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By Dan Byrnes Poem 802 (draft 2 of 13-6-2010)
I travel a lot in my mind
and today I see
the Gulf of Mexico is broken.
It collided with the hubris
of the United States of America
and it may well be in traction
for another fifty years.
The fish will die,
the birds will seep oil and die,
the remorse of the USA,
the weeping and gnashing of, yes,
mostly-Christian teeth,
will be surfed on the Internet
for the same half-a-century or more.
The oil men sank too deep,
deeper than anyone can safely go,
hit the bottom of the Gulf,
and it broke, just like that.
Far worse than when the levee broke,
far worse than if the Mississippi floods,
far worse than when the music died.
About as bad as the hard rain
would have been falling
the day Cuba almost disappeared
in a haze of nuclear wipeout
... which at least would have been quite quick.
Not like this abysmal, slow and seeping, creeping
crack in the ocean floor that will spill oil
where oil shouldn't be,
where oilmen should not be.
Where oil ambition went far too far.
The Gulf of Mexico broke, and that's that.
The people moved from the coast
after their second, huge and real-world disappointment in a decade,
their lives and souls lost along with the ruined fish catches
in the surf of a modern madness
as super-techo as a brand-new Hollywood movie,
but far more deadly than it looks when it's actually real.
The Gulf of Mexico broke.
Already I begin to think of this whenever
I see someone start a car.
If this modern madness doesn't stop,
I suppose this will happen
to another great body of water
somewhere in the world,
once great, once proudly wet and rolling free,
and only wet, but now oiled-up
with nowhere left to go,
miserable as a fish dumped in a bathtub
full of anti-freeze
some madman left on a beach.
I'm sorry, but now I have to move on.
It's a wide world, there's still a lot left to see,
and this will only make us cry,
and not stop crying.
See, there's the top of the Andes.
And over there is yet another melting glacier ...
Do you, perhaps as I do ...
(Ends)
Pope firm on priest's celibacy vow. As reported on 12-13 June 2010 in Australia. So reads the weekend newspaper's headline. But is it only this webmaster who feels it would be far more convenient if the present Pope would cease speaking patent nonsense, at least when he speaks in public? The already-embattled Pope Benedict XVI, who has spent his entire adult life in the celibacy departments of a world-wide institution, "has reaffirmed the Vatican's commitment to priestly vows of celibacy". This item is not the place to re-canvas the problems the Pope's church has world-wide with the paedophile-activity of a variety of priests. In any case, this remark from the Pope cuts off speculation that he might revise views on celibacy in the light of the scandals his church is facing.
The Pope claims that celibacy "is made possible by the grace of God ... who asks us to transcend ourselves." If he believes this, fine, we all in fact share a world in which many people in many countries believe 10,000 impossible things before breakfast. Moving along, "The Pope made it clear he supported continuing the practice of celibacy. He compared it to heterosexual marriage, which he called 'the foundation of Christian culture'." Which is where he instantly falls down. Comparing robust heterosexuality with celibacy? Comparing?
Heterosexual marriage as a chosen way of life has got absolutely nothing to do with the foundations of Christian culture. Some animals are more or less monogamous. Some people are monogamous and some aren't, which is also not the argument about marriage. Marriages between men and women, whether they last many years or not, long pre-date the beginnings of Christanity. Catholicism has nothing at all to do with the history of human marriage in India, or China, which are both civilizations long pre-dating the origins of Europe, or Rome for that matter.
So what the Pope here seems to be doing is to attempt to hijack (to re-hijack?) the ownership of an ancient human custom. For what sort of purposes? To buttress views about the practice of celibacy?
It is not just that the Pope's logic is peculiar, or spurious, or that his view in his remarks, of the entire sociological context of priestly misbehaviour, has been judged dodgy by the rest of the world.
For his purposes, he is backdating human history to before 1AD, or whichever date is preferred, in order to claim some kind of jurisdiction over a perfectly ordinary and often satisfactory sort of arrangement to be made between adult men and women who prefer to be sexually satisfied from time to time rather than be celibate. If he won at this sort of argument, it would be very much a triumph of monkish literary theology over the history of human history! And who needs that sort of triumph to be able to get around the world?
So it appears to this webmaster that heterosexual marriage is not the foundation of Christian culture at all, nor of Roman Catholicism, which incidentally is not the only form of Christian culture. It appears then that this Pope is more energetic than most Popes in uttering patent nonsense whenever he has the whim. And he implicitly makes it apparent that to be a Roman Catholic means meekly accepting this sort of nonsense whenever it is uttered by a Pope. Which, quite frankly, is also plain disgusting. As if the paedophile-priest problem encouraged by the culture of celibacy doesn't already give his church enough disgusting problems.
Or is it that this Pope is merely entering senility? If so, could he not do it in public? It's embarrassing. When old men start talking nonsense, the most sensible thing to do is inform the nurse in charge of their nursing home ... "Patient is confabulating again."
Spin is no match for debate in a democracy
By RICHARD TORBAY, Speaker NSW Parliament, Independent Member (State) for New England
Sydney Morning Herald, June 10, 2010
(And it's about time someone spoke up! Let's hope this starts a useful revolution in Australian politics generally. This webmaster lives in Armidale and voted for Richard Torbay. It's marvellous to see him grappling with the issues! - Ed)
When a young and promising minister reckons he can do better representing people outside Parliament than within it, we should start worrying. Graham West's resignation as Minister for Juvenile Justice last week is symptomatic of the malaise in the political party system.
We no longer have a system where the parties are ideologically opposed. Their philosophies have merged. We no longer know what either side of politics stands for. Politicians have become neutered and isolated by their parties' control mechanisms.
When you preside, as I did, over a parliament where a Labor government tries to sell off the state's power assets and the Liberal-National opposition works with the unions to oppose it, you have to assume it is about expediency, not conviction. This is dangerous territory because it transfers the focus from policies to personalities, from the main game to pointscoring. Voters are tiring of it, rapidly.
In this environment, political parties go into overdrive to control individual MPs. A small cabal of influential colleagues and advisers surrounds the leader and runs the show, dictating how members should vote and the message of the moment they should deliver, regardless of the interests of constituents.
It might be called spin but in my view it is a straitjacket. It's homogenised politics and it doesn't work for anyone, the parties, the individual politicians or the people.
When the media and the voters rightly suspect they are being misinformed or fed only the most palatable facts, they pursue what's really going on. Recently, there has been plenty of blood on the carpet.
As Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, the best experiences I have had in Parliament have been when the members are allowed a conscience vote. The level of debate is heightened, it is sincere and more honest and politicians more sure-footed representing the views of their communities than just trotting out the dismal party dogma of the day.
I would advocate the major parties unleashing their MPs and permitting more conscience voting and debate representing community views. That's what democracy is supposedly about. The focus ought to be on issues and outcomes, not personalities.
A clear and open process is not as frightening as the parties' control mechanics and bureaucracies appear to believe. When I introduced the Salary Package Amendment Bill, despite its potential for unpopularity and dissension, I was open about it and expressed my conviction that it was necessary to attract and retain good political candidates. The sky did not fall in and it passed through the house with bipartisan support.
Lies and cover-ups get political parties into trouble - they should know it by now. The truth might not deliver instant popularity but it generates respect. That is clearly missing at the moment. Written in stone should be: The people are not stupid.
The system now is democratically unhealthy. MPs who express individual views are threatened with extinction at preselection. Party apparatchiks are parachuted into seats, not as representatives but because they will toe the line.
To regain some credibility, political parties should revert to preselecting individuals who have served their communities in some leadership capacity and have local credibility.
The [NSW] upper house has ceased to be one of review. It is packed, mostly, with time-servers and party faithful owed a favour or three. No one in the upper house is directly elected. Unless the political parties seize the opportunity to preselect high-level leaders from business, industry, the professions and community service who can contribute to a worthwhile review process, there is no good reason to retain the Legislative Council.
Independents and the Greens should take little comfort from the ground they gained in recent polling - it reflects disaffection with major parties rather than a mass conversion.
I do not proselytise for independents, although I am one. As Speaker, I have had the privilege to observe state politics somewhat dispassionately. I am far more interested in presiding over a robust, open and properly representative democratic parliament than the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of political party mandarins who think and behave as if they are above the people who elected them.
(Richard Torbay is the independent member for Northern Tablelands.)
From: An emailer in Sydney 21 May 2010, a member of a Sceptics group.
Dear Dan, According to Wednesday's Sydney Morning Herald, the Religious Conservatives and Evangelists have just got control of the school curricula in Texas and all the say on what goes into text books, especially history and biology. They plan to revise the curriculum this week.
Skeptics have fought against this for many years.
It's very important for all of the USA.
Texas is so big that its textbook choices affect the size of print runs
and the pubilshers' profit a great deal. Most other US states just fall into line.
It's so bad this time round that California may ban
books printed to the Texas standards. Maths and science are downplayed.
Creationism is taught in science classes.
Military uses of science are highlighted.
Prominent Confederates are given more space,
and rival points of view downplayed.
Worst of all is glossing over slavery as a problem.
Creationism has been called "intelligent design" for many
years now, but this is topped by the slave trade
now being referred to as the "Atlantic triangular trade".
Cheers, Signature
By Dan Byrnes, A Non-American (2 May 2010)
The fact is, the much-vaunted, "world's best democracy", The USA, is having trouble facing the future. Here's some of how and why. And it's not just the Sarah Palin problem. Or the GFC (Global Financial Collapse of 2008).
During his presidency, after 9/11, President G. W. Bush plaintively asked on TV, "Why do they hate us?". It seemed he didn't know and couldn't work it out. But more likely, a cynical part of his drive for US unilateralism on the world stage, he was obliquely asking the American people to disregard their growing unpopularity worldwide and to treat it with contempt. It was an unpopularity he proceeded to energise and re-energise.
By April 2010, New York's David Letterman Show has re-invented the question, by regularly using a variety of depictions of only-in-America-type stupidities to explain why non-Americans are hating Americans, or at least, voting them down as popular or desirable company.
When a nightly TV comedy show starts explaining why Americans are so unpopular worldwide, it seems that the USA has serious problems, because the Letterman show lets go an issue only with reluctance after milking every shred of humour from the topic. Then to make things worse, along comes The Tea Party. (There's a wikipedia page on The Tea Party, so I won't bother here to explain how and why the Tea Party originated. Go Google!)
Suffice to say, The Tea Party is another idiotic US populist blowhard group, deeply into identity politics, upset about the ills of the nation, willing to agitate and publicize, but not willing to vote, not able to educate US voters, unable to explain the present status of issues to themselves or anyone else. Gripe gripe gripe. With any luck, the squeakiest wheel might be given some extra oil?
On the surface, the basic Tea Party list of complaints reads like a set of responsible concerns with political economy. It ain't necessarily so. Under the surface, it's about identity politics. All Tea Partiers know is that, as whites, they feel very ill at ease and want to blame someone. They feel "inchoate rage" about the apparent state of their world. (As noted Australian columnist Phillip Adams would say in a column of mid-May.) They also remind seriously remind a Non-American of the political life and times of President Andrew Jackson, which was a long time ago by now!
Importantly, most surveyed Tea Party members feel the taxes they pay are fair. So this is no argument about lack of political representation after taxation, it is a protest about lack of quality in representation. How much the Tea Partiers are lobbying individual politicians around the USA is not clear to a Non-American, but if they threatened to create a new political party and to mount useful candidates, they might develop some credibility. The Tea Partiers won't be doing this, however, since it would take thought and commitment.
On TV I have seen one female speaker at a Tea Party rally feistily saying, "We want our economy back." Well, when I last looked, the American economy was still there, though it could be in much better shape. It seems that no one (not even "Wall Street", yet) has taken away her economy. All this sort of sloganizing Tea Partier is doing is making a fool of America on international TV on a daily basis!
It also seems that many US commentators have noticed that certain groupings - certain "demographics" as they can quaintly be called - of US citizens are avoiding Tea Party rallies in their millions - American Indians, Afro-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and presumably, Muslims. That is, the Tea Party membership is not inclusive. It is exclusive, or imagines that it is. It seems that the Tea Party membership is self-selecting from the white Protestant sector of the US population. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Tea Party membership is made up of WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) from the USA's lower orders (and older rather than younger, surveys tend to suggest). Upper-class WASPs, being already organised via the Democratic and Republican parties, have no need of anything like the Tea Party, unless of course they can exploit its mindless populism.
From a website dated 21 Feb 2009 we find the first Tea Partiers, claiming to be genuinely grassroots, were -- anti-stimulus package, anti-entitlements, wanted a taxpayer revolt, were angry about Wall Street bailouts (but nevertheless wanted Wall Street and banking practices cleaned up). They want home owners (mortgagees) to keep their homes, and are anti-foreclosure. They are anti-government (egged-on by memories of President Ronald Reagan), anti-government spending, want followers to move their money out of "too-big-to-fail banks" (a boycott). Much vehement blogging is going on.
On any variety of websites, with patriotic red-white-blue colours uncannily like the set of the satirical Stephen Colbert Report, Tea Partiers bill themselves as patriots, desiring to protect the US and its constitution. In fact, with friends like the Tea Partiers, the US Constitution takes unto itself perhaps the demographic which is currently least-qualified, of all vocal US citizens, and because of their biases, to help the US ease out of its current dilemmas. (California is bankrupt, Arizona is applying border-control measures impossible to implement, and four states and their economies facing the Caribbean are now being devastated by perhaps the world's worst oil spill, ever. Certainly, this is no time to be crying, as Sarah Palin has cried, "Drill, baby, drill.")
In fact, the Tea Partiers fear that the American Dream has become The American Nightmare, which it has. In fact, the Tea Partiers fear the erosion and the loss of The Great American White Protestant Ascendancy (which it is never called in the US, but that is what it has been, and now it is being rapidly eroded).
A Non-American does feel though that where the Tea Party has been getting so much media coverage, the situation has to be subject to manipulation by certain parties who are probably already fairly powerful in US politics. ("Only a pawn in their game", in terms of a well-known Bob Dylan lyric.) The Tea Party is known as a right-wing populist movement. One guesses that certain Republican party forces will be hard at work, but a Non-American might also suggest that certain Democrat Party echelons would also like to see a national playing-out of the Identity Politics Card - if only for "academic reasons".
Is the Tea Party growingly a white supremacist grouping? This Non-American won't say so. Reports on attendances at Tea Party rallies suggest that the more affluent Tea Partiers might even be moderately well world-travelled. No, the Tea Partiers are not overwhelmingly white supremacist in outlook. They are, however, deeply fearful about their current (middle-class?) place in the American scheme of things. For one thing, they, and/or people in their nearby suburbs, have recently been pillaged by Wall Street. Tea Partiers, rather, don't quite know where to turn or who to scapegoat.
Which is richly ironic. President Ronald Reagan along with UK PM Margaret Thatcher did much to give the world into the hands of economic rationalists. As a decade or two went by, the economic rationalists made middle class life far more insecure, in the US, UK, Australia, in the EU. The current US recession has only made the Tea Partiers belatedly aware of the havoc the economic rationalizers have wrought! The Tea Partiers are victims of notorious US trends that have been afoot for decades. They are, self-evidently, slow learners and unobservant with it, since they give no sign they're aware that certain sets of problems have been looming for a very long time.
Here's another problem with US politics that is not discussed, as such, in the US - let's call it, the results of political inbreeding.
For far too long, the US political scenario has been drawing its talent from too-small, too-narrow a gene pool. It's hardly surprising that when a black president suddenly appears, some folks in the US feel shocked. (In the 1960s, some folks in the US had been shocked to find a Catholic with an Irish background elected as president.)
But today, against all the odds, we find that Barack Obama is distantly related to Sarah Palin. (Truly, humanity is just one large family.) This relationship would have to be on Obama's maternal side, since Obama is son of a black Kenyan father, and no Kenyans were taken from Africa as slaves to North America. Further, as we find from genealogy researched by William Addams Reitwiesener (see www.wargs.com/), Sarah Palin (nee Heath) and her genealogy (20 generations back) goes past few if any names especially famous ... to Deacon Joseph Bingham of Vermont (1709-1787) and Ruth Post (1711-1796), then past the name Howland (Mayflower descendants). (Some names in Palin's ancestry can also be seen in the ancestry of one-time presidential candidate Senator John Forbes Kerry). We find in Palin's case a common ancestor name applying to Obama, Lathrop/Lothrop.
Obama's mother Ann Dunham is descended from Rev. John Lothrop (1584-1653) husband of Hannah Howse (1590-1633) daughter of John Howse and Alice Lloyd. So does any Lathrop/Lothrop produce both descendants, Obama and Palin?
Yes, the Lothrops here can be found also on a website on the Lothrop founders of Barnstable Massachusetts. (Hannah Howse's genealogy can also be seen as connected to the genealogy of President Ulysses S. Grant.) Plain and Obama have comon ancestors named Lathrop/Lothrop.
There is richly funny irony here. If Tea Partiers complain that a black man is president of the USA, they can only blame the now-old-and-tired US political tradition of electing the descendants of the earliest American colonial settlers! In Obama's case, the odds against this happening are very large, yet it has happened. Ergo, US politics draws its talent from a relatively narrow (and mostly, very exclusive, ethnically non-inclusive) gene pool. Which is to say, the old tradition is still working perfectly! Albeit now with unintended consequences!
Somewhere here is a genealogical-political tipping point in action in US demographics. From here, anything at all can happen. (A black and female US secretary of state? A male black president? Where could it all end?)
It very much seems that deep down in the social structure of the USA, something is changing, perhaps too dramatically. But one might also say, these findings may merely be a question of taste in genealogy. Quite easily, these genealogical findings could equally be viewed as meaningless, or as significant. Whatever, we'd find that the faintest notion of "breeding" was quite irrelevant.
Meanwhile, there is, apparently, a "corrosive civil war" going on in US Republican circles, conducted between pragmatists versus right-wing purists. That is, it's about ideology. This turns out to work as a "Stalinesque" purge of today's Republican moderates. It's clearer what the Tea Partiers are against than what they are for. They work against big government, higher taxes, ... the Arizona April 2010 legislation acting against illegal migrants (mostly Hispanics?) is recommended to be adopted elsewhere. A Non-American would have to say to Tea Partiers, a non-inclusive policy just doesn't work anymore in any developed economy. Those days are long gone.
It's said that Tea Partiers have been watching too much of the propaganda on Fox News. One website on rational irrationality (a blog at www.newyorker.com/online/blog/johncassidy/), critical of Tea Partiers, suggests that many Americans grow up with a set of values and sense of identity "that is historically inaccurate and potentially dangerous". The Tea Partiers wish to overlook indispensable aspects of American life, mass immigation, the separations of church and state, the essentialities of the roles of government. (This Non-American quite agrees.)
Blogger Cassidy notes that "the paranoid style" of political comment in the US was identified in 1964 by Richard Hofstadter. Using a few graphics, Cassidy also suggests that historically in the US (since the 1960s), citizens are more trusting of government(s) when economic trends are rising, more distrustful when trends are declining. Therefore, it would be easy to predict from the USA's current economic mess that a populist movement might soon rise, vehemently distrustful of government. Exactly as has happened.
This website notes that countering its critics, Tea Partiers deny they are racist, they want to take the high moral ground of punishing Wall Street. All in all, in Australia, the issues that excite Tea Partiers, sans ideology, would be called simply, hip pocket nerve issues, as seen from a mostly middle-class perspective. But it also seems that many Tea Partiers are greatly affronted by the sight of a black man in the office of US President.
However, it must be noted that at the intersections of middle and lower-class perception, vis-a-vis economic life and issues about immigration, Australia has also seen a destructive right-wing populist movement, run by a brainless, ill-read, ill-educated woman named Pauline Hanson, named The One Nation Party. Shades of Sarah Palin!
One Nation was also (racially) non-inclusive, and followers liked to show off by waving the Australian flag. The One Nation delusion was that somewhere still in multicultural Australia, there is an Australian who IS The Real Australian, that is, someone of a white background, with a desirable set of values who perfectly typifies the Australian sense of identity. No such Australian exists! For the simple reason that life in Australia has grown too complex and sophisticated for such simple-minded formulae to prevail; Australians have happily outgrown an old and simplistic sense of identity.
One Nation wished not to capture the high moral ground at all, they wanted the highest ground of The Australian Sense of Identity, which would, suprise surprise, be an Anglo-Celtic (Anglo-Saxon) person.
The Tea Partiers are especially fearful about money. They are the stupid ones in Bill Clinton's now famous one-liner, "it's the economy, stupid". Fearful about their own sense of identity, they worry about what they are due as "inheritors" of American traditions (which is of course, their own, unacknowledged sense of entitlement, anti-entitlement and pro-rugged individualism in outlook as they delude themselves they are).
This Non-American would like to suggest that the Tea Partiers will possess an erroneous history of the American Revolution. In terms of social class, the Tea Partiers are simply the descendants of the colonial American lower orders who decided to follow the independence-seeking American elite (Washington, Jefferson, the Signers of the Declaration of Independence generally). What the Tea Partiers fail to realise is that the American Revolution involved three separate-but-related wars. A civil war (to purge American colonies of Loyalists and pro-British power and influence). A military war against Britain as conducted by Washington and defining "the real patriot". And a class war, to keep the rebelling colonial elite at the top of American society and to keep the property-owning, all-white voting franchise "managable" and small scale, that is, under the control of the elite. Despite their rhetoric about clawing back the economy, due to their education, or rather, brain-washing, the Tea Partiers with their lack of inclusiveness are falling for this same class-war tactic, yet again, as it is orchestrated today by the Republican Party elite.
Ergo, there is no progress here. For when this Non-American looks at the Tea Partiers, he sees people with the views Americans had about the time Andrew Jackson died (in 1745, before the gold rushes provided an upheaval to American life. Before railways grew really long. Before Southern Europeans, or Mediterranean people, emigrated in noticeable numbers to America).
And so with their unfortunate experience with One Nation, which is now defunct, Australians have already been through the sort of nonsense proposed in 2010 by America's Tea Partiers. It's worth mentioning that famously, this so-called party-founder, Pauline Hanson when she did arrive in Parliment in Canberra, built her first speech around her infamously ignorant question, "Please explain ... ". She was at least being honest. She literally didn't know or care why Australia had developed as it had, and she said so. She was horrifically ignorant, and remained ignorant, quite defiantly and as a matter of personal and political pride. Today's Tea Partiers in America are equally ignorant, and equally prone to adopting futile diagnoses, futile sloganeering.
In fact, today's USA has more and worse problems than the Tea Partiers are yet aware of. All the Tea Partiers are doing, internationally, is contributing to the wider world's convictions that the USA has lost the plot, lost its credibility, lost its self-esteem, lost its world financial pre-eminence, lost its former role in world affairs.
There is nothing that huffing and puffing on the basis of ignorance can do to improve any of this. Unless the USA's Tea Partiers get wise and develop a new political party free of the tired, hackneyed, over-sloganized, banal and intellectually and morally bankrupt, political and cultural baggage retailed by the USA's Democratic and Republican parties, the Tea Party will remain as futile as it is hackneyed, sloganized, intellectually and morally bankrupt - and non-inclusive.
Ideologically, instead of providing a chorus of voices of reason, the US media with all this is foolishly playing both ends against the middle - hardline Democrats and Republicans versus moderates of all kinds. The problem with this is that when the middle melts, the ends have nothing to hold them together, and they drop off. Which is what the credibility of the USA has been doing for a long time now, melting, dropping off, dropping away. Rather what the Tea Party fears is happening. And it is.
Returning to the rhetoric of 1773, the Boston Tea Party, is going to do no one any good. Government in the US has to be bigger rather than smaller because the US population is large, the States are vocal, issues are entrenched, problematic and increasingly complex, services need to be delivered, technology has everyone in its complicated grip. And as Wall Street has recently and ironically revealed, a great many US citizens are too irresponsible to be trusted in an ambience of less supervision than currently reigns. By 2010, Oh Intelligent Ones, the free market is more expensive than it used to be.
All the Tea Party is doing internationally for the USA is worsening its reputation for pouring out whiny self pity when things are somewhat difficult. When life is less fun than usual. Deep down, what the Tea Party agitators are most terrified of are perceptions of their own vulnerabilities. Their world has let them down, so it's bad world, it must be punished, or cured, or preached at. Maybe with fantasies of insurrection, even shot at. Yes world, the USA as the land of rugged individualism has gone soft as fairy floss at the centre. And most certainly, Jesus will also not be suggesting what to do. All this is a matter purely for the American Caesar, who is currently named Obama, so the Tea Partiers would be wisest to drop their anger kick and their religious kick, yesterday. - Dan Byrnes
Below are a few anti-Tea Party slogans sent in by one of this website's regular US emailers who happens to live in Texas - in the most multiculturally lively part of Texas he can find. It seems that the opposite of the US Tea Partier will be the tolerant-minded US multiculturalist! Which also would be a population numbers game ripe-easy to be surveyed. We can bet though that this is not something the US mainstream media is going to survey any time soon.
- Dan Byrnes, May 2010.
"The Tea Party's Yellow Brick Road"
"Let's Take Off the White Sheets and Embarrass our Mothers"
"George Wallace has Risen, Hallelujah!"
"From Burning Crosses to Political Activism"
"I got the Black President Blues"
"I got the I Don't Know which Way is Up Blues"
"I Don't Know Shit from Shinola but Opposition seems the Right Way" (In Australia, this is called, "I oppose, therefore I am".)
Are you (like George W. Bush) interested in promoting modern democracy around the world? Not even in any gung ho way? Here's where to start. With a list of the world's ten most unliveable cities as based on indicators of social stability, healthcare, environment, education and infrastructure. (1) Harare in Zimbabwe. (2) Dhaka in Bangladesh. (3) Algiers in Algeria. (4) Port Moresby in Papua/ New Ginear. (5) Lagos in Nigeria. (6) Karachi in Pakistan. (7) Douala in Camerooon. (8) Kathmandu in Nepeal. (9) Colombo in Sri Lanka. (10) Dakar in Senegal. So, Happy democracy hunting to you and the very best of luck!! (Reported The Weekend Australian, 20-21 March 2010 from The Economist, UK)
From The Telegraph UK on 2-3-2010 - Nail from Christ's crucifixion found? A nail dating from the time of Christ's crucifixion has been found at a remote fort believed to have once been a stronghold of the Knights Templar.
Published: 6:56AM GMT 02 Mar 2010 Nail from Christ's crucifixion found? Photo: GREG GRUNDY
The four-inch long nail is thought to be one of thousands used in crucifixions across the Roman empire. Archaeologists believe it dates from either the first or second century AD.
Related Articles * Car boot wood 'could be Crusades tabernacle' * Victoria's secrets: the kindness of strangers * Great walks around London: the City * A School of Dolphins by Charles Avery: review * Andrea Arnold: A Well-Kept British Secret The nail was found last summer in a decorated box in a fort on the tiny isle of Ilheu de Pontinha, just off the coast of Madeira.
Pontinha was thought to have been held by the Knights Templar, the religious order that was part of the Christian forces which occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades in the 12th century.
The knights were part of the plot of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Bryn Walters, an archaeologist, said the iron nail's remarkable condition suggested it had been handed with extreme care, as if it was a relic.
"It dates from the first to second centuries," he told the Daily Mirror.
While one would expect the surface to be "pitted and rough" he said on this nail the surface was smooth. That suggested that many people had handled it over the centuries, with the acid on their hands giving it a "peculiar finish".
Christopher Macklin of the Knights Templar of Britannia said the discovery was "momentous". He said the original Knights Templar may have thought it was one of the nails used in Christ's crucifixion.
The nail was found together with three skeletons and three swords. One of the swords had the Knight Templar's cross inscribed on it.
This file new by September 2009 is for comment on recent topics in the news in Australia, and to store new material incoming for the websites of this domain.
UK Muslim leader to issue fatwa against Jihad By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT 02/03/2010 00:05 Ruling is most comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism. Talkbacks (11)LONDON – A revered mainstream Muslim scholar is set to announce in London on Tuesday a fatwa (Muslim ruling) against terrorism and suicide bombing in the name of Islam.
Sheikh Dr. Tahir ul-Qadri, a widely recognized and respected authority on Islamic jurisprudence, will issue a comprehensive fatwa prohibiting terrorism and suicide bombing at a press conference in Westminster, centralLondon.
The Pakistani-born Dr. Qadri has authored an unprecedented, 600-page fatwa on why suicide bombings and terrorism are un-Islamic and scripturally forbidden. The ruling is the most comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism to date.
The fatwa will also be posted on the Internet and in English, making it readily accessible. It will also set an important precedent and allow other scholars to similarly condemn the ideas behind terrorism.
Dr. Qadri has used texts in the Koran and other Islamic writings to argue that suicide and other terrorist attacks are “absolutely against the teachings of Islam” and that “Islam does not permit such acts on any excuse, reason or pretext.”
The fatwa condemns suicide bombers as destined for hell, refuting the claim used by Islamists that such terrorists will earn paradise after death.
“Today’s tragedy is that terrorists, murderers, mischief-mongers and rioters try to prove their criminal, rebellious, tyrannous, brutal and blasphemous activities as a right and a justified reaction to foreign aggression under the garb of defense ofIslam and national interests,” he says about suicide bombing.
“It can in no way be permissible to keep foreign delegates under unlawful custody and murder them and other peaceful non-Muslim citizens in retaliation for interference, unjust activities and aggressive advances of their countries,” Qadri said, asserting, “The one who does has no relation toIslam.”
Dr. Qadri is the founder of the international Minhaj-ul-Quran movement. Supporters say his fatwa is significant because he is issuing it himself and his movement, a major grass-roots global organization, has hundreds of thousands of followers in South Asia and the UK.
The move has been welcomed by the Quilliam Foundation, a London-based anti-extremism think-tank led by former Islamists.
“This fatwa has the potential to be a highly significant step towards eradicating Islamist terrorism,” a Quilliam spokesperson said. “Fatwas by Wahhabi-influenced clerics and Islamist ideologues initiated modern terrorism against civilians. Terrorist groups such as al-Qaida continue to justify their mass killings with self-serving readings of religious scripture.
“Fatwas that demolish and expose such theological innovations will consign Islamist terrorism to the dustbin of history.”
London’s Centre for Social Cohesion think-tank has also welcomed the initiative.
CSC director Douglas Murray believes that in recent years, and since the July 2005 terrorist attack in London, Muslim leaders have failed to unequivocally condemn violence committed in the name of Islam.
“A sentence that may to many people seem clear, such as ‘There can be no justification for the killing of innocent people’ is filled with caveats – what is an ‘innocent’ person? Who decides who is or is not ‘innocent’?"
“Too many Muslim religious figures sound as if they are condemning violence when in fact they are merely condemning violence in certain situations, against certain people,” he said.
Murray said the fatwa takes away the caveats and will have far-reaching consequences. However he said it won’t stop Islamic terrorism instantaneously.
“Dr. ul-Qadri is respected for his ability to cross some of the notable sectarian boundaries that abound in the Islamic faith as in all others. Even Muslims who might dislike him will not be able to dismiss him out of hand.
“Yet even if the contents of this fatwa are what people have long hoped for, it will not, of course, stop Islamic terrorism straight away. A single fatwa will not change the level of denial and lack of self-criticism inherent in so much of modern Islam. Nor will it stop every fevered young radical eager to kill and maim. But the trickle-down effect is important. The most violent interpretations of Islam have indeed trickled down to terrorists via learned scholars,” he said.
By Dan Byrnes (2-2-2010)
Lately I've been wondering where is the leading edge of civilization? I suspect this is a topic that too few people think about.
Civilization is much-vaunted. A charming variety of countries including Australia are taken to be "civilized", although Germany allowed Hitler to seriously blot its copybook. The idea that an entire country is civilized at any one time is utter nonsense. (Just look awhile at British Imperial History or US foreign policy.) In any country, some people are civilized and some are not, independent of any country's set of institutions. No country has a uniformly civilized population, criminals, and corruption amongst and between "the civilized", see to that. As for linkages between "civilization"and "development", visit Papua-New Guinea any year you find convenient!
Some historians angst about the rise and fall of civilizations, in a misgided way I think. The more I learn, the more it seems that civilizations fall due to usual stresses plus inability to adapt to problems arising from climate change, not moral rot, not military softness, not decadence. It's climate problems which teach civilizations their use-by dates, it's just that historians are not yet good at explaining this. But leave aside the fall of civilizations, what about the rise?
What prompted these thoughts was reading the weekend newspaper finance pages. "I never read the finance pages", my adult son tells me, "they're all lies and crap." He means, hyperbole and puffery. He is correct.
I never used to read the finance pages either, but older now, I read them out of a morbidly growing curiosity about where the mistakes creep in. (And falling for lies is a mistake, no?)
You see, in a truly civilized society, mistakes should survive only a short time. By any such criterion, few nations are well-civilized. I don't mean that mistakes will never happen in a civilized society, I mean that if mistakes are made, they'll be recognised quickly and rectified.
What propelled me into this today was yet another claim that Australia is suffering a skills shortage. Really? All my lifetime in Australia, there have been plenty of technical colleges in small cities and suburbs in the largest cities which can train tradesmen; probably underfunded. Governments in my lifetime (state and federal) have routinely failed to support traditional systems and customs of industries supporting apprentice. We hear this nonsense about a skills shortage with monotonous regularity, as we hear about the death of proper religion, proper government, serious theatre, serious poetry, rock and roll, the serious novel, all of which are signs of declining civilization, apparently.
Apparently, Australia has a mismatch between where the employers are, and where the workers prefer to be. Apparently, no one wonders if it's the employers who put themselves in the wrong place (just as a theatre company can put a good production in front of the wrong audience, or the right audience in front of the wrong production).
But the finance pages assume that the employers' opinions have the most weight. And in today's case, where the story arises in Western Australia, it might just be that the complaining employers have put themselves in inconvenient places. Like deserts.
I suspect that Australia doesn't have a skills shortage at all, it has an excess of cowboy-minded capitalists running extractive industries who want to deploy their capital in places inconvenient for families, but who don't want to bid-up wages for workers wanting to help them. It's the grandest old false problem in the histories of civilization.
The "civilized" employer wants to expand the frontier, but finds himself short of labour. Since his desire to expand frontiers is not curtailed, more likely it is encouraged, the labour has to appear from somewhere. This would be a good way to encourage the spread of the use of coerced labour, of slavery, and it was.
Here's the conundrum, societies expand their frontiers by mixing the civilized with the less-than-civilized. Whether or not the civilization in question denies that this is the methodology is a measure of how civilized it is becoming. (The classic movie, The Mission, is deeply and eloquently, unforgettably preoccupied with this conundrum.)
Any civilization has a multitude of economic drivers to be considered, extent of "development", size of population, willingness to trade, types of output (costs of production versus levels of profit), levels of education, weaving enough give in the class structure to allow upward social mobility, frequency of war, adjustments to new technology, competitiveness with rivals.
I'd observe, that a lot of people I'd regard as well-civilized are not especially adventurous. Most of them will enjoy civilized society, but will contribute relatively little to its advancement because - maybe quite properly - they refuse to mix the civilized with the uncivilized. They're scrupulous.
Whereas, my reading of history, particularly the history of European exploration and colonization since 1550, tells me that it isn't the safety-conscious who expand civilization, it's the risk takers. And risk-takers are often not especially nice, sensible, scrupulous or civilized people. (Consider the genocidal activities of Pizarro and Cortes in South America, No More Mr Nice Guy, surely.)
So what did the risk-takers of England, France, Spain, Portugal do to advance the spread of "civilization". These nations' risk-takers were not necessarily all behaving in civilized ways all the time. They included serial adventurers, pirates (on the water, but including armies of them on land), gold-seekers, get-rich quick merchants, impetuous risk-takers, plain fools, mixing in dashes of spiritual arrogance, insatiable curiosity, a deal of technological leverage, or superiority. A little expertise in impressive sciences, interest in languages or travel, a love of the exotic. And very often an insufficient budget provided by their own employers, as with the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in the time of Pocahontas.
The Renaissance was propelled by risk-takers. Leonardo da Vinci, engineer, artist and corpse-dissector. Michaelangelo, another marvellous artist, also a corpse dissector, who took the theological liberty of depicting the finger of Adam touching the finger of God in The Sistine Chapel. The Medici of Florence, bankers turned politicians and sometime warmongers during Italy's long, insane and pointless period of warring city states.
The famous poet Dante, for example, took risks by insulting a good many of the notables and/or worthies of his day. (Dante had strong views on how corruption might flourish amongst and between "the civilized".)
So as I read the finance pages and watch the mistakes creep around in affairs and in the economy, both, my respect for those with excessive respect for civilization recedes because they are not vigilant enough about mistakes.
I've changed my definition of what civilization is about. It's about the safety-conscious eating the fruit of trees planted by the risk-takers. (This by the way fits deftly with Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian philosophy, taking steps to spread the greatest good for consumption by the greatest number. It also tends to fit long-term Chinese history. The respected Chinese tradition of filial piety tended to inhibit risk-taking, especially by younger men.)
That is, civilized people are more or less continually engaged in the sin of Adam and Eve, mixing the benefits of the fruits of the knowledge of good and of evil.
I think I see now. Being civilized is being able to see where the mistakes occur. It's about the arts and sciences of the examination of the behaviour of mistakes made by human beings and then correcting them.
It's the risk-takers who make a lot of mistakes and the safety-conscious who notice. Each needs the other, but it's more the risk-takers who are the leading edge of a society, in the sense that they renew the age-old issues for each new generation.
And our civilization today? It's under threat from climate problems. This won't bother the risk-takers much at all. It may just worry the safety-conscious to death.
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Preamble: This essay is prompted more than anything else by the shenanigans of Australia's Liberal Party of the week-ending 28 November 2009. (All quotations below are from Australia's major newspapers of the weekend 28-29 November unless otherwise indicated.)
On Tuesday 1 December 2009 at 9am, the Liberal party will have a meeting to decide yet again on its leadership. It seems the party is in self-destruct mode, and some party pundits say it might be out of government, languishing in opposition, for two or even three more parliamentary terms. In Australian terms, this is a sweet prospect for Labor Party voters, my kind of voter, more so, so early in a new century.
But on quick reflection, this is very bad for good government in Australia. Our parliamentary system needs a good strong opposition to keep any incumbent government restrained, this is the Australian way.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
Unfortunately, the Liberal Party has just sabotaged this along with sabotaging itself as a viable party, and are sabotaging themselves as individual politicians representing a constituency. So this is not the time for party-political gloating.
Power, the exercise of? Australia's Labor government now in power cannot even successfully command that more housing shall be built for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. The exercise of political power is about getting things done, not merely talking. Talk is cheap, but it appears that today, action in Australia is very expensive.
Along with some friends, most of us with no party-political affiliations, I've anyway been wondering for some time ... just how much power do politicians have today, anyway, over anything? I think politicians have decreasing power. But it's hard to describe just how this is. Apart from wondering if their lack of real eloquence, the deadness of their speech, might be a signal that they'll do no real good.
Historically, the easiest way to put it -- and this has been the case since the great British Reform Act era of the 1830s -- is that if universal suffrage is assumed in voterdom, then a well-educated, universally-enfranchised voterdom will gradually take more and more power from politicians. As well, if encouraged by their democratic system, this voterdom might widen opportunities for education to the point of insisting that university education be free for citizens. Which in turn might mean that the state bears the cost of widening educational opportunity in a context where a more-educated society will then arrogate itself more power and further reduce the power of politicians.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
My point is that the Australian Liberal Party in late November 2009 is suffering from precisely this problem. Their voters know as much about climate change problems, if not more, than politicians appear to. I think they are suffering from it in ways which many governments in the Western World, including the USA, could well learn from. As follows ...
The paradox is that if a well-educated voterdom (some of whom enter the governmental bureaucracy, of course) slowly reduces the actual power that politicians used to have, does there arrive a point at which the politicians (but not the voters who put them where they are) find that they live in a power vacuum? This seems to be precisely the problem that the Liberal Party is responding to so badly.
A Melbourne blogging friend quotes a line getting about in the media – that if the Liberal Party agrees that asylum seekers on their way to Australia should not sabotage their own boat, should asylum seekers agree that the Liberal Party should not sabotage its own boat? And, does the Liberal party now understand the mindset of suicide bombers, since it is doing what the suicidals do, taking things so seriously that they feel moved to destroy themselves to gain part of their objective.
And their objective is ? To avoid the implications of climate change. To rush into irrelevance and into the past that existed before climate was widely perceived as a problem.
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| Australia's Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong. Original portrait (and a superb one!) by Adam Knott. |
Remember, Australia has a Minister for Climate Change, a lawyer, Ms Penny Wong, who reminds the Senate that the emissions trading market is “politically constructed”. This website agrees, and find this is precisely the problem. The ETS is not a creature of economic demand at all, it's the opposite. It is a deluded attempt to make money from a problem without trying to solve the problem. It is not the way to discourage levels of demand for products/services which in a climate-change scenario will seem unhealthy.
We might also observe that the industries presently under most threat from any ETS-type measures are extractive – they are the the Australia-as-quarry view of Australia. There are other definitions of Australia to be re-examined. The Lifeboat Australia view; how many people can we find water for, feed and house?
There is the old White Australia view about population composition here, which might not take kindly to the arrival of large numbers of climate-change refugees from the Pacific or anywhere else. A hefty argument here would be quite ironic, Moslems might think: fine, this will distract attention from “Moslems”. But what about an argument about electricity supplies? One big attention-getter in Australia is security of baseload electricity supplies. What's at risk here are our beloved air-conditioners, for example.
There is a lot to argue about – such as, lifestyle. The last thing politicians want to talk about is real change in lifestyle now or in the future.
Many in the Liberal Party wish to avoid making a decision on the Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS, CETS) or Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The Liberals seem set to give themselves a climate-change Christmas. This year they don't believe that any conference in wonderful wonderful Copenhagen could possibly be wonderful.
It's fascinating. The Howard (Liberal) government for a decade thrived on spreading the politics of fear and loathing, and used “wedge politics” on its opposition. (A way of dividing issues into two or more sections to divide the opposition's energies.) Several years after Howard departed the scene, and ironically, his party is wedging itself, opposing the ETS for business reasons, dividing itself due to fear of climate change, wishing for business as usual.
But the ETS gives this website a problem. We think it is a very bad policy indeed. This website thinks that the ETS will provide incentives for society to invest money, time and effort in what is causing the problem, reducing or redirecting money time and effort to be invested in climate change adjustment reactions or in new and better technology. We think that responses to climate change problems should be mediated through modification of existing Federal and State tax systems, which can be adjusted/readjusted relatively quickly in response to events.
Here we can note the fetish in democracies for new legislation when modification to old legislation might suffice just as well. (There was no real need in the UK, Australia or the USA for new “anti-terror laws” after 9/11. The ordinary criminal law was enough of a legal arsenal for use against actual or aspiring terrorists. It might even be far better, for Westerners at least, if any apprehended terrorists were regarded as ordinary criminals and not dignified by new legislation which gave them added status as “special threats”.)
The ETS will generate various investment schemes (or is that, disinvestment schemes?) which will take time to shape themselves. But whether this is the case or not, the Liberals are now splitting their own party to avoid climate change problems by the simple expedient of not believing it is being made worse by human activity. If climate change is occurring, it's part of some natural cycle they insist, while assuming that business will be as usual. Even so, they are failing to propose any measures to be taken in Australia or elsewhere. So they condemn themselves to irrelevance. and one wonders if they actually read today's newspapers.
The headlines are egregious, and dismaying. What might this weekend's newspapers tell us? Sydney Morning Herald says that getting the Liberals to an ETS proved more difficult than herding cats, and adds that current Liberal dilemmas are “a plot written and directed by Nick Minchin, with Tony Abbott volunteered to be the suicide bomber”.
“Howard's legacy: Without a shepherd, Liberals find themselves in the dark”.
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| Photo by Dan Byrnes |
In the Australian, Lenore Taylor is headlined “Rambuctious conservatives put reason, facts and history off to one side - The Liberal Party has cynically changed its mind, then shot itself in the foot”.
The Australian's editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, who makes up his own mind, is headlined “Rebels with a lost cause – The test is whether this wilful contest is the party's political suicide or the means of its salvation”. Kelly thinks that Rudd will construe matters as the Liberals having ceased to be a mainstream political party and retreated into introspective denial.
Some quotes are funny. Dennis Shanahan in Weekend Australian says that never has the Liberal Party so lacked authority as now, and he quotes a “senior Liberal”, “The Liberal Party is now a circus without a tent.” Shanahan asks, can the Liberals settle policy differences without tearing their party apart?
“Liberals wallow in sceptic tank”, says Miranda Devine in Sydney Morning Herald, but she thinks the ETS is a dog and that the anti-Turnbull forces will prevail. So just to be more amusing, the SMH places beside Devine a column by Susan Butler, editor of Macquarie Dictionary, who outlines changes in our language usage as the risks of climate change dawn on us. Possibly, Butler thinks that a consensus about climate change will arrive via changing language use, not necessarily by “politics”. Which seems a very good way to look at it. Yet another reason for the world to be watching Australia's dysfunctional shenanigans just now.
One wonders, if climate change denial is somewhat similar, as a form of denial-of-real-threat, to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938?
A Sydney Morning Herald columnist reminds us that Turnbull is perceived, at least, as lacking sincerity. The wider problem here is that most of Turnbull's enemies in his own party are sincerely wrong, or at least wrenchingly out of touch with public opinion.
In the SMH, a UK columnist, George Monbiot, is quoted as saying that climate-change denial is now spreading like a contagious disease (while climate-change sceptics say that climate-change alarmism has spread like a contagious disease).
One view scuttling about like a pair of ragged claws on the sea bottom is that climate change deniers, who are now being serviced by a brand-new mini-publishing-industry, have room-temperature IQs. Which could well be said of the Australian Liberal Party today.
Monbiot notes that a lot of climate change deniers are older people. The psychology of which is interesting. Just maybe, older people have a longer experience of “normal” weather variations and are more tolerant of weather oddities?
On the other hand, this website is interested in maritime history, and notes that regarding the famous and non-existent North-West Passage that Captain Cook sought, it has never till recent years ever been predicted that the Passage will one day be free of Arctic ice. But it now seems the Passage might open up in 20 years or so when the summer Arctic is ice-free. Which means, the long-fabled North-West Passage, enabling cheaper transport by ship, will only appear because of climate disaster!
Yes, today we need to read geography globally, not just locally, while we react to mere slogans and think globally and act locally - another paradox likely to encourage political meltdown in your local area quite soon.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
Monbiot goes on to speculate that a scenario like climate change will only remind people of our frailties, of the reality of death. Since older people are closer to death anyway, they reject notions about climate change due to their personal psychology. Certainly with climate change, if it happens severely, water and food supplies will seem frail, and the world already refuses to supply all its populations with food; while over-population is not discussed usefully.
It's all getting curiouser and curiouser, turning very peculiar and pear-shaped. This website feels anyway that the pointiest ends of climate change problems in Australia right now are questions of water supplies for all purposes, drought, extra risks of bushfires and the idea, already growing, that beachfront and near-beachfront real estate development in Australia should cease. Or be greatly slowed. (Noosa Heads in Queensland and Byron Bay in NSW being the mostly-publicized beachfront case studies so far available.)
Reported in this weekend's Australian is the case in Victoria of a dark shadow being cast over the future of beachfront development due to the state's planning tribunal deciding that the risks of sea-level rises and extra flooding are too great. And there's a hint of a republican management question of Australia here: why not have uniform regulations about such matters nationwide, not piecemeal, state by state? Given Australia's small population, why not have uniform regulations about everything? But that's a broader story.
The Liberal Party has proposed nothing new, interesting, creative or viable about any of these problems. The only way out for any of the Liberal Party is Stalinist in style: it is for one side or other of the argument to win, enabling the winners to purge the entire party of dissenters, and get back to being a successful opposition. (While Sydney-based forces in the party seem to dominate over Melbourne, presumably a legacy of the Howard years). Whichever side wins, half the party and half its talent will be lost.
The current Liberal leader, Turnbull, would rather die on his feet than live on his knees, praying to the right wing, climate-change deniers in his party. Is this an argument about the Liberals' philosophy and future direction, a battle for the party's soul, or plain self-destruction (led by a right-wing) of the kind that ruined the Labor Party in the 1950s. If these problems bring on a double-dissolution, many commentators feel that the Liberal-National coalition in opposition will be annihilated, which seems correct.
All this is very Catch-22 in style, no one would want to lead the Liberal Party (as it is now), for fear of being thought insane, the risk of political death is high. It seems clear that whoever becomes Liberal leader, the party will have to change in the light of the most divisive issues, which are those posed by apparent climate change. First of all, due to voter anxieties (if not “green politics”), the Liberals had better be seen to be actually thinking clearly about climate change. And this is where the paradox rubs again and causes political friction. If an educated voterdom feels anxious about climate problems, right now they don't even have to vote. They just have to watch Liberal Party politicians reduce their own power of their own volition.
The voters will have their say in due course, more so if this Liberal self-destruction brings on a double-dissolution of parliament and an election has to be held.
If we need some more precise terminology here, where do we find it while so many disagree that the science is “in”? No one in Australia pretends to fully understand the ETS (or, Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme, CETS), not even Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who remains quite unconvincing as she tries to sell the ETS.
There is an alternative phrase to ETS, CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) as discussed in the Australian case on a Wikipedia page. This is “a cap-and-trade system”. About which, this website thinks, cap (demand for carbon) by all means, but trade in what, exactly? What is there to trade but finally, a reduction in demand for carbon-based products and services? (It seems risky, what participants in any Australian ETS will probably be trading will be the crumbs of marginal price differentials as carbon-based goods and services change. fall, or try with the aid of public relations to rise in price.)
So despite new entries in Macquarie Dictionary, we rather lack the vocabulary for discussing our problems. Certainly, Australia's Liberal Party is demonstrating how we need vocabulary to express our thoughts, while they are not thinking anyway. And here's the point. The rest of the world can learn much from Australia in late 2009 about the ways an educated national electorate can neuter the power of politicians – just at a time when better leadership is required. Certainly, most Australians now seem highly sceptical about the ETS/CPRS.
The whole world should be watching, because when Kevin Rudd, Australia's prime minister, attends a Copenhagen meeting about “environmental matters” in December, he will be representing a nation that is a perfect disgrace. He contents himself with saying that the Liberal chaos is undermining his presentation. It's more the case that in terms of Australia's settlement patterns, we have been shockingly prodigal of space and resources. We dislike living in residential density, so for two centuries we have spread infrastructure everywhere, and now we find it becoming more expensive to maintain.
Rudd will be speaking for a nation which has just seen a major political party neuter itself due to its avoidance of environmental issues. A nation which lets its Murray River basin decline in quality, and has done for decades. A nation with capital cities becoming more nervous about assured supplies of water and country towns more nervous about bushfires. Nationally, irrigation-based industries are becoming more nervous.
A nation which ignores its own solar power resources and technologies, if it admires other nations' solar technology or not. A population increasingly nervous about electricity pricing.
A nation which is a world-scale litmus test signalling alarm for all measures by which all issues can be measured, more so since Australia is stand-alone and has no land-neighbours. A nation with indefensible coastlines, with a population moving more to the coasts, now due to rising sea-levels becoming nervous about have to slow near-coastline real estate development.
Once again, Australia turns out to be a social laboratory, but right now, nervous that the most serious experiment yet undertaken on its soil is in train while the coal underneath that soil continues to be mined so enthusiastically.
World-wide, there is only one thing to be hopeful about from any of it. That something like this could happen with the right wing of the USA's Republican Party.
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| The day the Australian Liberal Party started to take climate change seriously |
The outcome: And on Tuesday morning from 9am, with three contenders for its leadership, the Liberal Party excluded Joe Hockey from consideration, and votes were 42 for Tony Abbott and 41 for the previous leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Which is ridiculous. The Australian Liberal Party is now of at least two minds, to say the least. All this website can do now is track the Liberal Party closely as it tries to cobble together a climate change policy. (Ends)
(Parliamentarian Wilson Tuckey surprised this website on Tuesday morning by saying he had "some" climate change policy items on his website. He does indeed, at least, have an idea that wave power could be developed on the Kimberley Coast area. His material is mostly available as downloadable PDF files. Meantime, Liberal MP for North Sydney, Joe Hockey, has nothing prominent about climate change on his personal website. -Ed)
And after we have looked up a variety of the personal websites of a variety of MPs, we find there is something easy that the webmasters of Australia can do to help keep the Liberals honest after their embarrassments of late November 2009. Keep a list on which of them have a section on climate change issues, and which do not. This way, it ought to be easy, nationally, to induce Liberal MPs to train their webmasters to update on climate change issues and keep us all informed. Very, very informed.
So some survey results. Tony Abbott (2-12-2009) has nothing prominent re climate change issues on his personal website, apart from his usual anti-ETS opinions.
Today's feeling/Blog emotion 21 October 2009: Law of the Sea: We have earlier loudly complained that leader of the Australian Liberal Party Malcolm Turnbull keeps speaking tosh. Lately we find his party is complaining about "illegal migrants" appearing freshly in boats off the n/w Australian coast. They are not "illegal" till proved so: they may be ordinary asylum seekers or stateless persons. The current Liberal Party stance on such folks is a moral and legal abomination in terms of the age-old Law of the Sea. Which is, that if any shipped party on the water has the wherewithal, they shall duly assist any other parties in trouble on the waters they become aware of, if it interferes with their own current business or not. It is an age-old standing human/moral obligation of maritime life. The current Liberal Party rhetoric is in dire breach of this convention and has been since John Howard's day. This website cannot understand why Australia's newspapers have not been pointing this out for years!
20 October 2009: Blog emotion: A Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is like re-investing in the cancer you are suffering from, feeding it. It is socio-political nonsense and an avoidance of real issues. Any ETS adopted should be monitored through taxation systems, with rewards given for emissions reductions, or commissioning of replacement energy-producing technology. Climate change itself will help penalize non-reductions. Read a rare article arguing such a line in Weekend Australian, 17-18 October, 2009, page 12, by Rebecca Weisser. "Tax carbon rather than trade in it". Highly recommended by this website.
By 5-10-2008, Has massive fraud been perpetrated by investment bankers? By 8-10-2008. Britain declares itself in recession. By 8-10-08, US, TV reports that policy makers are making it up as they go along, all this is unprecedented, is of historical dimensions. By 15-10-08, Lateline TV news (Australia), Australian PM Rudd criticises "extreme capitalism" and its ills, an obscenity brought about by greed, obscene failures in US regulations on corporate governance ... rating agencies are now up for inspection in Rudd's views, there is a need to reign in executives greed. By 16-10-08, NY Stock Exchange nose dives again. Markets are uncertain and unconvinced. By 16-1-0-08, There will be recession and it will be deep. Negative feedback loops are setting in, Gasp. The real economy is suffering, and is America on the skids? By 16-10-08, Interesting question arises, How would anyone quickly tell if China was experiencing a speculative bubble or a downturn? By 25-10-2008, Another day of market turmoil, but are things becoming more subtle? Greenspan's mistake, versus Bob Dylan's line, the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle. By 13-11-08, Germany and UK now in recession, Japan is predicted to go to recession. By 14-11-2008, the entire developed world is in recession.
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| Photo by Dan Byrnes |
US admission by 9-4-2008, in a new book, that WMDs were not the pretext of the Iraq war but a pre-emptive strike against any further problems from Iraq, or with Saddam Hussein's regime, and a special case re Hussein's regime, a case reigned of anticipatory self-defence. (By the way, see the Oliver Stone movie, "W" on the life of the man who became US President G. W. Bush. -Ed)
Bernie Madoff by 7 February 2009 is causing fresh worries which attack egos and create angst over privacy issues. Madoff's A-list clients were not as exclusive as they thought. Lists have been found of almost-ordinary folk who've been defrauded by Madoff, their names and addresses, and they include mere retirees, housewives, a plumber's union and a high school. Upper echelon names defrauded by Madoff include actor John Malkovich, US baseball giant Sandy Koufax. One of the names listed seems to be Madoff's own lawyer. Some of the lesser names listed, contacted by journalists, now worry that they have been "outed" and that they may now be mistaken as rich, and hence become targets for thieves. (Well, once rich, then defrauded by Madoff.) See www.madoffsearch.com/. (By November 2009, Madoff is still routinely derided on The David Letterman Late Show from New York, which advertises how many years he still has in jail [149].)
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Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. John Wiley and Sons, 2009, 336pp. Simon Adams, The Unforgiving Rope. UWA Press, 2009, 285pp. (On capital punishment in Australia) |
