Karma Gates-style
There are karmic ups and downs in the universe, my current experience would suggest. The hard-disk on my Mac PowerBook went boom and would not respond to my requests for action. That means under normal circumstances I would have been without home-based computer support. But things are rarely normal. A day or two earlier, I was gifted a PC portable. One piece of government largesse to the volunteers resulted in each Volunteer Coast Guard Training Officer being given a Dell notebook, equipped with Vista OS, a copy of Office Professional, a data projector and a 2 gig USB memory stick. Because my data were backed up, I was able to segue straight to the PC without missing a beat. That was obviously the impact of the positive force for karma and universal goodwill arising from my clean living and altruistic lifestyle. On the other hand, you might argue that the very fact that I have been forced to use a PC at all - and one which is run on the incredibly user-unfriendly Vista OS - is indicative of a karmic comeback from all the accreted lousiness in my life, revenge for whatever degree of hubris I was exhibiting that was so great that the universe thought it necessary to take me down a peg. Consider the three-week lesson in humility learned: I now have my PowerBook back, with a new hard-disk and all the data and programs recovered (bless Xyber and all who sail upon it), but the hiatus as slave to the Gatesian horror has taught me to live a better life and be kinder to my fellow creatures ...
Nomenclature
... with one exception.
I got pissed when all those anti-abortion hypocrites (particularly the one who favored the death penalty and the wide distribution of guns in the society - how exactly was their respect for life exhibited in those cases?) decided to call themselves "pro-life" and we have allowed them to do it. Now we are seeing the same developments (first in tragedy, then in farce) in the Global Warming debate - which isn't really a debate at all. We have allowed the closed-minded rejectionists to label themselves "climate change sceptics". First of all, they are not sceptics, they are deniers: they want to deny the existence of anthropogenic global warming, a phenomenon that has been recognised by every reasonable (and well-read) climate scientist. They have done so on the basis of factual inaccuracy, misrepresentation, and citation of any dissenting opinion, no matter how ill-informed. The issue is not climate change: it's global warming, occasioned by the human-induced increase in greenhouse gases. And people who want to question the science are not 'sceptics', they are denialists - in the same way that self-described 'historical revisionists' are, in fact, Holocaust deniers. So let's start calling things how they are, no bounding them with self-serving politically correct euphemisms: the people arguing against the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are global warming deniers, no matter what they call themselves.
The boring man keeps making inroads
No matter how many times the commentators tell him his fifteen minutes are up, Ned Rudd keeps on chugging along. At first it was agreed that Labor's surge in the polls was due to Rudd's honeymoon and some distaste for Howard's IR laws (please not to call them "WorkChoices" despite that being the name given them by Act of Parliament). But we all know that Howard is "a very clever politician" and that his numbers would start to go upwards once he got Kruddy to divulge all his dangerous policies, once Parliament resumed and once Cossie brought down an 'election-year budget'. Four polls later, Labor remains at 56-60 per cent, with a 12-20 per cent lead. The budget produced a dead cat bounce. There are a couple of reasonable explanations for this, although you'd be hard-pressed to find a commentator (by and large right wing apparatchiks on the Murdoch payroll or part of the Canberra Press Gallery group-mind) who'd say so. First I think that the people have stopped listening to Howard (like they stopped listening to Keating in 1996): Howard's gone to the well once too often with his usual plaint of blaming others for mistakes and taking credit for successes. Iraq was a mistake, the IR changes a disaster and he has shown that he doesn't understand global warming and water shortages (the major environmental questions of the day). The plan for umpteen nuclear power stations (one in your backyard) is the latest indicator that he underestimates the importance of the issue to the electorate or, indeed, the future. Secondly, I think that he has met his match in Ned Rudd: just about every night Kruddy appears on the commercial evening news, calmly spruiking his message-de-jour. He doesn't get flustered; he sees no reason to oppose good initiatives; he is a voice of reason amidst the chaos of crime, disaster and road crashes that dominate the bulletins. His creative use of cliche (for example, on climate change Howard "just doesn't get it") also allows him to communicate more directly with the voters, who literally speak his language. It doesn't really matter that Laurie Oakes or Paul Kelly thinks that his IR policy is crap; the punters aren't reading the pundits, they are watching the TV news, where they see Ned Rudd talking sense without pundit intermediation. And some of his policies are incredibly well-aimed: his $4.7 billion Broadband plan was one such initiative. Sound common sense, by-passing the Telstra roadblock. Four months later the government is still playing catch-up. The election between Howard and Rudd will be a battle of policy wonks at 50 paces: Howard using the budget surplus to buy votes and run pro-government ads as long as possible (he's already started with promotions of his superannuation policy - remember when he was opposed to Keating's superannuation guarantee levy? - and his attempts to rebadge WorkChoices); Rudd offering relatively cheap but targeted policies: his plan to use the RAN to stop Japanese whale researchers (now there's nomenclature worthy of a pro-life climate change sceptic) is one such, and he has reasonable policies on water and climate change already announced, as well as the IR roll-back. He can still lose the election: Howard might find a Tampa yet (a terrorist attack around the time of APEC would be perfect), the Liberal election ads will be well-targeted and any party with Simon Crean and Mar'n Fer'n on the frontbench is never safe. But you'd have to say that boring old Ned Rudd is looking the goods at the moment, the polls are not moving much and this could foster Howard's End.
From the Oval Office
When a political leader is in trouble one option is to find a foreign enemy to unite against. Menzies did this in the 1960s, with his spotlighting of the "downward thrust of China between the Pacific and Indian Oceans". (I still remember a cartoon response: a sailor on the bridge of an Australian aircraft carrier, commenting, 'That's the three millionth lone Chinese sailor we've seen going south today'.) Howard copied his mentor very well in 2001 by identifying the threat of south Asian Islamic boatpeople to our way of life. But this works even better in Australia when you can rope sport into the equation, as Malcolm Fraser demonstrated in 1980: the threat of a Moscow Olympic boycott helped keep attention away from his government's failures and won him a further, undeserved, term. Now John Howard has gone to the well again, this time by using the Australian cricket team in an attempt to make the audience look the other way while he mismanages the country. I can understand fully the desire to oppose Robert Mugabe, who has taken Zimbabwe from the economic showcase of Africa to an economic basket-case, while attacking people on ethnic and political grounds, but is the way to do it by withdrawing the Australian cricket team from a trip to Zimbabwe? An important justification for the sports boycotts of South Africa, under apartheid, boycotts that John Howard strenuously opposed and can still see no justification for, was that their sports teams were directly implicated in the regime. Teams were selected along racial lines and the regime refused even to allow entry to ex-pat 'coloreds' like Basil D'Olivera. As sport was intimately linked to the dominant political paradigm, boycotts directly aimed at sport were justifiable. On the other hand, Soviet policy in Afghanistan had no impact on the selection of sports teams, so targetting the Moscow Olympics as a way of punishing the USSR for its invasion was far less defensible, especially as we continued to trade with them - wool and meat exports to Russia were far more assistance to them with their invasion. And why pick on Mugabe? We continue to play sport with Iran, North Korea and Burma, all of which have equally repellent political systems, and equally nasty and brutish dictators. We played sports with, and sent wheat to, Saddam Hussein's Iraq right up to the day when we found the regime so obnoxious that we needed to use brute force to overthrow it. There are good reasons why the Australian XI should not tour Zimbabwe - mainly based on the fact that the Zimbabwe XI is now a second-class team, as Mugabe's policies have ensured that most of the better cricketers have left the country - but I cannot see Howard's grandstanding as anything other than an attempt to deflect attention from more pressing problems and exploit the national distaste for an egregious dictator.
It's becoming increasingly difficult for sports players and coaches to find the middle ground between saying too much and not saying enough. The AFL (and the NRL and the Football Federation) has continued to fine players and coaches who apparently insult umpires, or verbally bring the game into disrepute. (It is interesting to note that Kane Johnson, the Richmond captain has been fined for "bringing the game into disrepute" for suggesting that he couldn't understand why West Coast got twice as many free kicks in a game as Richmond, but Ben Cousins has not been fined as a result of admissions of serious drug use that saw him flown to LA for a month of rehab with the stars; Daniel Kerr has not been fined despite court appearances and taped admissions of drug buying; and Chad Fletcher has not been fined despite passing out in Las Vegas from a drug overdose and spending two night in hospital. Which of these activities is more likely to bring the game into disrepute? Not to mention the incident of the AFL CEO who criticised the playing style of one of his competition's teams only three months before they won their first premiership in 73 years.) It is important that we protect the right of players and coaches to speak their minds to the media about incidents in their game. The application of fines for such responses can only have a chilling effect on the ability of the press to report matters of interest or drive insiders to rely on anonymous leaks and backgrounders. It is the equivalent of the media management techniques practised by the federal government, seeking to have their spin on the story published, while not letting the full truth emerge. As if such threats were not enough, we now have the NRL threatening to fine Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett for the inadequacy of his responses to journalists after a recent game. Fined for saying too much; fined for saying too little: it's the Goldilocks' paradox for coaches.
Puzzling
A few moons ago I boasted how I'd avoided the Sudoku craze. Well, that was premature. Call me hooked. But I am not totally addicted to these number puzzles because I have taken up again the regular cryptic crossword habit. I try to do The Times cryptic in The Australian every day and the "DA" cryptic in Friday's Herald. DA is the setter of what is the best Australian cryptic but the English-sourced Times remains the real challenge and provides me with intellectual stimulation on the train-ride home. I have been into crosswords for many a year. My only international pen-pal resulted from that hobby. In 1962, at the Seattle World's Fair, I sent in a form for a computer-matching pen-pal project. I listed 'crosswords' as my primary hobby. The result was the name of a girl in Boys' Town, Nebraska. Yeah, I know: who but Jack would end up corresponding with the only girl in Boys' Town (her father was a teacher there)? For a couple of years we exchanged regular letters - and crosswords and other word puzzles. I introduced her to cryptics; she introduced me to anacrostics. And we talked about our respective societies - a Catholic in the American mid-west; a secular Jew in Sydney - but it was a lot of learning of each of us because we both belonged to relatively insular societies: Australia in the early 60s was very inward looking, although it has subsequently got better, and the US has ever been that way, and continues to be. By the time I was 16, my interests were changing: I'd discovered SF and F and was doing a lot more reading and a lot less puzzling. But, on and off, I have been doing cryptics ever since. I discovered The Times crossword when we were in Europe in 1988 - The Times was one of the few English-language papers available in most European cities - and when the Press Council started subscribing to The Australian I found it again and have been more or less addicted for a few years.
Throughout the years I have done the Herald cryptic from time to time, especially DA's. Unlike most setters, DA likes to use thematic elements in his puzzles - one of the reasons I like them so much. On one occasion, all the 'across' clues were the names of rock bands. On another - only a week or so ago - most of the answers were palindromes. Since I had been fiddling with [Weird Al Yankovic's Bob] as the idea of the title-poem for the June Necessity, the solutions to the puzzle became a little less difficult.
Great moments in conspiracy busting
Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson and family, has turned his forensic skills to the Strange Case of the Presidential Assassination in Dallas. And, in a little over 1600 pages, he establishes, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. Unassisted. At least that's what the blurb says. Life is far too short to spend it reading another book about the JFK killing, especially at a length (and most likely a prose style) that would daunt everyone but the most masochistic Proust reader. All the more so because the Kennedy conspiracies are as crazy as the moon-landings-were-fake conspiracies. Ever since I read Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, supposedly the undelivered defence of LHO, in the late 1960s, it has been clear to me that the Warren Commission got it right. In 1994 Gerald Posner took only 640 pages to write the definitive Case Closed (I must have had a lot more time on my hands in the early 1990s because I read that one) and the title sums it up for me. I note from some of the amazon.com reviews that the diehards are refusing to give up on their beloved conspiracies and don't even need to read Bugliosi to know that Osward was innocent and that the grassy knoll killed Kennedy (or whatever). It saddens me that more forests need to die in this cause, especially in the light of how prolix the former prosecutor has been.
Great moments in pseudo-science
I note that the Creation Museum has opened in Kentucky and that, according to the intelligent designers of the place, T. Rex and partner, among other creatures, were aboard the Ark, with Noah and family. Given all the species of thunder lizards now found, even allowing for the fact that no room needs to be found for the "brontosaurus", I'm not sure that the dimensions given for the Ark would be big enough for them all to fit along with the brace of each mammal and marsupial (including the extinct megafauna of each), reptile, bird, insect, amphibian and arachnid we already know of. (Or was it seven of each species of 'clean' animal and only two of the 'unclean' species, as another verse in Genesis suggests?) Not to mention the food they will all need for 40 days and 40 nights, and then a bit longer (150 days is suggested by a couple of verses until the Flood subsided). As a reminder the Ark was three storeys high. It measured 150 meters long, 25 meters wide and 15 meters high. And it had only one window, which was square, half a meter on a side. (All this assumes that a cubit was approximately 18 inches in the old money.) And another puzzle remains: how did the koala, with its exclusive diet of selected eucalypt leaves, migrate from the slopes of Mount Ararat to Australia, without a single edible plant along the way, and without leaving a single remnant of the journey along the way? I must ask the Creation Museum, which says that the dinosaurs were spared the flood, and were not, as previously suspected, victims of it, if there is an exhibit to explain that.
First written: June 2007
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