Aussie researchers have discovered that different honey bee species – using an elaborate bum wiggle to communicate – can learn each other’s dialects. They bred and combined Asian and European bees into a single colony.
“Using video camera footage, scientists discovered that not only were the two getting along, but after a time, both were eventually able to decode each other’s bottom signals.”
(Great restraint was used when I wrote the header.)
Was sold out. Line-up arguing the media cannot be trusted was Jonathan Holmes (Media Watch), Prof Catharine Lumby (academic, teaches the NRL how to behave towards women), and Stephen Mayne (crikey and shareholder activist).
The media can be trusted: John B Fairfax (FFX Media board), Mark Scott (ABC MD) and Julian Burnside QC (human rights barrister).
Team B won with a huge swing from 18 per cent of the pre-polled audience to about 45 per cent after the debate.
Burnside: “Being attacked by Andrew Bolt and Gerard Henderson is like being mauled by dead sheep – it doesn’t hurt, but you need a shower afterwards.”
Holmes: “You can find a website that’ll tell you the truth you want.”
Fairfax: “I made a mistake once. [anecdote about mixing up blokes names and getting sued. Was suspended for two weeks from newsroom.] Later on: “Oh, I made a second mistake. I was doing the shipping column and I sent a ship out a day before it was supposed to go.”
Lumby: (sending herself up] “I’m a promiscuous post-modernist so I agree with them [the other team] now.”
Mayne: described how he is enduring several 10-yr bans from various media outlets because of “petty vendettas”. Burnside thought Mayne’s worst crime though was trying to bombard us with too many facts and statistics without painting a bigger picture.
[I went to the last iQ debate on public vs private education. Brilliant. Much more audience debate, it was fiery.]
Am reading Brigid Delaney’s new book, This Restless Life. Chapter on Work is excellent. Details the downfalls of contracts/temping, which is what employers want. Crap if you want decent pay, superannuation, holiday pay and sick leave and ability to build a life.
She points out only the super-highly-paid truly benefit from temp contracts. The rest of us suffer.
“Most portfolio workers toil in the backwash of the restless economy. They talk about their work stretching to six or seven days a week … they are isolated, their hours are unpredictable or antisocial, and they live with the unnerving prospect that a source of income could be cut off without warning. They are a species unprotected from the whims and changes of fortune of the labour market.”
“He is going to slip down a rung to where I am, white-knuckled, still pyjama-clad in the afternoon, checking my bank account online with a measure of dread and fear.”
[I worked with Brigid at the SMH – occasionally subbing on MyCareer.]
Last paragraph in Ben Cubby’s story in SMH:
‘As well as its interest in unmanned spy planes, General Atomics has employed human spies. Last year it was caught hiring a former undercover police officer-turned-private investigator to infiltrate Australian environment groups and report on their actions. The former officer was posing as a Kurdish refugee and feeding information back to General Atomics.’
No wonder activists get paranoid about spies – who’d suspect a ‘Kurdish refugee’?
Great doco on Robert McNamara, US Statesman, on lessons he’d learnt. Eg. Immoral if you lose, moral if you win: if you kill 100,000 civillians – as he did in Tokyo one night via ordering fire bombing – you’re a war criminal, but if you win, you don’t get prosecuted.
“In order to do good, you might have to engage in evil.” i.e. kill foreigners to prevent deaths at home.
“Belief and seeing are often wrong.” The US thought the North Vietnamese had escalated fighting in 1964, but they hadn’t (sonar guys misread the sonar.) Oops!
SPIN: He delayed announcing more troops going into Vietnam until the late afternoon to “avoid the morning editions” of the papers.
And he said the best way to deal wth press interviews was to ignore the asked questions and just say what you want. That got him the best results.
So posthumous TULIP of the Week Award goes to: Robert McNamara (died July 2009).
Liberal Rule was like flicking through a picture book – didn’t learn anything new. Peter Costello’s comment on the NT intervention: “This is the democratic experiment – for better or worse.” I like it when politicians admit they don’t really know what they’re doing.
Cotton Ward 