The Hollow Arguments Against Full Equality Now that the public has voiced their support for marriage equality in Australia, it’s time for the politicians to do their jobs and fix the inequality they previously legislated in the Marriage Act, led by that recalcitrant bigot, John Howard, and with the full knowledge that other bigots among the LNP have been marginalised, most especially Howard’s protégé, Tony Abbott, whose electorate returned one of the largest margins in favor of equality. But arguments are still being put forward in an attempt to reduce any bill’s effect on achieving equality, empty, disingenuous arguments, such as the need to “recognise the religious freedom of commercial service suppliers.” Rot. Commercial service suppliers are free to practice their religion in Australia. They are not, however, free to pretend that their commercial services are the practice of their religion. If you are baking cakes for a living, bake them, sell them, and then go to whatever church you favor and pray to whatever god you worship howsoever you please on whatever topic you choose. You can even pray for the cake to turn to ashes in the mouths of the same-sex couples who bought it to share with their friends and families. “[A] guarantee to the rights of expression [and] association” is similarly vacuous. Exclusions regarding “threatening or harassing speech” notwithstanding, allowing same-sex couples to marry does not preclude anyone from speech in opposition to the practice or preventing them from excluding LGBTIQ persons from their social circles. You don’t have to talk to the gay couple or have them in your home just because society lets them marry. Go ahead, ignore them. They’ll more likely be grateful not to have to listen to you or associate with you than not. There is, indeed, a “right to be a bigot,” it’s just that it’s the social equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face. You do more harm to yourself than anyone else. But don’t think that if you make your behavior public you can’t be called out for it. Employment decision exclusions are just discriminatory. Period. You do not get to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. The days when you could legally discriminate on the basis of marital status are long past, and that’s where they should stay. That’s it. Church officials don’t have to marry anyone, gay or straight, but if they want to pretend there’s something different because their invisible sky friend tells them so, they can take their medieval trappings and fade into history.

Redux I wanted to go watch Blade Runner 2049 when it was still in production, and then when it came out I was ambivalent, but I finally broke down and went. It's very good. Long, maybe, but it takes its time and does the story justice. It's a police procedural, really, and police work takes a slow, plodding pace, with punctuations of misdirection and revelation, until the mystery is solved. The sequel also learned a lot from the original's post-production problems: no voice-over, mainly, the thing that bothered everyone until the final director's cut got released on DVD. Anyway, I'm going to have to watch this one again. I think I like it better than the original, although you have to have the first one for context. Maybe that's its particular flaw.

Omnibus Obamacare repeal down again, but don’t be fooled. The Senate Republicans will keep trying, because if they can’t undo everything Obama ever did, their donors will reckon them as failures and give the money to someone else. Until then, the House will continue to prioritize legislating against women’s health, because they’re already proven what losers they are, notably in regard to over 200 failed votes to repeal the ACA. Trump’s bankrupt golf course in Puerto Rico leads him to revenge himself on the island by pretending it’s so remote as to make even the US Navy helpless, plus of course he would: Puerto Ricans aren’t white enough are they even part of America? Build a wall! Watch for a Ten Commandments monument on the Washington Mall, now that we have one more crazed religious zealot in the Senate. Seriously, how does this man keep going? Fuelled on hate like Trump, but couldn’t even get Comrade Oompa-Loompa’s endorsement. Just because you don’t like what someone says, Jeff, doesn’t mean it isn’t legitimate or anything less than the same free speech you’d be applauding if you agreed with it. And if you really want to stand up for freedom of speech, you might want to try facing up to it, instead of hiding in your own echo chamber. Animal cruelty isn’t art. You want to comment on animal cruelty, o.k., or whatever your statement is intended to be, but being cruel yourself just makes you a monster, not an artist. If no prosecutions arise from the actions of Equifax executives in the lead-up to the revelation they’d been massively hacked, the system isn’t working. Yes, Comrade President, your fight with the NFL is over race alone. Australians will bet on anything. We are a gambling-crazy nation. Meanwhile, there is no valid argument against allowing same-sex couples to marry. Freedom of speech? No, shut up. I mean, no, you can say what you want, but you cannot deny someone the same rights you have because you don’t have the same sexual preference. Family and children? What about older couples, infertile couples, couples who choose not to have children, or to adopt? Would you legislate against them marrying? Then you can’t legislate against same-sex couples marrying. “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”? That’s not an argument; it’s a slogan. Tradition? Tradition used to involve marrying children. We’re not doing that anymore. Tradition changes. But their sex is yucky? All sex is yucky. Grow up. Enough. Whew.\

2020 Foresight It is a serious mistake to underestimate either the likelihood that Trump will run or his chances for re-election, as we learned to our cost in the last election. Making fun of him or his supporters is entertaining, but it will not get a more reasonable person in the White House or a different political distribution in the House or Senate. Opposition to Trump must assume he will complete his term of office and that he will run for re-election. Opposition to the Republicans must assume that Republican governors and legislatures around the country will do whatever they can to suppress voting and shape electoral districts to their advantage. If we want to take back the White House and Congress, we have to start locally and build. We have to take back municipalities, and the states. We have to have not just viable candidates, but compelling candidates.

The American Oligarchy I’ve just finished an article about Putin’s oligarchs, and I’ve got to say the correlation to Trump is patently obvious. Reading this article explained why Trump wanted to be President and his admiration of Putin. Sure, he’s a cheeto-faced fascist, as corrupt as the day is long, but being President gives him everything he needs to enrich himself in ways he’s never been able to use before. Whereas in the past Trump’s various businesses were subject to lawsuits and bankruptcy and profitable on the basis of stiffing his contractors and reneging on debts, now he makes money hand over fist, profiting from everyone who wants to do business with the US. Putin’s oligarchs operate outside of government, it’s true, but profit from it, and if Putin isn’t salting away his dictator’s portion of the proceeds, it would only be with the expectation of the payoff when he has to step aside. Trump is his own oligarch, along with many of his Cabinet of conmen, and the Republicans in Congress are more than happy to have it that way. They and their friends benefit, too, if less directly. Even if the current lawsuit against Trump based on the emoluments clause is successful, he is likely to continue his self-enrichment, but more in line with the Putin oligarchic model. Unless at some point even the Republicans have to acknowledge his corruption, based on some final act so egregious it cannot be ignored – like shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue – he will serve his full term, possibly – even probably – be re-elected, and drag the US into an unethical morass it may not be able to recover from, all to benefit himself and the monstrous children he’s engendered.

Covfefe Stroke.

Trumpian The Guardian had a piece wondering if Australia had already been through its Trumpian political phase, but the answer is no: It’s only just begun. Immigrants, whether they pass the stringent requirements to enter the country as residents at all, or as refugees (especially), cannot be expected to have university-level English. That may not be a requirement for the jobs they take up even for native-born Australians. But now, in order to vote, we expect them to be able to compose an essay suitable for academic credit? This is just the usual Liberal hate and fear of brown people. They would end all immigration from everywhere but white Britain if they could, and probably those whinging Poms, too, except that “real” Australians aren’t having enough babies. The rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation didn’t coincide with Tony Abbott becoming Prime Minister. He hated them. Mostly, he hated them because they took votes from the Liberal-National coalition, reducing their power to impose their race-hate on the country. No, One Nation rose because Abbott’s star fell, replaced by the smiling face of Malcolm Turnbull. But Turnbull kept the far-right on the front bench, like Peter Dutton, whose brainchild the new citizenship test is sold as. Don’t be fooled. Turnbull and the LNP today aren’t centre-right. They’re virulent extremists and always have been. Turnbull’s pleasant façade of reasonableness is the cover they give to controlling the population through hate and fear, causing internal divisions among us, the better to eliminate the middle class and create the new feudalism they believe is their right. They mean to rule, not govern, and to do that there must be Lords and Serfs. They know which group they belong to, and which group the rest of us are in. We’re the only ones fooling ourselves, continuing to vote against our own best interests, as the US did electing Trump and keeping the Republicans in power. Our “Trump moment” isn’t past, it’s prologue.

You Won’t Believe This One Simple Trick to What Happens Next Fairfax is shedding jobs, and moving to rely for content on “contributors”, which sounds like paying freelancers to do the work reporters and editors used to do. This is a shame, as the content of the Sydney Morning Herald is pretty much all click-bait at this point, and badly edited to boot. Online content is fairly rife with poor grammar and typos, but the Herald and its sister publications aren’t any different in print. Having shed editorial staff multiple times over the last couple of years, it’s only getting worse. It’s inevitable that media will move more and more to being fully digital, and that the content will, at least partially in consequence, rely less on the printed word and more on audio-visual presentation. The arrival of radio and television promised this long ago, but the platforms have finally arrived to make it happen. We can watch MSNBC or CNN or Fox on our phones and tablets, laptops and desktops, and many people do, but we can also access breaking news and news-related content via these services, too, which makes operations like Fairfax or the New York Times. etc., in many ways uniquely positioned as distinct providers. The loss of print media won’t be felt by the younger generations, but the degradation of content should be. That’s not a small reason to support the week-long strike, even if it won’t actually change anything that hasn’t been underway for a long time now. I’d cancel my subscription, but the only option is Murdoch’s Australian, and that son of a bitch doesn’t need my money any more than I would ever want to count towards that rag’s circulation. (I won’t even take a free copy of its sibling, the Telegraph, when it’s offered, so it can’t be counted.) It was once a better publication, but the Murdoch model means it’s all alt-right hate all the time for the last ten years and more. The ABC is useful, so long as the LNP don’t amputate its funding to the point of no return, but there’s no print option. So long, SMH; you’ve given up.

Emoluments Trump has been here before (and failed) and may try again, through Joo Kim Tiah, a Malaysia developer, with two hotels in Australia already – neither of which is planned to be branded with the Cheeto-faced fascist’s name in the immediate future. But if Mr Tiah wants to “know the sentiment of the Australian people or their mood”, I’d say there are no small number of them who would gleefully welcome the Pumpkin Fuhrer having a larger orange profile here, and many more who would take the opportunity to protest, boycott, and otherwise ensure it became an opportunity to deride and denigrate the Swamp Thing currently occupying the White House. In regard to whether pressuring foreign leaders to open their countries to Trump businesses constitutes corruption or not, yes, it very well may be, as it amounts to Trump being enriched and open then to influence by those same foreign governments, whether they hire prostitutes to urinate on him or not. And now that I know Trump and his fellow swamp-dweller Rex Tillerson are involved in BHP Billiton, I’m out, and hope others follow. Their pledges “to divest” aren’t worth the noxious fumes expelled from their lungs to make the statement.

End of Days? The Anti-Christ is in the White House, and Westminster Kennel Club is including cats in its annual dog show.

More Elliott Richardson's Congratulations Sally Yates, Acting Attorney General of the United States, for standing against Donald Trump's white supremacy, anti-establishment clause executive order.

Death and Disability Of course Monster-in-Chief-elect Donald Trump wants a review of vaccination, he doesn’t believe in vaccines. But there’s more to it: who will go unvaccinated? Children of the rich who can afford to keep their children away from those of the dirty poor as well as the increased cost of health care if they do fall ill, and the children of the poor and ill-informed sufficiently frightened away from vaccination as a result of the lies people like Trump peddle – and these latter are the ones most likely to end up most adversely affected, disabled or dead. Never forget: Donald Trump and the Republicans think being poor, sick, or elderly is a moral failing, deserving only the wrath of God, never any compassion from fellow humans. Vaccinations, especially anything paid for or subsidised by the government, is not something poor people should have, and Trump and his GOP majority flunkies will do everything they can to legitimise taking it away.

Theatre Notes We’ve been planning this for a year. In 2014, for Wagner’s 150th anniversary year, Opera Australia put on a new production of the full Ring cycle. B’s son, J was in it, having been hired for his expertise in adagio, even getting to be on stage for Siegfried’s death scene (so that the lead wouldn’t get hurt while dying). B didn’t get to see more of the show than a dress rehearsal of one of the four, so when I heard they were putting on a revival this year, and having a bit of cash from being made redundant at my last job, I got us tickets to the whole thing. I figure, B’s a classical music fan, I enjoy mythology and theatrical spectacle, what could go wrong? B came down with appendicitis, that’s what could go wrong, so we can’t go. She’s fine, now, or will be soon, but not soon enough to make the trip and sit through 20 hours of opera, fan or not. Meanwhile, Opera Australia very kindly offered no option for off-loading the tickets (no waiting list, no resale capacity), other than a store credit for upcoming productions – good for one year, but including purchases in both the 2017 and 2018 seasons – with the suggestion that maybe we’d like to see “My Fair Lady”. AU$2800 worth of opera tickets to a spectacular classic like the Ring, and they offer “My Fair Lady”? High school amateurs and community theatre troupes put on “My Fair Lady”. The movie plays on television fifteen times a year, and that’s the best they’ve got for two years? #OperaAustraliaFail.

Time for Change Time magazine has continued it’s “person of the year tradition”, a practice that may need review, given the selection this year - yes, an obvious choice, as was their selection in 1938.

Trumped Up It's going to be a long four years, but I don't think it'll be eight. The danger in 2020 is Pence, a man who believes you can "pray away the gay" and has nothing but contempt for women and minorities. Unlike his boss, Pence can give the appearance of being reasonable, and a lot of people will fall for it. We'll face that hurdle when it comes, however, and I hope we'll have a better candidate then. Meanwhile, farewell Obamacare, it was nice for millions while it lasted, but now you're uninsured again. Time to buy stock in health insurance companies, as their revenues will skyrocket on the increased premiums they'll charge. Farewell any chance of a left-leaning Supreme Court. There's one vacancy already, and Kennedy, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer are over 80 or getting there. That's going to be a problem for equal rights, voting rights, and campaign funding reform. The House and Senate have, effectively, a rubber stamp in the White House, so we can expect them to try on many bad plans, including tax cuts to increase income and wealth disparity, defunding Planned Parenthood, cutting welfare, gutting Social Security and Medicare, and generally driving the economy into the ground. Would we have done better with Sanders? I doubt it. We might have done better at getting out the vote if the Democrats had put up someone other than Clinton, but her candidacy was pretty much inevitable after 2008. Any who stayed home or went third party because Clinton beat Sanders were foolish, and while you can say that Johnson took votes from Trump, that ignores a lot of one of the things wrong with many liberal voters: they think "libertarian" candidates are more liberal than they actually are. Look at the support Rand Paul gets. A competitive third party wouldn't be a bad thing, but they aren't. They siphon votes and voters we need. I won't be putting my American passport into the post to the State Department. I sure as hell will be supporting the Democrats still in Congress and in the mid-terms in 2018. This fight's just getting started.

You May See the Doctor Now And it's totally worth it. Doctor Strange is easily in the top tier of Marvel movies: funny, when it needs to be, with especially fun special effects, and a stellar cast, all performing comic book material with fun and brio. I especially like how it treats magic as the manipulation of physical laws as they exist in one dimension in another. It's the String Theory of magic. But anything with Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be good, wasn't it?

President Ryan I think I know why Paul Ryan won't say Trump's name, even though he'll confirm he will vote for him: He's hoping it goes to a tie, and he gets to be President by default. Say it goes 269-269 Clinton-Trump. Say then it goes to the House for a vote on the candidates. Given that the Republicans control the House, but most of them don't actually want Trump in the White House, regardless of their actual behavior at the polls, which is driven solely by party loyalty), and given that the Freedom Caucus madmen want to control the House agenda regardless of the leadership and in opposition to anything resembling reasonable, it's possible for there to be no decision. Assume Pence is Vice President-elect, by virtue of the Senate being in Republican control and having that decision, instead of sticking with the Oompa-Loompa, he goes for Ryan. Or, if the Senate can't work it out, given the original tie starting point, Ryan just gets the job. Yea! In your face, Mitt Romney!

You Break It, You Bought It Should the Republican Party stop funding Trump's campaign? Why? They made him, they own him. The Republicans have spent decades on increasing wealth and income disparity, increasing racial tension, and increasing the size and scope of the police militarisation the outcomes of which we see play out nearly daily in our news. They are the party of Trump. Besides, it's not as if they have to spend all that much, as the compliant media give him all the free air he needs to bury himself and his party at the general election, or to gain the White House, for that matter, the latter being an outcome I suspect many in the media would welcome, as it would ensure lots of click-bait and airtime teasers to capture eyeballs.

Their Way Is Only the Highway Traffic in Sydney is bad, and anyone can see it. But Liberal promises to fix it rely on more and bigger highways from the west into the CBD. Problem is, that isn’t the problem. The current project underway, Westconnex, aims to expand and extend the M4 and M5, but in the end dump the increased volume of traffic into the inner west, along already the already highly congested King Street and Parramatta Road. Worse, this project will use “spaghetti junctions” at these interchange points, and the junction at St Peters will take up newly transformed green space, the only parkland of any significant size for kilometres. In addition, many kilometres of tunnels will be required, not a bad thing in themselves, but you have to consider the 35-metre tall exhaust stacks, concentrating particulate pollution and sending it out and across the city. The planning for Westconnex, a pet project of current NSW Premier Mike Baird, but supported by NSW Labor as well as the Federal Liberal and Labor parties, actually shows the project won’t achieve its stated goals. The new roads will reach capacity within eight years and the overall reduction of time spent in traffic will be a grand total of five minutes. The Liberal government in Canberra, under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, stated that public transport was not an option at all anywhere ever. This policy continues under Malcolm Turnbull. Labor’s official position is also in support of Westconnex, even though they have the example of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who canned the East-West link the previous government had planned, so that better mass transit could be implemented instead, even in the face of the Abbott government withdrawing co-funding. Mass transit won’t be improved by Westconnex. It will be the same limited trains and busses serving the same routes – and at the same volume and level of service. But new rail links, service improvements, better capacity, would improve traffic congestion, and air quality, along with emissions reductions. Bigger transport projects, such as the long-proposed and postponed heavy rail link from Brisbane through Sydney to Melbourne, would do their part, removing freight by trucking. But we get no traction. Urban planning is hard, but there are lots of examples of getting it right, all around the world. A new tram service, currently under construction in Sydney, will link the Eastern Suburbs with the CBD; and the existing lightrail, extended out to Haberfield, has already achieved its utilisation goals, despite naysaying from the state government. London has more bicycle usage, and bike-share projects are popping up all over, opening city centres in ways not seen in decades. We don’t need Robert Moses-style projects, projects designed to destroy neighbourhoods. No Westconnex!

Brisk It's the Brexit, and Britain's out, or as they are supposed to have had it in a headline once: EU Cut Off. Personally, I think it was a foolish thing to do. But I don't live there, so it's not up to me. Still, even with the pound dropping to 1985 levels, I'm sure they'll survive. They're the fifth largest economy globally, after all, which is pretty good for a former world power. Plus, or although, it's going to take two to five years to sort out the exit in full, even if Brussells says o.k., and possibly a decade of QEII announcing new laws on her birthday, as they sort out re-regulating the nation. Or KCIII. Whatever. More importantly, if the anti-immigrant forces and political far-right can be fingered as the drivers of this move, and it has a sufficiently noticable and lasting effect on the US economy, how much can this affect the Presidential race? Will America find itself driven to vote Trump, get a wall along the Atlantic? Will they fear the invading hoards of Scottish refugees? Yeah, actually I don't think it will have much effect, barring a substantial and lasting downward pressure on US markets, which seems unlikely. Meanwhile, Happy Birthday, Your Majesty, QEII, your present is a face-palm moment.