THE PSYCHOLOGIST : An Australian news roundup

An Australian news roundup

New air 'force' to help net illegal fishermen: "Illegal fishermen are plundering Australian waters of everything from reef fish and sharks to dolphins and turtles. More than 120,000kg of fish have been seized from illegal boats in the past three years, including large hauls of red emperor and sea cucumbers. The illegal-catch figures emerged as the Australian Customs Service announced a $1 billion contract to provide more effective aerial surveillance of Australia's coastline... More than 35 sightings of illegal fishing boats are reported in Australian waters every day. Last year, there were 13,018 sightings of foreign fishing vessels, up 35 per cent on 2004.... Customs Minister Chris Ellison yesterday said the new air surveillance fleet would include six Dash 8-202 aircraft and Dash 8-315 longer endurance aircraft, all fitted with improved electro-optics, infrared sensors and radar. "The improved sensors carried by these aircraft will also enable crews to detect significantly smaller targets and allow detection of targets at a greater range," he said. The new contract, which takes effect from 2008, will run for 12 years. "This fleet forms a vital part of the Government's capacity to detect and deter such illegal activities as drug and people smuggling, illegal fishing and environmental offences around Australia, particularly across our northern coastline," Mr Ellison said. The influx in illegal fishing sightings has been accompanied by an increase in seizures of illegal fishing vessels, but the Government concedes its ability to deter the intruders is being hampered by legal restraints. Australia is signatory to a fisheries convention which prohibits illegal fishermen being jailed.

Drug monopolies under threat: "A cloud is hanging over the minds of Australia's drug company bosses - a long white one. Radical proposals to drive down the cost of Australia's $6 billion a year Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme by incorporating elements of the New Zealand system have got the industry up in arms. Drug makers claim the consequences of such a move could make things worse, not better, for patients - by making market conditions uneconomic and ensuring some more expensive medicines used by small patient groups never reach these shores.... The PBS pays subsidies for expensive medicines, meaning patients fork out less than $30 for drugs sometimes costing up to $5000 for a single supply.... In New Zealand, companies are asked to tender to supply a drug to the government-funded scheme; the company that offers the lowest price gets the deal, in exchange for exclusivity - which often means just one drug available for each condition or disease. A carbon-copy of the New Zealand Pharmac scheme is considered a political impossibility in Australia, as it would amputate too many of the 2600-plus medicines funded under the PBS, which is also highly popular and has been going for over 50 years. But some form of tendering is being seriously looked at; Laming describes it as "the common denominator" of reform proposals. Under one plan, whenever a brand name drug's patent expires - the point at which generic manufacturers are able to start offering copycat versions - a tendering process would begin to find the generic maker willing to provide it at the lowest price. While the more expensive brand name versions would still be available, the PBS would share the savings with patients, who would be encouraged to ask their doctor and pharmacist for the generic by a dramatically lower co-payment (which could be cut by as much as half, saving around $15 a pop for general patients)... GMIA's president, John Montgomery, says such as scheme would prove a red carpet to third-world generics manufacturers, who would have "nothing to lose by offering to supply a drug to the Government at an impossibly low price"...

Surfwear big business in Oz: "Doug Spong hobbles into his new $15 million global headquarters in his standard business attire - boardshorts, T-shirt and thongs - his thinning hair tied back in a ponytail.... Spong is a fun-loving guy but he's deadly serious about turning his fledgling business, Cult Industries, into one of the world's top five surfing companies, up there with the multimillion-dollar global corporations Quiksilver, Rip Curl and the ASX-listed, Gold Coast-based Billabong International. The size of this lucrative pool was evident this week when Billabong founder Gordon Merchant, who started the company with his wife cutting boardshorts on the kitchen table in 1973, sold 5 per cent of his stake in the company for a cool $200 million. Unlike the reaction when former managing director Matthew Perrin offloaded 8 million shares for $66 million in 2002 without informing the board and just three days after an upbeat investor roadshow, the Merchant sale did not depress the market. Analysts say there remains significant growth in the global surfwear market. "The great thing about Billabong is its wonderful brand name and very strong management team," ABN Amro Morgans chief Tim Crommelin said of the resilience of the stock this week.... While the Billabongs and Quiksilvers and Rip Curls have taken more than 30 years to get where they are, Spong is proud of the fact that he has built an international brand in just four years, and is already exporting to 24 countries. His competitors are not afraid of the competition, shrugging off the threat as they continue to reap millions of dollars from an ever increasing global market".

Wards closed as virus strikes children: "Hospitals are normally where sick people go to be treated, not to become sicker. But Brisbane's Mater Children's Hospital yesterday confirmed five children had caught a debilitating virus during their stay in the hospital which forced the closure of two wards. Transmitted from person to person by direct contact, eating or drinking infected foods and liquids or touching contaminated surfaces, the norovirus produces symptoms including diarrhoea, vomiting and/or stomach cramps. Most symptoms last for up to three days but can be contagious for at least 48 hours. Next to the common cold, norovirus is the planet's most widespread illness but there's no vaccine available and no preventative medicine. Mater Hospital director Jenny King yesterday said the virus was hard to contain as it usually took 48 hours to exhibit symptoms and by then the disease was able to be transmitted further."

************************

(For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

An Australian news roundup

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive