxpayers, but not the majority of it by any means. Equally as arguably, the Mars Science Lab program has benefits of one kind or another for the human race. [↩]
5. I had trouble finding out how much the US government spends on sport. It’s either a well kept secret, or they don’t care to support the same ridiculous level of sports fantaticism as ours does. [↩]
6. Canadians are also included in this figure, but even cutting it by, say, a generous third, that’s still a shitload of money. [↩]
7. I couldn’t find anything more recent, but I think it’s safe to say that 2011 & 2011 will track that figure. [↩]
8. 2002 figures, but I think we can probably assume that has trended upwards rather than down. [↩]
9. This is probably a conservative estimate – it’s hard to get an exact figure due to the nature of defining the field, but I’m quoting on the conservative side. Stats here and here. [↩]
10. Depending who you ask. It’s variously quoted at somewhere between 20 and 40 billion. It’s certainly not less than 20, but it may be more than 40. In any case, I’ve erred on the probable side of conservatism and just taken the median. [↩]
11. Here, here, and here, for just three examples of hundreds you can find. [↩]
12. Or religious. [↩]
13. To all intents and purposes it is completely non-existant as far as we know, but that’s an area of research that is still contentious. [↩]

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Acowlytes! Do you suffer from quivering? Nervousness? Fear? A compulsion to flee? Visual blurring? Panic? Nausea? Can you rule out having glimpsed Tony Abbott in budgie smugglers as the cause of these ailments? Then it is possible, dear friends, that you may have Wind Turbine Syndrome, or WTS. A more fitting acronym for this affliction would probably be WTF? but I digress.

Wind Turbine Syndrome is aligned with other forms of paranoia-induced woo such as EHS (electrical hypersensitivity) which evince a plethora of diffuse and non-specific symptoms⁽ⁱ⁾ attributed to technology of which the sufferers (and their doctors) are afraid and/or ignorant (or just plain don’t like).

WTS is rather more irritating than EHS, though, because of its implementation in a political agenda. The story generally goes like this:

A land owner makes a deal with a power company to host (usually for a reasonably healthy figure) a bunch of wind turbines on a nice windy ridge on his/her property. Other people who are within visual distance of the turbines (and sometimes not even that) who are not making any money out of them, claim to have developed WTS. There is not one single case of WTS being developed by the franchisee of a wind farm operator.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

For reasons that are not at all clear to me, many country people seem to have taken against wind turbines with an amount of vitriol that is perplexing. Personally speaking, I think the lazy rotating blades are quite elegant and attractive, and the airy whooshing sound they make fairly inoffensive.

But WTS is not, of course, about common sense. It’s about political agendas, ignorance and NIMBYism.

You will recall that the first push by objectors to wind farms took the form of ‘Oh noes!! The horrible mincing blades are killing all the birds!’ This, from people who up till then had pretty much never even noticed the green speckled parrot or the golden-throated lark.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ Well, it turns out that on the list of things-that-birds-need-to-worry-about, wind farms are pretty damn far down, so, with these newly-adopted eco concerns of the anti-wind lobby not getting much traction, another bogeyman was needed to put the scare into folks. They found one with WTS. Deciding without evidence that something is, a priori, bad, and then finding multiple, disparate reasons to attempt to support your supposition, is, as you will all know by now, a glittering trademark of irrational thinking.

I was going to tell you next about exactly what it is that’s supposed to be the cause of WTS, but after reading pages of print about it, I’m finding that difficult. Mostly, though, the Big Bad is infrasound: sound frequencies that are so low they are literally inaudible to humans. Other sources claim that it’s ultrasound – high frequencies that are above the range of human hearing.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a New York paediatrician and self-styled expert on Wind Turbine Syndrome (she lays claim to coining the term) says:

…infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms

To be clear, she is saying that the problem is all the sound they make, from the highest part of the audio spectrum to the lowest. This kind of catch-all generalizing should immediately ring your woo-woo alarm bells.

In The Independent where the above quote originates, Dr Pierpont goes on to say that:

…the wind turbine companies constantly argue that the health problems are “imaginary, psychosomatic or malingering”. But she said their claims are “rubbish” and that medical evidence supports that the reported symptoms are real.

‘Rubbish’? That would be an effective scientific rebuttal if ever there was one. Professor Gary Wittert, the head of Medicine at the University of Adelaide, would be one person who would take exception to to Dr Pierpont’s claims that medical evidence supports WTS. Using data from the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Professor Wittert has demonstrated that a sampled population of around 10,000 people living in the vicinity of wind farms in Victoria and South Australia shows no variation in quantities of usage of sleeping pills or cardiovascular medications from that which can be seen in the overall general population. Either people who live near wind farms aren’t seeking treatment for their WTS, or it doesn’t exist. This kind of data is, of course, exactly what would expect to see if WTS was a psychosomatic condition experienced by a small number of impressionable people rather than a discrete medical phenomenon in the community at large. Prof Wittert’s figures have still to be published and peer-reviewed, but we know that even when they are found to be solid (as they will be) the anti-wind farm campaigners will simply start crying that he’s a wind farm shill.

Setting aside the statistical science for a moment, and wandering briefly into my own field of expertise, let’s consider that claim that infrasound is the cause of the WTS. First, there is no medical evidence at all to suggest that infrasound has any impact on human health. When you know that low frequency sound can be detected in your bones, it’s the sort of thing that seems like it might be possible, but that’s about it – no-one has collected data on such speculations.^(iv) So to prove that wind farms are producing infrasound that affects human health detrimentally, you need to do three separate things: show that wind turbines produce infrasound in the first place, demonstrate that infrasound has adverse effects on humans and then establish that the amount of infrasound coming from the turbines is sufficient to trigger those adverse effects. So far, the data accumulated for each of these scenarios is not at all promising for advocates of WTS.

Without even doing that, though, there is a much more persuasive argument against infrasound being harmful to humans. Let’s take a situation that arises in nature where large volumes of infrasound (and ultrasound and everything in between for that matter) are generated in a constant and repetitive manner, just as wind turbines are supposed to do…

Yes, that’s right – the sea. Crashing ocean waves create at least as much infrasound as a wind turbine, probably more by several orders of magnitude. And yet, living by the ocean has not been demonstrated by any science I’ve ever seen to cause people to exhibit any of the symptoms of WTS. On the contrary, the sound of the surf is considered, by anyone who is lucky enough to have a beach house, to be restful and relaxing.^(v)

Another insidious aspect of the anti-wind farm lobby when it comes to WTS is their habit of attempting to align the wind power industry with the tobacco and asbestos industries. This is, of course, the cynical employment of the logical fallacy of Weak Analogy (mixed with a bit of conspiracy-theory style paranoia). In other words, they’re saying that because the tobacco industry and the asbestos industry claimed their products were causing no human health problems and were found to be engaged in coverups, then it follows that the wind power industry is doing the same. There is no logical equation that you can make between those two things – it’s nothing more than a semantic trick designed to befuddle sloppy thinkers. What will speak here, is the science, as it did in the cases of tobacco and asbestos. So, what’s the state of the science on the side of the WTS advocates? Not very persuasive at all.^(vi)

Nina Pierpont, who is a vocal objector to wind farms, bases all her science on one small self-generated study (10 families who were already ‘diagnosed’ as having WTS), that was sloppy in protocol, was based on subjective self-reporting and was not controlled. It’s the kind of experiment that would get you a C- if you handed it in to your science teacher. In the UK, the NHS found that Dr Pierpont’s study:

…provides no conclusive evidence that wind turbines have an effect on health or are causing the set of symptoms described here as “wind turbine syndrome”. The study design was weak, the study was small and there was no comparison group.

In Australia, Sarah Laurie, an unregistered doctor and ‘Medical Director’ of the climate denialist affiliated Waubra Foundation is the chief ‘expert’ campaigner for people who supposedly have WTS. Laurie claims to have conducted research into the causes of WTS, but what she offers up is embarrassingly spare and scientifically awful. This article at Crikey examines Sarah Laurie’s claims and highlights an hysterical ‘Explicit Cautionary Notice’ from the Waubra Foundation that effectively challenges wind farm companies with a series of claims that are highly dubious. It is without doubt designed as a propaganda tool rather than as a document of sincere concern. The notice refers to Nina Pierpont’s study, incorrectly endorsing it as ‘peer reviewed’ which it was not.^(vii) It also raises the spectre of ‘Vibroacoustic Disease’, a malady which is not recognized by scientific medicine as any kind of genuine affliction.

Now, I want to make it clear that I do believe it is quite likely that most sufferers of so-called WTS are experiencing the symptoms they claim. Based on a rational appraisal of the science we have, though, it’s just not reasonable to conclude that those symptoms have got anything at all to do with any mechanical effects of wind turbine operation. An extremely balanced examination, by commentator Dave Clarke, sets out the state of play in the WTS debate with amazing clarity. Clarke examines every facet of the WTS phenomenon in thoughtful detail. It is effectively distilled down into one simple sentence:

It seems that complaints regarding nearby wind farms, regarding illness or simply annoyance, are often related to negative feelings about the wind farms.

In other words, for reasons that are hard to determine (but are most likely to do with politics or NIMBYism), people who don’t want the wind farms near them get stressed enough about it to make themselves ill. That is all.

At the very least, this explanation must be unequivocally ruled out before the promoters of Wind Turbine Syndrome can even begin to make claims that wind turbine technology is, by some unknown mechanism, causing the illness, and that ‘Big Wind’ is conspiratorially endeavouring to make it look like it’s not.

[Many thanks to Dr Rachael Dunlop for some of the source materials for this post]

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Footnotes:

1. “Symptoms of electromagnetic radiation sickness are for example sleep disturbances, dizziness, heart palpitations, headache, blurry sight, swelling, nausea, a burning skin, vibrations, electrical currents in the body, pressure on the breast, cramps, high blood pressure and general unwell-being.” [↩]
2. As far as my research has been able to determine, anyway. If anyone has heard of one I’d love to get a link. [↩]
3. Fictional birds because there are so many that are supposedly affected by wind turbines that you may as well say ‘any bird’ [↩]
4. It’s perfect territory for woo – a vaguely plausible mechanism that is ‘sciency-sounding’ enough to give it a sort of ersatz currency. [↩]
5. But God made the sea, right, so that’s OK. [↩]
6. And, like all pushers of pseudoscience, when the science is not on their side they freely wheel out the anecdotal evidence, the testimonials and the conspiracy theories. [↩]
7. Well, not in the properly understood scientific sense of the term, anyway. Pierpont showed her results to some friends, and then published the positive things any of them said. This is the same kind of peer review that made me Scientist of the Year in 2011. [↩]

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Still (briefly) on the topic of the disintegration of the world’s political and financial structures, I note that the media is carrying a story this morning about the Vatican’s concern about global financial markets. One such report here, from the Guardian.

Synopsizing: the Holy See released a document yesterday that called for a ‘world authority’ that could monitor and intervene in global financial affairs to help restore ‘the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics’.⁽ⁱ⁾ The Pope, apparently, is showing his solidarity with the #occupy movement.

Right. So would this be the same Vatican that is the richest religious institution on the planet that pays zero taxes, and has investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction and real estate?⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ Would it be the same Vatican that continually uses its influence in politics?

Or could it be some other principled Vatican that I’ve not heard about?

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Footnotes:

1. Yeah. The ‘spiritual’ in financial markets. I can really see how that fits like a foot in a glove. [↩]
2. This relates to a 1965 estimate, and is based on accumulated wealth, not operating profits. You may see people claiming throughout the interwebs that the Vatican barely scrapes by, pointing to various balance sheets, like this one that shows a (relatively) modest profit. Don’t be fooled. That’s like someone showing you what they earned at work – someone who never pays taxes, that is – while neglecting to disclose that they have their substantial life savings hidden under the mattress… [↩]

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OK, I gotta confess. I have a real problem with the #occupywherever thing. Hang on – put down the stones. It’s not that I don’t agree that it’s undesirable – evil, even – that 1% of the world has most of the wealth in its pockets, or that corporate greed is a huge problem and needs to have a chainsaw taken taken to it. Indeed, you won’t find many people who are as critical of Big Business practices (and even Little Business practices for that matter) as I am. Gee, I’m even up for a protest march every once in a while, if the situation benefits from it.

The thing is, as I see it the #occupy process is just not really a productive way to address what’s wrong in this particular case. More than that – I think it may even be a bad way to do it.⁽ⁱ⁾

Think about it for a moment. What does the #occupy movement hope to get done? For the most part it doesn’t appear to have any goals as such, other than a fairly general ‘It’s broken and we demand someone fixes it!’ manifesto. Evidently the reasoning is that if you get enough people to get together and shout that loud enough, then something will happen. Well, duh, it IS broken, and it SHOULD be fixed, but stamping your foot on the ground, chanting slogans and incurring the wrath of the conservative authorities is unlikely to achieve much. Sure you get footage of the police being brutish and stupid, but for what? A sum total of howling righteous indignation for being treated badly? The only message to be taken away from that is that the police, when instructed to move obdurate people on, will likely hit them with a stick if they resist. Again (sadly), duh.

If you do a Search™ on “goals of the occupy movement” you’ll see exactly what I mean. You get a whole bunch of links essentially discussing what such goals might be, but nothing much that defines those goals in any concrete terms. There’s stuff like this blog, ranking high on the search, that opines: ‘…the Occupy movement does not need to release a list of demands. Their demands are the demands of the majority of the American people.’ Sheesh.

According to abovementioned blog’s writer (who appears to be fairly representative on a quick scout), among these demands would be:

…raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans , universal health care, corporations are NOT people, money should not equal free speech, and we need to get the big money interests out of our politics. [sic]

In short, we could easily simplify this to be a call for the rectification of imbalances that favour the rights of the few over the rights of the many. In effect, then, the #occupy movement is objecting to a general level of injustice that has existed in human civilizations from the beginning of recorded history.

A protest highlighting such disharmony could be an extremely useful thing in the right circumstances, but the #occupy phenomenon in the democratic Western world is quite unlike the uprisings of the Arab Spring (with which it aligns itself) because many of the governing bodies of the Middle Eastern countries where that particular movement arose don’t allow their populations to have a say in the handling of inequalities. In America (like Australia), though, there is already a way for ‘the majority’ of people to address these kinds of issues: vote anyone who is in favour of a particular inequality out of power. In fact, we’ve nearly ALWAYS had that option, yet the fact is that we don’t exercise it! It is a simple idea and it works like this: if Obama doesn’t agree that there’s an inequality, vote him out! If George W doesn’t agree, vote him out! But – and here’s the crux – DON’T THEN GO AND VOTE FOR SOME OTHER IDIOT WHO ACTS THE SAME WAY! If you do that, you’re not voting to fix the problems of inequality, you’re voting for something else.

What, then, is wrong here? If, as the #occupy bunch contend, the majority of Americans agree with them, why isn’t that majority using their democratic power to change things, as they surely could? This problem is not new. It didn’t suddenly happen last week.

As I understand it, the #occupy movement seems to invoke conspiracy to answer this question: the governments are in on it; they want to keep the people poor; it’s Big Business itself that runs things.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ As is usually the case when anyone resorts to conspiracy theories, I think the actual answer is much simpler. I think the answer in this case is that the ‘majority’ of people are stupid. Well, I guess that’s harsh. Let’s say the majority of people are not properly educated, and don’t know how to wield the power they have. They also don’t understand (or don’t want to know) that to get the things they say they want, they’ll have to lose some of the things that they take for granted as ‘entitlements’ and some of the things that make them comfortable. The ‘majority’ of Americans (and Australians) are pretty damned skittish around that prospect. To give you some examples: an inequality of universal healthcare is not fixed by voting for a politician who offers you a reduction in your taxes. An inequality of rich people paying less tax than anyone else is not fixed by not-being-bothered-to-get-off-your-fat-ass-and-vote-in-the-first-place. Inequalities arising from having to deal with the planet heating up are not fixed by racking up your air conditioner to 11, driving a 6 cylinder 4WD and voting for a government that buys that vote with cheaper fuel prices. You get the drift.

What we have here is a situation where 1% of the population may have all the money, but the #occupy movement just represents a different 1% of people who want to get up on soapboxes and shout about how unfair that is. Yes, it sure is unfair, but to observe that is nothing more than a schoolyard no-brainer. The real problem is the 98% of people in the middle and their enormous apathy combined with selfishness and a frightening lack of acumen. It is partially because of them that the wealthy 1% are there in the first place, because they could, if they really wanted to, change that.

I suggest that this is the goal that the #occupy movement should be seeking (in democratic countries, at least): to teach people how to use their democratic power in an effective manner, and to educate them to understand that the change that ‘the majority’ wants, will come at a cost to more than just the wealthy 1% (who SHOULD be taxed more, don’t get me wrong. That is certainly something that needs to be addressed, but they are not the biggest part of the problem – they’re mostly a symptom and an easy target). Unlike much of the Middle East, we have system in place that could effect the kinds of changes we want if we only had the will.

As I write this, police have been called in to disperse #occupymelbourne, the demonstration in my own city. There is a sense of outrage and disbelief, which I share, that this kind of heavy-handed tactic should be implemented here. But I find myself kind of agreeing with the Lord Mayor of Melbourne when he said of the eviction:

Well, we’ve given them a fair go. We’ve allowed them to make their point.

Because, realistically speaking, what were the protesters hoping to achieve, if not this kind of outcome? Were they intending to stay there until the problem of societal inequality was fixed? If not, then what? That they got some kind of guarantee, perhaps, (by… whom?…) that things would be made better? Or were they intending to hang around so long that people got bored with them being there and ceased to notice their presence? You see my point, I trust.

It seems to me that if you can’t clearly outline what you hope to gain by your presence in such a demonstration and there is no definite outcome to be had, you can hardly be snitty about being told to move along after a reasonable show of solidarity (I want to emphasise here, in case it isn’t plain, that I don’t think sending in the police was a particularly sensible thing to do, and I certainly do not hold for one minute with any heavy-handedness or violence from them.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ I think the whole thing could have been handled with a lot more diplomacy, but that it unraveled the way it did just adds further weight to my assessment of the protest as an ultimately unproductive mess. Take note governing bodies: using police force is possibly the worst thing you can do in this instance. It’s just pouring fuel on a fire.)

The #occupy movement is painting itself as a revolution, but a revolution to achieve what, in the end? A fair system of government? We already have one of those – it’s called democracy and it is, to date, the fairest kind of governing system we’ve ever been able to devise. If the complaint is that the democracy we have isn’t working so good, then, sure, maybe that’s right. And it’s completely true that we only have the government to blame. But in a democracy, the government is… us. All of us. In a democracy, if the system is broken, then we are all to blame.

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Footnotes:

1. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but it seems to me that every nutjob and his dog is attempting to use these protests to further their on agenda. If it’s something that pisses off The Man, there’s someone at #occupywoop-woop on a megaphone about it. This is really counterproductive, as any protest organizer knows. What you need with a protest is a clear, easily graspable focus. Protests are not about doing anything per se, but about getting lots of coverage in the mainstream media. If you get that coverage and no-one in television land can tell what the fuck you’re on about, your protest is a waste of time and energy. [↩]
2. I’m basing this observation on my readings of the Twitter streams of various #occupy campaigns, which I’ve been tapping into over the last week or so, and on blogs I’ve read. It may be a misrepresentation, and if so, I’ll gladly take on any thoughtful commentary. [↩]
3. And that goes for all the #occupy protests. [↩]

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It really doesn’t take long does it? A news story of any magnitude comes along and, within mere hours, some idiot journalist decides it would be a great idea to attempt to relate it to their particular paycheck. Take this migraine-inducing offering that appeared in the Hollywood Reporter yesterday:

Eerie Links Between ‘Harry Potter,’ Osama Bin Laden; Why Movie May Benefit

You know, when I read something like that, I just want to smack the perpetrator with a dead halibut. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Smack. Smack smack smack smack.

OK. Eerie links it is, then. We’ve dealt with them before, so we are not intimidated. Let’s see how Mr Gregg Kilday, our hamfisted excuse for a newshound, manages the contortionist feat of tying Harry Potter to the execution of Osama bin Laden.

While the first volume in J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series was originally published in England in 1997, the first movie, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was released in November 2001, just months after 9/11.

Er… so what are you saying here, Sherlock? That J.K. Rowling was clairvoyant and foresaw 9/11 in a book written more than four years before the film came out? Because I’ll tell you something about the movie industry: the last four months of a movie the size of Harry Potter, and you don’t have your picture in pretty good shape, you’re in fucking trouble. And I’m going out on a limb here and saying that Warner Brothers probably had their release date figured out a teensy bit before then, you clown. You write for the Hollywood Reporter – you must know that huge films like this have established release dates years in advance. What can the confluence of the 9/11 attacks and the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ possibly have to do with one another? It is nothing more than a coincidence.⁽ⁱ⁾ Actually, it’s not even a coincidence. A coincidence implies some kind of connection and there isn’t one.

Voldemort is introduced as something of a formless boogie-man — not unlike the mysterious Osama — but then, over the course of the series, takes on more and more of a physical presence until in the last volume he and Harry go head-to-head in a final, cataclysmic battle.

Oh God. Give me the halibut again. Right, so just like Voldemort takes on a greater physical appearance as time goes by, Osama.. let’s see now… disappears from the view of the world and turns into an insubstantial wisp of rumour and guesswork. Yeah, that’s a really well thought out analogy. And that final cataclysmic battle with Harry is… what… bin Laden being shot in the head by Obama? Or by a Navy SEAL? Oh wait – maybe the SEAL is Harry? Was there a Hermione SEAL and a Ron Weasley SEAL? Did they have owls? Are you a FUCKING MORON?

Of course, what Gregg Kilday is really saying is that there’s some kind of supernatural element to all this – that the first film was released just after 9/11 and then that the last film is released just after bin Laden is killed and that means something. Never mind that the books don’t follow any kind of temporal logic in that respect, nor that it makes absolutely no sense in as many ways as you’d like to find; Obama represents Harry? Why doesn’t George Bush represent Harry? He was in charge when the planes flew into the WTC. Oh, maybe there are two Harrys? It’s dual personality thing! Smack smack smack smack.

For a generation of kids who grew up reading Rowling’s books and watching Hollywood’s big-screen adaptations in the shadows of 9/11, there have been inevitable echoes of the real world in Harry’s sometimes reluctant quest to defeat Voldemort.

You don’t have kids, do you Mr Kilday? This is what happens when kids go to watch Harry Potter: they see wizards and whomping willows and wands and werewolves. They see butterbeer and Every Flavour Beans and pumpkin juice. They see people flying and turning invisible and riding on broomsticks. They do not think about, care about, or even spare the most fleeting thought for, Osama bin Laden, George Bush, Pakistan, Barack Obama, international politics, Navy SEALs, the CIA, Wikileaks, conspiracy theories, or the Hollywood Reporter. This is what is referred to by people in the business as the magic of the cinema. It is only failed academics looking for attention, and sad geeks with nothing better to do, who draw stupid connections between escapist fantasy and the real world. Kids are not that dumb.

And as for Harry’s ‘sometimes reluctant quest to defeat Voldemort’, well there you go with the vacant analogies again. As far as I can tell there has never been any ‘reluctance’ on the part of the US in attempting to defeat Osama bin Laden. It seems to me (and most of the rest of the world) that the US has been pursuing him with relentless and almost psychopathological determination.

Back in 2004, a poster on mugglenet.com made some of it explicit, comparing the Death Eaters to Al Queda and noting of that “just as Voldemort was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, Osama was shaped by his personal struggle between Western pleasures and Islamic discipline.”

That ‘someone’ was you, wasn’t it Mr Kilday? C’mon, you can tell us. We won’t laugh at you for hanging around in Harry Potter chatrooms. Just in case you can’t see the utter crapness of the comparison from that muggle contributor (who – if it wasn’t you – is undoubtedly a failed academic looking for attention or a sad geek with nothing better to do), let me reword it for you:

“just as Voldemort was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, Adolf Hitler was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment.”⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

See, THAT is an analogy. It’s where you effortlessly draw comparisons between two things that have some meaningful commonness. It’s not where you take one thing, and then hammer another thing to within an inch of its life in an attempt to make it seem like it relates to the first thing in some vague manner. But I guess there’s no real point in drawing an analogy between Hitler and Voldemort because no-one is currently releasing a film about Hitler, and anyway, he died nearly 80 years ago on April 30, 1945 (just hold that date in your mind for a bit).⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

And just as Harry is known in the books as “the anointed one,” a number of President Obama’s critics like Rush Limbaugh have frequently dismissed the president by disparagingly referring to him as “the anointed one” as well^(iv)

Oh, right. Wow! That is eerie! And crikey, there was an ‘anointed one’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right? And Jesus – wasn’t He called ‘the anointed one’ too! So, what you’re saying is that Obama, right, is like Jesus and Harry Potter and the kid from Buffy. But hey – wasn’t the anointed one in Buffy evil? So Obama is, like, conflicted like Harry, the saviour of humankind like Jesus and an evil little bloodsucking monster who can only be killed by sunlight, all rolled up in one!

Sorry – I didn’t quite catch that. Did you just say I was pulling arbitrary connections out of my ass? C’mon! Who’d do that?

Meanwhile, in the wake of Bin Laden’s death in a mansion near Islamabad, a meme has already popped up on the web, noting the weird coincidence that Osama and Voldemort both died on the same day, May 1. But true Potter fans have been quick to point out that’s not quite true: When Harry and Voldemort actually finally come face-to-face in the Battle of Hogwarts, in the books’ chronology the date is really May 2, 1998

Wowzer! Now THAT’s eeeeeerrrriiiieeeeeeeeee! So, Osama was killed ON THE SAME DAY as Voldemort! Well, OK, not the same day – a day apart and thirteen years later. Yessirree, can’t get much closer than that! You know what would be REALLY creepy though? If Adolf Hitler was killed on May 1 or a day on either side!^(v)

But Bin Laden’s death is now likely to give the movie an extra emotional resonance for the Potter generation, and that could translate into an even bigger box office bonanza.

Oh yes, I can imagine that the execs at Warner’s were just wetting themselves when they heard bin Laden was dead. The thought of the cleverness of their allegory playing out must have been uppermost in their minds. In fact, I’m going to propose something really radical: Warner Brothers themselves arranged the killing of Osama bin Laden! Think about it – it’s the end of their lucrative Harry Potter franchise, they needed to do something to wring out those extra dollars! What could be more obvious?! I bet they even sent in their very best team for the job…

What a truly terrifying last moment it must have been for Osama, with Daffy holding him down, Bugs taking aim with his SIG 9mm and Porky gloating…

‘Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all folks..’

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Footnotes:

1. Unless Mr Kilday is suggesting that J.K. Rowling and al Qaeda are in kahoots. Well, I guess that’s at least as plausible as anything else he’s written in this article. [↩]
2. Hitler’s father actually died too, when the boy was young, but that’s abandonment, near enough, right? He was also violent and authoritarian. [↩]
3. And, just in case anyone is tempted, no, I’m not intending to draw comparisons between World War 2 and Harry Potter. I was just making a random example for a point of illustration. You could probably do the same with any despot you cared to name. [↩]
4. It was actually conservative radio commentator Sean Hannity who first used this term in reference to Obama, anyway. [↩]
5. And, I might point out, J.K. Rowling would have actually known that. [↩]

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Well, now that The Wedding⁽ⁱ⁾ has cleared the airwaves for some real reportage, we find out yesterday the extraordinary news that President Obama is, in fact, dead. Whoopsy, did I say President Obama? What I meant to say was Osama Bin Laden! But shucks, it’s a mistake anyone could make, right? Especially if that anyone is Republican-biased, Murdoch-owned Fox News.

Well, maybe you could forgive a tongue-tied reporter in the heat of the moment… it’s not like he was typing it or anything…

Dammit, that ‘b’ is so close to the ‘s’ on the keyboard isn’t it? I’m always accidentally typing abbholeb when what I actually meant to type was assholes.

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Footnotes:

1. Yes, apparently there was a wedding of some kind. [↩]

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