Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Fly me to the moon

Dunno about you but I've never liked flying. Never flew at all until I was 20 years old. Then had to fly fairly frequently on business, and now just occasionally on pleasure or for family crises. When I did I just wanted to be able to get to the airport in time to catch my plane, find parking, process my ticket quickly, get on the plane and grit my teeth and close my eyes until in the air, and then again when landing, hoping that there weren't any obstructions in the way. It wasn't a process of such great pleasure and joy that you would say to the family - "Come on, we need a treat, let's go out to the airport for the day, hang out." But in recent times people with an eye on the main chance and a large bank account have seen airport car park entrances as a place to station highwaymen, terminals as places to pack with shopping opportunities, and runways as just so much wasted space to pack with ever more shops and offices. And if, as a result of all this, the airport roads become so clogged with traffic you can't catch a flight, well then, tough luck, maybe the public will pay to build new roads.

A little while ago, an airport, not a million miles from Yass as the crow flies, announced its plans for massive expansion. More planes, bigger planes, round the clock planes; more retail development filling up every available piece of airport land not actually used by parked planes; more clogged roads, and parking that you need to mortgage your house to pay for. And the justification for all this? It would bring in, it was said, more than a billion dollars to the region.

Now call me cynical but I occasionally treat such claims with just a little bit of skepticism. Suggestions about untold riches, and job creation faster than pink batt production, are always trotted out whenever some group wants to make a few gadzillion dollars by destroying some chunk of the environment, or degrading some public amenity, or increasing pollution. The benefit to the spruiker is always obvious, the cost to the society always downplayed or entirely dismissed, the supposed financial benefits to the community always exaggerated.

So if someone tells you that some development is going to bring in one billion dollars to your region or town, ask yourself who gets that money - is it divided equally among the residents of the region? Of course not. So who actually gets it, and of what benefit is their getting it to the average member of the public? Does the money somehow stay in circulation around the development, or does it flow away in profit taking and payments to outside contractors? Is there a temporary boost to some local businesses while they supply temporary workers or is there a long-lasting increase in income? And when someone claims 3000 or even 300 "extra jobs" what does this mean? Temporary construction jobs (whether by local or external companies)? Some kind of arbitrary estimate of additional temporary employees supplying the project? And who does the accounting at the end to see what the actual long term financial or employment input to the community was? Anyone?

Conversely who accounts for community cost? Who measures traffic disruption and government-funded solutions, and extra costs to individuals in time and new charges, and reduction of amenities, and noise and chemical pollution, and loss of biodiversity, and government-funded repairs to damaged landscapes, and the effects of new big businesses on existing small ones?

So how do the benefits compare to the costs, and who gets the former and who pays the latter? It's a question we need to ask about every local development. It's a question we need to ask about the planet as a whole.

If you were playing poker for high stakes, and someone threw a promissory note for a billion dollars into the pot in order to make the opposing players fold their hands, would you go along with it or say "show me the money"? Far too often governments just go along with it, accepting whatever the handsome stranger who has ridden into town tells them. We need to start calling their bluff.

economic development

18 March 2010
Category Economics
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

Got to know when to hold em

The other day the NSW government announced, rather incredibly, that it was selling NSW Lotteries. Well, I shouldn't say incredibly, because nothing that the NSW government does should surprise anyone any more. But in the real world, outside Wonderland, the idea of selling the license to print money, sorry, lottery tickets, would be jealously guarded as a sure source of money for the state for as long as, well, as long as people want to gamble, or infinity, whichever is longer. But, there it was, up for sale, and snapped up (who would have thought?) by a private lottery company. A one off injection of cash to make the bottom line look a bit better, instead of regular income. But the new owners announced that they would be chasing increased profits. See NSW people haven't, apparently (who would have thought?), been gambling as much as those in other states. You would think, wouldn't you, that a NSW government would want to maintain this happy state of affairs, would want, perhaps, to even further reduce the bad effects that gambling has on individuals, families, societies. But no, by selling the lottery, the government ensured that an all out effort would be made to increase sales, the way a private company needs to do to increase profits. So there would be new "products", new promotional pushes to encourage people to lose more money, happily.

It is an example of a major defect in the capitalist system. All companies need to sell more and more product to increase profits and keep shareholders happy. Now that's fine when the product sold has a positive benefit to society, or at least not a negative one. But when the product is of negative social value, the more successful the company the less the community benefits. And indeed the more assiduous the company will be in ensuring that no government will be able to stop, or even curtail, its sales in the public interest. Gambling is an obvious example of this, but so is alcohol, and coal, and petrol, and electricity, and motorways, and forestry. Cigarettes were another classic example. The battle to reduce cigarette smoking in society was fought every step of the way by cigarette companies (using their political influence and using "think tanks" to produce "doubt" among politicians and public), and is still being fought as each minor change in warning notices, advertising restrictions, place of smoking restrictions and so on is resisted. And even as they were losing battle after battle, cigarette companies were shifting operations to poor countries in Africa and Asia, where, free of restriction and regulation, they could set about getting millions more potential customers addicted to nicotine.

In recent times we have seen the NSW government privatising motorways and then actually closing roads to force people on to the tollways because they had made a deal to ensure high profits to the motorway companies. A company relying on cars going through toll booths will do anything to prevent that flow of vehicles diminishing. The battle over privatising power stations in NSW was fought for a number of reasons. But the major one was that a private company selling power will be in the business of ensuring that power use is never reduced. What is energy efficiency for community good is decreased profit for company bad. In WA a few years ago an attempt to build a new power station based on natural gas, a marginally less polluting fuel than coal, was met with massive resistance by coal unions and the local Labor member, outraged that coal use would be reduced. John Howard won an election with significant help from Tasmanian forestry unions, outraged that the Labor party might try to protect some old growth forest. And so it goes. The hardest thing to teach a man, they say, is something his job depends on him not knowing.

And now the biggie. Continuing, and growing, profits to be made by producing ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the air with no concern about tomorrow. Attempts by government to switch to more efficient energy use, and sustainable energy sources may cause a temporary reduction in the growth of profits until the new energy economy is established. And so, just like cigarette smoking, the big companies have swung into action to create doubt and block political action. Even, among the more cynical, simultaneously denying there is a problem while pushing for massive funding and development of nuclear power and "clean coal" (think "clean cigarettes").

They are happy to gamble with our future. Are you? And are you willing to gamble more and more as time goes on?

global warming

16 March 2010
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

Atheists, walk this way

Going through airport security recently I was pulled up when the scanners spotted a can of shaving cream in my bag. Out of the queue, unpack bag, find shaving cream among all your other personal hygiene items as people keep a wary eye on you as a possible terrorist.

And I felt like saying - "Hey, I'm an atheist, I'm off to the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, atheists don't blow up planes or anything else."

And then, in my spot a money making venture a mile away (eye on being part of next year's Forbes list of excessively rich people) mode I thought - how about flights for atheists only? Special treatment, no need for scanning luggage and body and handing over phones and being embarrassed by shaving cream, just walk this way Mr Atheist sir. Flights could be cheaper without all that security, and certainly quicker.

I reckon a lot more atheists would come out of the closet too. Come forward to claim yet another benefit of living the superstition-free life.

And so, just as special benefits for non-smokers encourage the giving up of the filthy nicotine habit, so special benefits for atheists would encourage the giving up of the filthy religion habit.

And eventually (after hell freezes over) all of us could avoid the embarrassment and delay currently caused by the potential, at any time, for some religious person to go bat-shit crazy.

atheism

15 March 2010
Category Religion
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Our Gang

Remember when Butch Cassidy and Sundance, endlessly pursued by a gang of vigilantes, unable to shake them off, looked at each other and said, in wonderment, "Who are these guys?"

Feel the same way about the gang of vigilante know-nothings hunting down every post about climate change all over the world, endlessly coming back, no matter how many times partly shaken off, to repeat the same kinds of unscientific nonsense learnt from denier blogs. Endlessly attacking, both in public (libelling scientists) and in private (death threats and abuse), science, the crowning glory and achievement of western civilisation. Determined to destroy science and replace it with extreme right wing ideology and religion. Back to the Dark Ages but this time into a society run not by king and established church but by multinational corporation and fundamentalist church.

And they seem to have appeared from nowhere, these rabid naysayers.

If you had asked me, say ten years ago, how the world was going to respond to climate change and the absolutely imperative need to reduce greenhouse gas production, I would have responded somewhat pessimistically, knew that it was going to be a battle between science and vested interests, just like earlier battles over DDT, tobacco, CFCs, acid rain, asbestos, tree clearing, and on, and on. Whenever there are trillions of dollars (minimum $1 billion per day lost to oil industry if there is co-ordinated action to restrict the increase in global temperatures to 2ºC) at stake then the gloves come off. Donations will be made to political parties and individuals, lobbyists will set to work bending arms, right wing think tanks established with tame scientists willing to manufacture doubt, the Murdoch Press will open its opinion and news pages to outright denial, unions will be convinced that their natural allies are the bosses, scientific bodies will be silenced, opposition parties will buy votes by offering to do nothing. I could see all that coming to pass but I would not say that the struggle nought availeth. I thought that dispassionate and disinterested calm statements and restatements of scientific truths would eventually prevail over the forces of the energy company bottom line. But "Good, too, logic of course, but not in fine weather". And so the labour and the wounds were in vain, the enemy fainted not, nor faileth, "and as things have been, things remain".

What I hadn't counted on was the help that the vigilante know-nothings would give to the big corporations. Who could have known that, just as the battle was in the balance, a damned near run thing, red devils carrying pitchforks and pitch would come screaming over the hill on a Saturday night and destroy the representatives of five hundred years of scientific endeavour. That science's regimental colours, with images of Galileo, Newton, Arrhenius, and Einstein, would be trampled in the mud by striped uniform heathens with banners bearing the images of radio shock jocks and right wing bloggers and hereditary lords.

A number of us have tried to understand this phenomenon of the new dark ages, for example Clive Hamilton, John Quiggin, and myself, but all of us, not being football fans, have failed to really come to grips with that always lethal combination of hatred and ignorance seen on blog after blog about the reality and dangers of climate change. Having read the incredible number of vitriolic responses to Clive Hamilton's climate change series on Unleashed, and the positive applauding "you go girl" responses to Joanne Nova's Unleashed piece (in which the forces of light, the energy companies, desperately poverty stricken and outnumbered, are fighting the good fight against the forces of darkness, the green peril who have untold riches provided by governments), an LED light bulb suddenly lit up in my cerebellum. This was football. This was Manchester United supporters coming into Arsenal territory, or Collingwood and Essendon supporters outside the gates of the MCG. This was overweight and middle-aged men wearing no-longer-fitting-if-they-ever-did striped or red football jumpers, singing "We are the Champions", or "We'll do you on the train".

And each gang is led by the biggest meanest s.o.b. of all, the denialist bloggers. These are the leaders who start off the slogan chanting, lead the rush to the enemy, smash opposing leaders, put the boot into prone figures. This is the stuff of secret societies, our gang, outsiders, bogans, the rejected, the unpopular kids in school. They can be convinced that the Other (the elites, intelligentsia, government, scientists, authorities, people who look down on the unwashed hordes) is the enemy. And now comes payback time, hit back at those who you blame for your unsatisfied life. Show them who is really boss. Very powerful emotions. Used to motivate mobs since time began.

Have always been around, these people. I once met a chap over lunch. Normal conversation until he mentioned his large gun collection. Why so many, I asked. For when the Indonesians invade, he said. I began to go along with the joke, as you do, ho, ho, yes, they'll be charging through Alice Springs any day now, when something about his expression and silence made me realise he was deadly serious. Seems that is exactly what they would be doing and the Howard government had a secret agreement with them, like the Brisbane Line of WW2, to give them the top half of the country, he had read this in his conspiracy theory magazine (secret UFO research, fluoride poisoning our children). My lunch companion was ready to take to the hills and fight them.

The other day I met an at first apparently normal truck driver who said he was "cured" of blindness by the laying on of hands, and how all sickness was the result of not obeying the exact word of the Bible. Another fellow, met in a country pub, discovering that I was working on Aboriginal archaeology, told me proudly that they had "got rid of all the Abos in this town a while back" (Myall Creek massacre of 1838, 170 years before our conversation, but still a source of pride). Ah, if I had a dollar for every nutter I have met I would be as rich as George Soros and could take over the world. Point is, the knowledge-poor have always been with us, but once upon a time they were left to bloom unseen and waste their ignorance on the desert air. Now, what with first talk back radio, and now blogs, they not only have microphones, but are welcomed as statistics on visitor counters. Fair enough, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public, or as some shock jock said - there's a sucker born every minute. Gotta make a living how you can, and if your living involves inciting mobs to trash science and prevent action on global warming, well, then, what of it? Ya wanna fight?

But always look on the bright side of life. The advantage of all this is that these people are making themselves known. No longer spreading anonymous poison in pubs or at a football match. The hidden casual racism, the conspiracy theories, the anti government rhetoric, the gun ownership, the hatred of environmentalism and science in general, the extreme nationalism, are now exposed to the light of the internet. It will take another ten years of science and reason, another ten wasted years that are going to see CO2 levels so high as to cause serious planetary damage, but at least the battle will be fought knowing who all the players are, and who is over the hill waiting to attack.

Football is not just a matter of life and death, it's much more serious than that.

global warming

15 March 2010
Category Climate change
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Kevin Rudds schooldays

When I was a schoolboy I quite often got reports saying "must try harder". Not very helpful really because there was never any indication of how trying harder was to be achieved, or how it could be measured, or, indeed, what the purpose of the extra effort was. So you were left with the feeling that the headmaster, teacher, other members of the class, family, community, perhaps the whole population of Australia was dissatisfied with you in some undefined way, and so you needed to pull your socks up, knuckle down to it, put your nose to the grindstone, or undertake any undefined metaphor that would make everyone feel happier about you.

Was reminded of my schooldays recently when Kevin Rudd, in that schoolmasterly way he has, said that people were disappointed in the government, and that he was disappointed in his government, and indeed himself, and that they deserved a "whacking" (this will hurt me more than it hurts you), although he meant in opinion polls and not in the "only poll that counts". But just like my old school reports, there was no diagnosis of the reason for the disappointment, or a suggestion of a cure, just a desire to try harder. That is, he was committing himself to do more of the same but do it faster and higher and stronger or something. Look, perhaps I can help Kevin here, given my experience of disappointing people in my school years.

So here it is - people don't want more of the same Kevin. They don't want you, and your staff, and your ministers, spending 19 hours a day in your offices instead of 18 hours a day. They don't want you working harder at what you've been doing they want you doing things differently. See when you arrived in school in 2007 as the new head prefect you showed much promise. People had great expectations of you. There seemed to be intelligence, and hard work, and ideas, and a determination to be a new broom sweeping clean a schoolyard that had been left in a mess by the previous head prefect. And all of it informed by a kind of mysterious benefactor, seen only as a light on a hill, who would help you to be a good person, help you make Australia a better place. But something went wrong, Kevin, and, in another phrase I used to get on reports, you are "not performing to your potential".

And the reason is clear. In every subject area you have studied - health, industrial relations, the environment, education, indigenous affairs, terrorism - you haven't done any of your own work but just got hold of an old exam paper by the previous head boy and copied his answers word for word. Your benefactor turned out not to be a mysterious stranger with a shining light, but John Howard. And the public, us, don't like it Kevin. If we wanted John Howard's answers we would have kept him on as head boy. We didn't want school league tables, and nuclear waste dumps, and union bashing, and state health systems conducting business as usual, and "intervention", and troops for Afghanistan, and uranium mines, and phonics, and censorship, and big money for coal mining companies and banks and religious schools. What we wanted, after 11 years of neoconservative government pushing Australian culture and society and economy further and further to the right, was a social democrat government that was at least notionally left of centre to redress the balance a bit. So do some homework Kevin. Get out your old text books by Tressell, Dickens, Steinbeck, Zola, Orwell, Swift, and Pratchett. Check out the work of those earlier head boys in Curtin and Chifley and Whitlam. Have a chat to that other head boy from the American School who also promised much and proved a disappointment, for the same reasons as you, Barack Obama, see if he has any ideas for improving performance.

Don't forget that there is a big exam coming to measure your performance in your first three years of study. Don't want to have to put "failed" on your report card and install a new head boy, do we? And you seem to have become aware of this, belatedly, with your hospital announcement, although even here the correct answer would have included more money, not Howard-era rubbish about "efficiencies"

Nose to the grindstone, young Kevin, must try harder.

Kevin Rudd

5 March 2010
Category Politics federal
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

Putting away childish things

Who was it who said we shouldn't tell children fairy stories, things that aren't true? I disagree. My grandchildren all love made up things, strange things, things "beyond the present world". Love pretending that odd things like flying and magic can happen. Love, in fact, stuff that children have always loved.

But we stop, don't we, pretending about most of this stuff? Either when they ask a question, perhaps with some encouragement, or just let it slip away, embarrassed, when their friends spill the beans, one by one they lose belief in Father Xmas, Tooth Fairy and other fairies, Easter Bunny, witches and wizards, Superman, things that go bump in the night, and all the rest of the imaginary furniture of a child's world. And as parents, grandparents, we might regret the loss of belief in fantastic things, while appreciating more signposts, along with new teeth and pencil marks of height creeping up a wall, of a child maturing, growing wiser. Might in fact be a little worried if beliefs in unreality persisted too long, would drop big hints if a child was really still believing in obviously untrue things beyond, say, the age of seven, perhaps eight.

Except, in some cases, where the beliefs involve the obvious untruths of whichever religion the child has been indoctrinated with. Then the parents want the children to keep understanding as children, thinking as children, and never to put away these childish things.

Does it matter if grown people keep on believing in things that a seven year old child, given freedom of thought and action, would dump into the wastebasket along with the tooth fairy? Yes, of course it does, because if you can get an adult to keep on believing in untrue things in this area you can get them to believe untrue things in any area. Enter creationists, and tea-baggers, and climate change deniers, and birthers, and truthers, and WMD in Iraq, and death panels, and the global war on terrorism, and Obama is a socialist, and all the rest of this childish rubbish that is constantly being trotted out these days by children in adult bodies.

Going to take a long time to turn around this barrage of unreality that is corrupting political systems designed in and for more enlightened times. A good place to start would be to let children dump religion when they dump all the other fairy stories from their mental furniture.

atheism

3 March 2010
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

Health nuts

Ah, you can take the Liberal leader out of the health ministry, but you can't take the health minister out of the bike rider. There was Tony exhibiting the usual obsession - sell, sell, sell. One day he was selling off Medibank, again, the day before he was making public hospitals in marginal seats in NSW and Qld an offer they couldn't refuse. You will be independent and have a businessman running you and prepare for privatisation. Oh, ok, I made the last part up, but if I had a dollar for every time I made up some apparently far-fetched Liberal policy that later came true I would be moderately well off. Well, less poor.

Haven't had much personal direct experience in hospital, tonsils removed in about 1953, stent inserted about 55 years later, but I suspect that is two more experiences than Mr Abbott has had. What you have to understand about the "health policy" of the conservative side of politics is that there is no health policy, never has been, never will be. Conservative politicians have absolutely no interest in either public health or the health of the public. Health is just an area of potential profit making for corporations. Just like infrastructure, or the environment, or education, or indigenous affairs, or northern Australia. So sell Medibank - why would you keep it when some giant corporation, quite possibly overseas based, can make big money and phony claims about "retiring debt" can be made? What about the yearly return to the government, what about the presence in the market of an entity with an aim of keeping prices down and providing good service as a way of keeping some pressure on all the privately owned companies? Not interested - conservative politicians have no interest in real competition either, just the kind of fake competition that keeps profits high.

And put local boards in charge of individual hospitals? No mention of improved resources and funding for the hospitals, just breaking up the network into individual components. How exactly will this improve performance? Do they imagine competition between Yass and Goulburn hospitals? Ambulances racing along the highway hoping to be first on the scene to grab a new patient? Massive advertising campaigns to encourage people to turn left on the highway instead of right? How does it benefit the public if every local hospital is run differently with different priorities and staffing and facilities, and work to their own plan, not to an overall strategy that rationalises activities over a region, so that, to an even greater extent than now, what quality of health care you get will be absolutely determined by where you live. And then, since these hospitals are all independent, run by local businessmen in the same way as you would run a private company, why not sell them all off? And then, on top of the regional variations, taking profits out of each hospital will reduce services even more. And they will dwindle down to just performing the profitable activities.

Call me cynical, if you haven't before, but I think this is the extent of Liberal plans for the health system. They look with envy at the American system where huge profits are made by hospitals, insurers, drug companies. Where those who can afford it get the "best medical treatment in the world", and those who can't either go bankrupt trying to get treatment, or put up with debilitating health problems, or die young.

Look, I know it's too late for Tony - the conservatives got to him young and he was theirs for life. But surely there is someone left on the right of the political highway who could leave ideology behind like leaving suit, hat, and glasses behind in a phone booth, and think about what government action and funding is needed to provide quality health care to all Australians rich or poor, young or old, city or country. Propose asking each hospital what their needs are and provide them, rather than imposing a board on them with no new resources. Announce they were leaving Medibank where it is to keep the bastards honest. Work from the grass roots up, not from the ideology down.

I may be due for another hospital visit any time as my creaky bones reach the end of yet another 365 days. Hope they are not playing political football in the wards when I arrive.

Tony Abbott

27 February 2010
Category Health
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Three Strikes

One of those bad weeks recently for the environment where troubles come in threes. There was the Agriculture Minister the other day pushing, rightly, the benefits of research in agriculture as a way of helping to adapt to the coming climate change. Only to ruin it by forcibly demanding, in a kind of schoolmaster's voice that allows no dissenting opinion, that if all of this other research stuff didn't work, well, then, watch out world, coming, ready or not - GM crops. We will, it seems, eat our GM greens and like them. It is one of the most disheartening things about the battle to save the planet. Endless obstruction and denial of the most basic facts about a warming planet and its cause and effect. Deliberate obstruction to prevent public concern forcing political action. And then, every so often, an entirely cynical comment to the effect that if you greenies are so concerned about climate change then you would support GM organisms and nuclear power, they are the only solutions. Such people don't believe there is a problem, refuse to support real solutions (reduce CO2) and real adaptation (improving the efficiency of water use and cultivation practices in agriculture, making homes and factories more energy efficient), but see an opportunity for big profits (and massive government subsidies) if they can use public concern to ram through nuclear power and GM food. That is, add even more problems to those we are already faced with.

And then there was Warren Truss. Perhaps trying to show Barnaby who's boss of the National Party (having waited years, without result, for Barnaby to say "you are the Captain, I am no one") Warren struck out on to the vast plains of northern Australia. For several years a parliamentary committee has been looking in detail at whether the agriculture of southern Australia, faced with extinction as a result of rising temperatures and reduced rainfall as the effects of CO2 take hold in a way obvious to anyone sitting on a farm, could pack up, fold its tents in the night, and silently steal away, leaving the cares that infested their days to try growing wheat and Herefords on the flood plains of Arnhem Land. Taking testimony from expert witnesses, reading submissions and research reports, considering the matter carefully. Concluded, finally, and this was probably like confessing to a murder, that there was only an infinitesimally small area that was suitable, and even then you would have to be very careful not to cause massive environmental damage to this fragile area by damming rivers, clearing trees, ploughing soils. You would think that, faced with such a carefully researched conclusion, Mr Truss might pause to read it before commenting. But no, just like a modern day Joh Bjelke-Peterson (gotta be fair, compared Barnaby to Joh, don't want Warren to think I am playing favourites), Mr Truss was outraged that anyone should suggest that the whole of northern Australia couldn't be flattened with a ball and chain pulled between two tractors, and concrete poured into every river valley that had sloping sides. Outraged. I mean, we have done such a good job looking after the south that it is only fair that the northern half experience the same stewardship. And later Bill Heffernan was outraged that scientists had been asked to study the question on the task force because "all academics think about is retiring down the coast", continuing the frightening anti-science ignorance-is-bliss approach of the Howard government.

And then (no favourites here) came Anna Bligh, standing, the body language speaking volumes in both directions, next to Clive Palmer, and announcing that, great news, a gazillion tons or two of black stuff could be dug out of the sweeping plains of Queensland and fast-tracked to the furnaces of China. Great work - what's good for the coal industry is good for Australia. A job or two available perhaps, driving trucks and bulldozers and trains, and a lot of money going to Clive and to China (who had financed the deal, although within a couple of days the details seemed to be uncertain). Questioned (and the question seems not to have occurred to Anna, determined to (a) show Queensland that she was the Captain at the helm and (b) not let Clive kiss her) as to the possible effects of burning a gazillion tons (or two) of coal on that tiny process called global warming, she smiled and said we all supported "clean coal". The smile looked as convincing as the smile on the face of a dog that has just taken a cane toad into its mouth.

Anyway, it was a week as depressing for me as for Chris Gayle. Just when you think there might be a glimmer of hope on the horizon the sun is blocked by dark clouds. For some time now we have been taking two steps forward and three steps back, and we seem to be heading ever further back to the future into the 1950s and beyond. Pretty soon will come the building of the Ord River dam. Any moment now we will see Don Bradman striding to the crease only to be bowled, like Chris Gayle, first ball. And after that what? War? Depression? Fires? Dust bowls? Cane toads arriving?

But in the real world we are still faced with two degrees, three degrees of warming, and still faced with the massively damaging clearing of land, and still faced with the threat of GM organisms spreading all kinds of nasty DNA into weed species, faced with them spreading like canola along the roads of the southern tablelands. Would be good if some of these people could take a step back and look at what is really going on.

Three strikes and you're in trouble.

global warming

18 February 2010
Category Environment
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Then they came for the Greenies

There are groups of people in our society who are fair game for attack - bankers, drug dealers, breakfast show hosts, lawyers, used car dealers, scientologists, footballers, journalists, oil companies, politicians. There are other groups who are never attacked - nurses, carers, old people, boy scouts, preschool teachers, soldiers, quakers, swimmers, firefighters, lifesavers. The differences between the groups are clearly understood, the dichotomy between harmful and harmless, negative and positive, easily recognised, and new groups readily slotted in place for brickbats or bouquets.

Which makes it surprising that there is one group that of its very nature clearly belongs among the latter groups, but is subject to more virulent and hateful attacks than even the oil companies. I refer of course to “greenies”, conservationists, ecologists, environmentalists, climatologists.

A sample. An article in the Australian ("Snow-roots campaign a form of green self-hate") by Brendan O'Neill: "the human self-loathing of the environmentalist moment"; "the misanthropic, people-less politics of being green"; "the denigration of human desire, the subordination of the human will to the animalistic fearmongering of environmentalism." Some posts from climate change blogs: "this monstrous, anti-human, AGW cult of death"; "many of the greenies would love it if the world actually did come to an end and humanity was swallowed up into the fiery pit, since in its hardcore form, the green "religious belief" is really a hatred of humanity: believing that humans are a vile plague on the face of the planet that needs to be eradicated;" "Most conservationists are deeply right-wing misanthropists that see humanity and the great unwashed as a cancer upon the pure Earth." "These evil Greens are up there with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.” And finally Miranda Devine's SMH claim ("Green ideas must take blame for deaths") that greenies were responsible for the Victorian fires and the deaths - "it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies".

There is a long history in many countries of the world of various groups being used as scapegoats to keep a particular group in power, to divert attention from political shortcomings, to divert attention from shifts of wealth, to allow for land grabs. Lynch mobs can be, and are, whipped up, houses burnt, victims strung from lamp posts or trees, imprisoned in ghettoes or camps, labelled, abused, robbed, expelled. Powerful tool, hate, powerful technique, the creation of labels, the identification of the forces of evil, the causes of all that is wrong in a society.

Greenies are in real life good, mild mannered, citizens, who help little old ladies cross the road; who are opposed to war; who join community groups, give money to charities, support indigenous issues, protest on behalf of refugees, back unions, worry about children and old people; use public hospitals and public schools and public libraries; keep themselves well informed on political and economic issues; look after grandchildren, recycle waste, shop ethically, love music and art, make craft items for sale at school fetes, try to be vegetarian. They love people, and worry about what kind of world is going to be left to their grandchildren, and everyone's grandchildren, as the planet warms and forests are flattened and threatened species go extinct. Because they are deeply concerned about the human race they are deeply concerned about conserving the biodiversity that supports it, the environment that supplies the essentials for life. Oh and they believe that the thousands of other species we share DNA, history, and a planet, with, have a right to survive too.

So why the campaign to have them seen in the public eye as low life scum who make pedophiles look like Mother Theresa? Well partly it's an obvious cynical campaign by people with a vested interest in clearing forest, flattening sand dunes, building nuclear power stations, mining coal, growing GM crops, commercially exploiting national parks, pouring waste into tropical oceans, sucking all water out of rivers, causing species extinctions, warming the planet. The rise of environmental concerns and protests in the 1960s, with the EIS system and biodiversity protection, had big business, big agribusiness, big developers, big miners, all running a bit scared. Forced them to work a bit harder to preserve habitat or reduce pollution, raised their costs a little, put some opportunities for massive profit out of bounds. And so they have fought back - discredit the greenies and we are back to the "anything goes" "open for business" "get out of the way of progress" mentality that prevailed in the 1950s. The usual self interest of those to whom environmental destruction is just another name for nothing left to lose. And the nastiness heaped on greenies by those media shock jocks paid directly or indirectly by the enemies of the environment, and by the politicians who think that being a polluter or a destroyer should mean never having to say you are sorry, has an obvious source.

Less obvious are the motives of the lynch mobs who are whipped up by jocks and pollies. The angry red-faced men (usually) who haunt talk back radio and letters to the editor and swarm all over threads about climate change are not people who stand to make money from a satanic mill or a devilish uranium mine. So why the torrents of vicious abuse against retired gentle men and gentle girls with flowers in their hair?

Ever been in the position of needing to tell a friend about something fundamental to their sense of being, for example that they should stop smoking, lose weight, dump an abusive partner, or that they have a problem with, you know, um, odour? Ever lost a friend, just like that? Well, these snarling, shrieking, savaging, greenie haters are like once friends who you were honest with, now bagging you to all the once mutual friends. Greenies make the mistake of being honest about something that is fundamental to these people - the state of the planet and their beliefs about how it works. Have said that unchecked capitalism is the problem not the solution, that sustainable development is an oxymoron, that humans are powerful enough to change the climate of the planet, that other species matter, and that if they want their grandchildren to live in the kind of world their grandparents grew up in they have to change their ways and change them now.

How else can some people react to those ideas than with rage and violence and scapegoating eh? If a doctor told them they had heart problems, needed an operation, medicine, and a change of diet and lifestyle they would tell that fascist anti-human fear-mongering death cultist where he could go.

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

13 February 2010

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Joyce for Canberra

Remember the old "Six degrees of separation" fashion?. Went the way of hula hoops and yo-yos I suppose. The idea was that any person in the world could be linked to any other person in just 6 steps. Is it true? Well let's try it with, oh, say, Barnaby Joyce and Ronald Reagan. Can't be done you say? Well, I reckon I could do it in one step.

Among the many things for which Ronald Reagan, worst president in US history until the crown was snatched, easily, by Mr Bush, was famous was this. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, a man with his eye, unusually for a US president, on the future rather than the past, had installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Carter could see what was coming, having lived through the 1973 "oil shock", and decided to set an example for the American people in alternative energy use and in reduced energy consumption (he famously had the WH thermostats turned down a bit). Virtually Reagan's first act (I'm guessing after turning the thermostats up) after swearing-in was to order the panels torn off the roof.

Now note that this wasn't just a matter of leaving the panels there to rot because he wasn't interested, he actually and symbolically ripped them down as a way of thumbing his nose at any environmental considerations whatsoever. Americans would burn as much oil and coal as they wanted to, and they would never resort to this greenie solar energy nonsense. It was an emphatic statement that the right wing in America (and later here) was at war with the conservation movement.

And Barnaby? Well there he was the other day sneering at Labor for helping people insulate their houses. Insulation, ''that's the fluffy stuff that sits in the ceiling for rats and mice to urinate on''. Not a criticism of the way the program was implemented - certainly criticism there has been - but a sneer at the very idea that people would insulate their houses to save energy. In Barnaby's world, like Reagan's, Australians are free to waste as much energy as they please, and no world communist government is going to insulate their houses thanks very much. Or stop them clearing all the trees in Australia, if they felt like it, as he was saying a day earlier.

There you are, one degree of separation. But what is it about Queensland Nationals eh? They are all, it seems, like Joh Bjelke-Peterson, driven by a hatred of any idea of conservation, hate public service, hate foreigners, hate any regulations (especially environmental ones), and adopt loopy people (in Barnaby's case Lord Monckton) as their gurus.

Just once it would be refreshing to hear one of our friends from the north say something that wasn't based on a fundamentalist conservative view of the universe. Recognise, perhaps, that public servants are almost entirely hard working, low paid, dedicated people serving the community in ways that big business won't and can't; that foreign aid is both an obligation for a rich country, a sign of our humanity, and an investment in a more stable world; understand that enormous damage has already been done to our environment, a lot more is coming as the globe warms, and that failing ecosystems are in no one's interest (including the interest of the farmers these Nationals claim to represent). Just once.

Even Reagan (much in the same way as a stopped clock is right twice a day) occasionally said something sensible. Joh, not so much.

But Barnaby is young, and perhaps he is not totally lost to the real world. Maybe the southern Nationals could take him down to the basement, give him the old third degree treatment, tell him to start living in the real world.

Barnaby Joyce

11 February 2010
Category Politics federal
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Fame

Timesonline http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/02/best-science-blogs.html has a list of what they consider the world's 30 best science blogs, and are asking for nominations of others to get it up to 100. You might find something of interest in the current list, but if any of my loyal readers and occasional visitors thought that the Watermelon Blog was worth adding, and therefore gaining another million or two readers, it would be much appreciated by your humble author.

5 February 2010
Category Values
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Walk on the wild side

A strange protest the other day - a farmer's organisation protesting that farmers weren't being compensated for not damaging the environment. At the same time came the announcement that western governments were going to pay the Taliban not to fight. Here's a go, thought I, I'll say that I agree not to rob any banks as long as they pay me a lot of money. It's a protection racket approach isn't it, you pay us money or we are going to go on destroying the environment.

At the time of writing I don't know if Tony Abbott will address the assembled protesters (although I reckon I could make my retirement much more comfortable by mortgaging the house and putting all the money on a bet that he would be), but their cause would certainly be one he approves of. Tony came out recently with a proposal to massively fund a "green corps" of people who would go around pulling weeds, planting trees, repairing environmental damage. It is all reminiscent of the preference for treating medical conditions after they arise rather than finding ways to to stop them developing initially. You know the biggest advances in public health were preventative, don't you - improvements in diet, sewage disposal, water purity, vaccination? Same with the environment. I'm betting (this is going to be a rich retirement) that Mr Abbott is of the view that we should let things get wrecked, first, by big corporate business, big agribusiness, big Aboriginal business, big aquabusiness, big energybusiness. Don't ever allow any kind of regulation, any limitation, on damage to the environment if some corporation can make money from the damage. And don't allow any protest to halt the damage before it has reached the end of the road, it must go on until every last scrap of money-making damage has been inflicted. And then, turn around, and say, oh, my goodness gracious me, look at what a mess has been left here. We need to hire some people to plant some trees, clean up some rubbish - would have to be a private company, of course, must be a lot of money, government money, to be made by some corporation hired to clean up the mess other corporations have made.

The television media doesn't help. Happy (and right) to run, for example, stories about individual koalas rescued from a fire, or shot with a gun, but have no interest in saving habitat from logging, wood-chipping (for example, most recently, at Tathra), burning, development, that the species as a whole needs to survive. Bit like pandas really, both species almost certainly doomed to extinction as their habitats are wrecked, but there will still be money to be made by maintaining a few specimens in zoos and wildlife parks. Similarly Tony wants to get rid of Wild Rivers legislation in Cape York, one of the few places it might still be possible to conserve the environment before it is wrecked.

But over all these concerns is the biggie, climate change. This is the one that must be tackled before it takes hold fully, because there will be no tackling it after, Green Corps or no Green Corps. And Mr Abbott, no doubt hindered by the fact that his whole front bench, including himself, are climate change deniers, announced this week that a Liberal government would deal with global warming at absolutely no cost to anyone.

No such thing as a free koala, Tony. But the costs of prevention of environmental disaster, whether on a global scale or in a small country town, are far less than the costs of trying to fix up, clean up, adapt, later. You should have learned that prevention was better than cure when you were minister for health. But being a bush walking greenie, as you described yourself, doesn't seem to have taught you anything.

Give me a call, Tony, we'll go for a walk in the bush, on the wild side. I'll talk you through a few things.

global warming

4 February 2010
Category Environment
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Secret Millionaire

I have a photo on my wall of my grandfather as a young boy. Full of promise he was, and with musical talent, and his mother bought him, somehow, a piano, and enrolled him for lessons. Then she died, when he was just ten, and his uncle, effectively head of the extended family, demanded that the lessons stop, they were inappropriate for a boy from a poor family, all he needed to know was enough to play hymns in church. Oh, and by the way, time he was out of school and into a job - he knew how to read and write didn't he? And that was that.

It was a common pattern in Victorian England, where there was a place for everyone and everyone was in their place. An education League Table. The noble rich had excellent schools like Eton and Harrow where they were taught how to stay rich and rule the Empire while being prepared for respectable seconds at Oxford. The middle class with aspirations could try the flogging shop schools described by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, but it wouldn't change their rank at all. The poor had, at best, a village school where for a very few years they would learn, from an unqualified teacher, their times table and alphabet and, perhaps, how to sign their name, but before you could say "Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write", and probably before their age had reached double figures, they were out of school and down the mines and into the factories. They needed education for nothing more than that.

Government or state schools were meant to change all that. To provide, in Australia, a quality education for rich and poor alike. To provide a chance for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, or, for that matter, middle class backgrounds, to go as far educationally as their abilities and desires would take them. Oh there would still be those who wanted to recreate Eton under southern skies, providing an old school tie for Australian Boardrooms; or ensuring that children had no alternative to the religious certainties of their family. But if that's what you wanted to do you paid for it, otherwise you were all welcome at the local public school.

Julia Gillard's league tables are going to take us back to Dickensian times. Poor schools will get poorer as students are pulled out of them, rich ones richer as Julia unaccountably pours money into them. Eventually children from poor families will give up, as my grandfather had to do.

Look, I think gathering information on performance (as long as that is what you are really measuring, which is a question for another day) of schools is fine. There are many public schools in poor city areas and poor regional areas who have struggled for years as conservative and then Labor governments have pulled money out. Compounding the problems by naming and shaming them isn't something I thought I would ever see a Labor minister do though. Why couldn't Julia keep the results to herself? Keep them secret. But then turn up at a school, disguised perhaps as a teacher's aide, and suddenly announce herself as the secret millionaire who was going to write out a big cheque for the struggling school that had been trying so hard. Not rest content until every public school in Australia was equal on the level playing fields of Eton.

Come on Julia, I'll help you with the disguise.

Julia Gillard

28 January 2010
Category Education
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Jolly good fellow

Heard a description of the long awaited, loyal hearts-a-fluttering, arrival of young William Windsor (Wales? Whatever) in Australia. It will be, said one media outlet, speaking, I'm sure, for all of us, "His tour of duty to prove he's ready to be our King". Quite right too, and I think the principle could be extended to other important roles in Australia.

Imagine if you will that we have a young fellow wander into Yass - to see if he is ready to be Mayor (or police chief, doctor, headmaster, captain of football team). Has no qualifications, but is the son of the son of a woman whose father's brother was the second son of a Mayor in 1936. Pleasant sort of chap (with a lot to be pleasant about), it seems, not the sharpest knife in the drawer perhaps, but wears a suit, and a polo uniform well, and is apparently quite popular with the ladies. Church of England of course, no question of any other religion. Plenty of young fellows (and ladies, but ladies only get to play the DNA employment card if there isn't a man available) far more qualified, and experienced, to be mayor (or doctor etc) than this chap, but they don't have the breeding, do you see. And colonials just wouldn't do either. No, unless your great grandfather was available when his brother decided he didn't want to take over as Mayor from his father in 1936 then you don't have the right stuff.

So, anyway, the young fellow intends to arrive in Yass in a motorcade and wander along Comur Street for a few minutes. Will say, "Good morning, how are you?" and "Good morning, lovely day" to any locals who happen to be in the street. And they will all nod wisely and agree that there is something really special about someone who can trace his ancestry back to the son of a woman whose father's brother was the second son of a Mayor in 1936. Just looks .... well, just looks every inch a Mayor. Breeding will out every time of course.

He has this beautiful girlfriend too, so they will breed beautiful babies (just like Danni Minogue and what's 'is name), and then their oldest male baby will one day become Mayor of Yass in turn.

Look I know there are a few killjoys around. Not many, only a minority of about 60% thankfully, but they could never agree about whether a Mayor should get elected directly by the people of Yass, or whether the council members elected by the people of Yass should vote on who became mayor. Anyway, sort of like Stephen Bradbury winning the ice skating race after coming last and then all the other contestants falling over, the small number of mayorists won the day when the people got to vote about whether the great grandson of a former mayor should always become mayor. So the killjoys can mutter all they like, they know, really, it makes sense not to have to vote for a position like mayor. Sort of undignified really, this democracy business.

So the mayor of Yass will continue to automatically be the handsome young fellow with the right DNA (and a Y chromosome). We've seen him shake hands, and wave - he's clearly ready to be our mayor. After his father has his turn of course.

For he's a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us.

Prince William

22 January 2010
Category Politics federal
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On the road again

Ever looked after small children? You find yourself in the position of the sorcerer's apprentice. They will ask for something, and while you are getting that they will ask for something else, so you try to get both things. Meanwhile they have decided they want to do something different. Or go to the toilet. Or go outside. Or find something they have lost. And so on. One thing at a time, you can deal with; ten, a dozen, no chance.

It is one of the easiest and most cynical of all political opposition and media ploys - whenever a road accident occurs, anywhere, under any circumstances, demand on camera to know why the government hasn't spent money to fix that section of the road. If you are the journalist, ask locals whether this was "an accident waiting to happen" (by definition it was, every accident was once an accident waiting to happen). Ask motoring associations how many billions of dollars they think should be spent on roads (an infinite amount is never out of the question). Then demand of the minister for roads an explanation as to why that piece of road hasn't yet been turned into a six lane highway. Another day, another accident, another piece of road, repeat recipe as above.

The recipe never includes any context - no indication of how many kilometres of road there are, how much is being spent every year, how many people use the road concerned, how many accidents actually have occurred at that spot. And no indication of the actual cause of the accident concerned - was it the road itself, driver error, mechanical failure. Even more importantly, there is no context provided to remind viewers that recently, perhaps as recently as the day before, the same politician and media outlet were demanding, with equal ferocity, that taxes be slashed. May well have said, with an air of someone discovering a great undiscovered truth, that people can decide best how to "spend their own money" (they often, of course, spend it building roads, schools, hospitals). And, no reminder that, perhaps as recently as the day before yesterday, the same politician and media outlet were demanding that more money be spent to fix a particular hospital, school, old people's home, child care facility, train system, museum, river, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Look, no love lost between me and the NSW government. Having a party run by the unlovelies of the Right faction, controlled in turn by developers and lobbyists, is not a recipe for good government or even moderately okay government. But no government can respond to the strident and contradictory populist and media-driven demands to do something about everything instantly while massively reducing taxes. There should be a golden rule for Oppositions - do not demand that governments fix every bit of road when you know you are not going to be able to fix them yourself. And a rule for the public - demand a general plan from a party seeking office, and then let them get on with implementing it, don't keep constantly demanding new priorities.

And in the mean time the rest of us might drive just a little bit slower and more carefully - recognising that roads are never going to be accident proof under any government of any political persuasion. Oh, and we might join the push to get freight off the highways and back on to the railways - while recognising that you can't do that under a regime of cost cutting and tax cutting.

Over to you Mr O'Farrell.

roads

14 January 2010
Category Infrastructure
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Between the idea and the reality

The delusions of the religious are so all-pervasive these days, perhaps more so than they have been in several hundred years, that we seek explanations, and metaphors, for how our lovely Enlightenment, not to mention our irreligious Sixties, was stolen from us. And we seek explanations for other retrogressions of the 21st Century. How is it that wars are becoming more frequent and popular? Have we really brought back torture? Monarchy, whether the British real one or the Hollywood pretend one, more popular than ever? Still burning coal for energy? Jailing and executing people because of mob pressure? A belief in the creationism that Darwin banished 150 years ago? Belief in witchcraft and exorcism? Still a war on drugs? The list, depressingly, goes on and on. And a particularly worrying member of the list is a turning away from modern medicine and a return to quack medicine pushed by salesmen some of whose whose ancestors probably once sold snake oil in travelling circuses.

Hey presto, a metaphor, and an explanation. Let us take homeopathy. The fundamental proposition is that less is better. A scientist would say that if a substance is good for treating something (having been tested and proved) then its effect (obviously within limits) will be proportional to the amount. Homeopaths believe the reverse, that if something is good for you (and these benefits are never tested) then the less of it you have the better the effect will be. Not only are ingredients diluted well beyond the point where they could possibly have an effect, but they are diluted to the point where they are not actually present at all. The only possible "benefit" could come from being told firmly by someone that there is a benefit, that faith is necessary, and that the greater the dilution the greater the needed faith; and having a disease or condition that can respond to the placebo effect.

Why would people fall for something so obviously unrelated to reality? Well, firstly they are being told that it is true, firmly and confidently, by people who they think they can trust (because they speak firmly and confidently). And second, there is a problem with scientific modern medicine - certainty of cure carries the corollary of certainty of failure. If I say to you I can cure A with penicillin, B with chemotherapy, and fix C with an operation; I am also saying that if you have X, Y, or Z, you are out of luck, can't help you, get your affairs in order, write speeches for your friends to give at your wake.

Much better to have someone say "Look, I know it sounds strange, but trust me on this, just sip the medicine twice a day for the next year and I guarantee to not only cure A, B, C, X, Y and Z, but all of the diseases in between. Guaranteed. If you have faith, of course, and follow instructions TO THE LETTER. Any failures, we find, are caused by either lack of faith or patient error". Well, you can see where this metaphor is going, can't you? Doesn't homeopathy sound just like religion (no, not A religion, though it may be that as well)?

And for the same reasons - science deals in reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality. Science tells you there is no imaginary friend in the sky, that we evolved like all other organisms on the planet, and that life has no meaning beyond what we choose to ascribe to it. If such reality sends you to an early grave, or makes you poor, or stops you achieving anything you desire, then you are likely to reject science and turn to religion. And of course there will be any number of snake oil salesmen telling you that you have made just the right decision, they guarantee supernatural help in your everyday life, and, just as a bonus, make the right financial investment in snake oil and you get a second life, white robes, harps, grapes and all.

We, those of us to whom reality has a liberal bias, thought that people, all people, could deal with reality. But we were wrong - reality? They can't handle reality. And so they turn to religion, and homeopathy.

Nothing but reality on The Watermelon Blog.

alternative medicine

9 January 2010
Category Religion
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Power to the people

Warmest. Decade. Ever. Even the weatherpersons on commercial television seem aware of that fact now. Second warmest year on record for Australia (after 2005, both ahead, remarkably, of extreme El Nino 1998), fifth warmest globally. Highest temperatures extending right through NSW and SA, very low rainfalls for this area. The results, not that they were a surprise to anyone paying attention, came, in a depressing coincidence, just a day or so after yet more media publicity for the Cooma farmer determined to clear trees. Disappointing to see that he was being supported not just by Barnaby Joyce, whose blindness and actively obstructive behaviour on climate change is sadly no longer a surprise, but also by a crew of right wing climate change denialists with links to an extreme neoconservative think tank in America. At least Bill Heffernan retained some sanity on the matter (a sentence I never saw myself writing).

Usually when I write about climate change I get criticism from some readers, who, knowing that I think we should leave both coal and uranium in the ground, demand to know what my answer is, because, and I had never thought of this, solar panels don't produce electricity when the sun don't shine. Who knew? Well, John Howard of course, who always demanded to know where us extreme greens thought we were going to get "baseload power" from. It is the kind of question the Labor Party, in government, is fond of repeating. Well, I thought I knew the answer, and so, in an encouraging coincidence last week, came the news that the Europeans do too.

They have announced the aim of linking, and developing further, all the renewable energy sources into a single grid across Europe. Wind power in Scotland, solar power in Germany, wave power in Denmark, hydroelectricity in Norway, etcetera, etcetera. Even when the sun don't shine, waves keep moving, rivers flow, wind blows; and if the wind don't blow, the sun is probably shining. The grid won't discriminate, just take whichever power source is producing. In addition, the power can be stored by using it at low demand times to pump water up to the hydroelectric dams for use later. Or solar power can be used to boil water and feed the superheated liquid into turbines. Later they are looking to add in further solar power resources in North Africa. Twenty percent of renewable power by 2020, much higher aims for 2050. Our pitiful target of 5%, even that blocked by the Liberals and Nationals, looks pathetic by comparison.

Time we lifted our game, don't you think? Improved our performance. Raised our sights. Stopped listening to idiots on the one hand and coal mine owners on the other, exercised some famous Australian ingenuity. I reckon we could do even better than the Europeans, couldn't we? We'd better get on, next decade is going to be warmer again, much warmer. Time is running out. Come down from the tree Barnaby.

Oh, and stop clearing trees, start planting instead. Every bit helps. But we need an awful lot of bits.

global warming

8 January 2010
Category Climate change
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Where the buck stops

The television media made much in the period leading up to Christmas of the massive police "crack down" on drunken behaviour in the streets of the major cities. The only problem they, the media, had with the program was that there should, apparently, have been thousands more policemen, and they should be on the streets all the time, 24/7/365. Strange how the television media seems so in favour now of having a police state. Once upon a time the idea of thousands of armed police roaming Australian streets backed up by surveillance cameras on every street corner would have seemed inconceivable, Orwellian, but now it is taken for granted, the only criticism being the Oliver Twist one of "more please".

Virtually no discussion about how it came to be that teenage boys, and girls, were getting so drunk out of their minds they were vomiting on the street and kicking each other in the head. Just one of those things it seems. Almost no mention of the remarkable coincidence that a massive increase in liquor licenses, and switching from 10pm closing to drinking all night might have coincided with the change in drunkenness. The only time I heard this mentioned was when a tv presenter said that of course reducing the drinking hours wouldn't work because when we had 6pm closing we had the "6 oclock swill", when workmen, only one hour to drink, glugged down as many as possible. What this has to do with the more recent civilised closing hour of 10pm wasn't explained. Reduce drinking hours and the number of alcohol outlets would certainly reduce alcohol problems and also the huge profits the liquor industry is now used to. Guess more police is a preferable answer.

All the debates go like this now. A recent, and not unrelated increase in knife crime was being dealt with in Melbourne by random searches without necessary cause. Oh, civil libertarians complained of course, always do, but if you aren't carrying a knife then you would have no reason to object to being stopped in the street, at random, and being body searched by a couple of policemen. Would you? Again, much puzzlement about the increase in knife crime with little reference to the glorification of violence and criminals in the media. Nor any reference to the massive availability of all kinds of knives in certain shops. But restrict the showing of violent crime, or the availability of knives suitable for street fighting? No, can't be done.

Might be time to start considering causes, not just treating effects. Even if the result is a few less bucks for some interested parties. The cost to society has become too high, and it's the rest of us who are paying it.

knife crime

5 January 2010
Category Economics
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The last of earth yet to discover

Well, beautifully judged - this is post number 100 for the year (by sheer chance!)

We have talked of many things on this journey together in 2009 - of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — of cabbages— and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot— and whether pigs have wings. Well, not many of them, actually, except for the boiling hot sea, although I must put the others on my list for 2010. But two a week on average, rain, hail or shine, the posts must get through. So will need to pull some rabbits out of the hat (or rather, out of the garden - in the last 12 months the rabbit plague has reached, well, plague proportions) - find new things to say about our country's leader and his rival; new insights in an election year; outsider's thoughts on the Alice in Wonderland that is American politics; new thoughts about the slow motion train wreck that is climate change; occasionally happy, and apposite, pop culture titles and references; vicious but fair attacks on the madness that is religion; witty asides about quirky events; and, as always, deep and meaningful thoughts on whether the meaning of life is still 42 or has dropped to 41.

So thank you all for coming along for the ride this year - I was usually as unsure about where it was going as you were, but we arrived safely and the end of all our exploring was to arrive where we had started and know the place for the first time. I hope you will all be back in twenty ten (won't it be nice to have a year that sounds like a proper year again) - and please, bring some friends. The Cinderella coach is made out of watermelon, and there is plenty of room for more passengers.

Maybe this will be the year Mr Pickwick and his companions conquer the literary world - decipher the mysterious stone that leads to the breakthrough into the heights of internet fame. Or maybe not.

Bon chance.

30 December 2009
Category The Arts
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Get your kicks

Something new to say about Christmas-New Year as we reach the end of the first, and very warm, decade of the 21st century? Don't want much do you? Thousands of writers, tens of thousands, have laboured every year for the thousands of years we have marked the celebration of mid-winter (and hope for Spring - in the northern hemisphere of course, but that's another story down under) and the artificial end of one journey around the Sun by the Earth and the start of another one.

Did you see the story about the young fellow in a four wheel drive whose vehicle had somehow stuck in cruise control and careered down the road, pushing brakes, banging gear stick, until, oops, here comes the end of the Freeway? Always been suspicious of cruise control, if cars were meant to have cruise control we wouldn't have right feet, would we? Anyway, reminded me of those two pilots, plane on auto-pilot, who overshot their destination the other day by a few hundred kilometres, and had to turn around and come back. With red faces, one imagines.

Can be a bit like that as we cruise along on auto pilot through the year, doing things we used to do, drifting along, September, November, and then oops, here comes Christmas, where did the year go? Always reminded, at this time of the year, of the old photos you see of long ago Christmas and New Year's Eve celebrations. There they are, the young folks of 31 December, 1913, silly hats on heads, champagne glasses in hand, wishing each other a happy 1914.

Never know what a new year is going to bring, so best to try not to run through the old one on cruise control. Stop occasionally, not so much to smell the roses (though that's not a bad start), as to bang on the gear stick, stamp on the brake, try to shake yourself up, dust yourself down, start all over again. Pay attention to the passing parade, do things that are new, different, learn new skills, read new authors, make new friends, try a new job, a new house, a new town, perhaps.

We only had one go at 2009, and now, whammo, flash of an eye, into the pages of history, the party snaps stuck in the pages of the photo album. Remember when, you might say, when you look back at them in 2020 or 2030, red-faced at having not done what you meant to do since.

So get ready for 2010 without an auto-pilot. Cruise control off. Eyes on the road ahead, Route 66 perhaps. Choose a destination. And maybe a couple of detours.

There, how did I do?

New Year

28 December 2009
Category Values
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Hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness

To all my friends, readers, subscribers, occasional visitors, supporters, critics, wherever you are around the world, may you all have a Pickwickian Xmas full of good company, good food, and good cheer. May you receive a warm and cordial reception, wherever you go - and may the very servants grin with pleasure at the sight of you; after dinner, may the hot elder wine, well qualified with brandy and spice, go round and round and round again; and may there be not too many mince pies left for the fat boy the next day. Oh, and may your sleep be sound, and the dreams be pleasant, on the evening of Xmas Day.

24 December 2009
Category Values
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You guys - get a life

Having read about the growing evangelical influence in American sports (players dropping to knees to pray after a touchdown, "prayer circles" on the 50 yard line, every team having a chaplain, a "Fellowship of Christian Athletes") I wonder if there are any areas of American life that are not infused with religion? Sport, politics, education, law, media, science, health, welfare - there seems to be no institution or activity not bent and twisted by evangelists. Given that America already seems a society raddled with religion, as much if not more so than any fundamentalist regime in the Middle East or Africa, one wonders how bad it would be if there wasn't a supposed separation of church and state.

But having read about the athletes - one said "his Christianity is part of who he is, and he can't separate it from his life as an athlete", another that there was "no intent to alienate people, only to share Biblical truth", another that "when athletes publicly talk about Christianity, it's often just a reflection of the joy of the faith" - another thought came to me. Not new, necessarily, but revisited. And that is what extraordinarily limited minds the fundamentalists have.

When Shakespeare said "There are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" he might have had American fundamentalists in mind. There seems to be just one tiny part of their brain, the god particle, that has been programmed to think and speak in a particular way, and ... and, well, nothing. That's all there is. No curiosity it seems about life, the universe, and everything; about art and literature; history and geography; politics and society; different cultures, different ideas.

I mean, so much for this great big brain, evolved over millions of years to be much better than the Chimpanzee's brain at thinking and analysing and discovering and debating and creating. And these people don't use it. Bit like having hundreds of functions on a DVD player and all you do is play pre-recorded discs.

Normally chimp's brain capacities are compared to those of scientists and atheists (a tautology of course), and Chimps don't do very well, once you get past painting and communicating, and opening ant nests with sticks, and nuts with stone tools. But I reckon if you put a chimp against an evangelical it would be a near run thing. Would the evangelical succeed in getting the nut open? I think the answer is clear.

What a waste of a brain in Homo sapiens almost as big as that of Neanderthal man. Time these athletes stopped praying, in a circle or otherwise, started thinking. Got a life.

Reading the Watermelon Blog would be a good start.

Oh, and happy Xmas.

atheism

21 December 2009
Category Religion
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Canary in a coal mine

Well, who would have thought. Tony Abbott's first action as Opposition Leader was to visit a coal mine and talk gravely about jobs jobs jobs. All a bit reminiscent of John Howard's speech to the forestry workers before the 2004 election, and just as cynical. Tony Abbott now leads a party which, if the mine owners suggested it, would without a moment's hesitation approve the slashing of miner's wages and conditions, the removal of regulations, the sacking of thousands of miners and their replacement by machinery, or by cheap overseas workers, or the sale of a mine to overseas private equity firms, or just the closing of a mine to cut costs and push up prices. But phasing out coal gradually, retraining workers and promoting alternative jobs in communities, in order to keep the whole planet habitable? No sirree.

Once upon a time Australia was seen as a quarry. Shovelling up mineral riches as quickly as possible and selling them off cheaply overseas. Gradually Australians, and politicians, became aware that this probably wasn't the smartest long term strategy for the economy. We might be a little bigger than Nauru, but, just as inevitably, resources will eventually run out or become too costly to retrieve. And then what do you do? Nauru eventually settled for housing a prison where Australia sent its unwanted prisoners, but it's hard to imagine Australia being a penal colony, isn't it?

Eventually governments of both political persuasions realised that it might be prudent to plan for the future by encouraging, and even investing in, a manufacturing capacity for the country and an ability to develop the smart technology ideas Australians have always been good at.

But in recent years, bedeviled by ideological blinkers that insist that governments mustn't "pick winners" (why ever not, would picking losers be better?) the Australian economy must be run by the market, the whole market, and nothing but the market, Australia has seen the collapse of this program. Inventors and inventions have headed overseas, scientists likewise. The universities and CSIRO have been squashed, silenced, privatised, monetised. Policies on imports have seen manufacturers going broke and closing or taking their assembly lines offshore. A devil may care attitude to takeovers has seen many companies bought by overseas giants.

And so we have run gleefully back to just digging stuff out of the ground and sending it off - and even much of that is now being done by overseas companies buying, or buying into, Australian mining companies.

We are back to Quarry Australia. Back to the dumb country, with Mr Abbott's blessing. But picking winners would be easy peasy at the moment Tony. Easier than it's ever been. The winners are going to be companies, and countries, that encourage, and invest in, renewable energies. We are, or were, world leaders in solar power and the rest. Now we are not (the solar panels I bought recently were made in China - how ironic is that?) - inventors and inventions are heading overseas, local firms going broke. Kevin isn't doing anything Tony - you say you want to oppose, then here is a good thing to oppose.

And you have invented something called "Climate Action". Here is an action Tony, if you think you are an environmentalist as you say - start by announcing an immediate ban on all tree clearing, including Tasmanian forestry operations, in Australia (you're right Tony, land use is important). Then visit another coal mine and announce that all Australian coal mines are going to close by 2020 (with substantial help for miners and communities to adjust), that your Liberal Government is going to start work towards a Minimum Renewable Energy Target of 100% by 2050, that you will set up a massive "Sustainable Energy Investment Fund" which will support not just research but the implementation of all forms of renewable energy across Australia and support them with appropriate infrastructure development.

That will make us a Clever Country again. Oh, and help save the planet.

You there Tony? Tony?

global warming

17 December 2009
Category Climate change
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DUI - Denying under influence

Are climate change denialists all drunk all the time?

Increasingly, as I read threads relating to climate change the responses from denialists have become shriller and shriller, words are slurred, offers to fight becoming more common, vomiting on the floor not out of the question.

And hesitatingly offering a quiet rebuttal of some nonsense quickly gets you arguing with the town drunk/village idiot in the corner of the bar. "Greenland. Used to be ... Wotsis? green, thass it. Greenland useta be green. Didn't know that didya, Mr smarty ecofascist"?

You say "Um, well, no, it didn't, the icecap is very thick and was there at least 119,000 years before the Vikings".

"Rubbish, green, all over, cows everywhere. Anyway climate is always .... Hey Fred, what is it climate is always doing? Changing, that's it. Always changing. Them geologists, smart fellows, had to explain to Mr Fat Gore that climate changes. Didn't know apparently. Nor that alarmist Hansen fellow."

You reply "Uh, actually everyone did know that ..."

"No they didn't. Thought it was all new. Coulda told them - remember a hot year when I was a boy. Very hot. There you are ... And them fellows somewhere who were cooking the books. Ha ha, get it, cooking the books, they admitted they had hidden the fact that isn't getting warm, getting cold in fact, much colder than that Midlevel warm period. Couldn't tell because they had crook computers, and they'd stuck all their therm ..., thermo ... thermomometers over steam vents in NY. You know, those vents that blew Marilyn's skirt up, hee hee hee. Funny place to put a therm ... thermo....., oh, never mind, know what I'd like to have put ... never mind. Snort, slurp, burp, where was I? Oh yes, there's snow outside in't there? Not goin' to get snow if things are gettin' warm are ya, stands to reason. Cold enough to play ice hockey like they did in the ice age in the 1970s 'cept they broke all the hockey sticks them scientist fellows. "

"Anyway, CO2 is good for you, makes plants grow. Breathe it in and out, we do, like this ... See, like a food, isn't it, breath. Be trying to stop me breathing next, that Marxist Obama."

"Just wanna take over the world you lot, Hitler youth, like that funny English fellow said. Take over the world and kill everybody. Gonna have them panels, death panels, kill everone off who doesn't believe their lies."

"Shoutin, who's shoutin? You lookin at me?"

Yeah, I'm looking at you on The Watermelon Blog, want to make something of it?

global warming

13 December 2009
Category Climate change
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Are we there yet Mum?

And so NSW has a female premier at last. Of the eight states and territories, six have now had female leaders, with SA and Tasmania the hold outs. So 75% of states have had female leaders, the Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Opposition Leader are both women, numerous ministers are female, many other women in all state and federal parliaments, and we are of course famous as the second country in the world to give women the vote. So, doing pretty well here as far as women in politics is concerned eh? Time for the smug look.

Um, no, probably not, if truth be told. Of the six female led jurisdictions, five have had only one female leader (only the ACT has had two). Of the seven female leaders all except one have been Labor politicians (again, the ACT provides the only exception). Often a woman has been given the top job only when a government was on its last legs, faced with an unwinnable election to follow (ACT and Queensland are exceptions), much as women are often preselected in unwinnable seats or low positions on the Senate tickets, and rarely get blue ribbon seats or head of the Senate team. Unlike Britain, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Germany, India, Norway, Sri Lanka, Israel, and nearly 40 other countries, we have not yet had a national political female leader. Women are still not, it seems to me, treated as a fully equal part of the political landscape. Nor will they be as long as their attainment of a top job is met with the media description "Mother of two becomes Premier", or with analyses of weight, dress sense and hair styles.

It was said of one British actress, noted for some odd behaviour, that just because someone plays the roles of women who are intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, charming, funny, it doesn't mean that they have any of those characteristics personally. In a more general sense, just because a human being is a woman means that they will by definition behave better than men (although it must be said that this would rarely take much effort at all).

I don't think having women in politics means that countries become less warlike, more in favour of social justice, more environmentally aware. I have two words for anyone who thought that - Maggie Thatcher. And another two - Sarah Palin. And if it is indeed true that the new female Premier (and mother of two) of NSW pals around with the Right Wing power thugs who make and break premiers in the state, then don't expect her to have her sights set on the light on the hill. I have no more expectations of a Keneally premiership than I would of a Tripodi one.

But I do think that women should be represented in the body politic, at all levels, and in all capacities, whether saint or sinner, foolish or wise, nasty or nice, in proportion to their percentage in the population. Which means there should be more women than men in local councils, state parliaments, federal parliament. Of the 42 premiers we have so far had, 21 more than Ms Keneally should have been women. And of the 26 prime ministers, why were 14 not women?

To argue for a lesser representation, a lesser level of responsibility, would be to continue to argue, though perhaps in a more subtle way, for the kind of attitudes that brave women, especially in Britain, risked, and actually lost, their lives to overturn. Votes for women means not just turning up on polling day and then going back to the kitchen. It means having an equal opportunity for any desired level of political involvement.

With all due respect to Ms Keneally, we're not there yet.

feminism

10 December 2009
Category Politics general
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and melancholy" (Tynan)

22 January 2010
Category Politics federal
2 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

14 January 2010
Category Infrastructure
1 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

9 January 2010
Category Religion
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

8 January 2010
Category Climate change
2 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

5 January 2010
Category Economics
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

30 December 2009
Category The Arts
1 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

28 December 2009
Category Values
1 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

24 December 2009
Category Values
3 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

21 December 2009
Category Religion
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

17 December 2009
Category Climate change
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

13 December 2009
Category Climate change
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

10 December 2009
Category Politics general
0 comments
Link

"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)

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