From The Morgue

So Wellington re-elected Kerry Prendergast. She is a virulently hated mayor; so much so, in fact, that I had a period where I was very worried that there was some nasty misogyny at the basis of it. After confiding these doubts to others I’ve been reconvinced that, no, it’s not that we hate women or hold them to higher standards, it really is because of what she has done.
She is also, however, a mightily well-supported mayor. In the elections just completed, she doubled her nearest rival’s vote count.
This suggests two things. First, that being so hated and so well-supported at the same time means she has been a very divisive figure in Wellington. And second, that the mayoral election suffered from the lack of a clear opposition figure around which the Kerry-haters could comfortably rally. She was head and shoulders and torso above everyone else in terms of profile, except for the disturbing spectre of wacky typo-guy John McGrath. The Single Transferable Vote system should have made it impossible for splitting the vote to be a factor, so it can only be lack of a candidate who actually appeals to the anti-Kerry crowd; either that or the anti-Kerry crowd really is massively outnumbered. I shudder at the thought of that.
I note with disapproval that Ms Prendergast wants to get rid of STV.
In any case, I blundered and didn’t end up voting. Remembering too late that my electoral roll address was still lodged as Scotland; I didn’t get that sorted out fast enough. Stink.
New Zealand’s mayors do make me shake my head. John Banks? Michael Laws? We’re doing it to ourselves.
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I am intrigued by the prospect of an England-Argentina final in the Rugby World Cup. Malc and I have been discussing with appalled fascination how the Brit red-top press will be eager to revive the spirit of the Falklands… Argentina need to make it through South Africa to get there, though, and that won’t be an easy task.
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And I am marking. I have lots and lots of marking. Don’t talk to me, I’m marking. Marking now. Marking.

[UPDATED – see the end of the entry]
As the course I’ve just finished tutoring spent some time using Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as a resource, I was interested when I was linked to this from the NZ Centre for Political Research:

“Politics in Schools on Trial: Schools around New Zealand that are using Al Gore’s controversial film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to promote the Government’s climate change agenda should be warned that a High Court ruling in Britain has just found that the film is unfit for schools.”

Well, no, actually. The “NZ Centre for Political Research” is (cod-libertarian) ACT MP Muriel Newman and her friends. (See previous post on spam-mistress Muriel.) She has close ties to the extremely dubious neoliberal policy thinktank the Maxim Institute, who are quoted in the article, and who I’d wager forwarded it on to her in the first place. The message stands apart from its bearers, of course, but the provenance of this piece is *extremely* dubious. So lets do some digging.
A quick google on the name of the protagonist here, Stewart Dimmock, shows that the first half of Muriel’s NZCPR piece on this was a straight cut-and-paste that has been circling around the right-wing blogs.
A crucial piece of spin right away: Stewart Dimmock is described as “a lorry driver and school governor from Kent”, but there is no mention that he’s also a member of UK neo-liberal political party The New Party (http://newparty.co.uk/index.html). Characterised as a man of the people standing up for common sense, he is in fact deeply partisan himself. Notice that the substance of his attack is that the film is “political spin” – typical new-Right strategy, framing a scientific argument as a political (and therefore opinion-driven) one.
The New Party’s press release is the source of Muriel’s article. I note that it turned up on the Reuters wire and ran in NZ newspapers without reflection or further investigation.
So we have a classic new-Right attack on climate change, by the same people that attack the IPCC report and think it’s all just scaremongering. (I note with bitter amusement that the New Party’s policy page on “Fair trade” is about getting rid of farmer subsidies in France so the UK could compete fairly. No kidding.)
But, of course, that’s just attacking the messenger. What about the content of the story? Well, check out the rather differently-weighted version of events on the BBC. Key section:

Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan had earlier said: “It is important to be clear that the central arguments put forward in An Inconvenient Truth, that climate change is mainly caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases and will have serious adverse consequences, are supported by the vast weight of scientific opinion. “Nothing in the judge’s comments today detract from that.”

Okay, that’s all secondary stuff – reportage and opinion. Let’s go to the source. Here’s the actual judgement.
There’s lots I could say about this. Of special note for me is how Justice Burton accepts that “partisan” can mean “having an agenda” and “political” can mean “serves as evidence that would affect public decision-making”. For whatever reason, the education dept. doesn’t challenge this, so we end up with a definition of “partisan political” that seems to me absurdly broad. The terms become nearly meaningless, and quite divorced from the usage in Muriel Newman’s article.
(Basically, Burton confounds the premise with the response. A film about the risk of an earthquake in Wellington and implying that we should take steps to prepare would be “political” and “partisan” by this measure.)
Justice Burton does better later on when he’s talking about the duty of ‘balanced presentation’, which he takes to mean “fair and dispassionate” – not as a requirement to counterpoint Gore’s flick with climate change denial films.
Note paragraph 17, in which Justice Burton, and both the claimant and defendant, accept the IPCC report as a good representation of the scientific consensus, and that the four main hypotheses of the film represent this consensus. In other words, the fundamental message of the film is explicitly supported in the judgement.
Justice Burton’s nine “errors” (he even puts the word in speech marks in his judgement) are thus not material to the core of the film – although, as they all push in Gore’s “partisan political” direction, Burton finds that they should be noted as not mainstream.
It’s worth reading the judgement for these errors, because they’ve almost all been misquoted by Muriel Newman and the right-wing bloggers. The one that threatens the validity of the film the most addresses a 650,000 year graph. Newman’s article says:

“The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.”

But when you actually look, the judgement says:

“In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.”

So Newman’s source – the New Party – outright lied about what the Court found. Justice Burton doesn’t say a word about CO2 lagging behind temperature rises. Burton said, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”, which isn’t much of a condemnation. They certainly suggest what Mr Gore asserts! In any case, this point is something to dig into in future – Gore’s stuff could be shonky here.
Overall, the Court found that Inconvenient Truth needs a bit more guidance to point out the dodgy bits that we already knew were in there; but that its role as a teaching tool is clear and not in dispute.
The Muriel Newman article was almost entirely hype and spin. Go away, Muriel. Go away, Maxim. You’ve already lost this argument. Cope.
[NOTE: actual lawyers are invited to weigh in with criticism of my reading of Burton’s judgement.]
***UPDATE*** Check out this for more on the “errors”.

One of the great things about sport is that it’s a narrative engine. You have a bunch of people striving ot achieve some physical goal, and as they do so a story emerges, complete with its highs and lows, setbacks and achievements, personal challenges, tests of character and calm, and unexpected reversals.
The Ultimate crowd I play with enthusiastically blog about their games, and I like that. They recognise the narrative going on in it. I don’t always read their game write-ups, but I always enjoy it when I do.
I have a before-breakfast theory that the cultural space previously occupied by folk tales has now been replaced by sport.
Last night I was on the sweet end of a good story – and it put a good feeling on my evening that has stretched through to today. Basketball, and after a turgid performance we were down 8 points with less than 2 minutes to go. And somehow we came out firing, Erin knocked down two three-pointers in a row and our defence held them scoreless so in the dying seconds Mike slid into the lane and found a lay-up to tie it up. It was a huge comeback that sent us to golden-goal overtime, where again our defence stood firm and again Mike found his way through to score (and get fouled on the play to boot). What a way to win!*
The story works best with the knowledge of what came before, of the character of the game and the mood of the players and even the backstory, but that final turnaround felt good because no-one expected it, especially not us.
What is most interesting to me, though, is that the story you take from something is different for everyone. Everyone ascribes importance to different elements of the narrative. Everyone sees different cause and effect links playing out. Everyone thinks different things matter. Witness the All Blacks loss to France last weekend – NZ, and the rugby world, are arguing about why it happened and what the story actually was.
I prefer to ascribe the All Black’s loss to the simple fact that this is sport, and in sport there is always uncertainty, there will always be the chance of the unexpected. The All Blacks were on the bitter end of that uncertainty this time. We have to expect it, and in fact cherish it. The uncertainty that sunk “a nation’s hopes” is necessary for us to like sport at all.
(My previous best ever comeback was as a high-schooler, where our basketball team made up a seven point deficit in two minutes. That was fun too.)

This evening turned out less stress-free than I had hoped. But still.
A few weeks ago, word spread that Stephen Fry has a blog. I was immensely pleased to note that his first post, or “blog essay”, which appeared completely unheralded and unexplained, was a 6,500 word piece on smartphones.
I haven’t read that essay yet. Nor have I read his second, and much more general-audience friendly post, on the perils of fame, this time an even healthier 9,000 words. I have been busy.
Nevertheless I recommend them to you, because it’s Stephen Fry.
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Also: Peter Sellers, Dr Strangelove-era, takes us on a 90-second tour of UK accents.
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Zzzz….

This past month has been stupid.
Today I closed off the last of my current ultra-urgent-deadlines. I have been on a treadmill for ages. Feels good. Still more to do, but nothing ultra-urgent on the horizon.
So I’m going into the sun now. It shall be glorious.
Also: Ever wonder about Canadian Women’s hockey ?

The All Blacks’ ignominious defeat by the French has plunged New Zealand into mourning because our national psyche has been wounded, mental health experts say.
Tears of a nation spill over
Don’t take it out on anybody else
So much more than just a game
‘Smell of death’ in All Blacks dressing room

Malcolm today pointed me at the existence, on YouTube, of something I hadn’t known existed:
David Lynch retelling the entire story of Twin Peaks in three Japanese coffee commercials.
The first one:

Part Two
Part Three
See also here:

[This is a crossover! Like when Aliens met Predators, Godzilla met King Kong, and the beings from that Alien Nation movie turned up on the Planet of the Apes, so my LJ and my regular blog are crossing over today! The other part of the crossover is here.]
This is the flying scotsman I got on Sunday. It’s a Triang Hornby HO-scale model in very good nick. It’s one of the nicest pieces from my grandfather’s collection. It reminds me of him.

This clip has been doing the blog-rounds since someone posted it on YouTube:

It’s Denzel in ’98’s “The Siege“, arguing with Bruce Willis’s stubborn military commander that torturing a suspected terrorist undermines everything they’re fighting for. He loses the argument.
The Siege was an odd movie, even odder in hindsight. Denzel is from the FBI, and as he works to stop a series of terrorist attacks on New York martial law is declared, the military rolls in, everyone who looks like an Arab is rounded up and interrogated, and humanity swiftly goes out the window. Given what was coming, it seems prescient in the way it addressed the way things went out of control so fast. The clip resonates with images we’ve seen of Abu Ghraib and what we’ve heard about early Guantanamo and other outposts of CIA torture.
When I saw it back in Jan ’99 I wrote about it in my journal. I called it then disappointing, because it was obvious that there was an intensely political core to the film that had been watered down by the studio; in essence, Bruce Willis’ military commander was revealed as an aberration, a crazy man, and not representative. The whole movie somehow contrived to wave a figurative flag at the end. I remember being disappointed that the film hadn’t had the courage of its convictions and argued more forcefully that this kind of atrocity, power creating its own logic, was an inevitable outcome of the systems in place and not an exceptional moment of madness, easily corrected by Denzel’s true sight.
(The existence of Wikipedia now makes it trivial to find out more about the screenwriter. Lawrence Wright is, as I suspected then, far from a Hollywood hack – he’s a staff writer at the New Yorker, was the author of Pulitzer-winning Al-Qaeda history The Looming Tower, and earns cred from me for a positive role in the Paul Ingram false memory case.)

Wake showed her his study, the desk of half-finished ideas. The sun was bright in the window, low in the sky and getting close to the horizon. ‘It isn’t much.’
He waited in the doorway for her. She lingered in the room holding back conversation and he watched, she liked that he was watching her, she liked that he knew what was going on but not what to do about it.
Her fingers touched the wood of the desk, old and unvarnished, making contact. Wake’s voice from behind her: ‘Why did you turn me down?’
‘I had to.’ She wouldn’t face him. The wood was hard beneath her fingertips. ‘I couldn’t see another way.’
‘You weren’t interested?’
‘I couldn’t see it going well.’
‘How hard did you look?’
‘How hard did you?’
‘I never look ahead.’
Hills clipped the edge of the sun. Her fingers lifted. ‘Someone has to.’
She heard him walking away from the door, leaving her there. The little sadness was back. She smiled and closed her eyes to the sun.
[Found this random snippet of fiction in my files. A few months old I think. Don’t remember writing it but it’s clearly mine.]