Holiday Reading

Belated Christmas Wishes!

The following one of the items of our Summer reading list....

Hot Stuff, Cold Logic by Richard Tol

Just as there is no logical or scientific basis for thinking that climate change is new, there is no self-evident reason to assume that the climate of the past is “better” than the climate of the future. With just as little logic, we might assume that women’s rights, health care, or education were necessarily better in the past. Any such judgment also contradicts Hume’s Law and, perhaps worse, is grounded in a fallacious appeal to nature understood in a very slanted way.  

closing...

In sum, while climate change is a problem that must be tackled, we should not lose our sense of proportion or advocate solutions that would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid.¹ Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II.² That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it.

Fight for It?

Ex 7:30 host Quentin Dempster has a piece the Weekend Australian. The closing line reads...

Now is the time for all Australians who value a non-commercial, taxpayer-funded, mainstream, free, independent public broadcasting system to stand up and fight for it.

People would value it more if those that wanted it, paid for it! Rather than indiscriminately leeching off everyone ABC should be funded on a subscription basis. ABC is another form of middle class welfare. When will we get the same subsidy for our pay TV subscription?

Update...Some comments in today's letters page of the Oz..

ABC’s greatest threat

QUENTIN Dempster’s assertion the government has an ideological objection to public broadcasting is like saying cutting the fat off bacon demonstrates an ideological objection to bacon (“It’s time to fight for a free ABC”, 20/12).

Simplistic and transparent left-wing poseurism is the ABC’s greatest threat and the primary cause of its declining market share. Managing director Mark Scott’s media-mogul charade of buying up media real estate with other people’s money is doomed to failure if all he’s selling is a dishevelled slum.

Richard Duhig, Wavell Heights, Qld

QUENTIN Dempster asks readers of The Australian to stand up and fight for the ABC. Why on earth would I answer that call when, despite accepting my taxes with relish, the ABC treats my unremarkable conservative views with contempt in what has become little more than a left-green echo chamber?

H. Ronald, Jerrabomberra, NSW

FOI

Aging Journo Mike Steketee has a post on ABC's The Drum regarding FOI. Any mention of FOI on the ABC always causes much amusement here as the organization is largely exempt from it.
When these restrictions are finally lifted and ABC is exposed to the same FOI provisions as the rest of government perhaps it will be entitled to say a thing or two on the subject until then it's just more hypocrisy.